Amol Rajan’s University Challenge debut showed he is no Paxman

OK, what did you make of the new series of University Challenge then, with Amol Rajan occupying the seat that Jeremy Paxman once graced? Actually, if it was the same chair, it was a bit big for Amol, and I’m sure there’s a metaphor there somewhere.

But really, the whole thing was just fine. Amol was cheerful rather than intimidating. He lacks Jeremy Paxman’s cherishable incredulity and he doesn’t have a long nose to look down at people with, which is nobody’s fault.

There was less brusqueness and less mobility with the eyebrows, though he did manage a scathing ‘What!’ when Trinity College Cambridge suggested the end of a book title was Gone With the Wind (they were only kidding). And he brought himself into the frame by declaring that there should be more cricket questions. 

Nobody liked the slate-effect screen which he had to read the questions off. What you want for a quizmaster are actual cards, which you can deploy to good effect when exasperated. You can’t slap down a screen. It also means there’s less eye contact with the teams. 

Talking of whom, the interesting thing about the Trinity Cambridge v.s. Manchester university match was the number of contestants from abroad – Seoul and Poland and Massachusetts, USA, for instance. It turns out that University Challenge reflects the nature of modern British universities.

As for the questions, they seemed hard…that is to say, most threw me. But, as ever, the obvious ones – like which king was Anne Hyde married to – were the ones the students couldn’t answer. And if I am allowed to be picky, I’d like a University Challenge that was confined to undergraduates: bringing in PhD students seems like cheating.

But Amol was fortunate. The contest ended with a draw, with a penalty shootout to follow. Beginner’s luck. Incidentally, would Jeremy P have used the word ‘phenomenal’ to describe the performance? I think not. 

Amol started off by saying that ‘a few things have changed… but all the important things remain the same: The format is still simple, the questions are still complicated and the teams are still terrifyingly knowledgeable’. Well, ye-es.

Would I be in quite such a rush to watch University Challenge without the prospect of Jeremy Paxman looking sneery? To be honest, no. But then I bet fans thought the same when the really bright Bamber Gascoigne was succeeded by Jeremy P.  

Oh and Amol’s orange tie and handkerchief managed to steal the show.

Stop trying to make high culture funky

Clive Myrie, now probably the top face of the BBC, and host of their television coverage of the Proms, had a strange one on Twitter this weekend. A fan gushed at him that ‘[the Proms are] completely accessible – no formal dress code and you can buy a Prom ticket on the day for the price of a pint! To hear some of the world’s best performers. What’s not to love?’ To which Myrie replied, ‘We’ve to keep pushing on that. This is music for everyone, not a select few who know their crotchets from their quavers!! That’s boring and naff!!’

What a strange exchange. A formal dress code and knowledge of musical notation aren’t things demanded at the Proms, no. But they aren’t demanded anywhere else either. When and where was this ever the case, at least in the longest of living memories? I’ve been going to concerts and operas for nearly 40 years and I’ve never been either quizzed on music theory or refused entry for wearing trainers, and I am a scruffy, scruffy man. ‘Dress in a way that suits you. There are no rules,’ says the website of the poshest of music festivals, Glyndebourne. Even more weirdly, crotchets and quavers are really basic and simple to grasp, ABC stuff. I remember ‘doing’ them at a very ordinary state school when I was 8. Is it really the mark of the ‘select few’ to know what they are? If Myrie had gone on about Picardy thirds and the crisis of tonality, maybe he’d have more of a point. Yes, classical concerts may often be expensive, but that will happen when you have to pay lots of highly trained performers a reasonable amount.

When other tweeters wondered what Myrie was going on about, he said, ‘I’m so glad we’re having this discussion!!’ (He does like his exclamation marks!!) People who say ‘I’m glad we’re having this discussion’ are always lying. ‘It’s about time. Crotchets and quavers without enthusiasm and joy mean zilch in the vital task of passing on wonderful music to new generations. Technical knowledge is VITAL, but part of a much bigger equation.’

This is another example of the curious modern phenomenon of pushing back very hard against something – Kipling-style history teaching, gay conversion therapy, lesbian Nazism, etc – that isn’t even happening. I think the people who take these ‘vital’ and ‘important’ stands against phantoms enjoy the cost-free thrill of demanding an immediate end to something that nobody is actually doing.

But the Myrie incident speaks to another modern irritation, the attempt to make ‘high’ culture ‘relevant’ by trivialising and reducing it, to funk it up.

One of the attractive things about some of the classical repertoire is the awe-inspiring massiveness and impenetrability of it. It doesn’t give a damn what you think, it looms above your insect being like a thundering waterfall. There is a different variety of pleasure to take from that. There is no right or wrong way to enjoy it, but its formal structure and grandness really matter. It is the polar opposite of the bish-bosh TikTok three-minutes-and-out snippet culture of almost everything else on offer today.

Myrie talks like a grim municipal pamphlet about ‘pushing at’ making things ‘accessible’, then switches to stock 1980s teenager with ‘boring’ and ‘naff’. (But then, like me, he was one, so fair enough.) The way adults talk in this ‘inspired’ way – like presenters on CB:TV or Wacaday – summons up my last meal. I saw some of the BBC’s Wimbledon coverage and it made me want to set fire to the studio. And that’s bloody tennis, hardly the most complex thing to wrap your head around.

This tone brings back acutely painful memories of being patronised just because you’re young. I think this trendy vicar bonhomie could in fact be more off-putting than the actual gravity and enormity of the high culture being presented. We are often told that something classic and enduring is ‘relevant’ and ‘accessible’. Well, what a surprise. All good art is relevant and accessible.

But sometimes I’m afraid that you do have to make an effort to meet it – a small one or a big one. You simply can’t knock off Der Ring des Nibelungen in ten minutes while scrolling down your Insta. If you have to really force yourself to like something, it’s probably not for you. And that’s fine.

The time required to make such efforts is in fact the important, unspoken factor here, the real reason why high culture has a snob appeal. It is a coded demonstration that you have the time to engage with it and to acquaint yourself fully with it. But to react to this with the groovy Bible, the rapping King Lear, the peng Proms? No no no.

Can topical comedy survive?

Seen any good stand-up recently? It’s a loaded question, but if you have, there’s every chance you didn’t view it via terrestrial TV. You might instead have laughed at some brash American on Netflix, or a deeply un-PC comic on YouTube – or more likely still, a comedian sitting in the palm of your hand.

Over the past 12 months in particular, stand-up clips have been going down a storm on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. The kind of clips which do well online have come as a surprise to some of the industry’s traditional gatekeepers. In a shock twist, it seems audiences still find stuff about the differences between men and women pretty funny (and we’re talking behavioural differences here, rather than biological or semantic ones). While some in TV might have thought crowd-work had become passe, it turns out seeing a hapless guy in the front row get slaughtered has never really got old.

The explosion of stand-up’s popularity on these short online ‘reels’ has been a revelation and given some highly talented comics, such as Jeff Innocent, a much bigger audience. With a huge back catalogue of brilliant material, Jeff started uploading clips to Instagram and the public lapped it up. Looking like a possible football hooligan – but in reality a liberal in a mixed-race marriage – Jeff expertly mines a bundle of surface contradictions and has gained a large and growing following, especially among the young. This underlines part of the problem conventional television has: if a producer had pitched a show about a guy in his sixties for a Gen Z audience they’d have been laughed out of Shoreditch House.

The online success of people such as Jeff (maybe I should start spelling my name with a ‘J’) has prompted an industry scramble to build a following via clips. The comedy business may skew heavily left, but it can represent the very best of nimble capitalism when there’s money to be made. Where comics used to turn up to gigs with a hangover and relationship issues, they now rock up with a tripod and a fancy camera. After the show, instead of returning to their hotel room to drink the mini-bar dry, they’re rushing back to decide on the best font for their captions.

I’ve had a few clips ‘go big’, but in truth this technological development mostly favours people without young children. It’s very hard, upon returning home after three days on the road, to tell your wife you need to get on a Zoom with your social media manager to decide on the best title for a 40-second clip about bollock pain.

With this constant need to create content, there’s no doubt the young generation of comics coming through are the hardest working of all time. These guys are generating output night and day, where club comics like me used to do just 20 minutes’ work three nights a week then try to convince our other halves that getting pissed with the punters after was ‘networking’.

I worry for younger comic’s mental health, as the vast majority of clips go for very little and the ‘feedback’ is non-stop. Even the positive comments can leave you scratching your head. Recently, a viewer enjoyed a clip of mine on Facebook and commented: ‘Very funny, a lot better than some of the so-called pros.’ Evidently me hosting Live at the Apollo wasn’t quite enough for him to think I’d hung up my teaching corduroy for good.

While stand-up clips are hot stuff, conventional TV comedy commissioning is going through a period of soul searching as it becomes harder than ever to make new approaches succeed. Topical formats have felt this more acutely than most. How can TV keep up with the fast-moving world of social media platforms, where someone can produce a Huw Edwards deepfake rap before your lawyer has even cleared the topic for discussion?

Commentators once asked ‘Can we get more political balance in topical comedy?’. Presented with that existential problem, the industry responded by saying ‘How about no topical comedy at all?’, and proceeded to cancel anything which didn’t involve a celebrity road-trip.

All of which leaves topical comedians with fewer and fewer places to ply their trade. Comics appearing on GB News initially got a bit of stick, but the industry will soon wake up to the fact that these kinds of channels will become the go-to places for jokes about current affairs. In a way, rolling news discussion formats are the closest televisual entity to social media; they too are constantly in the market for content and give lawyers nightmares.

It’s ironic really that after we obsessed for so long over whether the public wanted left- or right-wing comedy, in a surprise twist of fate it turns out they didn’t specifically want either. They just wanted funny. And now they have it, via a phone and some clever algorithms which know their sense of humour better than a partner of 20 years. Those of us who still lean towards legacy media have a huge fight on our hands to keep up.

How chefs cut costs in the kitchen

My grandmother, and many like her, kept an account book for household spending. This was not the product of an overbearing marriage or mistrust on anyone’s behalf – it was simply how things were done at a time when habits had been formed during rationing after the second world war, and banking was manual and slow.

I spent a lot of time observing her kitchen on childhood visits. It was where my lifelong obsession with cooking began, and I can still recall a sense of balance in how she shopped and cooked; she was fond of naughty treats and lavish cuts, but she kept a stock pot, knew her way around basic butchery and was reluctant to let anything go to waste.

Later, as head chef in busy restaurants which relied on close control of tight margins to stay in business, I also kept a daily account book. We didn’t call it that, of course: day sheets, GPs, margins and P&Ls are the head chef’s stock in trade. But all we are really doing is keeping an account book, staying on top of incomings vs outgoings.

It was during a recent conversation with friends, all chefs or restaurateurs, that chatter turned to the increasingly complex task of running restaurant kitchens in the current climate – i.e. one where costs of ingredients, labour, rent and rates have all gone skyward, and the very task of finding people to work in hospitality has become Herculean, all while real household incomes and disposable spending are declining. As we talked, I wasn’t the only one at the table whose mind went back to our grandparents’ kitchens.

Just before the nexus of too many beers drunk, we felt we landed on a list of genuinely useful, practical tips and tricks that we as chefs use to make things go further, taste better and cost less to produce in the running of our kitchens. All of them could either be traced to the kitchens of our grandparents, or wouldn’t have felt out of place there; and all could be drawn on now in home kitchens up and down the country in order to better cope in the current climes. The list below is not exhaustive, but hopefully it acts as a catalyst or inspiration.

Cook from scratch

That’s the first and last commandment. As any chef who has tried to trim a gross profit margin will tell you, eradicating anything premade from your kitchen is a surefire way to buy yourself some financial headroom. There is a time cost, for sure, but the economies are plain to see, especially when taken in conjunction with the next tip…

Learn to love waste

Unlike in most home kitchens, in professional kitchens (and my grandmother’s kitchen) trimmings, peelings, leftovers and waste are relished. The odds and ends of one thing are often the foundations, or catalyst at least, for another. Stock is the most obvious application here, but I would argue it is actually the least useful in an economising kitchen. Pickings from bones and carcasses can become pie and sandwich fillings, bits of joy in pasta sauces or little luxuries stirred into curries, soups and stews. The peelings and skins of many vegetables can be kept and blitzed, cooked down with onions and other aromatics, and turned into veggie fillings in the same way as above. Stems of items such as broccoli, cauliflower and kale should always be kept: chopped through and sweated down in butter or oil, they are full of goodness and often more delicious than the rest of the vegetable. Any bread left at the back of the bread bin should be turned into croutons or breadcrumbs.

Learn to roux

This is a classic technique where relatively cheap fat and flour are cooked together to give a nice thick sauce that can magnify flavour. It was often pressed into service in my grandmother’s kitchen, and is a staple in kitchens in the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal. If you’ve been keeping your crusts and turning them to crumbs, you can have a croquette in no time, perhaps with the ends of cheese or a few pickings from yesterday’s roast chicken or pan-fried sausage chopped and stirred through. Similarly, cauliflower cheese, macaroni cheese, chicken and leek pie and many more all rely on a good roux to create cheap ballast and sauce and turn a scrap or leftover into a treat to be celebrated.

Get to know your butcher and your fruit and veg shops

The ease of supermarkets makes them compelling to us as time-poor consumers, and their commercial heft and buying power makes them compelling to us as cash-poor consumers. But sometimes having a relationship with your smaller local shops can lead to taking advantage of gluts and unsold stock. While a supermarket is duty bound to throw away labelled stock that falls foul of its official shelf life, a fruit and veg shop has the freedom to offer cut prices on (or even give away for free) fruit and veg it knows need using sooner rather than later. In restaurant kitchens, chefs have a constant dialogue with their suppliers – if you don’t ask you don’t get, and a friendly enquiry as to what a supplier might have as ‘seconds’, or on the turn, usually results in great-value seasonal bounty or bits and bobs for free. My grandmother’s canvas might have been jams and chutneys, but her method was the same.

Stop cooking just for tonight

Cook for tomorrow, and the day after that too. Chefs will often cook at least part of a dish in bulk before it breaking down and using it in multiple ways or for multiple dishes. What we mean by this for the home cook is moving away from, say, frying specific small portions of meat or fish for one meal, and instead poaching or boiling a relative bulk. You end up with plenty of cooked meat or fish, some of which can be tarted up in a frying pan for tonight’s supper and the rest of which can be used in myriad applications throughout the rest of the week. Similarly, you’ll also be the proud owner of a stock or sauce resulting from your one act of cooking, which again can insinuate itself into dishes throughout the week. Our prediction: as we go ever deeper into this cost-of-living squeeze, we’ll be seeing more boiled beef, fish stews, poached chicken, pork in milk and other frugally-inspired dishes gracing restaurant menus. The home cook should follow suit.

Know your flavour bombs

Any restaurant chef worth his or her salt knows instinctively that small applications of big flavours can salvage tough, cheap or harder-to-cook dishes. The home cook can take this one step further. Increasing ‘flavour bombs’ can mean relying less on more expensive meats and fish while still ending up with a dish that packs a serious punch. Having a cupboard stocked with anchovies, fish sauce, Worcestershire sauce, tomato puree, sun-dried tomato puree, harissa paste, chipotle paste and many more like these enables you, at the flick of a teaspoon, to elevate something basic into something mouthwatering, with minimal cost.

Give up on the oven

It’s an inefficient beast, takes a long time to heat up, guzzles fuel and is often overkill when all you want is to cook a few sausages or a piece of fish. Learn instead to love the stovetop. Alternatively, if the oven is going on, fill it right to the brim – ram it chock full of trays with anything from your fridge that might respond well to a nice roasting. It doesn’t matter a jot if you’ve no plans to eat it there and then: as above, store it and use it later. Cooking in a pan over a flame is cheaper and more efficient than heating the oven. Having a fridge full of pre- or par-cooked bits and pieces that can become a curry or part of a sauce or a stew throughout the week is how it often works in restaurant kitchens, and it’s certainly closer to how my grandmother navigated the week. Save yourself the cost of that air fryer or pressure cooker you’ve been eyeing up, and instead consider making better use of the kitchen you’ve already got.

Simmer down

A lot of the things many of us cook all the time – pasta, rice, potatoes and greens, for example – need enough water in the pan to just cover them, and only require temperatures of about 80°C to cook. This means that that big pot of water running at a rolling boil on the back of the stove for your spaghetti could be about half as full and bubbling at a much slower rate. Similarly, sauces and stews just need a gentle simmer; running pans of something tasty on high heat is a waste of energy.

Buy more frozen food

Or, more broadly, freeze more food. Frozen meat, fish and veg have endless benefits to the scrimping shopper and home cook: frozen at peak freshness, i.e. when just slaughtered, caught or picked, they benefit from being subject to less wastage, meaning both that wastage isn’t costed into the price by the retailer and we’re not as likely to waste the thing at home when we do buy it. Win-win. There’s no need to pander to any age-old snobbery surrounding fresh vs frozen food. As a chef friend’s grandfather is said to have uttered: ‘A well-stocked freezer means a well-fed geezer.’ We can’t say fairer than that.

The £160,000 Maserati that’s the last of its kind

There were a couple of moments where this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed might’ve been a little dicey. Day three of the four-day extravaganza, on Saturday, was cancelled due to 50mph winds. That may not sound all that alarming, but the ‘central feature’ at the Festival of Speed amounted to nearly 100 tonnes of steel sculpture soaring eight storeys over Goodwood House – seat of the Duke of Richmond since the 17th century – with typically several thousand petrolheads picnicking below. It also included six valuable Porsches hovering just below the clouds, and with the public told to stay away there was still every chance His Grace might suffer a Blaupunkt 962 stuck in his roof.

The Goodwood hillclimb takes place on a 1.16-mile section of the Duke’s drive and is flanked by 100,000 spectators. On Thursday, a wheel snapped off the back of a drifting Jaguar Mk 1 and bounced with furious energy into the crowd. This could easily have been lethal. There have been three fatalities in the festival’s 30 years, and to not have had a serious injury this time was nothing short of divine. Two people took a blow from the errant wheel but, according to an official statement, ‘were able to go back to enjoying the event’. I picture them cursing their half-spilt pints – that would be the British way. Earlier, an electric concept car from Hyundai had failed to slow at the perilous Molecomb Corner and smashed through four rows of hay bales. It looked like an explosion in a Shredded Wheat factory. All of which delayed proceedings and made my end-of-the-day slot to drive a special Maserati up the hill look in doubt.

To drive at Goodwood one needs to hold a racing licence, and the thrill of thrashing somebody else’s car in front of a capacity crowd and on television is pretty much the sole reason I renew mine each year. I was raring to go, and my promised steed was Maserati’s last ever V8-engined car: the Ghibli 334 Ultima.

Let’s pause for a minute’s silence. Since 1959, Maserati has been building some of the most stirring V8 road cars in the business. The first was the gorgeous 5000 GT ‘Scià di Persia’, a one-off coupe commissioned by the Shah of Persia himself, the car-mad Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, with elegant superleggera coachwork by the famed Carrozzeria Touring.

Now, in 2023, Maserati bids a fond farewell to its V8, adaptations of which also powered the Quattroporte, the Mexico, the original 1960s Ghibli, the Indy, Khamsin, Bora, Kyalami, Shamal, 3200GT, and the previous-gen GranTurismo which ended production in 2019. That was the best-sounding 2+2 production car of the past decade. The new GranTurismo comes with a choice of V6 twin-turbo or triple fully-electric motors. Welcome to a quieter Modena. Maserati is emerging as a leader when it comes to high-end electrification. Its BEV department is called ‘folgore’ – the Italian word for lightning. But where’s the thunder? With the Ghibli 334 Ultima, the Trident-brand is allowing itself a rare moment of reflection, but the uneasy truth is that so much of its soul is aural.

The ‘334’ points to its top speed – 334km/h or, in real money, an astounding 208mph. This makes it the fastest saloon in the world. You wouldn’t know it, because the current Ghibli is so unshouty, even with some slightly enlarged air inlets and vents. It’s much less brawny than an AMG Mercedes, for instance. It looks modern but discreet, a bit like one of Rishi Sunak’s Henry Herbert suits. Just 103 units will be built (103 was the secret code name for the original Shah of Persia 5000 GT), with only five being right-hand drive. The UK price is expected to be around £160,000. It’s painted Persian blue, which looks deep blue or jade green depending on the light, just like the Arabian Gulf. Inside, the seats are pale terracotta reminiscent of the Shah’s car.

At its heart is the four-litre twin-turbo V8, with the cylinder banks angled at 90 degrees. It produces 572bhp. I call that adequate.

Of course, I want to hear the roar of the engine bouncing off Goodwood’s infamous ‘flint wall’. The noise, definitely not the car’s bodywork. That is what we don’t want. In addition to the Hyundai Ioniq 6 RN22e’s shunt at Molecomb, we’ve also seen a Leyton House F1 car, a BMW M1 Procar and a McLaren F1 GTR (which is worth well into the teens of millions) go crunch. That’s enough to make even the most boisterous helmsman’s confidence waiver. And there is a communications breakdown. The paddock marshals are telling me to jump into the Ghibli and head to the start line, while the course is red flagged due to the Jag incident and we’re receiving word we could be done for today. Rumours abound that those struck by the errant wheel lost a lot more than their drinks. It’s not happening, I’m told; no more runs. No more burying my right foot in some Italian carpet. No more making those 572 cavalli sing. I wander off to look at the stands before Maserati’s UK boss chases after me: He’d got a call from race control, and we were back on.

Helmet, check. Approved driver wristband, check. Three, two, one, go. The 334 Ultima screeches off the line, spinning its wheels through the first two gears. Zero to 62mph takes 3.9 seconds. I never look at the speedometer. I’ve raced up this hill a dozen times, and the first corner is always earlier and tighter than I remember. We’re already doing better than the first time (when I flooded a classic Lancia rally car and never made the start). The second time I did it, it was in race-prepped 1965 Alfa Romeo Giulia GTA and the gearstick came off in my hand halfway round. It’s enough to put you off Italian cars, but I figure a brand-new Maser should be better sorted. No need to worry on that front. Kick up a little dirt at the entry to the second turn like the pros and bury the throttle past the hospitality tents, the central feature, and the thousands thronging to get a picture.

Under the bridge, a twist and a blind crest and you’d better already be nursing the brakes before Molecomb hoves into view. If you’re not, you’ll go the way of the Hyundai and that’s an embarrassment I’d rather avoid. I’ve got electronic stability control turned off, helping the car rotate nicely into the corner so I can apply power right on the apex. Oversteer, not understeer – that’s the key here. Into the tree-lined avenue. The flint wall is ahead, shielded from the light, black as coal. Err on the side of caution – it can be slippery. For the next turn, a right-hander, it gets extra narrow with hay bales either side and it’s easy to lose concentration thinking back to how you just escaped Molecomb and the wall and ensuing repair bills. Think two corners ahead and nothing else. The last is a longer left hander and across the finish line. At which point, you sit in the world’s most expensive and tightly-packed car park for half an hour moaning about who held you up (another bloody Hyundai), before being allowed to go back down the hill and return to one’s paddock.

There remain 103 examples of this car available, I’m happy to say, but this is the finale. I just wish that glorious V8 was going under many more Maserati bonnets, with no end date.

Inside Labour’s fiery Commons meeting

Sparks flew at tonight’s Parliamentary Labour party (PLP) meeting. Deputy leader Angela Rayner had been due to speak to MPs as part of an end of term pep talk. Instead, the ongoing row over Keir Starmer’s decision to maintain the two child benefit cap if Labour enters government dominated the entire session. 

Rayner herself has previously labelled the cap ‘obscene and inhumane’ and she was forced to defend herself when those past comments were raised by backbench Labour MPs. The deputy leader told her colleagues that she stood by the tweet but that there was a need for fiscal responsibility. More surprising than Rayner’s remarks were the range of criticisms voiced at tonight’s meeting.

Both Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Rosie Duffield – two MPs with very different views on trans rights – were united in their condemnation of Labour’s U-turn. Russell-Moyle subsequently told journalists afterwards that while ‘no reassurances were given, I am confident it will go back to Keir.’ ‘ Duffield argued that the abolition of the ‘rape clause’ was ‘just a basic thing that you expect from Labour.’ 

Other MPs who voiced their concerns in the meeting included Stella Creasy, Clive Efford and Ian Lavery. Tonight’s debate highlighted the uneasy truce that exists between various factions in Keir Starmer’s party. ‘It’s just like the old days,’ remarked one loyalist on seeing the waiting journalists outside the PLP room.

Starmer’s team will hope that the benefits cap row is merely a one-off reminder of the tensions that exist within the parliamentary caucus – and that it is a lesson in the discipline required if they enter government. However, for some Labour MPs, the whole episode has left them asking what exactly the party is for.

In defence of private jets

Barbara Amiel was right that one private jet isn’t enough. One jet is always in the wrong place, or undergoing maintenance, or perhaps these days being attacked by eco-activists. So two is the absolute minimum. 

Needless to say, the very idea of private jets sends environmentalists insane. Just last week, Just Stop Oil types attacked private jets at Ibiza, splashing paint and glueing themselves to the wings.   

The Stay Grounded network, which also campaigns against private jets, boasts on its web site, ‘We’ve come to tell the super-rich the party is over’. This goes to show that much of the eco-extremist anger at private jets has probably more to do with class warfare than the environment. Air travel accounts for an estimated 2 per cent of total global greenhouse emissions. Private jets account for 2 per cent of this 2 per cent, or 0.04 per cent.  

Is it only the super-rich, as Stay Grounded say, who are in the PJ set? There are certainly more expenses than you might imagine. Buying a jet is merely a down payment on the ongoing costs of ownership. It costs £600 just to land at the private jet port at Farnborough, plus parking. It’s extra if you bring a pet.  

A rule of thumb is that after paying pilots, insurance costs, filling up with aviation fuel, hanger fees, technicians, flight attendants, and cleaning and catering contractors, operating an Elon Musk-style Gulfstream G650 costs around a million dollars a month.  

Because your jet will only fly you to an airport, albeit to luxurious private terminals like Farnborough, a helicopter might also be necessary for the onward trip to your factory, mansion or yacht. Abramovich’s yacht has two helipads. One for his Airbus helicopter, the other for the pizza delivery helicopter, perhaps.  

In the TV series Succession, the media tycoon Logan Roy favoured the Sikorsky S-76-B, a medium helicopter that’s also the choice of the British Royal Family. Figure $15 to 20 million for one of these, depending on the fit-out. And perhaps $100,000 a month in running costs.  

But this is a billionaire-class approach. What about mere millionaires? Or those with lesser fortunes who would rather spend it on temporal luxuries than leave it to be taxed by the revenue?  

There’s fractional ownership. You can own half a jet, or even 10 per cent. Like a timeshare. A million would buy you perhaps 10 per cent of a light jet, although there’s fuel, pilots and landing fees on top. A few hundred thousand, a small share of a turboprop. Still pretty rich.  

For us lesser mortals, I am pleased to report, there are even more palatable alternatives. ‘If you can f*** it or fly it, rent it don’t buy it,’ is the advice of those who privately fly five to six times annually, perhaps to the Alps to ski, or the Balearics for summer sun. A flight in a light jet from London to Geneva is about £5,000 one-way. Malaga is a little more. So a (comparatively) modest budget of £50,000 will buy you four to five return flights a year.  And you can bring your pets.   

My own experience of private jetting is I confess fairly limited, although I should like to indulge more in my senescence. I once chartered a modest jet to get me from Paris to Luxembourg, where I was having dinner with the prime minister of that country.  And I once chartered a jet to get me out of Blackpool after a Conservative party conference, which is a sound excuse. It would be indiscreet to acknowledge who signed my expenses claim but I’m duty bound to admit that Rupert Murdoch paid, unwittingly, both times.   

I’m writing this in seat 8D on the Ryanair flight from Béziers to Shannon and it’s extremely uncomfortable. My flight in sardine class has cost roughly €250 round trip. I could do this 18 times for the cost of a single one-way flight in a Dassault Falcon. But my bottom is protesting. 

A stonking rich surgeon friend in London called me the other day and wanted me to chip in £500,000 for 10 per cent of a Pilatus PC-12, a sweet Swiss turboprop ideal for European peregrinations.  I’m thinking about it. Fly first class or your children will, seems the apposite rule here.  Would I regret this exorbitant expenditure on my death bed? I’m not convinced it’s as insane as it sounds. And even better if it annoys the likes of Just Stop Oil.  

I dislike David Cameron, but he was right on gay marriage

The other day, I found myself at a large event in a posh garden where David Cameron was present. Being a polite sort of person, he smiled and mouthed some sort of greeting as we passed. And being an impolite sort of person, I ignored him and walked on.

When someone asked me why I’d been so rude, I explained that I was just being consistent. I’ve been very rude about Cameron in print over several years, so wouldn’t it be a bit hypocritical – craven, even – to be all smiley and polite in person?

My rudeness has taken many forms and has several causes. I thought that Cameron’s near-immediate desertion of his post after the Brexit referendum was irresponsibility on a historic scale, especially given his refusal to allow the civil service to prepare for the possibility of a Leave vote.

I thought the referendum itself was the product of Cameron’s hopeless and spineless management of his party dating back to his daft 2005 promise to pull the Tories out of the European People’s party bloc in the European parliament. It started a cycle where he would make a promise to eurosceptics that validated their complaints but which he then failed to deliver on – then sought to make amends by making an even bigger promise. He fed buns to a crocodile, which grew until it was big enough to take over the bakery.

And I thought that Cameron’s post-power antics with Lex Greensill were deeply shabby, the actions of a man who doesn’t feel that the little people’s rules apply to him.

I also have a rather more personal grievance against our former PM, but I’m not – quite – ready to write about that yet.

Overall then, I’m not David Cameron’s biggest fan, so being a bit rude to him in a garden felt like it made sense. It’s also been good copy: I’ve written several nasty columns about the man over the years, and yes, been paid for them.

But a couple of things have made me reflect on this since that moment of childish spite in the garden.

One is a conversation with someone at Alzheimer’s Research UK, where Cameron has been president since 2017. According to my friend there, he’s been extremely good for the charity, devoting a lot of time to supporting fundraising and influencing while never seeking credit or acclaim. In a world where some are very keen for you to know about their selfless work for good causes, that deserves a positive mention. And today’s headlines about a dementia treatment drug are just a reminder of how much that work matters.

The other thing that gives me pause is today’s date, the tenth anniversary of possibly the best thing the Cameron government did. On 17 July 2013, royal assent was given to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act. For ten years now, gay couples have been able to get married.

This is a good thing, as Cameron himself argued back then. It may have been mildly controversial at the time, but gay marriage quickly became one of those reforms that ends up a permanent fixture: no party would seriously contemplate its repeal. (See also: the ban on smoking indoors; London’s congestion charge).

There are some perfectly good arguments to be made that Cameron doesn’t deserve real credit on gay marriage. Some would claim Tories such as George Osborne and Boris Johnson were braver on gay equality. Others might suggest Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems pushed Cameron into it.

But none of that matters. The law passed on his watch. He was PM at the time, so just as he takes final responsibility for bad stuff that happened, so he gets the credit for good stuff. And letting same-sex couples get married was a good thing to do.

All of which is a reminder that life is complicated and no one is wholly good or wholly bad. David Cameron may be a shallow spiv who risked his country’s strategic and economic future on his own personal charms then ran away to make money when he failed, but he also did some good things for the world. Well done, Dave.

Labour mayor quits and torches Keir

So. Farewell then. Jamie Driscoll. The left-wing North of Tyne mayor – widely described as the ‘last Corbynista in power’ – has today quit the Labour party with a double-barrelled blast at Keir Starmer. Driscoll was last month barred from the longlist to run in the new expanded north east authority after appearing at an event alongside film maker Ken Loach.

And today Driscoll has exacted his revenge by dramatically quitting and firing a departing blast at the Starmer army. In a series of tweets, Driscoll says that if he can raise £25,000 for a campaign by the end of August, he will stand as an independent against Labour’s candidate for north-east mayor. He argues that:

The only “whip” should be the people. The North East needs an experienced, independent voice. Even if you don’t live here, this affects you. Our politics is a mess. Millions feel no one speaks for them. Politicians should answer to you, not to party bosses in London HQs.

In his resignation letter, Driscoll takes direct aim at Starmer, whom he accuses of ‘mental gymnastics worthy of Olympic gold’ for continually suggesting it is ‘grown-up politics to say Britain is broken and then claim things are now so difficult we will abandon any plan to fix it.’

Talk about Keir’s night mayor…

Children need to fight back against political indoctrination

There’s something troubling happening in our schools. In art class, my children have been instructed to make Black Lives Matter posters. Their assemblies in recent years have been a dreary parade of presentations on sexuality, identity and race politics. They have been subjected to workshops involving LGBTQI+ flash cards and printouts of tweets about transgenderism, and taught that Sam Smith – who is obviously overweight and wears provocative bondage clothing – is a shining example of ‘body positivity.’

It’s not that I object to them being exposed to this stuff at school. I’d be quite happy for identity politics to be presented critically and examined alongside competing philosophies. They are teenagers and it’s an unavoidable part of contemporary culture. But there’s a difference between teaching and preaching. In too many British schools, a fashionable creed is presented as an ideological certainty, brooking no opposition. Independent thinking is discouraged and dissent, however reasonable, is suppressed. You thought that story about a pupil being rebuked for refusing to accept that it was reasonable to identify as a cat was an outlier? Think again. This stuff is all over the education system like a drag queen’s make-up. 

Last week, a report by the campaign group Don’t Divide Us looked at the way schools have allowed organisations to teach controversial ‘anti-racism’ theories. The materials they looked at included ‘unconscious bias’, ‘privilege’ and ‘micro-aggressions’. The teaching profession is being ‘radicalised’, the report’s author, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, said. This is social engineering – no, social experimentation – on a massive scale, using our children as the monkeys. And there has been zero democratic consent. 

In the children’s section of my local library, a display of books includes titles like Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide To Gender Identity; Princess Kevin; and Black Artists Shaping The World. Clearly, the rise of dogmatic moralising is reflected in the demise of quality fiction. Milan Kundera, who died last week, put it best. ‘All over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties,’ he wrote. 

Parents are powerless in the face of this rising tide. They are locked out of the school system, with the government only just getting round to issuing non-statutory guidance stipulating that they should be informed if their children are ‘socially transitioning’ (official guidance is expected this week). All well and good, but King Canute himself would have scoffed. This is heart-breaking, and to a parent it feels like a personal and societal failure.  

As for the teachers, those who harbour private alarm at the spread of the cult are intimidated into silence, fearing for their careers. The best they can manage is delivering mandated ideological instruction in a half-hearted or subversive way. (Though I do know one or two souls who carry the torch online, using pseudonyms.) Meanwhile the government, until very recently, has done woefully little to counter this disturbing trend, effectively conceding the education system to a cabal of zealots, fanatics and ideological cultists who seek to mould the future of our country by moulding the minds of our children. 

The tragic conclusion is clear: the only ones capable of saving society are our children themselves. Just as the treatment of the year eight pupil arguing about feline self-identification was not an outlier, the bravery of the child herself was not entirely unusual. There aren’t that many of them, but there are some courageous souls who are determined to go down fighting. 

Only our children can stand up for their friends. It is as depressing as it is true. A larger and larger number of youngsters are sliding into confused introversion as they try to work out which of the umpteen different sexual identities they should ‘identify with’, rather than just getting on with living their lives and working things out naturally as they go along. Many are taking on different genders and playing with fantasies of disfiguring, painful and life-changing surgery. Mental health difficulties are soaring among young people, and even those who have not succumbed have been left ill-equipped to deal with the cut and thrust of the real world when they grow up. Teachers – who themselves benefited from childhoods free from all this stuff – expend much effort providing emotional support to anxious and mollycoddled teens. This is like poisoning them while cushioning the symptoms; given the amount of time they spend enforcing gender and race ideology, it’s a wonder they get any teaching done at all. The remaining children who, usually as a result of good early years’ parenting, still have brains and hearts intact, are increasingly distressed. And with the government coming too late and too weakly to the fight, they are starting to shoulder the burden. 

Recently, after a particularly galling lesson about the number of ‘genders’ that apparently exist – was it 46? 200? 1,000? – my son engaged his teacher in debate. You’re not supposed to be promoting political views at school, he pointed out. ‘It’s not political, it’s politicised,’ the teacher nonsensically replied. In response to this word salad, my son simply remarked: what’s the difference? That won him the argument. Thankfully, he wasn’t sent to the headmistress. 

But maybe there is something parents can do. If your child had decent early years that were not saturated with television, mobile phones and junk food, but instead played with Lego or dolls, read books, engaged in sports, built dens, climbed trees, bashed around on musical instruments and played imaginary games, they may be showing signs of courage now. If so, equip them with the arguments and material they need to fight back. To start with, familiarise them with Section 406 of the Education Act 1996. Entitled ‘Political Indoctrination’, it states: ‘The governing body and head teacher shall forbid (a) the pursuit of partisan political activities by any of those registered pupils at a maintained school who are junior pupils, and (b) the promotion of partisan political views, in the teaching of any subject in the school.’ Tragically, the rest is up to them. 

It’s not for Sunak to save students from themselves

Rishi Sunak is not wrong to write, as he does in the Telegraph today, that too many young people are being ‘ripped off’ by poor-quality university courses, and that many would be better signing up for apprenticeships. But should a Conservative government really be threatening to tell the universities what to do?

David Cameron’s tuition fee hike was meant to make discerning consumers out of university applicants. Rishi Sunak clearly thinks that’s failed. Cameron allowed universities to charge students tuition fees of up to £9,000 per year (since increased to £9,250). Universities would be able to charge full fees on good quality course, but find themselves having to reduce fees on lower quality courses, with poorer employment outcomes, if not cease offering them altogether.

Instead, £9,000 rapidly became the standard annual tuition fee, charged by almost all universities for almost all courses. The quality of many courses remained questionable, with low levels of contact time. Worse, universities used Covid as an excuse to place teaching online, well beyond the period when it was necessary. There remained a horrible mismatch between the number of places available on popular courses and the employment opportunities available at the end.

Students can’t claim that the government keeps them in the dark: it publishes data on employment levels and earnings levels, by subject, for graduates five years after graduation. The percentage of graduates in sustained employment or further study varies from 82.2 per cent in the case of creative arts and design to 92.5 per cent in medicine and dentistry (it doesn’t say how many are employed in jobs for which they actually require their degree, or that are related to their degree subject). Median earnings vary between £21,200 for performing arts to £52,900 for medicine and dentistry (so much for junior doctors bleating that they are paid less than coffee shop baristas).

The question is, why aren’t students studying the data, and using their buying power to squeeze out poor quality courses? It is ironic, given students’ reputation for protesting about all manner of things, that so few seem to be prepared to demand a better quality product in return for their £9,250 a year investment. There have been some cases of students taking their universities to court, but it is a wonder there are not mass marches on the country’s senate houses.

Were taxpayers paying for student tuition as they used to, a degree of central planning would be inevitable. In the absence of a market mechanism, the government would have to be involved in deciding how much money to dole out to each university and for each course. A more confident Conservative government, on the other hand, would surely be asking how the market in higher education can be made to work better. There ought certainly to be better incentives for businesses that offer apprenticeships, but as for universities, should we really be clipping their freedoms? Far better to make sure that their customers are better informed about what they are signing up for.

The government should not be laying down what courses universities can and cannot offer. However much we might wince at media studies courses and the like, it shouldn’t be illegal to offer them – it should be up to university applicants to decide whether or not they should exist.

Six times Starmer’s team demanded benefits cap be scrapped

In fairness to Keir Starmer, he only U-turns when his lips move. In an impressive double yesterday, the Labour leader managed to U-turn twice in one interview with Laura Kuenssberg. Starmer managed to both float and then, er, reject the notion that Labour would change the Bank of England’s inflation target (nice one!) while also confirming that the party is no longer committed to scrapping the two-child benefits cap.

This longtime Labour policy appears to have been unceremoniously dropped sometime within the last few months despite both Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner winning their mandates on it. Below is a quick list by Mr S on half-a-dozen Labour frontbenchers who have promised to scrap the cap…

Jonathan Ashworth, June 2023: ‘We are very, very aware that this is one of the single most heinous elements of the system which is pushing children and families into poverty today.’

Jonathan Reynolds, September 2021: ‘Under Labour’s plans – scrapping the five-week wait, ending the benefit cap and binning the two-child limit – 500,000, yes half a million, fewer people would be in poverty right now.’

Ian Murray, March 2021: We could have debated universal credit and the £20 uplift becoming permanent, extending it to legacy benefits, removing the rape clause and helping those most in need.’

Angela Rayner, December 2020: The obscene and inhumane two child cap must go, as must the five week wait.

Wes Streeting, March 2020: ‘Part of the solution for our broken social contract lies in restoring a social security system worthy of the name.’

Keir Starmer, February 2020: ‘We must scrap the inhuman Work Capability Assessments and private provision of disability assessments (e.g. ATOS), scrap punitive sanctions, two-child limit and benefits cap.’

Crimea’s Kerch bridge targeted in second attack

The Kerch bridge, Russia’s only road link to Crimea, has been targeted once again in what seems to have been a drone attack. The damage appears to be extensive may take weeks, if not months, to repair. The Russian-installed head of the Crimean parliament, Vladimir Konstatinov, has blamed the ‘terrorist regime in Kyiv’ for a ‘new crime’ – but in Kyiv, it will be seen as an audacious attack on a legitimate military target. This attack underlines the vulnerability of Russia’s most important assets to a new wave of Ukrainian drones.

Ukrainian media is reporting that Kyiv’s navy and security services were behind the explosions, and that drones were used to blow up the bridge. The newspaper RBK-Ukraine quotes an unnamed source in Ukraine’s security services who said, ‘The bridge was attacked with surface drones. It was difficult to reach the bridge, but in the end it was possible.’ 

As has become customary for Ukraine, the country’s authorities are yet to comment on the incident or claim responsibility for it. Footage circulating on social media shows the aftermath of the two explosions on the bridge, with plumes of rising smoke and a portion of the bridge’s illumination cutting out. Meanwhile videos of the incident’s aftermath taken this morning show a mangled and shattered portion of the bridge’s metal and concrete structure.

The Russian authorities have confirmed that a couple from the Russian region of Belgorod which borders Ukraine, were killed in the incident with their teenage daughter hospitalised with serious injuries. The Kremlin has gone a step further than Konstatinov. The Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova baselessly claimed that this attack was carried out by Ukraine with backing from American and British intelligence.

Just hours after the attack on the bridge, a vast feat of engineering which opened just five years ago, the Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov announced that Russia has pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal to allow the international export of grain from Ukraine’s ports. Peskov claimed that the decision to suspend Russia’s participation in the deal, brokered last year by the UN and Turkey, had nothing to do with this morning’s events. Calling them ‘absolutely unrelated events’, Peskov said that ‘even before the terrorist attack, this position was declared by President Putin’ after certain conditions for the deal’s extension had not been fulfilled.

Whoever is responsible, this is the second time in less than a year that the Kerch bridge has been targeted in an attack. Last October, a 250-metre portion of the bridge’s road and rail route was blown up, using explosives planted in a civilian truck that was crossing the bridge at the time. While it was widely suspected that Ukraine was responsible, this remains unconfirmed. But over the past year, the Ukrainian military has made no secret of the fact they consider the bridge to be a legitimate military target. 

As a result of that first attack, the bridge underwent several months of intensive repair works and was only fully reopened again in February of this year. Much to the irritation of Russian tourists, ever since the bridge reopened, additional security checks introduced for vehicles going on to the bridge have been causing hours-long tailbacks.

While damage to the Kerch bridge is seemingly less severe this time around, with the bridge’s rail route apparently unharmed, this attack once more has the potential to cause logistical challenges to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine and its occupation of Crimea. With Ukraine’s counter-offensive well under way, the Ukrainian army will have been looking for ways to disrupt Russia’s ability to support its troops occupying Crimea and the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson. 

As the only vehicular route to directly link Crimea and Russia, while the road is out of action, any Russians trying to get to and from the peninsula will be forced to travel through the Russian-occupied territories of Donetsk or Luhansk, closer to the front line and therefore more dangerous. According to one Crimean government source, the bridge might take up to a month to fix.

For Putin, the Kerch bridge holds a special significance, a physical symbol of his efforts to incorporate Crimea, and more widely Ukraine, into Russia. Such was the importance of the bridge, the president personally opened it upon its completion in 2018, driving an enormous truck across it. Therefore, in Ukraine’s eyes, there are not only practical incentives for targeting the bridge, but symbolic ones too: to destroy it permanently would be to destroy a key colonial symbol of Putin’s occupation.

Is New Zealand changing its tune on China?

Is New Zealand’s prime minister changing his tune on China? Chris Hipkins said this morning that China’s greater assertiveness has led to the Pacific region becoming ‘more contested, less predictable, and less secure.’ New Zealand is reliant upon China, a country that makes up about a third of its export market. So, when Hipkins, visited Beijing last month, it was hardly a surprise that he avoided saying anything to offend his hosts. But back at home, in a speech to the China Business Summit today, Hipkins felt able to be a little more forthright in his rhetoric; yet this largely served to emphasise a disparity between the language of direct interaction, and that of reflection on principles, in this tricky, ongoing diplomatic balancing act.

Hipkins reflected on ‘New Zealand’s evolving and multifaceted relationship with China.’ He said: ‘Our region is becoming more contested, less predictable, and less secure,’ noting that this poses challenges for small countries like New Zealand that are reliant on the stability and predictability of international rules for our prosperity and security.

The PM noted three key principles that will continue to guide New Zealand’s relationship with China: engagement and cooperation in areas where the two nation’s interests converge; that New Zealand will always act to preserve, protect, and promote its national interests and our values; and that New Zealand will work with partners to advocate for approaches that reflect its interests and values.

New Zealand also has a deep interest in a peaceful and stable Indo-Pacific region. As a trade-dependent nation, with nearly half its trade passing through the South China Sea, continued unimpeded access to shipping and air routes is vital. But this, Hipkins suggested, doesn’t mean that New Zealand isn’t willing to stand up to China. Hipkins made a point of mentioning that he had spoken robustly during his recent visit to China. But we’ll have to take his word for it: these discussions in Beijing were behind closed doors, and the New Zealand media were given next to no insights. Hipkins also refused to divulge what he discussed during his 40-minute chat with president Xi, or what was put forward by the Chinese side.

Following the meeting, Xi described New Zealand as a ‘friend and partner’. Asked whether he would characterise the relationship in the same way, Hipkins, after dissembling for a while, eventually framed the relationship as an ‘international partnership’ and a ‘friendship’, but it ‘depends on the context’. He said human rights were raised, although ‘not in great depth’.

New Zealand is striving to maintain a balance between China and its more traditional partners. Hipkins was among the world leaders who descended on the Lithuanian city of Vilnius for the Nato Leaders’ summit. Wellington is weighing up joining the second pillar of the Aukus agreement, made up of Australia, the UK and the US. The agreement is intended to offer a deterrent to Chinese military development and potential escalation in the Pacific. New Zealand’s participation in Pillar II of the agreement would involves the sharing of advanced military technologies and strategic information. But signing up to Aukus would mean alienating China – something Hipkins seemed hesitant about doing on his trip to Beijing.

New Zealand’s heavy trade reliance on China, and being at a slight remove from the likes of the US and Australia in terms of strategic planning and capacity, means New Zealand’s relationship with China will continue to be a tricky one.

Labour row brews over two-child benefit cap

Another day, another Keir Starmer U-turn. The Labour leader is facing a backlash from his own side after Starmer used an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg’s to say that a Labour government would keep the two-child benefits cap.

When asked whether he would scrap the cap – which has been blamed by Labour politicians for pushing families into poverty – Starmer said he was ‘not changing that policy’. That is a decision that will upset many in the shadow cabinet, let alone the wider parliamentary party.

The current work and pensions secretary John Ashworth has previously described the cap as heinous: ‘the idea that this policy helps move people into work is completely offensive nonsense’. Ashworth’s predecessor in the role, Jonathan Reynolds, also took a dismal view of it. Speaking at the 2021 Labour party conference, when Starmer was already leader, Reynolds said the party planned to scrap it:

Conference, we will not let them forget. Because the steps they took were nowhere near enough. Under Labour’s plans – scrapping the five-week wait, ending the benefit cap and binning the two-child limit – 500,000, yes half a million, fewer people would be in poverty right now. That’s the difference Labour can make: safety and security for you and your family.

So, what’s happened? As the Fabian Society’s Andrew Harrop points out, research by the group found that the public back the current policy when asked both in polls and after deliberation on a citizen’s jury. But a worry about electoral appeal is not the main driving force here – the Fabian Society report also came up with ways to pitch it and more tailored option.

Instead, this comes back to money, another sign of the grip of the shadow treasury in Rachel Reeves’s fight for fiscal responsibility to come first. Scrapping the cap, which places a limit on the amount a household can receive in benefits if they have no, or low, earnings, is estimated to cost £1.3 billion. But the current view of the Labour leadership is that the state of the economy means they cannot commit to it. It comes as Starmer refused to say whether a Labour government would spend more money on public services than the Tories.

This is in part because Labour aides feel the best line of attack for the Tories at the next election will be to suggest the party cannot be trusted on the economy and would make the situation worse through higher borrowing. Secondly, there is concern that the situation Labour might inherit will be bad enough that they won’t be able to do many of the things the party would want them to.

The reaction of Labour MPs to the news is a reminder of how hard a sell that will be if in they are power. Over the weekend, Starmer’s MPs have been questioning what the point of a Labour government is if it doesn’t take action on child poverty. It hints at the problems ahead if Keir Starmer enters No. 10, not least in getting his own party to play ball with the hard choices coming.

Will the French riots spawn a new generation of jihadists?

Apart from the 96 arrests and 255 burned cars, Bastille Day passed off without a hitch in France. A bullish Interior Minister, Gerald Darmanin, expressed his satisfaction in a tweet, thanking the 45,000 policemen and women who had been deployed across the country. It says much for the state of France that avoiding a riot on their national day is a cause for celebration. 

Still, one can understand why the government is grateful for small mercies after the trauma of the recent uprising. The financial cost of the damage caused by the rioters is predicted to top €1 billion (£858 million), a staggering sum for a country that is already dangerously indebted. This figure is double that of the unrest of 2005, when for three weeks youths went on the rampage. 

The gravest cost to France of those riots 18 years ago, however, wasn’t financial but ideological, although it took several years before this became apparent. The date it did was March 2012 when 23-year-old Mohammed Merah murdered seven people over the course of eight days, including soldiers and Jewish children. Merah was the first of what Gilles Kepel – France’s leading expert on Islamic extremism – termed the ‘third generation’ of jihadists.  

The first generation fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s; the second came of age at the turn of the millennium, inspired by Al-Qaida, and the third generation appeared in 2012. The difference, Kepel explained in 2015, shortly after two more of this generation – the Kouachi brothers – had murdered the staff of Charlie Hebdo, was that they were not as highly trained and disciplined. ‘They are not professional terrorists,’ he said, which made them more susceptible to making mistakes. On the other hand, the fact they don’t belong to any organisation ‘allows them to slip under the radar of the police’. 

Kepel pinpoints three factors as central to the evolution of this third generation of jihadists in France, and all occurred in 2005: the first was the release online of ‘The Global Islamic Resistance Call’ by Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri, a 1600-page call to arms by an Islamist intellectual that would become a guide to waging a jihadist’s guerrilla war in Europe 

The second factor was the launch of YouTube in 2005. The site would become a crucial platform in the diffusion of Islamist propaganda among a young generation of Muslims searching for an identity in 21st century Europe. And then there were the riots in France in the autumn of 2005. 

In his 2015 book, Terror: the genesis of the French Jihad, Keppel wrote that between 2005 and 2012 there was a major shift within Islam in France as a result of the riots. ‘The most significant consequence of the 2005 riots was the emergence of the generation of post-colonial immigrants,’ he explained. ‘Through the scenes of devastation, the looting, burning of vehicles and harassment of the police, it sent an existential message to the rest of the population.’ 

This message was the assertion of Islamic identity, a phenomenon some commentators now call the ‘re-Islamisation’ of French Muslims, specifically among the young. This was borne out in 2020 by a survey that reported 57 per cent of 15-24 year-olds believed Islamic law was more important than French law. 

Thus far a ‘fourth generation’ of jihadists has not materialised; but there is what Kepel terms an ‘atmospheric jihadism’, consisting of angry young men whose callow minds are exploited by older Islamists. Their strategy is the ‘creation of a culture of rupture with the Republic and its values’. 

The recent riots will accelerate this rupture, feeding into the narrative of an ‘Islamophobic’ French state that oppresses its Muslim population. It doesn’t help that the governments of Algeria and Turkey are encouraging this sense of victimisation. Recep Erdogan said the recent riots were a consequence of France’s ‘racism’ and ‘colonialism’. At the time of the 2005 riots in France, Erdogan – then prime minister of Turkey – blamed the disorder on the fact that, in 2004, France had banned the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in schools. 

The new riots come at a time when European intelligence services, including MI5, report that the Islamic State is again planning to attack the continent. London, Berlin and Paris are said to be on their hit list and ‘active commando units’ have reportedly already been infiltrated into Europe.  

That is just one facet of the threat. Arguably the greater danger – certainly to France – comes from the homegrown extremists, a new generation of Merahs, Kouachis, Coulibalys (who murdered four shoppers in a Jewish supermarket in 2015) and the Bataclan killers. They emerged from the smouldering aftermath of the 2005 riots when their youth, immaturity and aimlessness were manipulated online and in person (often in prison, where Merah, Coulibaly and Chérif Kouachi were radicalised post-riots) by veteran extremists. 

Last year in France, nearly 100 ‘Third Generation’ extremists were released from prison in France, most of whom were convicted for travelling to Syria to fight between 2013 and 2015. A similar number will be freed this year. According to the French counter-terrorism unit responsible for monitoring the inmates on their release from prison, the majority are no longer committed to violent jihad but ‘most remain sufficiently ideologically anchored’. 

If that is the case, and they wish to share their ideology and experience with a new generation, then they may find a receptive audience among some of the angry young men who recently ran riot in France. 

YouTube and the final state of total Kippleization 

When I look back over my life, a decade or two from now, when I finally succumb to the strontium smog, I’ll at least be able to pinpoint the moment when I first knew human civilisation was doomed. Ah yes, I’ll think, as I hear scavengers scuttling towards my body across the trashscape, grunting and hooting for meat: that was the moment. That Friday evening, way back in the middle of 2023, when I was spooning out the usual overcooked pasta for the usual undercooked children and I asked them what they’d been up to. 

‘We found this hilarious thing on YouTube,’ my oldest said. ‘It was, like, this AI-generated video of Boris Johnson eating raw onions.’ Was, like, what? ‘Yes,’ chipped in the second oldest. ‘WHOLE raw onions. It’s hilarious!’

It turned out they’d been watching this one on repeat – as well as the decontextualised clip from some interview (a real interview) in which he claimed to have cooked steak and oven chips the previous night and done so with an explosive enthusiasm that the kids seemed to find extremely funny. This had been their evening’s cultural diet. Now YouTube, their preferences thus revealed, was presumably filling up with microtargeted Boris Johnson/onion content.   

Muse on that, for a moment. It’s not just the inanity of the piece of content described. Well, it is in part the inanity of the content described. They showed it to me. It was inane. It was about fifteen seconds long, and it really leaned into its basic premise. There was Boris – a twitchy, blotchy, ravenous caricature from the depths of uncanny valley, but recognisably Boris – and he was cramming raw onions into his gob with the ferocity of a starving man – or at least, a man who really, really likes gobbling up huge raw onions in no more than a couple of bites per onion.

In the first scene, he held a vast green onion in his left hand while the right pushed a red onion urgently into the old pie-hole. Jump cut, and he’s making short work of another red onion, just shredding it. Jump-cut, there’s a green one getting the treatment. Jump cut: he’s sitting at a table, gazing for a moment with wild surmise at one of those giant mild Spanish onions, held at arm’s length like Yorick’s skull, then, whoomph, down the hatch. 

What could bring such an artefact into the world? Well, whimsy, I guess. Someone, somewhere –perhaps someone with the sort of kink that is best left uninvestigated – decided to type ‘Boris Johnson eating raw onions’ as the prompt for some sort of AI video-generator, and watched the result, and saw that it was good. And they duly stuck it up on YouTube because, duh, where else are you going to put a fifteen-second video of Boris Johnson eating raw onions whole?

What concerns and bewilders me a bit more is that somehow, this piece of random whimsy found its way to the eyes of my children. There’s no moral panic here, I should say. Not like the moral panic when we noticed that my browser search history contained ‘lady taking off brar [sic]’, and after, I’d satisfied my wife that I know how to spell ‘bra’, we had to retool all our safesearch settings at the router. But I will confess to dismay.  

YouTube, as any readers with youngish children will know, is what the young now do instead of watching television. Watching telly – a whole show, that may go on for as long as half an hour, in front of which you sit patiently – is very much not the thing these days. Either you’re jumpily processing the unending algorithmic burble of TikTok, or, if you prefer long-form entertainment or your spoilsport parents won’t let you have TikTok, you’re watching YouTube, moving jumpily from one shaky and amateurish video to another.

My children, perhaps because it’s more like TikTok, seem to prefer ‘YouTube shorts’, which last a few seconds instead of a few minutes. (I know we like to complain about dwindling attention spans, but they can, oddly, watch YouTube shorts for hours.) YouTube really does serve an unending stream of what Philip K Dick called ‘kipple’: aka mindless rubbish. And as Dick noted, the first law of kipple is that kipple drives out nonkipple: ‘The entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization’. The internet has accelerated this process.  

A caveat. We are all, as a species, given to what psychologists call ‘rosy recollection’. Our own parents’ generation liked to chide us with their memories of a golden age in which you made your own entertainment instead of sitting square-eyed in front of the gogglebox; a time when nobody locked their front doors because there was no such thing as crime, and childhood was a paradise of hoops on sticks, apple-scrumping, orange-box karties and green-shield stamps. No doubt their parents in turn looked down with disgust on green-shield stamps and the brain-rotting effects of hoops and sticks, and remembered how as children they spent hours engrossed in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury or the improving works of Dr Arnold. 

But I think that, in this generation, there’s a difference. However inane the content we consumed was – and we all watched The Clangers and The Magic Roundabout, so we can’t completely take the high ground here – it was selected and arranged and programmed by a human hand, as all culture since the dawn of time hitherto has been. The canon was formed by human taste.

Now, not only is AI producing an infinite sludge of meaningless sort-of-art, it’s using algorithms to serve it up. The canon itself, when it comes to books on Amazon and movies on Netflix, is being shaped by a statistical if-you-liked-that-you’re-sure-to-like-this machine, which generates ever smaller feedback loops. YouTube shorts is simply a very stark example – because it evolves in fruit-fly rather than mammal generations – of how dementedly the kippleization process proceeds.  

I got a glimpse of the future on Friday night. A computer-generated simulacrum of Boris Johnson eating a computer-generated simulacrum of raw onions – for ever. Ay me. The lone and level sands stretch far away. I tried to explain these concerns to my kids, incidentally, and it was hard to tell for sure, because of the mouthful of pasta, but I think one of them may have said: ‘OK Boomer.’  

Giorgia Meloni and the true migration hypocrites

Cerberus, the record-breaking heatwave that struck the Mediterranean, was followed this week by another one called Charon – after the mythical boatman who ferried the dead across the Styx to Hades. Meanwhile illegal migrants continue to be ferried across the Mediterranean in record numbers to Italy – thus to Europe – by people traffickers. Relatives placed a single obol, it is said, in the mouths of the dead to pay Charon for the voyage. The living pay the traffickers €3,000 to €10,000, it is said, for theirs.

In April, Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni declared Italy’s migrant crisis a national emergency. So far this year 75,000 illegal migrants have arrived here by boat – more than double the number who arrived in the same period in 2022. This year’s total looks set to exceed the 2016 record of 181,436. 

The European Union signed a deal on Sunday by which it hands over immediately €105 million to Tunisia to help stop the flow of migrants to Italy and £150 million in aid as the first part of its planned €1 billion aid and investment package for the crisis-torn country. It is a similar bargain to the one the EU made with Turkey in 2016 — essentially a way of bribing a country to keep migrants — although it also looks to achieve political stability in Tunisia through investment. 

The deal was signed in Tunis in the presence of EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Meloni who has been its driving force. Italy’s prime minister hailed the agreement as a model for new relations with north African countries. She called it a source of ‘pride… and gratitude.’ But that won’t silence her critics, who are cock-a-hoop at what they see as proof that Italy’s conservative prime minister is all mouth and no trousers. She is failing to deliver – they crow – on her election campaign pledge last summer to stop the migrant boats. Just as Rishi Sunak in Britain is failing to deliver on his promise to stop migrant boats crossing the Channel. 

Would her opponents, who include not just the left but most newspapers and television channels outside Italy, stop the boats? No, of course not. The more migrants the merrier as far as they are concerned. So why aren’t they applauding her, you might ask. 

They are just as delighted by her announcement earlier this month that Italy will grant work permits to 450,000 non-EU workers between 2023 and 2025 – roughly 150,000 a year. This is higher than the quotas in recent years, though well below the record 250,000 in 2006.

This relatively high quota is proof – they tell us – that she is a hypocrite who has been forced to accept their narrative which dictates that Italy needs migrants because employers cannot find Italians to work for them, and because fertility rates are in decline with no young people to pay its pensions (since peaking at 60.8 million in 2014, Italy’s population has fallen by 1.7 million). 

Actually, contrary to what you might think by reading British newspaper coverage of Italy, Meloni has always been in favour of such quotas. 

When I interviewed her during last summer’s election campaign which brought her to power, she told me that Italy does indeed need non-EU workers. Italy ‘needs a quota of migrants’, she said. But ‘the first rule is that no one must enter Italy illegally’. 

Precisely. Unlike those who arrive illegally by boat, migrants admitted under Italy’s quota system at least have a passport and a work permit which is temporary not permanent. And to get that permit, an employer in Italy must send them a work contract in their country of origin. Only then, will they be able to get a visa to travel to Italy – which they can only get from the Italian consulate in their own country. Under a new rule, employers can only employ a non-EU worker if they are unable to find an Italian for the job – except in the case of seasonal workers. And applicants from countries with which Italy has signed agreements to hinder the trafficking of illegal migrants get preference. 

Italy’s quota system is of course open to serious abuse. It is commonly believed, for instance, that a large percentage of non-EU quota workers are already in Italy, where there are believed to be about 500,000 illegal migrants. And that a large number of the employers offering contracts under the quota system are immigrants and the contracts themselves bogus. 

Italy does need a certain number of migrant workers from outside the EU, especially seasonal workers in sectors such as agriculture and tourism. But it cannot be true that it needs huge numbers across the board. Nearly all work quota migrants – just like the ones who arrive illegally by boat – are young men. Yet Italy’s youth unemployment rate is 25 per cent and as high as 50 per cent in much of the poor south. 

Migrants also place pressure on schools, housing and the health service. As for the economic consequences, even the Office for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is sceptical. An OECD report concludes: ‘There is little doubt that where migration expands the workforce, aggregate GDP can be expected to grow. However, the situation is less clear when it comes to per capita GDP growth… An increase of 50 per cent in net migration of the foreign-born generates less than one tenth of a percentage-point variation in productivity growth.’ 

And the only reason Italy needs so many seasonal workers is because most Italians refuse to accept the pitiful wages employers get away with thanks to the availability of migrants. Ironically, it is capitalists and their ruthless greed rather than the no borders left who are mostly to blame for Europe’s migrant crisis. That makes it so much more difficult for right-wing governments to tackle the crisis. And it explains why in the 1960s and 1970s the left was as hostile to mass immigration as the right. 

But nor does the idea stand up to scrutiny that the only way to solve Italy’s demographic crisis is to open the gates to huge numbers of migrants. As Meloni told me: ‘It won’t help if they’re nearly all men!’ 

Meloni’s aim is to persuade Italian women to have more babies. But sadly, it is probably harder to do this than to solve the migrant crisis. Italy’s fertility rate is 1.24 which is way below the replacement level of 2.1. She is considering, among other things, the abolition of income tax for families with three or more children. 

But to put the size of her 450,000 non-EU workers quota into perspective, in 2022 Italy’s net migration (the difference between those who legally emigrated and immigrated) was 228,816 compared to Britain’s 600,000. Whereas 360,685 legal immigrants came to Italy last year, 1.2 million came to Britain. 

Italy’s immediate problem is illegal immigration. Meloni is using the migrant work quota system as a bargaining chip with countries such as Libya and Tunisia in order to secure their help in trying to stop the flow of illegal migrants. 

For more than a decade Libya has been the main departure point for the people trafficker boats even though it is 300 miles from Sicily. But this year Tunisia – far closer – has taken over.

Since becoming Italy’s first female prime minister Meloni has devoted much of her energy to trying to persuade Tunisian president Kais Saied to stop the boats. Saied was elected in 2019, but with Tunisia on the verge of bankruptcy, suspended democracy in 2021 and rules by decree.

In March, Meloni warned EU leaders at a European Council summit that ‘if Tunisia collapses’ Italy risks the arrival by sea of  900,000 migrants from Tunisia. Italy’s secret services warn of a further 685,000 migrants ready to cross to Italy from Libya.

Meloni has tried hard to convince reluctant EU leaders that all member states must share the defence of the EU’s common external borders and share out the migrants who arrive – but with only mixed success. She is also adamant that the EU must convince African countries to allow the EU to process asylum applications in those countries. For once migrants reach Italy – and Europe – it is virtually impossible to send them home. Italy actually physically deports only 5,000 migrants a year.

Meloni’s main goal is to convince her EU partners to fork out a similar bribe to the €6 billion EU one, orchestrated by then German chancellor Angel Merkel, to president Recep Erdogan in 2016 to stop refugees departing from Turkey for Greece. Many of those stopped from departing from Turkey were genuine refugees, above all from Syria. In Italy’s case, however, most are economic migrants. 

In June, Meloni met Tunisia’s president Saied twice in an attempt to stop the boats – the second time she was accompanied by EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. 

Von der Leyen’s presence was a clear sign that Meloni was making progress with her EU partners. As was the EU Commission president’s pledge of £1 billion in aid and investment – and now Sunday’s agreement on immediate delivery of a first tranche of €105 million to combat illegal migration plus €150 million in aid. ‘We are very pleased, it is a further important step towards creation of a true partnership between Tunisia and the EU, which can address in an integrated fashion the migration crisis,’ Meloni said after Sunday’s deal had been agreed.

In Libya, Italy has since 2016 equipped and trained with some success the Libyan coastguard to stop and take back migrant boats – it returned nearly 25,000 migrants to Libya in 2022. Meloni has visited Libya to talk about oil, gas and migrants and in June its prime minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, was in Rome to meet her. 

Before coming to power Meloni often used to say that she would impose a naval blockade of Libya to stop the migrants. Her opponents taunt her constantly about this as well, insisting that it is yet another example of her supposedly far right, fascist psyche.

Such a blockade would of course be impossible given the length of Libya’s coast – not to mention Tunisia’s – but the Libyan coastguard is already performing that role to a limited extent. And guess who introduced the programme to train and equip the Libyan coastguard back in 2016? Why yes, the left-wing Italian government of Matteo Renzi who was Barack Obama’s favourite European. Italy faces its hottest summer ever for both temperature and migration. But the biggest hypocrites of all are Meloni’s opponents – not her.

The politics of sun loungers

The poolside was deserted when we passed on our way to breakfast. This time, I thought, as we ate at the still-quiet restaurant buffet, we’d triumph. Yet arriving back at the pool after eating, all the sun loungers closest to it had already been claimed – by owners who were nowhere to be seen.

Reserving loungers might have been against the hotel’s policy, but removing the towels and beach bags that their claimants had placed on top of them felt like an act of aggression. Instead I sulked silently from my bed near the bins as, an hour later, the family of four who’d taken the plum spot I’d had my eye on for my own family finally sauntered over, ready to spend some time in their premium seats.

That afternoon, something snapped and I decided I wasn’t going to take such flagrant sunbed-snatching lying down. Or rather, I was. The following morning, trialling a new ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ strategy, I too laid down towels to hog the best loungers before breakfast, trying to look as brazen as I could as I walked past the hotel guests I’d gazumped to reclaim them. The victory felt hollow, however, my joy at lying within toe-dipping distance of the pool offset by guilt at cheating the system and paranoia someone would poison my pistachio ice cream in revenge.

Yes, the politics of hotel sun loungers are petty, privileged and laughably entitled. But they’re claiming ever more casualties as this year’s summer holiday season gets under way. In one corner: the serial, shameless hoggers who rise at dawn (or even lay down towels the night before) to reserve seats they don’t plan to use for hours. In the other: strident rule-sticklers who snitch or retaliate by shaming hoggers on social media with video covertly filmed from hotel balconies (TikTok seems to do the biggest trade in #sunbedwars). Then there are the sunbed centrists like me, resentful of ‘lounger louts’, as the tabloid parlance goes, but too conscientious, or cowardly, to routinely take their misplaced towels to task.

Recently, the lounger land-grab insanity seems to have escalated a notch. Last month a British guest at a four-star Majorcan hotel reported guests lining up their towels in queue order on the floor at the locked door to the pool area from 6.30 a.m. ‘I must add this wasn’t youngsters, but mostly elderly and middle-aged people,’ he said. ‘Crazy behaviour.’ At another Majorcan hotel last year guests left their towels unfolded on the ground from 5 a.m. to reserve the slot where they wanted their as-yet-unavailable loungers to go. The mother of two who posted the madness on Instagram described the ‘sunbed showdown’ as a ‘British hybrid version of musical chairs meets the Hunger Games’.

The dash for decent loungers can result in injury – one man is reported to have broken his toe at a Gran Canaria hotel – and even police action. In 2007, Welsh coach driver Glyn Bowden got so fed up with guests reserving sun loungers on a private Italian beach that he piled around 20 up and set them alight. ‘I was put in a cell at the local nick for a couple of hours,’ he said. ‘They were going to charge me with criminal damage but the hotel management intervened on my behalf.’

Whether you’re willing to admit it or not, the chances are you’ve reserved a sun lounger you shouldn’t have. A survey of 2,150 adults by online travel agent sunshine.co.uk found that although 98 per cent of respondents felt irritated by other hotel guests reserving loungers, 71 per cent were also guilty of unfairly bagging beds for themselves. That’s a lot of holiday hypocrisy.

Then again, when you’ve spent thousands on a week in the sun, the stakes are high – competition never greater, I’ve found, than on package holidays, where groups of British guests (we are, I’m afraid, by far the worst offenders) tend to arrive on the same day. Last year a group of three families in our hotel swooped early on the first morning to monopolise 12 loungers with the best view of the beach. By day three they appeared to have acquired squatters’ rights, the rest of us begrudgingly accepting that their books, balls and bags were there for the duration.

Perhaps we should have challenged them. Last month honeymooners Thom Aspland and his wife Lisa asserted ownership over reserved loungers at Grand Barong Resort in Bali that had been left unattended for nine hours. When the people who’d reserved them finally returned, ‘they didn’t confront us’, Thom said. ‘They knew what they had done.’

I don’t think I’ve been to a hotel that hasn’t had a sign telling guests not to reserve loungers, but I’ve never seen the policy enforced – perhaps because the problem is too rife, or staff don’t want to risk embarrassing holidaymakers, or both. Little wonder, then, that when staff do intervene, they acquire hero status – as shown last week when a security guard at a Tenerife hotel was lionised after a film of him ripping towels off unused beds went viral on TikTok. ‘Should do this everywhere,’ wrote one woman, who added that on her holiday ‘people were putting towels on beds from midnight’.

Absurdly, much of my time under the parasol is spent pondering a solution. A wider rollout of a 2018 Thomas Cook system in which travellers could pay £22 to reserve a lounger ahead of their arrival might help, as could guests being allocated a lounger that tallies with their hotel room number, which also forces hotels to stump out for more beds. Or perhaps I should just focus on reminding myself, next time I’m confronted with a mass of reserved loungers and a compulsion to throw them all in the sea, that I’m lucky to be on holiday at all.

What’s behind the bungalow boom?

‘Bungalows are almost perfect,’ as the old gag goes. ‘They only have one floor.’ But these once unfashionable properties are rapidly becoming anything but a joke. While the mortgage crisis is cooling most sectors of the housing market, demand for bungalows is growing.

Estate agents report the properties receiving dozens of offers, selling for tens of thousands over the asking price or being snapped up before officially going on the market. The usual breed of downsizers and retirees looking to replace large family homes with something all on one level are facing stiff competition from budget-conscious purchasers seeking to renovate single-storey homes – and often turn them into family homes with stairs. The capacious pitched roofs often give enough space for two extra bedrooms, where planning allows.

A survey by estate agent Strutt & Parker found that 29 per cent of those looking to move in the next five years consider a bungalow to be their ideal next home – up 7 percentage points from last year. All of this means that the days of bagging a cheap bungalow are long gone, says Louise Ridings of Stacks Property Search: ‘High demand and declining supply mean that bungalows can demand a significant price premium.’

Compared with the first five months of 2018 – when estate agent Hamptons says the number of bungalows on its books was at its highest – there are 18 per cent fewer for sale now. And the very fact that some are being converted into four-bedroom homes or knocked down and replaced (so-called ‘bungalow bashing’) is reducing supply further. A home with an upstairs is no longer technically a bungalow.

Bungalows’ potential for an outward extension is also appealing. With a good footprint and plot size they suit contemporary design trends for open-plan, lateral space with scope for indoor/outdoor living areas. Such extensions won’t always compromise the amount of outdoor space, says Kevin Allen of John D Wood & Co.

Another estate agent points to the fact that verandas are increasingly built into the design of bungalows to ‘bring the outside in’ – taking them closer in style to the very first ones constructed during the days of the Raj, when British officials enjoyed G&Ts on their shady verandas in India. Sir Edwin Lutyens designed some elegant examples in Delhi (with servants’ quarters) before bungalows arrived in Britain in the 1860s.

Still airy and spacious, bungalows’ more modest modern-day proportions remain practical and also economic. ‘With everyone now keeping a closer eye on household bills, prospective homebuyers have a newfound appreciation for homes that cost less to heat,’ says Nick Ferrier of Jackson-Stops.

Those being revamped into futuristic homes are often rebranded to move away from the bungalow’s traditionally uncool image, says Edward Heaton of buying agents Heaton & Partners: ‘An estate agent is unlikely to call a cutting-edge contemporary home laid out over one floor a bungalow. Instead they will use terms such as “single storey” or “lateral space”. Luxury ‘single-storey’ homes include this £1.1 million four-bedroom one in Haslemere, Surrey, or this chic new complex under development in Ascot, Berkshire.

Second-home buyers are also hunting down older bungalows in enviable clifftop or beachside locations as fixer-uppers – if allowed. Josephine Ashby of John Bray Estates says: ‘In many cases it’s possible to get permission for replacement properties, but increasingly these need to be in keeping with existing build lines and ridge heights.’ There’s a two-bedroom one for sale in Deal, Kent that needs modernising; or one in the downsizers’ hot spot of Christchurch in Dorset with scope to remodel.

New or renovated bungalows with contemporary designs get snapped up, especially among downsizing buyers in Cornwall, says Ben Standen of Jackson-Stops Truro. ‘Local developers should consider making bungalows a greater part of development plans,’ he adds. ‘There is a real demand for future-proofed properties with modern tech and design: ground source heat pumps, solar panels and EV charging points.’

The traditional business model of seizing as much square footage as possible for cost effectiveness has deterred developers from building bungalows in the past, but new-build bungalows are now often achieving a higher price per sq ft than multi-storey houses – which means this is changing, according to Charlotte Moxon, head of regional new homes at Strutt & Parker. ‘Planning regulations play a role. Opting to build single-storey homes enables developers to work in areas with restrictions on the number of storeys or size of property,’ she says. ‘This is particularly true with agricultural building conversions.’

As the saying goes, build it and they will come. Adele McCoy of the Edenstone Group says that bungalows they build in their new schemes are the house type that sells the fastest. ‘Across the industry they account for around 1 per cent of homes built. In our new communities [Ross-on-Wye and Morriston, near Swansea] they are 20 per cent of homes.’ The company is planning more in the South West, including at Sampford Peverell in Devon.

It seems that in today’s value-seeking market, the bungalow might just be the perfect home after all.