Are gamers becoming a national security risk?

Once again gamers appear to be behind a dramatic leak of classified military intelligence. Documents originally emanating from the Pentagon appear to have been shared on the video game chat platform Discord by a 21-year-old air national guardsman – in an effort to win an esoteric argument involving the highly popular video game Minecraft Maps and the war in Ukraine. He has now been arrested as the prime suspect.  

Many are describing this as the most serious breach of US security in a decade since the 2013 Wikileaks scandal. The leaked documents suggest that special forces personnel from western countries could be active in Ukraine — with the largest contingent coming from the UK.  

While military officials and politicians obfuscate over the fallout, this particular round of leaks may come as a source of relief to the makers of War Thunder, a popular online multiplayer combat video simulation game. Previously, War Thunder had been leading the way when it comes to leaking state secrets, with several of its users publishing classified military intelligence to win arguments about vehicles that feature in the game.   

Recent War Thunder leaks have included a player claiming to be a French army tank crewman uploading on the game’s online public forum part of the manual for the French Leclerc main battle tank during a debate about its turret rotation speed. Two separate users uploaded sensitive information about the F-16A Fighting Falcon and the F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets in the space of two days.  

Even the UK’s Chally 2 tank – which has now been sent to Ukraine – has got caught up in it all. A War Thunder player, who in his bio identified himself as a tank commander based at Tidworth Camp, took issue with what he deemed was the game developers’ incorrect representation of the British army’s main battle tank. 

The problem, he believed, was its mantlet – the armour around where the gun barrel sticks out of the front of the turret. To emphasise his point that the game’s creators ‘didn’t model it correctly’, Pyrophoric (to use the player’s War Thunder handle), shared an image of Chally 2 specs taken from the Army Equipment Support Publication, a great wedge of a manual that I remember being forever stuffed at the bottom of one of Delta-30’s turret bins as we trundled around trying to find the Line of Departure where an attack was to begin.   

In this instance, the game’s developers decided to contact the Ministry of Defence. After the MOD confirmed the document was classified, a moderator for the forum removed the images.  

The Pentagon leak is far more of a concern. Any evidence of western involvement shifting from the supply of weapons to boots on the ground has enormous implications. Not least of which it potentially hands Vladimir Putin a gift for his arguments about western meddling and Nato aggression against Russia, which he will no doubt hammer away about on Russian state media. 

The general response in the West to the latest leak has been telling. Beyond the obvious questions about how the leak could happen – with the Guardian focusing on the Pentagon suspect having, it claims, ‘racist and anti-establishment views’ – there seems very little desire to dive into the deeper and wider implications of the military intelligence assessments about how the war is actually going. The intel appears to contradict some of the political reassurances from our politicians about Ukraine’s military successes and provides a more candid appraisal of the Ukrainian military’s deficiencies. 

There is some irony as well that these leaks have come about from individuals engaging in vigorous, if somewhat bizarre, debate. Whereas, as Peter Hitchens recently argues in the American Conservative, ‘Putin’s tanks have ended all debate,’ with attempts to question the narrative over Ukraine being ‘met with bafflement mixed with mistrust.’ 

Either way, in future it is going to become increasingly difficult for intelligence agencies to maintain what was referred to during my time as ‘Opsec’ – operations security – when increasing numbers of people have access to intelligence and are willing to share it online over trivial spats. After 9/11 and the run-up to the Iraq war, it was decided that key intelligence was not being widely shared enough and was not open enough to critical analysis.  

Now the Guardian notes that the Pentagon leak has reignited debate ‘about whether the US classifies too much material, requiring security clearances for too many people.’ There should also surely be a debate about whether the widespread levels of security clearance – and the sheer volume of people involved – reflects the mushrooming national-security-industrial complex. 

Meanwhile, we now know that alongside our Chally tanks, some very tough and deadly guys from our special forces might also be in Ukraine. What might the gamers reveal next? 

Michael O’Leary’s Brexit jibe is a step too far

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary never has exactly been the master of tact, but will his latest outburst make his customers finally ask themselves: do they really want to travel in his planes? Speaking at a Bloomberg event he asserted that Britain will one day rejoin the single market because ‘in the next five to ten years, quite a number of the Brexiteers will die, as the average age of them is about over 70’. 

Let’s leave aside, for a moment, whether it is wise to talk about your customers in this way; O’Leary’s remarks are wrong-headed. It is right that the proportion of people voting Brexit in 2016 rose with age. And, of course, humans being mortal, these voters will inevitably thin out. It is quite possible, too, that Britain will one day rejoin the single market or at least enter into a closer relationship with the EU than it has at the moment. Many of the figures who led the rancid Brexit negotiations have already left the political stage – the Boris Johnsons and Michel Barniers – and have been replaced with leaders who might be more apt to compromise. While many on the EU side felt they had to punish Britain for having the temerity to vote to leave, this urge will surely diminish with time.

Yet what O’Leary forgets is that people’s attitudes tend to change with age. The generation of septuagenarians which voted for Brexit in 2016 were in their thirties in 1975 when Britain voted – by two-thirds to one-third – to stay in the EU. They changed their minds about Europe when they began to feel that the reality failed to live up to the promise – and perhaps their priorities changed too. While in their youth they might have been enticed by the thought of living and working abroad, trying continental food and drink etc, by the time they reached their 70s they were more concerned with migration and the effect it was having on their communities. 

Today’s younger generations are unlikely to be fundamentally different. As they age and settle down, they will be less interested in taking a summer job in a bar in Ibiza and more interested in the quality of life in their own neighbourhood – which may mean adopting a harsher attitude towards freedom of movement. It is far from clear, therefore, that because young people tend to be more pro-EU now,  they will always be so.

O’Leary’s latest remarks do, however, raise one of the great conundrums of our age: why hasn’t Ryanair and its boss gone the way of Ratners? Gerald Ratner famously built up a fabulously successful chain of budget-priced jewellers only to destroy his empire in a single speech in 1991 when he described one of his products as ‘total crap’. His customers walked away and the name Ratner quickly disappeared from the High Street. For years, Michael O’Leary has been insulting his passengers in a similar way, yet Ryanair never seems to suffer for it. On the contrary, the airline has grown and grown as passengers put his remarks – and their comfort – aside and enjoy cheap flights. I honestly don’t know the answer to this question, other than to say that many a time I have sworn never to fly Ryanair again – yet when the time comes to book a holiday, it always seems to be Ryanair, annoyingly, that has the right flight at the right price.       

The SNP has given Labour a golden opportunity

Humza Yousaf is not a leader with troubles to seek. In the three weeks since his election as First Minister, the SNP has been rocked by a series of arrests and accusations of mismanagement. Meanwhile, the Scottish Nationalists’ poll ratings have continued to slide as Yousaf’s attempts to regain the initiative have inevitably been overshadowed by more negative headlines about his party, government, or both. Rather than a honeymoon, Yousaf has so far endured a holiday from hell. 

Arguably his most damaging misstep is his lurch to the left on policy. Under the influence of his political partners, the Scottish Green party, Yousaf is determined to squeeze an ever-shrinking tax base while paying mere lip service to economic growth. As he outlined in a speech to the Scottish Parliament on Tuesday, Yousaf intends to be ‘bolder’ on taxation and redistribution of wealth – despite Scotland already being the highest taxed part of the UK. The exact form this ‘bold’ action will take has yet to be outlined, but Yousaf has already indicated his willingness to lower the higher rate threshold to £40,000 and introduce a new 44 per cent rate on those earning more than £75,000 a year. At the same time, Yousaf’s statement offered warm words but little succour to Scotland’s weary business community, other than to dump or delay some of his predecessor’s more encumbering regulations, such as the deposit return scheme. Rather than tax and spend, Yousaf’s mantra is increasingly tax and mismanage. 

This represents a significant change of tack for the SNP, which – despite the radicalism of its central premise – has never been a party in favour of sweeping social change. While Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon enjoyed grandstanding about social justice and equality, they also sought to support business and economic growth. Both former first ministers recognised that the outcome of an election in Scotland, as elsewhere in the UK, is determined by who controls the centre ground.

Yousaf’s main rival for the top job, Kate Forbes, also understood the importance of this principle. During the leadership campaign, Forbes’ message had social justice at its core, but she was also at pains to recognise that objective was only achievable with the cooperation of business and, crucially, a strong economy. She was therefore an unapologetic advocate of policies to raise Scotland’s pitiful economic growth rate – predicted to average just 1.3 per cent a year between 2020 and 2035 – and, while a firm believer in public services, hinted she would not shy away from reform either. That there is huge appetite for this platform (essentially New Labour wrapped in a Saltire) is best evidenced by Forbes’ popularity among the general public during and since the leadership election, despite the well-publicised controversy around her views on equal marriage.

There is now an opportunity for the opposition to pick up Forbes’ popular agenda as they move to occupy the political centre ground that is being increasingly vacated by Yousaf. While the Scottish Conservative party might hope to capture some of the SNP’s dwindling support among the business community, it is Scottish Labour that has the most to gain.

By marrying its commitment to social justice with a definitively pro-growth agenda, Scottish Labour can become the party of business in Scotland once again, solidifying and building on its increasingly buoyant position in the polls in the process. To do so, it will need to develop a tax regime that not only adequately funds public services, but also ensures Scotland is a more competitive and attractive place to invest. Equally, it will need to support public sector reform alongside public sector spending and shake its commitment to regressive universal benefits, such as free prescriptions and tuition, instead targeting them at those most in need and therefore more effective and sustainable in the long term. For his part, leader Anas Sarwar will need to stop pandering to trade unions and other vested interests – as he did recently at the Scottish Trades Union Congress – and instead show he can lead in the interests of all Scotland. 

This will not be easy for a party that is still traumatised by the SNP taunts of ‘Red Tory’ that emerged after the 2014 independence referendum. It will require a heavy dose of courage from party members and politicians – as well as some firm leadership from Sarwar – but it is a vital process if the party is to regain credibility and be serious about winning power at the 2026 Scottish Parliament election. Yousaf and the SNP have vacated the centre ground in Scotland: now it is down to the Labour party to occupy it.

The truth about Britain’s entitled strikers

Striking was part of my childhood. One of my first memories is of walking through Middlesbrough town centre and seeing people with ‘Coal Not Dole’ badges, holding buckets and asking us to ‘Dig Deep for the Miners’. Long before I left primary school, I knew what it meant to be a ‘scab’ and why it was important never to cross a picket line. I backed the men who looked like my dad, men who worked hard but needed more money for their families, over the bosses that wanted to keep them poor.

The world has moved on but the class divide continues and I have not changed sides. At the same time, I am not foolish enough to think that today’s strikes by junior doctors, teachers, nurses and university lecturers are of a piece with the mass walkouts of the 1980s. The demand for higher wages is still there, of course, as are the ballots, picket lines and placards. But what this all means has changed completely. Today’s strikers are members of a professional middle class pulling rank at the expense of those less well off.

In 1979, 13.2 million UK employees belonged to a trade union, but by 2019-20, this figure had dropped to 6.67 million despite the numbers of those in work having grown. Today’s smaller unions are a far cry from yesteryear’s mass membership organisations. A third of professional workers are union members, making this the most highly unionised occupational group. Those with a university degree are significantly more likely to belong to a union than those without traditional academic qualifications (around 30 per cent compared to 15 per cent). Union members also have higher salaries: only 12 per cent of people earning under £250 per week belong to a union, compared to 30 per cent of those earning between £500 and £999.  

Of course, the middle class have every right to organise, withdraw their labour and demand better pay. Neither teachers nor nurses are responsible for spiralling inflation and their aspiration for a better standard of living is to be welcomed. The problem is not that today’s strikers are middle class but that in fighting for their own interests they are attacking the livelihood and ambitions of the working class.

Take junior doctors. They garner sympathy by highlighting a minimal hourly pay rate while failing to mention pension contributions, rapidly escalating pay scales and the many opportunities for salary-enhancing that set them in an income bracket far removed from most people. As doctors are employed by the NHS, there is no profit-margin to be cut into for funding pay rises. Instead, the cost will be met by the public: taxpayers statistically likely to earn far less than the doctors they are funding.

Meanwhile, it is the public – not shareholders or factory owners – who pay the price for strike action. Almost 200,000 hospital appointments were cancelled and rescheduled as a result of last week’s 96 hour walk-out. Each of these cancellations means a person’s life is put on hold. It might mean someone unable to work, or a sick child deteriorating further. In tragic cases these cancelled appointments hasten death. The number of excess deaths recorded during the last round of strike action, and in the following week, were 11.1 per cent above the seasonal average.

Or take schools. Children missed weeks away from the classroom while schools closed due to Covid lockdowns. Education union leaders pushed for ever tougher measures to be in place before face-to-face teaching could resume. A significant number of children have still not returned to school and many more are yet to catch up with missed learning. For teachers to strike now is a kick in the teeth to the nation’s children.

Strikes are supposed to be disruptive, cry the union-backers. But wealthy people secure private medical care and send their children to fee-paying schools where teachers are less likely to strike. Poorer people can afford no such luxuries and suffer most when public services are withdrawn.

It would be possible for disruption to be directed elsewhere. Everyone agrees that professional jobs nowadays come with inordinate amounts of paperwork as well as onerous requirements for staff to undertake diversity training programmes. If doctors or lecturers want to cause disruption while still teaching or treating patients they could boycott all unnecessary training and form-filling. That they do not do this suggests a warped understanding of the priorities associated with their role. Today’s trade unions sometimes promote the same divisive ideas about race and gender that are found in diversity workshops. Convinced of their moral superiority, union members are now striking to secure wages that will set them financially apart from the rest of society.

Today’s professional, middle class strikers show little interest in seeing life improve for everyone. They do not want to discuss fully reforming the health service, creating a more productive economy or kicking indoctrination out of the classroom. Far from being a progressive demand to increase everyone’s living standards, today’s strikers want a bigger slice of a smaller pie in order to consolidate their own social and economic status. Meanwhile, ordinary people suffer. These strikers are not working class heroes but a temper-tantruming cos-playing elite.

Tory rebels win concessions on judges blocking flights

Ministers have agreed to back two amendments to its flagship Illegal Migration Bill as part of No. 10’s attempt to ward off the latest Tory rebellion. The first is an agreement to change the law so that judges can no longer block migrant deportations. An amendment will give the Home Secretary the power to ‘disregard’ interim ‘Rule 39’ orders from the European Court of Human Rights – the so-called ‘pyjama injunctions’ suspended the first scheduled Rwanda deportation flight last June late at night. Previously, ministers were only willing to introduce this power to ignore last-minute injunctions if ministers failed to persuade the Strasbourg court to reform its Rule 39 orders.

A second concession to the 40-odd Tory rebels on the right of the party will make it much harder for UK courts to grant injunctions to stop deportations. The Bill will be amended so that the only way to stop a deportation of failed asylum seeker is by persuading a British judge that it would lead to ‘serious and irreversible harm’ in the territory to which they are being deported. These amendments are expected to be published today, before the Bill returns to the House of Commons for the next stage of votes next week. The legislation aims to bar anyone who arrives in the UK illegally from claiming asylum and ensure that all illegal migrants are detained and removed, as part of Rishi Sunak’s pledge to ‘stop the boats.’

Today’s concessions are a reminder of the importance which Sunak and his team place on party management. As part of his bid to buy off the rebels, the Prime Minister hosted members of the Common Sense Group for a breakfast of bacon sandwiches on Tuesday to discuss their concerns prior to a meeting that evening with Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister. In exchange for these amendments, the rebels will now no longer table their own amendments which risked splitting the party. Sunak is said to have told the rebels ‘Let’s not have blue on blue attacks – let’s not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory’ – a plea which fits with his pattern of parliamentary management. The government has repeatedly sought concessions rather than conflict on issues like small boats, house-building and wind farms. Votes which can’t be ducked – like on the Stormont Brake – are fought at the moment of maximum political advantage. It’s part of the government’s reasoning that it is better to have these fights in private, behind closed doors, rather than in public and in parliament.

The risk of this strategy is that while it may keep the party united, it will strengthen and embolden opposition in the House of Lords. Some in government fear that the rebels risk jeopardising the entire bill if it is strengthened even further. ‘This was already being described as the toughest bill ever – now it’s even tougher’ said one insider. Others are more relaxed about a fight with the Upper House, reasoning it could have a populist ‘Peers versus the People’ appeal. But the danger for Sunak is the spectacle of protracted parliamentary wrangling as the number of small boats arrivals ticks up over the coming warmer months.

We shouldn’t rest until all ‘smart’ motorways are axed

Six months after he became Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has finally honoured one of the smaller, but more eye-catching, promises he made during his party leadership campaign. He has announced an end to the building of so-called ‘smart’ motorways, citing the economic cost and safety concerns.

In doing so, Sunak has halted a near 20-year policy that has been increasingly distinguished not only by its unpopularity among the car-driving public, but by its toll in lives. Thirty-eight people died in the five years to 2020 on ‘smart’ motorways, even though they only make up a small proportion of the road network.

Indeed, the only people who seemed wedded to the concept in recent years were successive transport ministers who apparently bought into the idea that an overcrowded road network could be expanded on the cheap.

For those who have never had the pleasure of driving on a ‘smart’ motorway, they are motorways where the hard shoulder or breakdown lane has been upgraded and brought into use as a regular lane. The carriageways are monitored by cameras, with signs appearing on overhead gantries to warn if a lane is blocked. Cheerfully orange-coloured refuges have been added at intervals to accommodate any vehicles that have the misfortune to break down.

At this point, even if you have never sat behind a steering wheel, you may have spotted a potentially fatal, and I stress fatal, flaw. How many drivers have the luck or the time to reach a breakdown refuge in an emergency? And if they don’t, how much warning will following vehicles receive if their lane is blocked? Without an instantaneous alert, even the most law-abiding drivers may be unable to slow or swerve in time to avoid a collision of the sort that has now accounted for so many lives.

For me the ‘smart’ motorway issue is also personal. A few years ago, I was driving along the M20 towards the Channel Tunnel when a left-hand drive lorry veered into my lane without warning. The impact span our car around, and I only just managed to steer it on to the hard shoulder. The car had good anti-crash protection; the glass splintered, but did not cut, and my husband and I were unhurt. A kind motorist behind stopped to check we were okay, offered to be a witness if that was needed (it was), and waited until the police came.

Now imagine (and I have imagined many times) if the same sort of accident had happened on a ‘smart’ motorway. There would have been nowhere to go – unless, of course, the lorry driver had had the foresight to pull into my path just before a refuge. Like all roads to the Channel ports, the M20 carries a large number of heavy lorries. It would have taken a miracle not to be hit – indeed, to avoid a multi-vehicle pile-up.

This is not, it should be said, how ‘smart’ motorways began. The original idea was for ‘dynamic’ lanes, where the hard shoulder might be used as an extra lane in areas, or at times, of particular congestion, and when strict limits on speed were applied. This is what happens in some continental countries and has proved generally effective and uncontroversial. Alas, successive UK governments did not stop there. Instead, the incorporation of the hard shoulder was made permanent in a version of ‘smart’ motorways known as ‘all-lanes running’.

Yet as the casualties mounted, so did the opposition. The Select Committee on Transport published a report in 2016 calling on the government not to proceed with a major investment in ‘smart’ motorways so long as safety concerns existed, saying that the trade-off between safety and reduced congestion was ‘an unacceptable price to pay’. By 2019, however, a big expansion of ‘smart’ motorways was announced. That was then paused, but not stopped, to allow for a five-year safety assessment. A new Commons committee report objected that the precautions so far announced were nowhere near enough.

None of this seriously deterred the proponents of ‘smart’ motorways, who decided that any problems were mainly down to the ignorance and poor skills of drivers. So they commissioned an advertising campaign to re-train us. A jingle sung to the tune of the Pet Shop Boys’ Go West told drivers who broke down on a motorway to ‘Go Left’. Where exactly that ‘left’ might be, on motorways without a hard shoulder, was another matter. I was one of many who lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority to the effect that this was misleading, but the ASA did not agree.

And this brings us to today. For, grateful though many of us may be that Rishi Sunak has started to put a stop to the ‘smart’ motorway madness, the campaigning will go on, tinged with disappointment on the part of those who thought Sunak would remove all smart motorways entirely.

The call, supported by both main motorists’ organisations, the AA and the RAC, is  now to reinstate the hard shoulder on motorways where it has been removed, or at very least return to the original concept of ‘dynamic’ lanes, where the hard shoulder may be opened to traffic at peak times, with strict speed monitoring. How hard could such a change be?

Supporters of smart motorways, however, have not yet thrown in the towel. They insist that ‘smart’ motorways, by relieving congestion, are safer. They believe that technological improvements are the answer and – wait for this – that one reason for our problems is the British motorist’s appetite for risk and cavalier attitude to signs (in contrast to the greater obedience of our continental cousins).

But the clinching argument has to be this: if the economic and human cost of all-lane running motorways has been judged to be too high, what makes those already built any different? Given that emergencies are rarely predictable, and that accidents can happen in a split second, it seems improbable that either the technology or we, as drivers, will ever be smart enough to make ‘smart’ motorways safe.

How I found friendship through online Scrabble

The internet, as we all know, is a place for rage and hate. It’s a free-fire zone in which even something as apparently innocuous as Facebook – original use-case: posting family snaps for your gran – ends up incubating armed insurrection and spreading 5G conspiracy theories. But what if there was some corner of it untouched by death threats, disinformation and the baleful influence of Vladimir Putin’s troll farms? What if there was still some corner of the world wide web which lived up to its original promise of connecting people who would not otherwise be connected, and what if once connected they were nothing but agreeable to each other?

Be of good cheer. That corner exists. Not everyone is arguing with Owen Jones and India Willoughby. Not everyone is flaming Lee Anderson and Suella Braverman, fighting glowy-eyed bitcoin cultists or railing against Elon Musk. Some of us are playing Scrabble.

Playing Scrabble on a smartphone app may not change the world – not in a visible, glorious, concrete way. It may not alter the balance of power in Congress or on the battlefield in Ukraine. But, just from time to time, il faut cultiver notre jardin; and contra those who believe that screens are isolating us from one another and fraying the social fabric, here’s a way in which they are not. Little, silly games played online are considerably underappreciated contributors to the web of human interconnection and the sum of human happiness.

I have a couple of old friends whom I don’t see from one year to the next – people who live in Cornwall, or in New York, or even in the remote and inaccessible wilds of south London – but whom I keep up with simply through Scrabble.

Friendship, it seems to me, isn’t always about exchanging deep and meaningful confidences. If it were, there are a whole lot of lifelong old-school male relationships that would not even earn the name of friendship. I think of my late uncle’s Wednesday chess game, of interactions that consist only of football banter, or the silent togetherness on a riverbank of anglers. Friendship doesn’t even rely on intimacy, necessarily. It can be just about checking in: a few seconds of companionable engagement every day or two. And that’s what Scrabble, or chess – my brother-in-law thrashes me at that – offers most satisfactorily.

You will have lifelong friends with whom you have shared the deepest of emotional turmoil and whom you see in the flesh not more than once a year or so. Knowing that they are there will matter to you very much, but they are not features of your day-to-day life. But you will also have the friends with whom you have a series of games of Scrabble, or online chess, that will run over months, years or even decades – and their existence touches your life, just glancingly, nearly every day. The ebb and flow of the relationship is marked by sunglasses emojis when you get a high-scoring bingo, exploding head emojis when your opponent does, by ‘gg’ and ‘gz’. Perhaps you’ll wish one another happy birthday, or commiserate when a job interview goes badly, but that will be about it. 

These two categories of friends can overlap. A game of Scrabble is more fun and less cursory, more personal and less guilt-shrouded than a Christmas card list – which you could see as the analogue method of keeping in touch with friends with whom you’ve lost touch. But they can also be quite separate. Most Scrabblers or chess players (or, I guess, devotees of play-money poker, Yahtzee or what have you) will have acquired friends whom they never meet in the form of regular opponents. I have had a couple of pals over the year who I only knew through online Scrabble. I still smart, sometimes, at the thought of quite how comprehensively and how often ‘Mark G’ used to beat me. A colleague of mine reports that his mother not long ago attended the funeral of one of her Scrabble friends – never having met him in real life. (Turns out he was quite the fantasist – but I suppose that didn’t much matter given that the online version of him was the only version she ever knew or needed to know.)

The ad hoc online relationships which form around games are not quite a whole new thing in the world. If you were a passionate stamp-collector, or bridge-player, or Doctor Who fan, you would perhaps bump into the same people at conventions or clubs or the like. But these hobby communities have become much easier to form and much more common in the age of the internet – and they reach deeper into the lives of their participants while remaining all but invisible to the outside world. It seems to me that this is a wholly good thing – and that its effect on the mental health and general happiness of those who belong to such communities is not to be underestimated. If you live somewhere remote, or you’re lonely, or you do shift work at antisocial hours or if, like me, you work at home and seldom leave the house, these communities add up to an enriching but low-pressure form of human contact.

I play a very silly old-school multiplayer game called World of Warcraft, for instance – and so am part of an in-game ‘guild’ (you team up to kill monsters once or twice a week) whose members I interact with much more often than my real-life friends. They are scattered all over the world (I’ve become very familiar with the South Africa’s load-shedding issues) and include people of all ages and from many walks of life: grandmother, schoolboy, long-distance lorry driver, care-home worker, caterer, paediatric nurse, accountant, a couple who run a rifle range. I know them only by their in-game names or Discord tags – I could walk past any of them in the street without recognising them – yet I’m never not pleased to see them in-game. We share virtual experiences, teasing and in-jokes. They’re friends.

You don’t have to be launching a 25-man raid on Ulduar to enjoy that sort of companionship, though. All you need to be able to do is to take a minute or two out of your day to figure out how best to use that triple-letter square your opponent has left free.

Pay and dismay: the nightmare of ‘smart’ parking apps

In Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson bemoaned the ‘wilfully unhelpful’ ticket machines in car parks: ‘You go hunting for some distant pay-and-display machine, which doesn’t make change or accept any coin introduced since 1976, and wait on an old guy who likes to read all the instructions before committing himself and then tries to insert his money through the ticket slot. The remarkable thing is that everything about this process is intentionally – mark this, intentionally – designed to flood your life with unhappiness.’

Almost three decades later, you’d be lucky to find a parking meter at all. Pay-and-display machines across Britain are disappearing in favour of cashless ‘smart’ parking using mobile phone apps. It was reported this month that more than two million drivers will soon live in ‘parking meter deserts’ where the only way to pay for parking is via a smartphone.

If my experience is anything to go by, Bryson’s account could perhaps be updated for the present era: you go hunting for some distant sign to tell you which of the seven parking apps on your phone to use to pay, only to find that the required one won’t open without you updating to the ‘latest version’. You wait on a download over patchy 5G reception, and once the thing finally completes you must remember your username and password (how many capital letters did this one need?), then consult the sign again to find out which five digits represent the parking zone you’re in. You re-enter your car make, model and registration, painstakingly type out your credit card details – and then while you wait for the app to connect to your bank to validate the payment, you realise it’s all taken so long that you’ve missed your train/hospital appointment/dinner reservation anyway.

There are as many as 30 different parking apps in use in the UK, and about half seem to have found their way on to my phone. All have upbeat, encouraging slogans (RingGo: ‘Parking made easy’; PayByPhone: ‘Simple, worry-free parking’) that I have found to be patently untrue.

I live on the border of three London boroughs that all use different apps, so any trip to the dentist/vet/hairdresser involves remembering which road requires which before you begin the game of trying to get it to work. Phone out of battery, out of signal or out of memory? You’re out of luck.

Even if you can access the app, the frustrations don’t end there. Sometimes it tells you the car park you’re standing in doesn’t exist; other times it simply refuses to take your money. I was trying to park in Chiswick, west London, recently when an app glitch meant that every time I tapped the screen to pay I was told: ‘Unfortunately you’ve taken too much time to confirm your parking and your quote has expired.’ Over in Ealing, I entered the location number from the road sign I’d parked next to and up came the message: ‘Sorry, that zone does not exist.’ I eventually learned that the area had just made the switch from Ringo to PayByPhone – but none of the road signs had yet been updated. I couldn’t find a way to pay for my parking as there wasn’t a meter in sight – perhaps no surprise when this particular council had 196 machines in 2016 but will have just 60 by the end of this year.

Other apps come with additional costs. On a visit to Harrogate, I downloaded AppyParking (‘Make parking forgettable’ – if only), set up an account, entered my vehicle registration and handed over my credit card details. Only once I had done all this did I learn that it added a 20p ‘convenience fee’ for my troubles. Fortunately in Harrogate there are still roadside parking meters, so I abandoned the app and used those instead – but for how long will that be an option?

Already at least 13 councils in England and Wales have made parking completely cashless – but countless more have, like Ealing, slashed the number of meters on their streets. Local authorities claim it saves money and reduces incidents of vandalism and theft. But there may be other benefits for them, too. Last year, Freedom of Information data showed councils collected £158 million in parking fines across areas that offered a cash payment option – and £257 million across those that did not.

While these apps are an annoyance for me, they’re positively prohibitive for those who don’t have smartphones – or struggle to use them. Nearly a fifth of drivers in the UK are over the age of 65 – more than seven million people – but only 69 per cent of this age group used a smartphone in 2021, the latest year for which figures are available. Dame Esther Rantzen has warned that confusion and uncertainty around app payments could leave some older people ‘imprisoned at home’.

A poll commissioned by the Daily Mail recently found that more than half of over-65s do not want to use parking apps – and four in ten respondents of all ages said they would be put off going to town centres that lacked parking meters. This month, the Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove intervened, writing to local authorities across England to say that forcing drivers to use smartphones to pay for parking is unfair.

Of course, cash parking meters weren’t perfect. They could chew up your ticket, swallow your change or refuse to dish out change at all (as Bryson wrote: ‘You can’t tell me that a machine that can recognise and reject any foreign coin ever produced couldn’t make change if it wanted to’). But they had nothing on the very particular frustrations that come with ‘smart’ parking apps.

I can’t help thinking it’s just another tactic – along with Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, the ever-expanding Ulez and congestion charges everywhere from Bath to Birmingham – to try to force drivers out of their cars entirely. ‘There isn’t a single feature of driving in Britain that has even the tiniest measure of enjoyment in it,’ wrote Bryson in 1995 – proof, perhaps, that some things haven’t changed.

The grand shame of the Grand National protestors

When jockey Derek Fox came over from Ireland to join the Scottish stable run by Lucinda Russell and her partner, Peter Scudamore, the long-time champion rider, he was teaching himself to read via texts on his phone. Now he discusses books with Scu. Cleverness comes in different shapes and it was a supremely intelligent ride Fox gave Corach Rambler to win this year’s Grand National, just as he did winning two Ultima Chases at Cheltenham on the same horse.

The same close-knit team won the National six years before with One For Arthur but this time Fox’s participation was in doubt until just hours before the race when, after completing a series of press-ups, he finally declared himself recovered from a shoulder injury. He had given up a cherished ride on the other stable favourite Ahoy Senor to Brian Hughes earlier in the week to make sure he made it for the big race. You couldn’t have a better example of mutual trust between trainer and jockey. When the injury occurred, Lucinda revealed that: ‘Scu and I went to Corach’s box and said to him “Derek’s had a fall”. Can you believe that, we’re supposed to be professionals! He looked really worried! He said, “I know Brian Hughes is a champion jockey but I just want Derek!” That’s how mad we are anyways!’ That’s a kind of madness I relish.

This column should have been a joyful celebration of such madness. I would like to have dwelt on Gordon Elliott’s shrewdness in realising they were pushing things too fast with novice hurdler Irish Point and backing off a Cheltenham preparation so that he came to Aintree cherry ripe to give Davy Russell his last winner before his second retirement. I wanted to note how his National day double with West Balboa and 15-2 Midnight River (one of this column’s Twelve to Follow) underlined the relentless advance of the Dan Skelton team which will soon be rapping on the castle gates of Messrs Nicholls and Henderson. Resisting the temptation of the strong mares’ races at Cheltenham with West Balboa was the epitome of patient race planning.

I wanted too to record Warren Greatrex’s emotional reaction to the victory of Bill Baxter in the Topham. After early success with the likes of Cole Harden and La Bague Au Roi, he’s had a lean couple of years and the deaths of two staff members to cope with. This was a triumph by a put-you-back-on-the-map horse whom he rides out himself: the night before he’d told the owner he would withdraw him if it didn’t rain, but it did.

Sadly, although Aintree’s Grand National fixture is the best organised race meeting in the western world and the authorities coped effectively with the ‘animal rights’ protestors who delayed the National start, I cannot, after the headlines caused, avoid giving them the attention they do not deserve. I understand the emotions which stir some: I too give to animal charities and take injured birds to the pet hospital. Part of me wants to sit the protestors down in a stableyard of cosseted racehorses and have Scudamore stand in front of them to voice the passion and the privilege (a word he regularly and significantly uses) he and Lucinda feel in looking after these magnificent animals and explaining what a fine life they lead.

After the National, Lucinda declared of Corach Rambler: ‘He loves the sport. He loves everything he does and he is kept in the best conditions.’ But alas I don’t think the protestors would be open to argument. I suspect that for many of them the objective is not so much to avoid what they perceive as the suffering of animals involved in sport (and horses do compete naturally) as to deny pleasure to the millions who enjoy watching them race, millions whom they wrongly perceive as belonging to a particular class.

Racing folk as ever passionately hoped it would be an injury-free National. Even over obstacles that have been eased, a single horse death is still one too many. But ironically the protestors may well have been at least a contributory factor to the death of Hill Sixteen in this year’s race. Jockey nerves are always tense before the National start and those nerves transmit themselves to their mounts. Delaying the start, with the horses taken back to the pre-parade ring and out again, only intensified the tension.

Hill Sixteen was an experienced horse. He had twice jumped round the National course without mishap but with the delay he got in a right lather. According to his angry trainer, Sandy Thomson: ‘He got absolutely hyper and we washed him off. He just hasn’t taken off at the first fence: he’s got so bloody hyper after all the carry-on.’

I am with him. Looking back at the previous year’s Grand National with no protest-occasioned delays, a total of two horses fell at the first two fences. This year five went at the first obstacle and three more at the second. That it then became a rough race with many unseats was partly down to riderless early fallers causing havoc.

Why are beds flat?

Last month in a Swiss hotel, I came across an idea so beautifully simple that I felt it would be immoral of me not to share it. The bed in our room, rather than having one king-sized duvet, was covered by two double-size duvets overlapping in the middle. Eureka!

Given that the Swiss are world leaders in conflict-avoidance, it seems likely the idea originated there, although I have since learned the practice is also common in Scandinavia. Back in Blighty, when one person in a double bed rolls towards the edge, they take three feet of duvet with them, leaving their partner out in the cold. This typically leads to retaliation and often escalation. The Scandi-Swiss system, by contrast, creates a buffer, a DMZ of surplus duvet, which means that bedding fights are no longer a zero-sum game.

Why has this approach not been adopted more widely? The question led me into a rabbit hole of research into bedding innovation – during which I discovered that in the 1980s as many of 20 per cent of US households owned a waterbed. And that the first one was salaciously marketed as The Pleasure Pit since, despite many downsides, waterbeds are apparently far superior to conventional mattresses when the occupants are both (or possibly all) awake.

The reason this topic interests me is that for years I’ve believed the whole premise of the bed is wrong. And here I go right back to first principles: I don’t think beds should be flat.

Anyone who has fallen asleep on a sofa and enjoyed a surprisingly good night’s sleep with their arm draped along the backrest or behind a cushion has had some intimation of what I am suggesting. Did our primate ancestors choose to sleep on level ground? I doubt it.

Besides, most people have two arms, so why isn’t there a hole or crevice to accommodate one when you sleep on your side? And why no elevated ledge at the edge of the bed where you can rest your leg? Why is there no kind of temperature or ventilation control? Why isn’t the firmness adjustable? The pace of progress seems glacial.

Actually, superior products do exist. For instance, in the US you can buy the SONU Sleep System – a mattress with a hole for your elbow, which is described as the world’s first mattress designed for side-sleepers – but it isn’t cheap.

Innovation is particularly hard for products that are purchased infrequently. There is a Catch-22 effect where, no matter how good a product is, sales volumes never hit the point where you can bring prices down.

The Quooker (boiling water on demand from your tap) and the Japanese electronic toilet are both life-changing in my experience, but both occupy this space. Because people replace their taps/toilets/mattresses so rarely and because at current prices only perhaps 5 per cent can afford the more innovative product, you are left with very few consumers in the market at any time. It hence takes ages to reach a critical mass of adoption.

You are also faced with another problem: domestic products typically have to be sold to two people, of whom one is usually more Luddite. I come from south Wales; my wife, unfortunately, from Sussex, where they have a thing called ‘taste’. This means she prefers to spend money and time making hair-splitting distinctions between shades of Farrow & Ball rather than simply buying a 75” flatscreen TV so you no longer have to look at your walls for entertainment.

I write all this because it seems to me that our narrative of progress is highly asymmetrical. We credit ourselves for areas in which progress is fast, all the time failing to see where it is woefully slow. Given its importance, our sleeping hardware must be at least a century out of date.

The restorative qualities of a great martini

It was a perfect setting for a spring day, next to a 15th-century barn. Other walls and buildings had clearly recycled ancient masonry over the centuries. This was in Kent. Though not that far from Ashford station, it was a garden deep in the garden of England: l’Angleterre profonde. There are excellent local pubs, with absolutely no pop music, but proper hoppy beer as well as proper dogs, looking forward to the shooting season.

There was also modernity, in the shape of the Pleasant Land distillery, which has the most up-to-date impressive-looking German kit. Vorsprung Durch Technik also applies to pot stills. The fellow who inspired all this is Sebastian Barnick. After six happy and successful years in the navy, he was diagnosed with a marginal case of colour-blindness which would have debarred him from the most interesting aspects of seaboard life. So what to do for a new career? Obvious: turn to drink.

During his nautical career, Sebastian had been able to travel a great deal and sample the local grog, including coconut wine in the Seychelles, celebrating a successful mission to suppress piracy. After leaving the navy, he went on a pilgrimage to serious vineyards. He is eloquent on the subject, especially when discussing South Africa, Austria and the Rhineland. Indeed, he will sound almost mystical. ‘Taking agricultural products and immortalising them through man’s mastery of fire’ – that is his philosophy.

Sebastian was entranced and moved by the experience of sailing ships through the world’s oceans. To enjoy all that, the navy depends on professionalism. The same is true of wine-making, and of distilling. Sebastian found himself increasingly drawn to the creation of spirits, partly because he was also enthusiastic about living in Kent and supplying the modern equivalent of the navy’s wardrooms with what is now more likely to be gin than rum.

He assembled a delightful team, most of them already acquaintances – but also including Andrew Smith. An old friend of mine, Andrew has been selling spirits all over the world for about 50 years. What he does not know about the spirits business is not knowledge.

He would have got involved only if three conditions had been met. First, that he thought it would fly. Second, that those involved were wholly committed. Third, that it would be fun. To judge by my experience on that sunny Sunday afternoon – with a scent of hog roast to whet the appetite and a succession of handmaidens asking ‘Have you tried this?’ – those criteria are triumphantly met.

They say that White Cliffs gin, Pleasant Land’s staple product, tastes of freshness and country air. My palate concurred. The distillery makes a sound dry martini too, that vital restorative if the blood alcohol level ever falls to a dangerous low. But it also produces vodka, amaretto and eaux de vie, and is working on an apple brandy – Kentish apples, of course, although even outside the EU they will still not be allowed to call it calvados (it will be). I was initially sceptical: would not such a range of products risk overstretch? No sign of it: the range only entices one to try everything.

Pleasant Land is organic, using local produce, including botanicals. But do not let that put you off.

The result is a wholly professional and sophisticated selection of bottles. Look out for it, and there will be no disappointment.

There was yet more proof of the SNP’s megalomania at PMQs

‘Sir Softie.’ That’s Rishi’s new nickname for Sir Keir Starmer. ‘Sir Softie,’ he called out twice at PMQs. ‘He’s soft on crime!’ The insult works because it’s easy to remember and pleasantly alliterative. And it builds on an existing perception of Sir Keir as a criminal-hugging lawyer.

Sir Keir set out to overturn that impression by posing as the scourge of the law-breaking classes. He started with a trick question. Citing the case of a man found guilty of scalding a prison officer with boiling water, he asked if the offender deserved a jail sentence. Rishi could tell that this was a booby-trap so he answered in generalities. Sir Keir had to unpick his subterfuge. The convicted man received a suspended sentence because several years had passed between the offence and the date of the court case. Terrific. What a brilliant way to highlight the collapse of Britain’s justice system. Well it’s brilliant if you’re a legal whiz kid speaking to other legal whiz kids. Sir Keir seems unaware that most voters regard lawyers as scrounging lightweights with modest abilities and immodest fees.

He continued his ‘broken Britain’ theme by naming the public services allegedly wrecked by Tory incompetence. ‘Roads! Trains! The NHS! The asylum system! Policing! Mental health provision!… The Tories have broken them all.’ As he harrumphed and snorted through his list he was wildly cheered by his backbenchers. Then he delivered a peal of Wagnerian anguish. ‘Why, everywhere you look, does nothing seem to work at all?’ More ecstasies from his MPs. But not every voter shares Labour’s perverse lust for ruin.

Sir Keir finished by complaining about over-stuffed prisons. Judges are being discreetly warned not to increase the problem when delivering sentences, (‘be aware of the prison population’ says the coded advice). But is that bad news for the government? ‘Vote Tory for fuller prisons’ sounds like a law-and-order message. And by bringing up sentencing, Sir Keir gave Rishi a chance to boast about his new prisons programme. Up to 20,000 extra places are being built – nearly enough to house the incoming wave of offenders from the SNP.

Their leader in Westminster, Stephen Flynn, has contracted a bad case of windbaggery – perhaps inherited from his garrulous predecessor, Ian Blackford. Instead of putting questions to the PM, Flynn makes speeches for the benefit of SNP voters at home. Suddenly he feels the need to shore up his support in Scotland. Why could that be? Today, in a convoluted effort, Flynn signalled his solidarity with striking nurses, his yearning for independence, his phobia of Brexit and his tribal loathing of the Tories. Rishi ignored these ritual complaints and reminded Flynn of the ‘Barnet consequentials’, a sum of £1.5 billion, being paid to the SNP. Flynn is a nimble-witted speaker but he wastes parliament’s time with his divisive posturing.

A more interesting question was put by Flynn’s SNP colleague, Chris Law, the pony-tailed member for Dundee who looks like a Dutch porn-star dressed up for an awards ceremony. Today, he revealed a fresh SNP scandal. Law told parliament that the Holyrood government has been attempting to negotiate diplomatic side-deals with foreign powers as if Scotland were an independent nation. This skulduggery is so widespread that UK embassies around the world have been told to warn their hosts about bogus overtures from the SNP. Law believes this attempt by the Foreign Office to stop the SNP from acting as a separate country is a curtailment of its rights. To everyone else it looks like yet more proof of the SNP’s arrogance and megalomania. The death spiral of Scottish nationalism continues.

Tories fear Commons recruitment crisis

It seems that not even MPs’ offices are exempt from the nation’s employment crisis. Ahead of next year’s general election, Mr S hears that many bright young things on the Tory side are leaving parliament – with their elected members now finding it difficult to hire suitable replacements. Some quitting the Commons fear a Labour landslide; others suggest it’s merely long-serving staff reaching a natural end point after three or four years of service.

‘Large amounts of my mates are actively looking’ for new jobs, said one Portcullis House veteran, with Tory MPs now ‘finding it hard to recruit.’ Another agreed that they had ‘Definitely heard of people leaving parliament en masse’ but argued it was ‘more to do with the fact most staffers I know have been here since 2019 and just feel like it’s time to move on.’

Listings on the popular W4MP jobs site would certainly support claims of an exodus, with one Tory backbencher listing the same post three times in four months. Another MP has tried to recruit for three different staff positions since February while a third simply ‘can’t hire’. Maybe Jeremy Hunt can try getting some over-50s from off the golf course?

Separately, Steerpike hears rumours about plans for a BBC documentary looking at the culture in parliament and how it has changed in recent years. Don’t expect a rush of new job applications off the back of that…

We’ll miss Rupert Murdoch when he’s gone

The idea that Donald Trump was denied victory in the 2020 presidential election by conspirators determined to fiddle with the electoral system was never more than a fiction dreamed up by a frustrated losing candidate. At such times, the role of the media is crucial. If there were genuine evidence of vote-rigging then it should of course be investigated. But to amplify conspiracy theories for the sake of ratings could have grave consequences.

The editorial decision to try to give legs to the stolen election claim is now costing Fox News dearly. This week the company reached a $788 million settlement with Dominion, a company which supplies vote-counting technology for US elections and had been accused of involvement in rigging the election. The staggering sums and reputational damage represent one of the deepest setbacks of Rupert Murdoch’s career.

It’s not just the size of the Dominion payout that matters, but the sense that, as with phone hacking, more payments are coming. Dominion wanted $1.6 billion, and settled for about half that. Another legal case beckons with a second company, Smartmatic, which is claiming $2.7 billion in damages.

The first case was made worse by Fox News’s bung-ling of it – in particular the failure to disclose until the last moment that Murdoch was personally involved, as executive chairman of Fox News. That the judge threatened to call him to the witness stand as a result of this omission may well explain why Fox News decided to settle the case.

Fox News’s credibility is under the microscope. There is also the threat of legal action from shareholders appalled at the way that Fox’s against-the-grain culture failed to distinguish legitimate concerns from conspiracy theories. Murdoch himself now accepts that the network perpetuated a false election narrative, saying that he ‘would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight’. This is going to be hard to reconcile with the official Fox News response that it was just reporting newsworthy allegations.

Murdoch launched Fox News at a time when the overwhelming consensus was that there was no space in the American market for a new TV news channel. The network won its audience not by making rapid attacks on the left, as Murdoch’s critics attest, but by producing high-quality news and commentary that demurred from a stale consensus. Variety was brought to a news market that badly needed it, and it’s hard to think who else could have accomplished this.

Indeed Murdoch’s whole career has been one of defying the odds and (usually) winning. He bought the Sun at a time when radio and television had already bitten heavily into the circulation of popular newspapers. The Times was dying on its feet when he bought it in 1981, having been out of print for nearly a year due to an industrial dispute. For more than a decade, Murdoch endured heavy losses there, but has now turned a £73 million profit – charging for news that for years other papers thought they had to provide for free.

Some on the left in Britain will never forgive Murdoch for defeating the print unions in the 1980s, seeing it as an ideological battle against organised labour. Yet in essence it was simply about the right of a newspaper company to use new technology and survive. Where he led, other papers followed, prolonging the life of an industry that had threatened to become chronically unprofitable.

With satellite TV, too, many expected him to fail. He asked householders to pay for an expensive satellite dish plus a subscription – all in competition with the BBC and ITV which could be viewed for no payment beyond the TV licence. Yet Sky TV prospered, transforming not only television but also sport. 

Yet battles against malpractice in his organisations are proving harder to win. The hacking scandal closed the News of the World. To avoid more court cases, News Group Newspapers has kept settling with claimants year after year: its last accounts showed £100 million expended in a single year. One analysis calculates that the damages and costs amount to over a billion pounds so far. 

The Fox News election debacle may end up costing even more than the hacking, given the other impending claims. This is a showdown with global relevance: telling a heavily partisan audience what it wanted to hear provided too big a temptation for the channel. It fell short of the standards that Murdoch himself has imposed, as he openly accepts. The cost of this now threatens the whole economic viability of Fox News.

Fox News is hardly the only partisan news organisation in the US, of course. America’s increasingly polarised society has spouted plenty of left-leaning channels and publications whose spin is often at odds with reality (as the New York Times’s coverage of Britain regularly shows). But the legal risks are of a magnitude never before seen in the industry. There are plenty of shareholders who would be more comfortable if Murdoch sold all of his news interests, to minimise this liability.

At 92, Murdoch is well beyond the age at which most moguls have retired to the golf course. That’s why the later part of his career has been dogged by the question of succession: is there anyone within his family, or indeed outside, who would have taken the risks that he did to bring diversity to readers and viewers? Just as he sold Sky News and closed the News of the World, there will be huge pressure on him now to drop his UK newspaper interests and retreat to safer territory. He may do so. We may then find out that the only thing worse than a media landscape with Rupert Murdoch is one without him.

What would it take for house prices to crash?

Just what would it take to induce a housing price crash in Britain? Evidently, more than a Bank of England base rate of 4.25 per cent combined with a cost of living crisis. 

The Office for National Statistics’ House Price Index – the most comprehensive of the house pries indices – shows that prices fell in February by 0.3 per cent. That includes all transactions and is based on actual sales prices rather than mortgage approvals.

Yet over the past 12 months, prices are still up 5.5 per cent. Given anecdotal evidence of landlords selling up in response to rising mortgage rates, changes to the taxation of buy-to-lets and new rules demanding the upgrade of all rental properties meet a grade C rating on an Energy Performance Certificate by 2028, it is truly remarkable. Not only that, but the end of the Help-to-Buy scheme has removed incentives for first time buyers. 

There is no indication, so far, of anything to match the housing slump of 2008-09, when prices plunged 15 per cent in a single year – a slump which itself was rapidly reversed in London and the south-east. Indeed, annual house price growth remains higher than it was on the eve of the pandemic, when annualised growth was running at just over zero. Bizarrely, the worst pandemic in a century, which caused the economy to contract by a fifth in a single quarter, sparked a housing boom which has yet fully to deflate.

It ought to be noted that today’s figures do point to a real-terms fall in housing prices. With consumer inflation remaining stubbornly high at just over 10 per cent, house prices have fallen by around 4.5 per cent in real terms over the past year. Yet they are managing to keep pace with wage growth, which itself is running well behind inflation.

For so many years, UK property has had a reputation as the investment which cannot go wrong – where share prices may crash, bricks and mortar will hold its value. That has created a powerful mentality that is very difficult to dislodge. It is partly a product of housing shortage. We are building 200,000 homes a year – itself a step up from a decade ago when we were managing fewer than 140,000 – while the population is growing at around 240,000 a year. Combined with the trend towards smaller households, and the demand for second homes, it makes for a very tight supply of housing. 

Moreover, in London and some other cities whole neighbourhoods have been taken out of the housing supply by buy-to-leave investors. Many of them from overseas, they buy properties and then leave them empty as they appreciate in value.

Today’s ONS index reveals an interesting division between house prices in Scotland, which have grown by 1.0 per cent over the past year and those in the rest of the UK. In England prices grew by 6.0 per cent, in Wales they grew by 6.4 per cent and Northern Ireland 10.2 per cent.

True, Scottish house prices surged in the previous year, rising by 13.8 per cent in the year to last April. But there may also be an element of owner-occupiers being reluctant to buy in Scotland thanks to the increasing income tax rates there. The flight of high-earning taxpayers may be just one more problem with which the SNP has to contend.       

We’ll miss Rupert Murdoch when he’s gone

The idea that Donald Trump was denied victory in the 2020 presidential election by conspirators determined to fiddle with the electoral system was never more than a fiction dreamed up by a frustrated losing candidate. At such times, the role of the media is crucial. If there were genuine evidence of vote-rigging then it should of course be investigated. But to amplify conspiracy theories for the sake of ratings could have grave consequences.

The editorial decision to try to give legs to the stolen election claim is now costing Fox News dearly. This week the company reached a $788 million settlement with Dominion, a company which supplies vote-counting technology for US elections and had been accused of involvement in rigging the election. The staggering sums and reputational damage represent one of the deepest setbacks of Rupert Murdoch’s career.

It’s not just the size of the Dominion payout that matters, but the sense that, as with phone hacking, more payments are coming. Dominion wanted $1.6 billion, and settled for about half that. Another legal case beckons with a second company, Smartmatic, which is claiming $2.7 billion in damages. The first case was made worse by Fox News’s bung-ling of it – in particular the failure to disclose until the last moment that Murdoch was personally involved, as executive chairman of Fox News. That the judge threatened to call him to the witness stand as a result of this omission may well explain why Fox News decided to settle the case.

Fox News’s credibility is under the microscope. There is also the threat of legal action from shareholders appalled at the way that Fox’s against-the-grain culture failed to distinguish legitimate concerns from conspiracy theories. Murdoch himself now accepts that the network perpetuated a false election narrative, saying that he ‘would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight’. This is going to be hard to reconcile with the official Fox News response that it was just reporting newsworthy allegations.

Murdoch launched Fox News at a time when the overwhelming consensus was that there was no space in the American market for a new TV news channel. The network won its audience not by making rapid attacks on the left, as Murdoch’s critics attest, but by producing high-quality news and commentary that demurred from a stale consensus. Variety was brought to a news market that badly needed it, and it’s hard to think who else could have accomplished this.

Indeed Murdoch’s whole career has been one of defying the odds and (usually) winning. He bought the Sun at a time when radio and television had already bitten heavily into the circulation of popular newspapers. The Times was dying on its feet when he bought it in 1981, having been out of print for nearly a year due to an industrial dispute. For more than a decade, Murdoch endured heavy losses there, but has now turned a £73 million profit – charging for news that for years other papers thought they had to provide for free.

Some on the left in Britain will never forgive Murdoch for defeating the print unions in the 1980s, seeing it as an ideological battle against organised labour. Yet in essence it was simply about the right of a newspaper company to use new technology and survive. Where he led, other papers followed, prolonging the life of an industry that had threatened to become chronically unprofitable.

With satellite TV, too, many expected him to fail. He asked householders to pay for an expensive satellite dish plus a subscription – all in competition with the BBC and ITV which could be viewed for no payment beyond the TV licence. Yet Sky TV prospered, transforming not only television but also sport.

Yet battles against malpractice in his organisations are proving harder to win. The hacking scandal closed the News of the World. To avoid more court cases, News Group Newspapers has kept settling with claimants year after year: its last accounts showed £100 million expended in a single year. One analysis calculates that the damages and costs amount to over a billion pounds so far.

The Fox News election debacle may end up costing even more than the hacking, given the other impending claims. This is a showdown with global relevance: telling a heavily partisan audience what it wanted to hear provided too big a temptation for the channel. It fell short of the standards that Murdoch himself has imposed, as he openly accepts. The cost of this now threatens the whole economic viability of Fox News.

Fox News is hardly the only partisan news organisation in the US, of course. America’s increasingly polarised society has spouted plenty of left-leaning channels and publications whose spin is often at odds with reality (as the New York Times’s coverage of Britain regularly shows). But the legal risks are of a magnitude never before seen in the industry. There are plenty of shareholders who would be more comfortable if Murdoch sold all of his news interests, to minimise this liability.

At 92, Murdoch is well beyond the age at which most moguls have retired to the golf course. That’s why the later part of his career has been dogged by the question of succession: is there anyone within his family, or indeed outside, who would have taken the risks that he did to bring diversity to readers and viewers? Just as he sold Sky News and closed the News of the World, there will be huge pressure on him now to drop his UK newspaper interests and retreat to safer territory. He may do so. We may then find out that the only thing worse than a media landscape with Rupert Murdoch is one without him.

Portrait of the week: Strikes, Scottish arrests and stabbings

Home

Nurses in England belonging to the Royal College of Nursing union rejected the government’s pay offer and hurried to go on strike over the first May bank holiday and thereafter on chosen dates till Christmas. Members of Unison voted to accept the NHS pay offer. More than 196,000 hospital appointments were cancelled because of the junior doctors’ strike in England the week before. Strikes by public-sector workers contributed to the complete lack of growth in GDP in February, according to the Office for National Statistics. Humza Yousaf, the First Minister of Scotland, declined to suspend Nicola Sturgeon, his predecessor, from the Scottish National party as police investigated its finances. Colin Beattie MSP, the SNP Treasurer, was arrested by Police Scotland and released without charge as investigations continued. Margaret Ferrier MP is to appeal against a proposed 30-day ban from the House of Commons for having travelled to Glasgow from London on a train in September 2020, though she had received a positive result from a Covid test; she was elected as an SNP MP, but lost the whip; more than ten days’ suspension allows a recall petition
seeking a by-election.

Inflation fell from 10.4 to 10.1 per cent, buoyed by the price of chocolate. Voters in local elections on 4 May would have to show photographic identification; 22 forms of ID were authorised including an Icelandic passport and an expired older person’s bus pass. Protestors invaded the Grand National course, upsetting the horses, one of which later fell and died; protestors invaded the snooker world championships. Brecon Beacons national park said it would in future only use the name Bannau Brycheiniog (pronounced ban-aye bruch-ay-nee-og).

The government cancelled the building of planned so-called smart motorways (which allow traffic to run on hard shoulders). Existing smart motorways (10 per cent of England’s network) would remain. Michael Gove, the Housing Secretary, stopped the building of 165 houses by Berkeley Homes in the Crane Valley, Kent, because the development was not ‘sensitively designed having regard to its setting’. De La Rue, the banknote printers, said world demand is at its lowest level in 20 years; it would renegotiate its bank loans.

Abroad

Scores of civilians were killed in fighting in Khartoum between the Sudanese army, headed by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who has ruled the country since a coup in 2021, and the rival Rapid Support Forces, 100,000 strong, headed by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. The Islamic State group killed 26 people searching for truffles in the Syrian desert. New Australian government figures put Melbourne’s population at 4,875,400 – 18,700 more than Sydney’s.

Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, aged 21, was charged with having posted, since December, in an online gamers’ chat group called Thug Shaker Central, classified documents that could cause ‘exceptionally grave damage’ to national security. The documents mostly concerned the war in Ukraine. The G7 group of industrialised countries asserted its support for Taiwan and for sanctions against Russia over Ukraine in reaction to suggestions by President Emmanuel Macron of France that the EU should distance itself from tension between America and China. President Vladimir Putin of Russia visited occupied parts of Ukraine’s Kherson region, the Kremlin said. Vladimir Kara-Murza, 41, a Russian-British politician, was sentenced to 25 years in a ‘strict regime correctional colony’ on charges of treason relating to his opposition to the war in Ukraine. Poland and Hungary banned the import of Ukrainian grain to protect their farmers from cheap competition. Germany closed its last nuclear power stations, leaving coal to produce more than a third of its energy. The launch of Elon Musk’s 390ft Starship rocket was postponed when a valve went wrong.

Four people were shot dead and 28 wounded at a 16th birthday party in Dadeville, Tallapoosa County, Alabama, the 162nd mass shooting in the United States this year. A black boy, Ralph Yarl, 16, was shot in Kansas City, Missouri, after he rang the wrong doorbell by mistake, but survived. An 11-year-old boy was stabbed in the lung and liver at a dollar store at Mill Creek, Washington state, after calling a 29-year-old man an NPC (non-playable character, a video gaming term). An explosion at South Fork Dairy Farm near Dimmitt, Texas, killed 18,000 cows. CSH

I’ll be forever grateful to my son’s surrogate

When my husband, Robin, and I first discussed how we might try to have a child, we were against exploring surrogacy. Wasn’t this something that only celebrities did in America? Was it really in children’s best interests? How could you be sure that the women were not being forced?

Five years later, and we have a son, Solly, who has just turned three and was born through surrogacy in the UK.

There were two things that changed our minds: meeting these women and hearing them speak for themselves; and reading academic research, which is clear that children born through surrogacy are just as likely to flourish as anyone else.

Undoubtedly surrogacy can be exploitative, particularly in developing countries, with women coerced, sometimes by abusive partners, into carrying babies for rich foreigners. However, surrogacy can also be pursued ethically – when women with agency choose to carry children for others.

In 2018, a colleague of mine told me that he and his husband were going through surrogacy in Britain. I learned that it is legal here, but non-commercial: you cannot pay surrogates to carry your child, only cover expenses, such as maternity wear, travel expenses for appointments, loss of earnings and medication.

We listened to various podcasts in which surrogates spoke of the pride they felt in helping couples create families, and the lifelong relationships they formed with them. We wanted to find out more, so tentatively signed up to Surrogacy UK, a not-for-profit organisation that hosts events where surrogates can meet ‘intended parents’, a term in the surrogacy community for couples like us. (I use the term ‘surrogate’, rather than ‘surrogate mother’ because every surrogate I’ve met preferred this wording.)

The first surrogacy event we attended was at a pub near Stroud. We spent most of the day with a small powerhouse woman with a blonde bob and a Brummie accent who had carried twins for a gay couple. She still travelled the country for surrogacy events even though she could no longer carry. Clearly this wasn’t some kind of speed-dating style event, but a lively community.

Over the next few months we met many women who wanted to be surrogates, or who had been surrogates. They came from a variety of backgrounds. Most already had their own children. After six months, we met Rachel, a teaching assistant, and her husband James at a pub in Derbyshire and ended up spending the day together. A few months later, we returned there for another event and met her again. That time she was with her sons Charlie and Jack, then seven and five.

A few weeks later we got a call from Surrogacy UK telling us Rachel wanted to get to know us better. At Surrogacy UK, intended parents aren’t allowed to ask surrogates if they want to carry a child for them. Rightly, surrogates are in control. We spent the next few months travelling to and from Rachel’s home. She had been inspired to become a surrogate by her sister, who had carried for a couple with fertility problems.

We went through paperwork outlining different awful decisions you might have to make during a surrogate pregnancy – such as whether the surrogate would have an abortion in extreme circumstances – and were relieved that we agreed on every point.

Separately, Robin and I made embryos at a fertility clinic with an egg donor. Crucially for us, the egg donation agency didn’t have lists of donors for couples to choose from. Instead, we were interviewed, and our details sent to potential donors. Three months later we were chosen by a woman who liked the sound of us. She chose to remain anonymous, but it’s Solly’s legal right to have her details when he’s 18. We will of course support him in finding her if he wants to.

After signing an agreement with Rachel and having counselling separately and then together, our first frozen embryo – which was made with Robin’s sperm – was transferred to Rachel in July 2019.

Nine months later Solly was born. We were all together for the birth. Rachel and James cuddled him. After spending a magical hour together in the labour ward, we had two rooms: one for me, Robin and Solly, and one for Rachel. We watched Solly with the lights low, reaching out to touch his chest and check he was still breathing, again and again, like all new parents do. Rachel could come and see us as she pleased but chose to have some toast and sleep before coming back to our room to join us in the morning.

After we left the hospital, Robin and I spent the first few days in a rented cottage close to Rachel’s home. She seemed joyous after the birth and we stayed in close contact to make sure she was fine. Solly was a newborn: he just needed love and feeding. There was never any issue with bonding. Rachel expressed milk which he had at the start as well as formula.

Rachel says being pregnant with a surrogate baby was a ‘totally different’ experience to having her own. ‘I knew the child wasn’t mine. I felt connected to the baby but in a very different way,’ she wrote in my book The Equal Parent, which is about how dads should properly share responsibility for childcare. ‘It is a strange feeling, being proud of yourself… When I see photos of Solly with his dads, or videos of him laughing when he is playing with his grandparents, I think to myself: “I did that. I had a part in bringing that happiness to them.”’

We are still close to Rachel and her family, chat regularly and stay with each other a few times per year. If you ask Solly whose tummy he grew inside he says, ‘Aunty Rachel!’ His middle name is Ezra, which is Hebrew for ‘help’, to honour Rachel.

No matter how often Rachel and other British surrogates speak about their reasons for helping people become parents, they are often viewed with suspicion and told they cannot possibly know their own minds. This doesn’t tally with our experience with Rachel and all the other surrogates we’ve met. At their most damning, critics who claim to care for these people’s welfare insult them and compare them to breeding animals. It is deeply hurtful. Since Robin and I started posting about our family online, we have been accused of ‘erasing motherhood’, denying Solly his heritage and treating him like a commodity.

Of course women carry and give birth to babies. There’s no suggestion mothers aren’t central to most families. But if some women want to altruistically donate eggs and carry children for non-traditional families, what’s most important for kids is having positive relationships with their parents, regardless of their genetic make-up. Last month, a major review of worldwide academic studies in this area published in the BMJ Global Health journal found children with same-sex parents fare just as well as, and sometimes better, than those from ‘traditional’ families.

Academic work has also suggested it is vital these children are not misled about their origins. We are following this advice.

About 450 babies per year who are brought up in England and Wales are born through surrogacy. Critics often point to a few horrific cases from foreign countries, and they should absolutely be studied carefully. But these are not representative of surrogacy here. However, while we found a way to have a child that we felt was ethical, the law has not been robust enough to ensure this in all cases. That’s why the Law Commission’s proposed changes have been widely welcomed, including by UK surrogates.

At the moment, you can go through surrogacy in the UK independently, without the oversight of an organisation like Surrogacy UK. There is no regulator. We chose to go through pre-conception checks – such as counselling and discussing the medical implications with Rachel – but this was our preference; it wasn’t legally required.

Initially, Rachel and James were listed as legal parents on Solly’s birth certificate, even though they didn’t want this status. We went through a six-month ‘parental order’ process in the courts for them to pass on these theoretical rights to us.

In practice, it didn’t affect us. But in theory, had Solly had a medical emergency, his care could have been delayed by a doctor wanting permission from Rachel and James to give life-saving treatment. Currently surrogates are at risk of being left with legal parental responsibility for a child not in their care. The proposed guidelines would allow legal parenthood to be granted at birth if the surrogate agrees – but only if a licensed fertility clinic or surrogacy organisation is used, if everyone involved in the process has had counselling and received legal advice, and if criminal record checks have been conducted before conception. The proposed guidelines would uphold the surrogate’s right to change her mind about granting immediate legal parenthood for up to six weeks after the birth. They also maintain the principle of altruistic surrogacy in the UK, with only legitimate expenses allowed.

There would be a national register of surrogacy arrangements, to ensure that anyone born through surrogacy has access as an adult to an impartial legal record of how they were conceived and born. The changes would apply only to those going through surrogacy in the UK. If people went abroad for it, they would subsequently have to go through the full parental order court process involving social services.

Crucially, surrogates in the UK, including Rachel, are delighted about the changes. We should listen to them.

What is the point of Humza Yousaf?

A seized luxury campervan, a raid on a politician’s home and two arrests. The latest twists in Police Scotland’s investigation into how the SNP spent £600,000 of IndyRef2 donations wouldn’t seem out of place in an Ian Rankin novel.

Just a year ago, Nicola Sturgeon looked invincible. Now the SNP is in freefall and Humza Yousaf, its new leader, is unable to give a clear answer when asked if his party is currently a criminal organisation. The latest arrest – of the party’s treasurer, Colin Beattie – was on the same day as Yousaf’s supposed policy relaunch day (‘not helpful,’ he said) and more developments are expected from Operation Branchform, the investigation into the missing funds for a referendum campaign that never took place. Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell was arrested (and released) earlier this month. The former first minister is now the only senior SNP official named on the accounts who has not been arrested as part of the finance probe. ‘It’s one rolling disaster movie,’ says a party figure.

‘New leadership: a fresh start for Scotland,’ promised the continuity candidate in his relaunch. He had hoped to make news by marking distance from Sturgeon, postponing several of her policies. Instead, the most memorable moment was Yousaf’s declaration that he is ‘of course surprised when one of my colleagues is arrested’. By now the public will be rather less surprised. It was certainly curious to find a £110,000 campervan parked on the driveway of Murrell’s 92-year-old mother. If it was intended for campaigning, as the SNP claims, why use her drive?

No one has yet been charged. But if the donations row goes to trial, the drama could run for years. Under current Scottish rules, serving politicians can be charged and even convicted but not have to give up their seats unless sentenced to jail for more than a year.

When Alex Salmond faced his sexual assault charges, the trial took place 14 months after he was charged. Fraud trials take longer and would probably have to be heard in the High Court. All this potentially adds up for a 2024 general election nightmare for the SNP, whose critics would be able to portray the party as an essentially criminal enterprise in the process of being busted.

Even if there are no further developments in the police investigation, many in the SNP believe it is a matter of when, not if, Yousaf is pushed out. His comments that there was not sufficient reason yet to suspend either Murrell or Sturgeon from his party have landed badly with party figures who say colleagues have been kicked out for far less.

One old hand predicts that Yousaf won’t be removed imminently – better to let him be associated with whatever more bad news is to come. But less than a month into his premiership he has already lost any hope of being seen as a fresh face. ‘The party won’t move against him yet. It’s not how they work,’ says a party source. ‘He will hang on until the general election next year.’

Some pessimistic SNP politicians fear the party could lose as many as 20 seats to Labour in 2024. Supporters of Kate Forbes – who believe she was robbed in the leadership contest – think she can now stand again as the ideal candidate to rebuild. She ran not just against Yousaf but against the party establishment. She is already developing a base: a splinter group of out-of-vogue SNP politicians who plan to challenge the Scottish government to do ‘more with the powers it has’ domestically to tackle poverty.

Forbes is being talked up among opposition MPs as a ‘future Sunak’: the point being that she, too, would be the loser who goes on to win after the leadership implodes. Forbes, a Highlander disparaged for her Free Church faith, has always kept a safe distance from the SNP hierarchy in Edinburgh. ‘Not everyone has realised how serious the situation is, but there will be realisation,’ says an SNP supporter. ‘Only then can the party change in the way it needs.’

For Scotland’s other parties, the SNP’s worsening fortunes offer plenty of opportunity. Salmond wants to use his former protégée’s woes to rally support for his pro-independence party Alba. For now, SNP figures are sceptical about the likelihood of mass defections. But they do believe party members are there for the taking. Alba reports 700 new members, but the membership is still only around 7,000, as compared to the SNP’s 70,000.

Alba strategists hope that its improved polling – to 5 per cent – will be enough to convince some SNP politicians to jump ship. Salmond hopes to present Alba as the more serious pro-independence party that won’t get into bed with the Greens. Seven SNP politicians recently backed a Westminster motion to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ – something cited by Alba as proof that the SNP has the wrong priorities.

On his relaunch day, Yousaf mistakenly referred to ‘Keir Sarwar’ – a sign that he’s really worried about Anas Sarwar, his fellow Hutchesons’ Grammar alumnus who runs Scottish Labour. The Tories are worried about him too. Douglas Ross, the party leader, has openly said that there are some circumstances where Tories voting for Labour would make sense if Sarwar is better placed to take the fight to the SNP. His comments led to anger in No. 10, which holds the view that the Scottish Tory leader should back Scottish Tory candidates.

The schadenfreude among Scottish Tories over the SNP’s woes is fading fast. ‘It had been a point of fun that the SNP was doing so badly, but now there’s concern,’ says one senior Conservative. ‘Every blow to the SNP is a win for Labour.’ There could still be some Conservative pickings if the nationalist vote subsides, but not as many as for Labour.

For now, the Scottish Labour attack line is to depict the SNP as a party of sleaze and a tired government that’s run out of ideas and lost the ability to go on. But to really win over some wavering pro-Indy voters, Labour will be pressed on its position on independence. Would it commit to an independence referendum, under certain circumstances, if public support was there? If it did, at this point some SNP politicians might even think about offering their support.

The common cause of Scottish Unionism

Although it cannot be stated publicly, Labour and the Conservatives have much common cause in Scotland now. They won’t stand down in each other’s favour at the next election; but expect ‘paper’ candidates in constituencies where one is much stronger than the other and the Nationalist is vulnerable. Wavering SNP supporters can be divided into welfare drones (who have benefited under the SNP to the detriment of spending on health and schools), and ‘tartan Tories’, social conservatives who hoped that Kate Forbes would be SNP leader. Labour courts the former, the Tories the latter. Both parties pray that Humza Yousaf, the new First Minister, remains in office. He is the gift that keeps on giving. The biggest task for Sir Keir Starmer is to get out from under the weight of Gordon Brown on the subject. Brown led the original thrust for devolution in the 1990s. His political aim of thus entrenching Labour power collapsed utterly, yet he still thinks he knows how to dominate his native land. Eighteen months ago he launched Labour’s paper A New Britain, which advocated federalism, including in England. Sir Keir supported it but is gradually realising that the loss of Westminster control over tax in Scotland would weaken a Labour government’s power there and thus encourage an SNP revival. Unionism trumps left/right ideological differences. 

Scotland under the SNP has, oddly, been more lavish towards monarchical ceremony than the government is Westminster. The SNP leadership is mostly republican, but it does not want to frighten off the royalist vote. This difference is affecting the coronation in a tiny way. Traditionally, the chief heralds, the Kings of Arms, wear (as befits their description) small crowns for the ceremony. There are four of them – Garter, Clarenceux, Norroy and Lord Lyon. The last is the chief Scottish herald. This time, in the spiritless spirit of modernisation, it was planned that the Kings of Arms would not wear their crowns for the ceremony, in line with the decision to deprive the peers of their coronets. But then it turned out that Lord Lyon’s crown had been expensively restored for the occasion with Holyrood’s blessing. So all the Kings of Arms will wear their crowns after all. 

Lord Lyon is clearly a powerful figure north of the border. Dr Joseph Morrow has an almost Wolseyan plurality of roles. He is a judge. When he sits in his heraldic court he wears, for complicated historical reasons, an earl’s robe. He is also a clergyman (an honorary canon of St Paul’s cathedral, Dundee, and former chaplain of Glamis castle), sometime grand master mason of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, Squadron Colonel of 2 (City of Dundee and Highland) Signal Squadron and a former Labour councillor. His other relevant judicial experience is that he used to be the president of the mental health tribunal for Scotland. Lord Lyon’s crest is ‘A dexter hand Or holding a dagger erect Purpure hilted and pomelled Or’. 

If the symbol of a beacon is ‘not a good look’, as the chief executive of the Brecon Beacons national park puts it, and must be jettisoned as ‘a direct response to the climate emergency’, how far will this principle go? In the United Kingdom, there are at least five towns or villages which contain the word Beacon, including Beaconsfield, Beacon’s Bottom and, in Devon, plain Beacon. If links to fossil fuels must be extirpated, that should also include 19 towns and villages with coal in their names, including Coalville, Coalbrookdale, Coalisland and Coal Pool. Environmental logic demands nothing less. But such changes, ‘direct response’ though they may be, will lack global impact. Time to snuff out the Olympic flame, surely, and the torch held aloft by the Statue of Liberty. Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’ depicts Jesus holding a presumably fossil-fuelled lamp. I hope Keble College, Oxford, in whose chapel the painting resides, will see what a bad look this is. Couldn’t someone tweak the picture so that Our Lord carries an LED instead?  

This week in Westminster Hall, MPs stood up for the sheep of Dartmoor. In February, the MPs complained, the sheep’s owners received, without warning, letters from Natural England threatening the eviction of their stocks from the moor. There is a psychological study to be done of which creatures the green movement adores or abhors. It loves beavers, raptors and foxes, ignores the needs of grouse and songbirds and hates sheep. Appearing recently before a Commons select committee, the chairman of Natural England, Tony Juniper, referred disparagingly to pheasants as ‘non-native’. True, in that pheasants came over with the Romans, but the same could be said of beech trees, rabbits and brown hares. I accuse Natural England of trying to create a ‘hostile environment’ for certain long-standing and well-assimilated immigrant groups against which it has a prejudice.  

Rishi Sunak’s recent interview with Paul Goodman for the Conservative Home website ended endearingly. Asked about his religion, the Prime Minister said with a shy smile that a statuette of ‘Lord Ganesh’ stands beside him in his office. He had put it on his desk when he became chancellor and brought it with him when he moved to 10 Downing Street. Given how ignorant the British are about other faiths (and, indeed, all faiths), I wondered whether half-listening viewers would have picked up on who this Lord Ganesh was. Could he be a life peer (Lord Ganesh of Neasden?) recently ennobled so that he could bring his economic policy expertise to the work of government and parliament? Mr Sunak spoke of him with a respectful familiarity rather as Mrs Thatcher used to refer to Milton Friedman. Lord Ganesh is actually the Hindu god of beginnings, the bringer of good fortune, remover of obstacles: a most comforting tutelary deity for a prime minister to have.