PMQs was all about the local elections

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer were both present for Prime Minister’s Questions, but the session was largely Why You Should Vote For This Party In The Local Elections Tomorrow. Backbenchers on both sides used the half hour to air their grievances with local councils led by their rivals, or praise the important work of authorities where their own party had power. Both party leaders framed their exchanges around their own local messaging, too, but what was interesting was that Starmer chose to lead on home ownership and housebuilding. 

The Labour leader used housing as the latest example of things Sunak likes to pretend are going absolutely fine even when they manifestly aren’t. He has been making this case at PMQs for the past few weeks, always driving the point home by pointing to some aspect of Sunak’s own wealthy lifestyle which shows the Prime Minister hasn’t got a clue what’s going on. Today he also decided to remind people of the Liz Truss era and the impact that has had on people’s own finances.

Starmer opened by asking how many homeowners were paying higher mortgages as a result of Truss’s mini-Budget. Sunak, who is mulling bringing back Help to Buy, replied that the government had cut costs for first-time buyers and had seen the ‘largest number of people buying their first home’, which wasn’t what he’d been asked about. Starmer pointed this out, offering the figure of 850,000 people paying higher rates because Truss ‘used their money as a casino’ and ‘created a self-inflicted financial crisis’. Sunak then accused Labour of wanting to push up debt, Starmer carried on with his focus on higher mortgages with a warning that 935,000 people would be paying higher mortgages by the end of this year and that the cost of a deposit was rising by £9,000. The pair continued to swap arguments about whether the Tories were doing enough. 

The most depressing line was from Sunak accusing Starmer of wanting to ‘impose top-down housing targets, he wants to concrete over the green belt and ride roughshod over local communities’ and that he had U-turned on his previous policies. It was a retort to the Labour leader saying the Tories were failing to build enough homes or help people onto the housing ladder, but it was also clearly something he felt would appeal to Conservative voters, whose worries about building enough homes have thwarted the attempts of the government to reform the planning system and increase supply over the past 13 years. The best line came from Starmer, who told the Commons that the Tories were ‘going to need a bigger note’. It was a memorable reference to the Liam Byrne ‘no money’ note that the Conservatives are still waving around more than a decade on, and part of a wider attempt by Labour to acknowledge that note and turn it back on the Tories. Given Starmer has now settled into a pattern at Prime Minister’s Questions, we should expect the note to come back long after the fallout from tomorrow’s local elections have faded. 

What will Charles III’s reign look like?

The last time a monarch acceded to the throne, her subjects had to wait ten months to hear her speak. Elizabeth II was only 25 and had her whole adult life before her. The public were more patient in those days and the media was an entirely different creature, moving at a slower pace. 

It was not until Christmas Day 1952 that the British heard their Queen (by now 26) begin: ‘Each Christmas, at this time, my beloved father broadcast a message to his people in all parts of the world. Today I am doing this to you, who are now my people…’

In 2022, we had to wait all of 24 hours before hearing Charles III outline his vision for his reign. He did so in a speech which, by common consent, hit the right note (a YouGov poll days later gave it a 94 per cent approval rating). Since then, he has maintained a similarly frantic pace, whether
in terms of new coinage, new stamps or, indeed, coronation arrangements.

There has been some grumbling about the last-minute nature of the preparations for Saturday’s event, not to mention the guest list – and outbreaks of FOMO among those previously unfamiliar with the condition.  Following a ration of just 50 seats apiece for the Lords and Commons and a near wipe-out of the hereditary peerage, the ‘fear of missing out’ has reached the highest echelons. Traditionalists mutter privately about the King and his master of ceremonies, the Earl Marshal, ‘going woke’. They point to the 75 per cent reduction in seating capacity compared with 1953 and a very different dress code (morning dress or lounge suits this time, vs the coronation robes or breeches and velvet court dress of yesteryear).

Even among those who have made the cut, there has been bellyaching. There has been much amusement at the persistent efforts of one very grand hereditary peer who not only wants to wear his ancestral coronation robes and coronet but to arrive in the family horse-drawn coach accompanied by a page. He has been told, in no uncertain terms, to dress like everyone else, come by car or on foot (minus page) and be grateful that he is not having to watch on telly like most of the nobility.

This is not a case of regal wokery. It simply reflects the fact that ministers and Whitehall are calling many of the shots, on the basis that they are footing the bill. So, for example, the ancient Court of Claims, the panel of peers and senior judges appointed to decide who should be permitted to perform certain roles at each coronation, has been replaced by a ‘coronation claims office’ made up of civil servants. It is they who have trimmed the ermine and shortened the processional route. In other words, don’t blame the Earl Marshal. 

Of course, everything has received the nod from the King. He is at heart a great traditionalist, but he is also determined to be different. He accepts that a 21st-century coronation must look and be of its time. The last one was entirely white and Anglican (with a walk-on part for the Moderator of the Church of Scotland). The Queen herself accepted that those days were long gone when she faced down Church of England traditionalists in the 1970s and pushed through a new multifaith annual service for the Commonwealth at Westminster Abbey. No one would call that ‘woke’. 

Seven months into Charles III’s reign, we have a clearer view of the ways in which he is going to be different. It is not that he is impatient, but he certainly appears to be in a hurry. This is not surprising given that he will be 75 this year and is not giving much thought to jubilees. 

In the immediate aftermath of his accession, there was a simplistic narrative that he would suddenly, overnight, have to button his lip. Constitutional experts confidently proclaimed that he would have to bury opinions which he had been voicing for decades. Commentators were quick to point to his non-appearance at the COP27 climate change summit in Egypt, held two months after the Queen’s death. Here, they said, was proof that the erstwhile prince of environmentalism had either been neutered as sovereign or was being placed under house arrest by the Conservative government.

In fact, though the King was acting on ministerial advice, he was quite content not to go. Great thought goes into the first overseas visit by a new monarch. A new US president does the same. Squeezing into a summit alongside more than 100 world leaders to deliver a diluted version of what he said just one year before at COP26 in Glasgow would have been a huge waste of a diplomatic trump card. His COP credentials were beyond reproach anyway. It was the then Prince of Wales who, in 1991, held a conference on board the royal yacht in Brazil, helping to pave the way for the very first COP. I was in the room in Glasgow in 2021 when the US President Joe Biden hugged him, saying: ‘If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be here.’

However, being King has certainly not stopped Charles from making these same points in different ways. He not only held a Buckingham Palace reception on the eve of COP27 for all those heading off to Egypt, but just three months later I watched him holding a ‘reception in support of action on global biodiversity’ at Buckingham Palace. Those who warned that the King would not be able to ‘meddle’ in politics as monarch had completely missed the point. Here was ‘meddling’ of a different sort, much to the delight of all the British government ministers at the same event. They had just been staging an international biodiversity conference over the road at Lancaster House. Initial take-up had been unexceptional until the King offered to host a palace reception for those attending the conference – at which point, to the delight of politicians and officials, both the numbers and the calibre of delegates shot up. The King did not say a word in public. He did not need to. 

Back in his princely days, I asked him what would happen to the ‘meddling’ when he became King. ‘I wouldn’t call it meddling. I would call it mobilising,’ he explained, adding: ‘I might still have some convening power that could be brought to use for various purposes actually.’ Here was a clear illustration of the convener King in action.

I saw it time and again during his debut state visit the other day, to Germany (after riot-torn France cancelled at the 11th hour). At the most formal level, his speech to the Bundestag correctly echoed all the points the British government wanted him to make, from post-war reconciliation to shared culture as well as the fight against climate change. Yet he did it in his own words. His was the first address to the Bundestag by a foreign head of state in German and it drew rave reviews. As Germany’s bestselling paper, Bild, declared: ‘He came, he spoke, he inspired.’ Those who feared a draining away of the monarchy’s soft-power potential could park those fears.

In between the big events, though, the tour was full of personal ‘convening’ touches. No sooner had the official state welcome finished (the first to be held in front of the Brandenburg Gate) than the King was getting stuck into his first engagement. It was not one the late Queen would have countenanced. On her last state visit to Berlin, in 2015, her first engagement had been a boat trip down the river Spree. For the King, it was a meeting of the ‘Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue’. 

Those who know him well have detected something different about the King himself. He is, quite simply, happier. This might seem odd in someone who, having just buried his mother, was assailed by a six-part TV broadside and then an explosive memoir from his younger son, not to mention a running media debate on the future of the monarchy. Yet he is very clearly enjoying his new role.

‘As monarch, you are treated differently. Your engagements receive more attention. You are taken more seriously because you are in charge. Plus, you have a lot more to do,’ says a member of his team. ‘You can’t sit around worrying what Harry might say next when you have a Christmas broadcast to write.’

Key to his contentment has been the way in which the Queen Consort has embraced her role, injecting a blend of humour and common sense into each engagement while never seeking to be the centre of attention. Like Prince Philip before her, she takes a no-nonsense, eye-on-the-clock approach to the role of consort. If the King is dawdling, a gentle tap of handbag on back usually does the trick.

Another new aspect which has surprised even close friends is the fact that the King spends more and more time at Windsor and at Birkhall, at the expense of trusty old Highgrove. His love of the second-string residence on the Balmoral estate is reflected in the fact that staff now refer to Birkhall as ‘the marital home’. Whenever the couple need to decompress, as they did in the days after the Queen’s funeral, they head for Deeside. As for Windsor, officials had always imagined that the din of air traffic and the constant stream of tourists would mean that the King only used it for official events. After all, he spent precious little time there as Prince of Wales.

However, he has always adored the treasures of the Royal Collection and of the Royal Library, which stretches out below the state apartments. Having appointed himself Ranger of the Great Park, in succession to Prince Philip, who held the post longer than anyone in history, he is also taking a very keen interest in all that happens on this most ancient of the royal estates. 

Elsewhere, he has big plans for the grounds of both Buckingham Palace and Sandringham. For one area where monarchs can meddle to their heart’s content is in the garden. Having devoted so much of his time – and, indeed, his soul – to transforming the landscape at Highgrove, the horizon has suddenly expanded very considerably.

So much to do. Yet, ever-present if unspoken, is that race against the clock. He made it clear in that first address on the evening after his mother’s death: ‘As the Queen herself did with such unswerving devotion, I too now solemnly pledge myself, throughout the remaining time God grants me…’ 

It explains another difference between this reign and the last. It is one which can sometimes upset the hosts of awaydays and state visits as they search in vain for a breather in the royal itinerary. The King, as his staff know only too well, does not do lunch.

Which Tory MP will be the next ‘presentician’?

These days it’s hard to turn your telly and not find a politician gurning back at you. But while once MPs both past and present were wheeled out only as guests – hapless prey before a fearless interviewer – now they’re more likely to be running the show. A veritable smorgasbord of Tory MPs currently host or have previously hosted such shows on GB News including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Dehenna Davison, Esther McVey, Philip Davies and Lee Anderson.

TalkTV meanwhile have ‘Friday night with Nadine Dorries’ while her fellow parliamentarians Bim Afolami and Labour’s Tan Dhesi as talking heads on Talk’s flagship late night show. And even Jake Berry has been trying his hand in the presenter’s hot seat, filling in for Jeremy Kyle last week alongside Emily Sheffield. Egocentric, abrasive and antagonistic, Kyle has since returned to the station. But it does raise the question as to which Tory MP will be next to be snapped up as a part-time ‘presentician’ alongside their duties in the House?

GB News have reportedly considered giving Dominic Raab his own ‘comeback gig’ though rumours of a Matt Hancock show on TalkTV appear to have died after the channel’s international editor, er, leaked his WhatsApp messages. Watch this space…

Dear Mary: Should I hire a fortune-teller for the village fete?

Q. I am organising a village fête and am happy to throw cash into it, as we want to make a favourable local impact as the new owners of the Old Rectory. We will have games for children, teas and cakes, secondhand stalls and a brass band. My question is – should I also hire an old-fashioned fortune-teller? I feel this would generate a lot of harmless excitement, but my husband thinks it could cause trouble as some people take fortune-telling seriously.

– Name and address withheld

A. A more useful community service would be to hire a pop-up GP. These now feature in the back rooms of certain upmarket London chemists and give consultations to the time-pressed for £45. Hold a men-only raffle to allow ten winners a free consultation. Men are hopeless at going to the doctor but here they could be lulled by the gaiety outside the tent into vocalising their prostate issues and thereby clearing the first hurdle.

Q. Has it really become ‘bad form’ to date someone one knows (Dear Mary, 8 April)? My brother is 59, newly single and lonely. He is still a romantic so would rather remain single than have to meet someone who had ‘swiped right’ on a dating app. So clinical. Any ideas, Mary?

– H.R., Wallingford

A. The new protocol only applies to the young. Dating apps allow young men to sidestep the spectre of #MeToo-ism as, by swiping right, the female has signalled theoretical interest in a physical relationship. Most older singletons also dislike the soullessness of apps, and hence friendship clubs are emerging. One example is theottoconnection.com, an invitation-only group offering friendship to those in their fifties and sixties. Everyone is pre-vetted by another member. The club offers parties, picnics, suppers, games nights, films and holidays, with none of the tensions of one-on-one encounters. The slow exposure is reminiscent of old-fashioned office life where, having got to know a colleague gradually, workers sometimes realised they were attracted to each other. At least a friendship club would deal with the loneliness issue.

Q. My godfather owns a wonderful, fully staffed house near the sea and has offered it to me as a 40th birthday present. I can invite who I like. It sleeps eight but my wife and I have eight needy friends, all of whom are broke and desperately want a treat. How on earth can we decide which two to reject?

– F.J., London SW18

A. Email everyone in the middle of the night explaining that, because you can only have six guests, it will have to be first come, first served. The most desperate will be up through the night anyway with insomnia and this will be a fair way of filtering out the least needy.

The case against koalas

There was a reason 18th-century rulers were eager for their subjects to grow and eat potatoes: the miraculous tuber offered an alternative source of nutrition to grain, hence reducing bread prices. In the event of a catastrophic harvest, people could survive. To the rulers themselves, however, the biggest benefit was probably what happened when the grain harvest was merely disappointing. With grain no longer critical to survival, the price of bread would be far less volatile. And high bread prices might be more likely to lead to civil unrest than no bread at all.

Humans evolved to be foraging omnivores, but agriculture made us over-reliant on whatever crop could best be grown nearby. The potato rebalanced that. Being a monovore is never a good plan in the long term. Notice that koalas, despite having opposable thumbs, have never successfully colonised distant continents or developed extensive worldwide trade networks. Had they done so, it is likely that eucalyptus leaf prices would have been very volatile indeed, quite possibly manipulated by some shady koala cartel.

Rather like oil. Today there is wiggle-room for many people when food prices go up. By contrast, oil and gas prices affect the price of everything – of accommodation, of durable goods, of transportation – and indeed of food.

I make this point to explain why, regardless of any environmental considerations, a partial shift towards electrification of cars may be a good thing. The internal combustion engine is a koala – a monovore. Oil or nothing. By contrast an electric car motor is like an external combustion engine. It is effectively omnivorous, able to run on whatever form of energy – from gas to solar to nuclear – that’s abundant or cheap. Early US steam locomotives switched from burning coal to wood as they headed west away from coalfields. Such flexibility is valuable in itself. EV batteries can also store surplus energy generated overnight.

It’s time we made a patriotic case for electrification alongside the environmental one. Not only is the diesel engine the only form of mechanical propulsion not to be invented in the UK, and hence inherently ungodly, but Britain has a huge potential advantage over many other countries in being able to achieve a more balanced energy diet. We have a lot of offshore wind, for one thing, and a healthily small Green party. This means we do not all don PLO scarves and face-paint at the sight of a nuclear power station. The net effect of this is that we might be able to power the country without funding our enemies.

Again, we do not need every vehicle to be electric for this. (Why must we always assume either/or when the answer is both/and?) It pains me when I write about electric cars and the online comments field turns into a fight between supporters and opponents of electrification. Such infighting risks allowing half a million metropolitan idiots to indulge their socialistic fetish for mass transit by playing divide and rule over the 50 million other Britons who know that the car, van and taxi, however they may be powered, are essential to any recognisably pleasant future. We all know this – yet when did you last hear anyone say we need to build more roads? With more roads, we could build more houses. In fact we could sell the houses to pay for the roads. (Google Henry George for more.)

Of course, other forms of transport have their place. Trains are great for commuting and long journeys. And bikes are wonderful for able-bodied middle-class people aged between 15 and 45, undertaking a journey of under three miles, with no luggage or children or shame, in dry, warm weather in a place with no hills. But for 80 per cent of people 90 per cent of the time, only a car will do. We need to say this more loudly and more often.

The mystical power of the coronation spoon

A spoon may seem too homely for grand ceremony. It might even, in this sceptical and utilitarian age, seem slightly ridiculous. This prompts the question of how, or whether, we value ancient traditions and ceremonies whose original meanings and power are largely lost to us. And if we do value them, why?

This particular spoon, undeniably, is a very special one: doubtless the world’s most important spoon, and certainly one of the most beautiful examples of that humble genus: silver-gilt, finely engraved with acanthus scrolls, decorated with pearls, and with its bowl strangely divided into two. It dates from the 12th century, and may have been used ever since Richard the Lionheart. It is the oldest piece of the coronation regalia.

 After the Civil War the new republic melted everything down. The spoon alone was saved by a Mr Kinnersley, who bought it for 16 shillings – £3,000 today – and presented it to the restored Charles II. It holds the oil that anoints each sovereign (hence the divided bowl, for the archbishop’s two fingers), re-enacting the Biblical anointing of King Solomon by Zadok the Priest, in the ancient belief that monarchs were sacred and ruled in God’s name. France’s kings, indeed, enjoyed chrism brought down from heaven itself by a dove in the year 496 and used, wars and revolutions notwithstanding, until King Charles X in 1825. For King Charles III, the oil comes from olives in the Holy Land, consecrated by the Patriarch of Jerusalem and its Anglican archbishop.

Such mysticism has not always been taken seriously. Following two revolutions, the Calvinist William of Orange, one of our greatest kings, dismissed his coronation in 1689 as ‘funny old popish rites’. Generations of Whigs, dissenters and the left would have agreed. Our late Queen, of course, took it seriously, as now, it seems, does King Charles.

How does our literally disenchanted age respond to a golden spoon of holy oil? Many will be as dismissive as King William. Pious souls will regard it as reverently as the King himself does. Others, including me, will willingly suspend our disbelief. As Walter Bagehot put it in his classic study of the constitution, the monarchy ‘consecrates our whole state’; the spoonful of oil does so literally. Consecrated by God, or by the will of the people, or by the drama of history?

Whichever we choose to believe, it renews what Edmund Burke saw as a perpetual contract between the dead, the living and the yet unborn. This imagined community of nationhood, if it is to survive and flourish, must be what the late Roger Scruton called ‘the inherited first person plural’ – something that over the past few years we have come perilously close to losing.

The coronation ceremony, with all its mysteries and oddities, dates back before the Norman Conquest, and it is something that we can all – however diverse our backgrounds – choose to accept and celebrate as above and beyond our present discontents. If we wish our nation to be more than ‘UK plc’ or a chaos of resentful factions, we should welcome the thought that at its heart is something ancient, unique, even sacred. Not to be deified, but to be respected and cherished. As the choir sings Handel’s anthem Zadok the Priest (‘And all the people rejoiced…’) the humble spoon will perform for perhaps the 13th time its mystical function.

The Battle for Britain | 6 May 2023

I’ve ridden my last rollercoaster

I was in Canada last week, travelling across British Columbia on a luxury train called the Rocky Mountaineer. It was great. The downside was I had to travel to North America and back in five days, meaning that as soon as my body clock had adjusted to the time difference I was back in England. So I was feeling a bit discombobulated when I set off on a road trip to Stoke-on-Trent with my three sons on Saturday morning.

Our first reason for making the journey was to see QPR’s penultimate match of the 2022-23 season against Stoke City, a must-win game for us. We’ve performed so badly since October that only four points separated us from the relegation zone, meaning we needed three from this game or the next to guarantee our survival. More than 2,000 QPR fans made their way up the M1, hoping to have something to celebrate in this miserable season, and for once they weren’t disappointed. Albert Adomah, a 35-year-old midfielder known as ‘Uncle Albert’, scored the only goal, winning the match and cementing our place in the Championship. The visiting fans started singing ‘The Rs are staying up’ the moment the ball found the net and continued until long after the final whistle.

As I often tell my children, the beauty of supporting a struggling second-tier club is that victories come along so infrequently they mean much more than they would to an Arsenal or Chelsea fan. I can’t think of many other football supporters who would be so ecstatically happy just because their team had avoided the drop, but for us it was like winning the FA Cup. I liken it to being a not particularly attractive man. Yes, you have to work a lot harder to persuade a woman to go to bed with you, but when you do it produces a sense of achievement that the Hugh Grants and Brad Pitts of this world will never know. If Man City become the first team ever to win the Premier League title three times in a row – which they’re on track to do – I’m sure that will be very nice for ‘Citeh’ fans. But the pleasure it gives them will be analogous to Leonardo DiCaprio pulling his third Victoria’s Secret model. It will be nothing compared to the thrill I got when I persuaded Caroline to marry me.

So that was Saturday and it was made all the better by my friend Tom – a Stoke supporter – introducing me to North Staffordshire oatcakes, which were vastly superior to the Scottish variety. Discovering a takeaway on London Road offering these hidden gems, once used in a party political broadcast by President Macron to illustrate the fate that awaited France if people voted for Marine Le Pen, was another perk of supporting QPR. My sons and I have enjoyed some fine meals in England’s Red Wall constituencies as we follow our benighted club round the country.

Our second reason for making the trip was not such a success. Fourteen-year-old Charlie has been nagging me to take him to Alton Towers ever since he discovered rollercoaster videos on YouTube and, given that it’s only half an hour’s drive from Stoke, this was an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. After an overnight stay in a Holiday Inn, we set off early in an attempt to reduce the waiting times to get on the rides. But after queueing for 20 minutes for one of the coasters, we were informed it had closed ‘due to a technical difficulty’. When Charlie then checked the Alton Towers app, he discovered that four of the seven rides he’d planned to go on were closed, which was a bit rum considering the park had only been open for half an hour. Admittedly, it was pouring with rain, but that couldn’t have been the reason, surely? You’d hope the engineers would have thought of that, given that it’s in Staffordshire.

To be fair, when I complained to customer services they offered me four complimentary tickets to another amusement park, and then some of the rides reopened later in the day. But I don’t think I’ll be accompanying Charlie on any more rollercoasters. At 59, I’m too old. I don’t mean my body can no longer cope with being tossed around like a tennis ball in a tumble dryer, although that’s certainly a struggle. Rather, it’s that floating sensation you get in your stomach when you’re descending a steep incline and your internal organs are suddenly weightless. As a child, I used to love that feeling and remember encouraging my father to drive as fast as he could over humpback bridges. Now I don’t like it at all. After each ride at Alton Towers I was grateful for the half-hour wait, because it took that long for my organs to settle back into place.

On the plus side, it had the effect of resetting my body clock, and on Sunday I got my first good night’s sleep in a week.

Wine Club: six beauties from Yapp Brothers

I’m seeing Jason Yapp next week and am deeply nervous. It’s been a while since we caught up and as followers of this column might recall, he and wicked step-brother Tom Ashworth have form in leading me astray. I think I told you about our little adventure in that backstreet bar in Biarritz. It was years ago and I’m still in shock. And still paying off the credit card. And still apologising to Mrs Ray, although she really should have moved on by now.

The fact that mighty Gavin Rankin, le patron of London’s finest eatery, Bellamy’s – that fabled ‘club without a sub’ – is going to be joining us and that we are convening at 12.15 p.m. ‘because we’ve a lot to get through and the Pink Coconut opens early on a Wednesday’ only heightens my anxiety. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I’ll take succour from these delicious bottles I’ve selected with Tom’s help from Yapps’ list. Every one’s a beauty, ideal for steadying the nerves after an hour or so in JY’s company.

The 2022 Gérard Cordier Reuilly (1) is wonderfully invigorating, a 100 per cent Sauvignon Blanc from the Loire that Yapp Bros have shipped every year for over half a century. Crisp, clean and correct, it makes a glorious aperitif. And if you wonder where Jason gets his habits from, his father Robin downed a whole bottle in one on stage at the 1978 Reuilly Wine & Oyster Festival. They still talk about it, and I believe there’s a plaque up somewhere. If not, there should be. Please don’t try it at home. £14.90 down from £15.90.

The 2021 JM Raffault Chinon Blanc (2) is a charming rarity, with just 2 per cent of Chinon’s wines being white. Made in the Loire Valley entirely from Chenin Blanc, it’s fresh and enticing with hints of wild flowers, honey, white stone fruit and apples on nose and palate, followed by a long, dry finish. Rodolphe Raffault is the 15th generation of his family to make wine here and is bang on the top of his game. £15.50 down from £16.50.

The 2021 Christophe Camu Chablis (3) is completely new to me and right up my alley, being textbook sub-£20 Chablis. It has that elusive whisper of honey on the nose – it’s there and it’s gone – and a green apple-laden, bone-dry finish. It’s fresh and – thanks to the fruit of 50-year-old vines – intense and concentrated. £18.95 down from £19.95.

The 2017 Domaines des Rebouls Fitou (4) is as fine an example I’ve had from this red-only Appellation in France Profonde. A typical blend of Grenache, Carignan and Syrah – roughly a third of each – it’s rich, juicy, fruity and spicy and, unfiltered and with five years’ bottle age, it can do with decanting. I’d pay another fiver at least for wine of this quality and wouldn’t moan. £13.25 down from £14.25.

The 2019 Domaine des Oullières Harmonie Coteaux d’Aix en Provence (5) is also cracking value. Produced in the far south-east of Provence, it’s a rich, dark-fruited, spicy, piquant blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Grenache and Syrah and is how I imagine a half-and-half blend of Cru Bourgeois claret and fine Rhône might taste. If you’re pondering the first barbecue of the year, give this a whirl alongside it. £13.75 down from £14.75.

Finally, the 2020 Domaine Filliatreau Saumur-Champigny (6), an old favourite, a couple of bottles of which I knocked back only the other evening with Lucy, Céline and the gang at the Academy Club, Soho. And, gosh, it’s tasty! 100 per cent organic/biodynamic Cabernet Franc from the Loire, it’s super-fresh yet concentrated, with plenty of lively bramble fruit and a touch of spice. Great at room temperature, it also stands a bit of chilling and is absolutely perfect springtime fare. £16.25 down from £17.25.

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

Order online today or download an orderform.

George Osborne’s smoking ban is deluded

Former Chancellor George Osborne has become the latest British politician to call for a smoking ban. The architect of the sugar tax wants the UK to follow the lead of New Zealand, which will prohibit anyone born after 2008 from purchasing cigarettes. 

‘You basically phase it out. Of course you’re going to have lots of problems with illegal smoking, but you have lots of problems with other illegal activities,’ Osborne said. ‘It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and ban them and police them and make it less readily available. I thought that was a compelling public health intervention.’

You have to admire his flawless logic. Prohibition has proven so successful for recreational drugs; so successful that even senior politicians have admitted to using Class A substances. So successful that it fuels international criminal gangs and knife crime across London’s streets. It’s also not like Britain’s police are struggling to tackle violent crime and need more distractions.

Osborne is talking about creating a two-tier society. Anyone born after an arbitrary date would be treated as if they were a child. In the not-too-distant future, a 31-year-old could be forced to bum a cigarette off a 33-year-old. 

This would, of course, not impact Osborne who was last photographed smoking just a few years ago. But it would mean over time a loss of £10 billion a year in tobacco taxes, much of which could end up lining the pockets of criminal gangs, while other taxes would have to go up.

In the past, anti-tobacco crusaders would at least give a nod and a wink to J. S. Mill’s harm principle: ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.’

Advertising bans were meant to protect children, while banning indoor smoking at pubs was to prevent second-hand smoke in enclosed locations. Politicians have consistently exaggerated ‘harm to others’ to justify interventions across all sorts of activities. But at least there was a philosophy of intervention, with a nod towards limits on state power over individuals in cases where the activity did not impact others. 

Many will shrug with indifference at demands to ban cigarettes. It’s not a healthy or wholesome habit. A relatively small and shrinking proportion of Brits continue to light up. We should remember, though, that for some smokers there is some joy in the ritual. Not all smokers want to quit, despite the universal knowledge that the product is unhealthy. But the mark of a free society is accepting and tolerating that not everyone can, should or does live the same. It means, against our judgemental instincts, accepting the freedom of others to make decisions about their bodies so that we can do the same. 

This was a revolutionary idea when J S Mill wrote in the 19^th century, but subsequent history has shown that it has served us well when followed and lead to disaster when ignored. The alternative is a world where there is limitless state power. All that matters is a belief a certain behaviour is wrong. In this world, the space for individual choice or personal freedom entirely disappears. George Osborne says that ‘anti-nanny state Conservatives’ are ‘not worth listening to’. Perhaps we could say the same about former Chancellors of the Exchequer trying to ban things they don’t like.

I demand reparations for my ancestors’ fall from grace

Recent births and deaths in my family have got me thinking about the family tree. A few years ago, we pieced together a remarkably discernible lineage that goes right back to William the Conqueror, or at least his alleged Anglo-Saxon concubine, and various Norman knights who used to own much of England. And it is this lineage that has made me realise: the hideous underprivilege and mistreatment of my ancestors entitles me to reparations.

The story begins with that Anglo-Saxon woman Maud Ingelric. Many historians believe she was the mistress of William the Conqueror, and bore him a favoured son, William Peverel the Elder, my great-great-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-(etc)-grandfather. Maud herself was of ‘noble English descent’, an alleged granddaughter of King Aethelred the Unready and the daughter of ‘the Saxon Ingelric, Keeper of the Sacred Grail’. Maud now lies in the chancel of the monastery she founded in Hatfield Peverel, Essex.

If William Peverel the Elder was not the bastard son of William the Bastard, he was the son of Norman Knight Ranulph Peverel, but as the Peverels are likely descended from Welsh kings, various Viking earls of the Orkneys and possibly the Nordic God of Snow and Ice (this last is disputed by pedants), it is clear that, either way, I am the direct if distant progeny of seriously posh dudes.

Trouble is, it all went downhill from there. For a couple of centuries the Peverels peacefully taxed and brutalised their English serfs, but then they chose the wrong side in the odd war, various castles got taken away, and ‘my side’ of the family moved west, marrying into the lordly Tremaynes of St Martin-in-Meneage, west Cornwall. The Tremaynes were not royal favourites but they were still doing OK – to this day there is an exquisite Tremayne Manor by Frenchman’s Creek, Helford (a Regency job now, as the original medieval seat got torched).

From this lovely spot, unfortunately, things spiralled further down. One Tremayne took the wrong side of the Cornish Rebellion in 1497, and bang went the beautiful manor. The Tremaynes fatefully divided again: my side began marrying into minor and quite drunken gentry and living in rather small manorial farmhouses in the Lizard or Penwith, though they did own the odd tin mine and smelting house. From there it all gets even more depressing, as the mine-owning gentry kept having too many kids, and small estates were divided ever further, until the sons are described as mere yeoman farmers, or even – shudder – ‘apprentices’. 

A generation later, the dreaded word ‘tinner’ – an actual tin miner – appears in the parish records, describing one of my ancestors. These tinners were toiling in the mines once owned by their great-great-great-grandparents. They would surely not have known. Did they even care? Probably not, as the social slide continued, and as the farmers, labourers and tinners kept sprogging even more kids, including one daughter, Frances Tremayne, who married John Moyle in 1752. John Moyle was also probably a tin miner.

By the late 18th, 19th century we were in truly dire straits. John Moyle’s son Peter married Mary Hill, and from the off they were living in serious penury, which wasn’t helped by their having another ten kids.

One of these was Peter Moyle, my great-great-great-grandfather; in 1830 he married Elizabeth Perry, and they had, yes, ten kids – and they were living in some of the worst poverty ever seen in Britain. In the census of 1851, it is recorded that of the ten children, Elizabeth (aged 18) is a labourer, Peter (15) is a tin miner, William (13) is a tin miner and Stephen (ten) is a tin miner. Only the under-tens are spared the quasi-child slavery of crawling naked for hours down the tunnels of undersea Botallack, in constant danger of drowning or rockfall, barely seeing the sun from one winter to the next, and probably dying of silicosis or arsenic poisoning in their mid-twenties as a reward. One record for west Cornwall at this time puts the life expectancy of tin miners at 23.

Nor did this serfdom bring them any material comfort. By the next census the family is even more impoverished, despite throwing all of its children down the mines: they are recorded as needing ‘village alms’ to prevent starvation.

It is for these people that I make my demands. Where, for instance, is the ‘white privilege’ of little Stephen Moyle, forced down a tin mine aged ten? The concept of white privilege applied to Stephen and his desperate siblings is beyond insulting. Moreover, why should his descendants be paying ‘reparations’ to anyone else? Was Stephen Moyle’s life demonstrably better than the rest of humanity’s?

And if we are talking reparations, then I’d quite like a word for my maternal grandmother, Annie Maud Jory. At the age of 11 she was packed off to the mines to be a ‘bal maiden’ – a young girl sent to break rocks, barefoot, in all weathers, with little hammers. This job was known for its desperate harshness. The sound of the ‘stamps’ – the ore-breaking machines – was so loud it sent many of the bal maidens deaf, and they had to develop their own sign language. If anyone deserves reparations we could start with my very own grandmother, a forced child labourer, whose grandson – me – would rather like a belated slice of the profits made by her hideous child slavery in those lucrative mines.

I am, of course, joking. I do not believe in the concept of generational reparations, no more than I really believe in the concept of white privilege. By definition, as humans of any race, creed or colour, we are all descended from kings and warlords, just as, by definition, we are all descended from serfs, peasants and slaves.

Let us, as they say, draw a line. We could get my grandfather Harold Thomas to do it. He was by all accounts an excellent carpenter – and probably the first of my family to escape the tin mines for 100 years, about 900 years after his granddad William the Conqueror came over the Channel.

The comedy of the Queen’s coronation

Once, years ago, making small talk with Elizabeth II, I asked her if it was true that many peers attending her coronation in 1953 had taken sandwiches into Westminster Abbey hidden inside their coronets. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘They were in the abbey for something like six hours, you know. The Archbishop of Canterbury even had a flask of brandy tucked inside his cassock.’ Apparently, His Grace offered Her Majesty a discreet nip, but she declined.

When I pressed the Queen for any amusing recollections of the great day, she did recall the moment, after the crowning, when England’s premier baron, William Stourton (22nd Baron Stourton, 26th Baron Segrave and 25th Baron Mowbray), came forward to pay homage. As the noble lord, whose titles dated back to 1283, when Edward I was king, retreated backwards from the throne, the poor fellow almost fell over. ‘His robe – which had been used by generations of the family – bunched up around him, with moth balls and pieces of ermine flying all over the place.’ This could explain why the peers in attendance this weekend were initially instructed not to dig out the family coronation robes. At the last minute, they have been allowed to dress as they please, but advised to check for moth balls first.

Elizabeth II certainly remembered the best quip from the day. She only heard about it afterwards, but it made her laugh out loud. Crowned heads from around the world came to London for the event and one of them was Queen Salote of Tonga. She was a magnificent lady, aged 53 in 1953, very tall (6ft 3in) and splendidly built. She travelled to the abbey in an open carriage sitting opposite the comparatively diminutive Sultan of Kelantan. Someone asked Noël Coward: ‘Who is that with Queen Salote?’ ‘That,’ replied the playwright, ‘is her lunch.’

Coward’s quip went around the world and, 20 years later, when Prince Philip was on a visit to Malaysia, he met a group of VIPs at a reception and was much amused when the shortest member of the party introduced himself with a squeal of pride: ‘I’m the lunch!’

As a rule, Noël Coward is one of my favourite diarists, but his record of 2 June 1953 is disappointingly straightforward: ‘Tuesday, coronation day, I spent at home watching the proceedings on television, most excellently done. The English State Ballet at its best. Weather foul and everyone soaked.’

Much more fun is the unpublished diary of Vyvyan Holland, the son of another great playwright, Oscar Wilde. Holland’s son Merlin kindly let me dip into his father’s journal when I was writing my recent biography of Elizabeth II. Vyvyan Holland’s Australian wife, Thelma Besant, was the Queen’s make-up consultant through the 1950s and in charge of the ‘royal face’ on coronation day. Thelma was devoted to Her Majesty, but her husband had royal reservations. A few days before the coronation, he reported in his diary: ‘We took an expensive taxi (15/-) to go to see the show in Parliament Square, Whitehall, etc. It is, of course, all very grand, but the whole thing is too mediaeval and barbaric for my liking. It is only the fact of having a young Queen that makes the thing possible at all. With an old goat like Edward VII the situation would become absurd.’ Later he recorded, clearly chuckling to himself: ‘I have started a rumour that the footmen standing at the back of the coronation coach are really eminent physicians in disguise, just in case the Queen is taken queer.’

Having not so long ago played Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and (when considerably younger and prettier) having given my Rosalind in As You Like It and Chinese princess in Lady Precious Stream, I have never had a problem with gender-fluid and colour-blind casting. It can sometimes help the audience to look at a familiar work in a new way – as it does with the thrilling production of Richard III at the Rose Theatre in Kingston. Bridgerton star Adjoa Andoh plays Richard not as a hunchback but as the only black woman in the Cotswolds. Shakespeare’s play (not a word of the original is altered) is set in a bucolic but brutal 15th-century world that includes Morris dancing. It works – and resonates in the time of Putin and war-torn Sudan.

I thought of our new King, too, towards the end of the play. Richard is dead and his successor, Henry VII, is handed the crown with this instruction: ‘Wear it, enjoy it, and make much of it.’ It is a line with which Charles – a profound lover of Shakespeare – will be familiar. I reckon he will make much of it. He is a good man. I hope he finds time to enjoy it, too.

The cost of mass migration

Way back in the long distant 1990s, net migration into this country used to be in the tens of thousands each year. There was no lack of discussion about that, but we were not yet in the ‘dependency’ period of migration: that is, when people routinely said we had to have migration because otherwise who would do the menial jobs that we Brits didn’t want to do? You know, things like work in the NHS, work in restaurants, clean. That sort of thing.

Then the Blair government came in, sent annual immigration into the hundreds of thousands and everything changed. There is a dispute among partisans over whether that government lost control of immigration or had a deliberate policy to transform the UK. It seems to have been a bit of both, with people like the immigration minister Barbara Roche intent on the latter, and occasional wiser heads wondering whether it was such a good idea but not knowing which levers to pull.

Either way, by the mid-2000s we were in the dependency phase of mass migration. Those who were for it, or who excused it, simultaneously said that it solved the problem of the jobs the locals wouldn’t do and also that the people who were arriving were mainly brain surgeons. Migrants were never middle-class, apparently, only rocket scientists or street sweepers. Nothing in between.

One of the principal reasons people voted to leave the EU in 2016 was because the public had – rightly – got the idea that all of this was out of our control unless we exited the bloc. For years, those in both the Labour and Conservative parties liked to make this point: that the EU effectively tied their hands. So we left the EU – and net migration numbers into the UK actually increased. That’s the problem with always blaming another party, even if it has some truth to it. Nothing is ever simply the fault of something else – it is also your responsibility to fix on the other side.  As usual, the Tory party gave us the rhetoric they thought we wanted, misjudged though it often was, as in Theresa May’s ugly attempts to capture what she imagined to be the public mood. But the facts belied the rhetoric as surely as they had in the New Labour years, when Phil Woolas or some other minister would be sent out to talk tough, only for the figures to continue rocketing.

Last year net migration to the UK hit a staggering 500,000. Various factors were offered to explain it. The effects of lockdowns lifting. The war in Ukraine. The Hong Kong nationals. But migration is like markets. ‘Once in a generation’ events are always used as an excuse by managers who can’t blame anything else. Besides, ‘once in a generation’ events now happen several times each year.

The small boats in the Channel are the most visible symbol of the system being broken. But the tens of thousands coming across this way are the mere tip of the issue. The hundreds of thousands coming in by plane are what make the historic highs.

I can already hear the typical objections to this – the usual, addled, Golem-like complaint: ‘We needs it.’ And the people who say this never contend with the flip-side – which is that if you import your working class, then what happens to your working class? One answer is that a significant portion put their feet up.

Officially, unemployment figures in the UK are relatively low – somewhere in the region of 1,293,000 (or 2.4 per cent of the adult population), according to the Office for National Statistics. But as The Spectator has proven in face of considerable outside opposition, what this ignores are the five million people in this country on benefits who for various reasons are deemed to be unsuited to work. These are people of working age, remember.

Conservative governments have been trying to address this section of people for a good decade or more. Iain Duncan Smith and others made some inroads into it. But that (actually over) five million figure remains – a great block who cannot or will not work.

The left would like to pretend that all of these people are suffering from debilitating disease, at risk at any moment of having pins thrust in their legs by Conservative minions and then being hurled on to the factory floor. It is a fantasy, not least because we have the figures for incapacity benefits and they account for a fraction of the five million.

But let us pretend for a moment that what the defenders of the status quo say is true. If it was true, then are there not questions to ask? What is this plague that has blighted some of our biggest cities? What is this wasting disease that means that one in five people of working age in Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester – to name just a few cities – are claiming out of work benefits? And why are half a million people coming into this country each year to do jobs which these people won’t do?

I have long argued that mass migration – as opposed to limited migration – damages a country for two reasons. First, it allows the immobilisation of a percentage (quibble over that number as you will) of the local population, who will find certain jobs beneath them. Second, it allows the country to change beyond all recognition.

The more I look at the UK, the more it seems to me to have changed utterly. Is all of that change bad? No. But is all of it good? Definitely not. There remain pockets of the country that are recognisable, but the idea that we any longer have a coherent country, with a coherent set of values, ideas or beliefs, disappeared years ago. We are a collection of communities. Buy your way into one of the richer ones and you can still have a wonderful life – even a recognisable one. Fail to get your crampons into that and you will have to live in the confused mêlée that a generation of politicians has cast you into.

And still some people say politicians make nothing happen.

Trans activists will regret picking on Joanna Cherry

Another feminist getting no-platformed in Scotland is hardly news. Poets, writers, students, academics, comedians and, of course, film-makers have become inured to being cancelled north of the border if they stray from the dogma that trans women are women. Normally this kind of thing happens in the shadows, without publicity. People just find, like the poet Jenny Lindsay, that their livelihood disappears. Cancellation is the standard operating procedure for the handful of trans activists who seem to have a stranglehold on Scottish cultural life and education institutions. But this time they took on someone willing to fight back. 

The SNP MP for Edinburgh Central, Joanna Cherry, refused to go quietly when the Stand Comedy Club, which was founded by the SNP MP for Edinburgh East, Tommy Sheppard, cancelled her booking at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She was due to appear at the popular venue as part of an ‘In Conversation’ series, which included the film director, Ken Loach, and Jeremy Corbyn. Some members of staff apparently objected to her well-known ‘gender critical’ opposition to Self-ID and refused to work on the show, so the Stand cancelled the engagement.

Cherry is a prominent lesbian politician. She is also a barrister and chairs Westminster’s human rights committee, so she knows a bit about the law. Cherry has suggested that the cancellation of her show is a violation of the Equality Act. ‘It’s clearly a case of unlawful discrimination,’ she says, ‘and the Stand needs to think if that is something it really wants to do’.

In a remarkable intervention, the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Roddy Dunlop KC, agreed and tweeted:

‘It’s plainly unlawful. Is the venue aware that they would be vulnerable to a discrimination claim?’

Unusually, the Scottish broadcast media has also waded in. Like most cultural bodies in Scotland, the BBC has tended to avoid active discussion of the witch-hunt against gender critical feminists. Not this time. The social justice secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville, when asked on Good Morning Scotland whether she agreed with the Stand policy, ignored the question and complained that ‘two senior SNP politicians have been asked about this on successive days’. 

It seems the ‘no debate’ omerta is finally weakening. The results are an eye-opener to listeners who thought this was just an issue about ‘trans rights’. On yesterday’s BBC Drive Time programme the trans newsreader, India Willoughby, went gloriously over the top. Cherry’s cancellation was, she said, a ‘really good day for equality, diversity and love in Scotland’. She then suggested that ‘if the KKK had booked a meeting at the venue…’ they should also have had their meeting cancelled. Willoughby then effectively invited Cherry to sue her for defamation by saying that ‘these people want trans people eliminated’.

Those on the free speech side of the fence tend not to rush to the courts. Nor is it clear whether Cherry will pursue the Stand for discrimination. If you support freedom of expression you have to accept that people will say nasty and even defamatory things about you. 

However, the upside is that, in the court of public opinion, activists like Willoughby condemn themselves out of their own mouths. As do those who remain silent, like Cherry’s colleague, Angus Robertson, the MSP for Edinburgh Central. The Stand’s SNP founder, Tommy Sheppard MP, has also refused to speak up. It may be occurring to him that is is not feminists like Jo Cherry who are on the wrong side of history, but his own club. 

The godfather of AI: why I left Google

Ten minutes before I meet Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘godfather of AI’, the New York Times announces he’s leaving Google. After decades working on artificial intelligence, Hinton now believes it could wipe out humanity. ‘It is like aliens have landed on our planet and we haven’t quite realised it yet because they speak very good English,’ he says. He also tells me that he has been unable to sleep for months.

Hinton, 75, revolutionised AI not once but twice: first with his work on neural networks, computer architecture that closely resembles the brain’s structure, and then with so-called ‘deep learning’, which allows AI to refine and extract patterns and concepts on a vast quantity of data. He persevered with neural networks during the 1970s and 1980s when the industry had largely abandoned it. In 1986 he designed the very first chatbot, then called a ‘language predictor model’. Decades later, in 2012, he developed a deep-learning AI, the intellectual foundation for ChatGPT.

Hinton comes from a family of mathematicians and scientists (his grandfather was George Boole, who formulated Boolean algebra, laying the foundations for the entire digital age). He has had his qualms about AI in the past, but only over its application rather than the fundamentals. He loathed the development of autonomous weapons, and left his US job because of the State Department funding of AI. He’s also been worried about the ability of AI to help ‘bad actors’ such as Vladimir Putin pump out fake news. ‘I’d always kind of ignored the existential threat before about it wiping out humanity,’ he says. ‘Now I think there’s a significant chance of that.’

What changed? ‘Google had a big language model called Palm which could explain why a joke was funny. That shocked me. I arrived at the conclusion – this might just be a much better form of intelligence. If it is, it’ll replace us.’

How likely is it that billions of people could be wiped out by AI? ‘So much of all of this is unknown territory… I don’t want to give a number,’ he says, pacing from the kitchen table to the oven at his home in north London. I push him for specifics. ‘I am going to summarise in a very sloppy way what the French philosopher Blaise Pascal said: if you have two alternatives [i.e. AI killing humanity or not] and you have very little understanding of what is going on, then you should say 50 per cent.’

The next AI landmark will be Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): AI that is at least as competent as a human thinker. ‘It’s the first time in mankind’s history that we’re on the brink of developing something smarter than us,’ he says. ‘It still uses hugely more power, but it’s comparable in intelligence now. Not as good, but getting there. And many people think it’s going to get smarter than us soon. Not in a hundred years and not in 50 years – maybe 20 years, maybe five years. It may be that we’re going to reach a new stage of evolution when biological intelligence gets replaced by digital intelligence. We may be history.’

Hinton, who won the Turing Award in 2018 (often called the ‘Nobel Prize of Computing’), asks me to think of ‘cases where a more intelligent thing is controlled by a less intelligent thing’. After a few embarrassing ‘ums’, he rescues me. ‘There’s Covid. That virus isn’t that intelligent. It’s not making decisions about what should happen – it’s just screwing with us. It’s not in charge.

‘The only example I know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing is a mother and baby. But the mother is wired so that she can’t stand the baby crying. Also, she cares a lot about the baby’s welfare. And there’s not as much difference in intelligence there: these things are going to be much more intelligent than us.’

With the tech giants (Microsoft, Google et al) thrashing it out to be top dog in the field, Hinton says that ‘it’s conceivable that the genie is already out of the bottle’.

Yet he is defensive of Google (he sold his company to the tech giant in 2012 for $44 million and opened Google’s AI lab in Toronto) and blames Microsoft for forcing a market war. ‘Google had the lead in AI for years. Google behaved very responsibly by not releasing chatbots. It had them quite a long time ago… But you can only do that when you’re the leader. As soon as OpenAI gave ChatGPT to Microsoft – who funded the computing required – then Google had to put these things out there. There was no choice.’

The chief scientist at OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, is a former student of Hinton’s. ‘I talk to him regularly,’ Hinton says. ‘He’s quite concerned. But he doesn’t think that the problems will be solved by OpenAI stopping research.’

Hinton is also pessimistic about whether any brakes can be applied, because of the competition between the US and China. ‘I don’t think there’s any chance whatsoever of getting a pause. If they paused in the West, China wouldn’t pause. There’s a race going on.’

Does Hinton regret his lifetime’s work? ‘I don’t really have regrets. There’s the standard excuse if I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,’ he says. ‘But also, until very recently it looked like the benefits were going to be great and were certain; the risks were a long way off and not certain. The decision to work on it may have turned out to be unfortunate, but it was a wise decision at the time.’

His reasons for leaving Google are ‘complicated’: ‘I’m 75. And I’m finding it harder and harder to do the technical work, because you have to remember all sorts of fine details and that’s tricky. Another reason is I want to actually be able to tell the public how responsible Google has been so far. I want to say good things about Google, and it’s much more credible if I’m not there. The third reason is, even if Google doesn’t tell you what you should and shouldn’t say, there’s inevitable self-censorship if you work for an organisation… I’m aware of self-censorship. And so I don’t want to be constrained by it. I just want to be able to say what I believe.’

At the heart of his Oppenheimer-style U-turn is the fear that the human brain isn’t as impressive as digital intelligence. ‘It was always assumed before that the brain was the best thing there was, and the things that we were producing were kind of wimpy attempts to mimic the brain. For 49 of the 50 years I was working on it, that’s what I believed – brains were better.’

The human brain, he explains, runs on very low power: ‘about 30 watts and we’ve got about 100 trillion connections’. He says trying to learn knowledge from someone ‘is a slow and painful business’.

Digital intelligence requires much more energy but is shared across entire networks. ‘If we fabricate it accurately, then you can have thousands and thousands of agents. When one agent learns something, all the others know it instantly… They can process so much more data than we can and see all sorts of things we’ll never see.

‘A way of thinking about this is: if you go to your doctor with a rare condition, you’re lucky if they have seen even one case before. Now imagine going to a doctor who’d seen 100 million patients, including dozens who have this rare condition.’ So there are ‘wonderful’ short-term gains for AI being used in medicine and elsewhere, he says. ‘Anywhere where humans use intelligence, it’s going to help.’ Then he adds, with a smile: ‘In particular, it’s going to help where it’s a kind of not very acute intelligence like law.’

How exactly does Hinton think this digital intelligence could harm humanity? ‘Imagine it [AI] has the power to perform actions in the world as opposed to just answering questions. So a little bit of that power would be the power to connect to the internet and look things up on the internet, which chatbots didn’t originally have. Now imagine a household robot where you could tell it what to do and it can do things. That household robot will be a lot smarter than you. Are you confident it would keep doing what you told it to? We don’t know the answer. It’s kind of like the sorcerer’s apprentice.’

One of the big concerns for Hinton is that as AI progresses it will develop sub-goals to work more efficiently in achieving its main goal, but these sub-goals won’t necessarily align with human objectives and that will make us vulnerable to AI manipulation.

‘If you look at a baby in a highchair, its mother gives him a spoon to feed itself. And what’s the first thing he does? He drops it on the floor and the mother picks it up. He looks at his mother and drops it again.

‘The baby is trying to get control of his mother. There’s a very good reason for that – the more control you have, the easier it is to achieve your other goals. That’s why, in general, having power is good, because it allows you to achieve other things… Inevitably people will give these systems the ability to create sub-goals, because that’s how to make them efficient. One of the sub-goals they will immediately derive is to get more power, because that makes everything else easier.’

Even if AI manipulated us to have sub-goals to be more efficient, would they necessarily want more power? Here’s where evolution comes in, according to Hinton. ‘A sort of basic principle of evolution is if you take two varieties of a species, the one that produces more viable offspring wins. It’s going to end up replacing the other one. You see it operating very fast with viruses, like Omicron. The virus with a higher infection rate wins. But that’s true for all species. That’s how evolution works. Things that can produce more viable offspring win.

‘Now imagine there are several different AGI. Which one’s going to win? The one that produces more copies of itself. So what worries me is if AGI ever got the idea that it should produce lots of copies of itself, then the one that was best at doing that would wipe out the others. It’s not clear that being nice to humans is going to help it produce more copies of itself. I don’t see why we shouldn’t get evolution among AGI.’

Even worse for us is that these machines can’t die. ‘If one of those digital computers dies, it doesn’t matter. You haven’t lost the knowledge. Also, if you just record the knowledge in a memory medium, then as soon as you have another digital computer, you can download it – it’s alive again.’

But surely we could just unplug a dodgy AI and deprive it of electricity – would that not stop them? Hinton smiles at me and paraphrases Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey. ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t answer that question.’

Why Baroness Benjamin deserves her coronation role

Baroness Benjamin has suggested that King Charles’s choice of her to join the coronation procession demonstrates that he is in favour of ‘diversity and inclusion’. What would the ancients have made of that, let alone of ‘equality’ and ‘identity’?

‘Equality’ had little purchase. Politically, male citizens had a vote in democratic Athens and (of sorts) in republican Rome. Otherwise there were human experiences of ‘levelling’ or ‘belonging’ in e.g. the battle-line, at childbirth, at the games, religious festivals and initiations.

For the rest, it is important to understand that the ancient world was an unforgiving place and took no prisoners. The ‘normal’ family attempted to survive on the strength of its own efforts to protect and tend its resources (in most cases its farm), produce fit young men to farm and fight, fertile girls to bear children, and elders to pass on their experience to the young. There was no room for anyone who could not pull their weight (the old were usually dead by 50). Only results counted.

Paradoxically, the slave trade demonstrated just how ‘diverse and inclusive’ the ancient world was. Slaves from all over most of the known world, from craftsman to wet nurses, from accountants to teachers, were eagerly sought. Serve your master well and you could become a Roman citizen. Romans admired Germanic soldiers – the more they could lure into their army the better – as they did Greek medical, academic and artistic skills. Greeks keenly offered their services. No one needed a state injunction to seek out the best for the job.

And ‘identity’? For the ancients your identity emerged from your ability to deliver results by serving the needs of society or, if from a famous family, living up to it. In other words, the value that society placed upon you, not the value that you placed on yourself, was what earned you an ‘identity’, or rather ‘respect’.

Ancients, then, would look to Baroness Benjamin’s admirable achievements, not the views she assigns to King Charles, to amply justify her role in the coronation. So should we.

Will my coronation marching measure up?

Travelling to Ukraine on the President’s train is the most secure route into Kyiv. This is my fourth visit to the country since the invasion. Previously I accompanied Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. This time I am with Tim Barrow, our National Security Adviser. The continuity of access reflects the extraordinary trust between Britain and Ukraine. The train is punctual and with an aura of seasoned grandeur. The enforced lack of phones combined with a steady rhythm for ten hours aids reflection. I think back to travelling to Moscow with Ben Wallace before the invasion and a meeting with my Russian opposite, General Gerasimov. At the time we still hoped war could be averted. This conflict has been a disaster for the Kremlin. Putin thought he could take Kyiv and the cities of Ukraine in a matter of days, but now faces a horrific war of attrition. Four out of five of Russia’s recent offensives have failed and the fifth, Bakhmut, has cost Moscow 30,000 dead and wounded. Russia is weaker and more isolated. Nato is stronger and more united. Ukraine stands even more defiant.

We arrive in Kyiv and head to see Volodymyr Zelensky. The curtains are pulled and sandbags are everywhere but there is no sense of crisis, just steady determination. President Zelensky looks fit and healthy, as does my counterpart, General Zaluzhnyi. I always give him a bottle of Glenmorangie whisky. His eyes also light up when told we have sourced more weapons. The survival of his country is at stake. The pressure is immense, but it is carried well, and I have enormous respect for his leadership. I emerge from a day of briefings confident in Ukraine’s ability to prevail, providing the international community stays strong.

I am reunited with my phone and am confronted by a backlog of messages. The Vice Chief, General Gwyn Jenkins, updates me on the evacuation of British citizens from Sudan. The ceasefire is fragile, communications are difficult, the logistical challenge immense and evacuees are flowing from tens to hundreds to potentially thousands. Early decisions to deploy troops, marines and transport aircraft to Cyprus are paying dividends. It meant options for the Prime Minister. I phone my Saudi counterpart to coordinate. His reply is resoundingly supportive, as is the US, France, Egypt, Germany and India. This is the power of networks. As ever, the people on the ground are magnificent: clear, committed, resilient, action-oriented; ultimately, problem solvers. We need to capture the same sense of urgency and pace and apply it to how we do things at home to become even more effective.

The Palace has appointed me Lord High Constable of England for the coronation. If that were not honour enough, the Duke of Wellington has generously offered to lend me a baton used by his ancestor: would I like the one used for Queen Victoria’s coronation or for George IV’s? It’s all getting a bit surreal, but any notions of grandeur are quickly dispelled by Sunday drill practice at a Hampshire airfield. The army’s Garrison Sergeant Major is not a man who suffers fools gladly, admirals, generals and air marshals included. The chiefs are put through our paces alongside thousands of sailors, soldiers and aviators, some of them only in their teens. Marching has never been my strong point and I’ve become a little rusty in the 37 years since I was originally on the parade ground. That evening I find myself practising my step as I get ready for bed.

The Lord High Constable dates from the 12th century, but my day job is focused on the technology of the 21st. One of the big lessons of Ukraine is the importance of nuclear deterrence. We should be proud of the UK’s contribution to Nato’s defensive umbrella. It’s not easy: our submarines are perhaps the most complex machines on the planet. I spend a lot of time discussing the importance of skills and the need for thousands more nuclear apprentices. Our whole nuclear enterprise needs to be elevated to a national endeavour.

The past 18 months have seen a shift from a world that was competitive to one that is contested and volatile. The Budget in March put the country on course to spend 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence. The army alone will receive £130 billion over the next decade. I’ve challenged the Ministry of Defence to double our output using the resources we currently have. It’s not just about money and people. It’s as much about reform. Ukraine has taught us that we need to embrace technology even more strongly, especially long-range missiles and greater numbers of drones.

The final coronation rehearsal takes place overnight. Whitehall is deserted as we parade down the Mall under the cover of darkness. Military pageantry symbolises our identity and self-confidence as a nation, and the style and assurance are itself a form of power. But the pomp and splendour need to be seen alongside everything else the armed forces are doing: Sudan, Ukraine, our Nato roles, our burgeoning defence partnerships with Australia, India and Japan. I’m proud of our people for all they do for all of us.

I’m looking forward to spending Sunday night at the coronation concert. My marching has improved but I’m less confident about my dad-dancing. Either way, my children will keep me in check.

The religious roots of the coronation

It is many years since anyone seriously entertained the doctrine expounded by Shakespeare’s Richard II: ‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm off from an anointed king. The breath of worldly men cannot depose the deputy elected by the Lord.’ Nevertheless, on Saturday King Charles III will be solemnly anointed in Westminster Abbey in a ceremony whose roots are ancient but whose meaning is fresh.

The Israelites asked for a king so that they could be ‘like all the nations’. Anointed monarchs have a long history but today the rites surrounding the British monarch are unique in Europe.

In the unwritten British constitution, while much of the ancient theatre has been preserved since the coronation of King Edgar the Peaceful in 973, the symbolism has changed. During the 19th century, effective power passed to ministers whose position depended on electoral success. As power was transferred elsewhere, however, the symbolic significance of the monarchy increased. Victoria’s reign was crucial in this respect and, often much against her personal tastes, she became a symbolic focus of loyalty surrounded by increasingly elaborate ceremonial events.

The language of these events is referred to, often disparagingly, as ‘symbolic’. Yet symbols, which elude neat definitions, can open the mind and heart to the transcendent. Symbols speak for themselves and lose power if they are larded with pedestrian explanation.

Walter Bagehot, the Liberal Victorian economist, analysed the new case for monarchy in his 1867 book The English Constitution: ‘The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance which are essential to true monarchy are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.’

In the coronation of King Edgar, the central act was his anointing, and this will be the case on Saturday. Once again, as in 1953, this particular aspect of the ceremony will be shrouded to reflect its central significance and to set free the imagination. Behind the screen, in a very personal act of commitment, the King accepts his calling from God and receives the grace and power to fulfil
his responsibilities.

It is undeniable that one of the changes since the coronation of 1953 has been a steep decline in participation in public worship. Our political life is for the most part functionally atheist, but the voice of faith can be heard in the public square even if it does not dominate. The situation is very different in some other European countries, which is why the Muslim political scientist Tariq Modood has remarked that ‘the minimal nature of the Anglican establishment… may be far less intimidating to the minority faiths than a triumphant secularism’.

The monarchy itself has played a notable part in binding the different faiths in this country and in the Commonwealth into the evolving story of our community. The coronation rites will undoubtedly reflect these new realities.

In a departure from previous practice, the oil which will be used in the anointing has its source on the Mount of Olives and has been blessed by the Orthodox Patriarch and the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem. Anointing is a symbol of a profound spiritual truth. Much of contemporary life is centred on ‘choosing’, but beyond individual choice there is the realm of ‘calling’ in which a person accepts a servant role for the common good. Those who have followed this way, consciously or unconsciously, are on the way of Jesus Christ, who found life in all its fullness by losing himself and going beyond himself in loving service.

The continuation of a rite which has proved adaptable in very different cultural and political circumstances over 1,000 years serves to affirm some vital principles. We are part of a story and a land which we share with generations past and future. Contrary to the assumption that we should be free to devise and enact whatever the will of a majority of citizens at any particular time might desire, the moral legitimacy of government is derived from faithfulness to given principles of justice distilled from the experience of centuries. Coronations help to define eras, and to promote reflection on the character of the tapestry which we are weaving in partnership with those who have gone before.

The partnership evoked by coronations also involves generations to come. Our generation is not the sole possessor of our land and history. We are responsible for an inheritance on which we have a full repairing lease and a duty to pass it on intact.

In a remarkable essay entitled ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’ published in the Sociological Review for 1953, Edward Shils and Michael Young (who had played a leading role in drafting the Labour manifesto in 1945) quoted the sociologist Émile Durk-heim: ‘There can be no society which  does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality.’ The two authors suggested that the coronation was just such a reaffirmation in an act of national communion.

Simply invoking abstract universal concepts such as justice and tolerance does not generate the energy necessary to bind people together in a common cause. It is when the abstractions are embodied in a story, a community memory which we can all share, or in symbolic representative figures, that they are invested with power.

The temptation is to opt for what is sometimes described as ‘secular neutrality’ in our public rituals. ‘Secular neutrality’ is, of course, a myth. It is not possible to live and act without some kind of world view, either explicit or implicit.

The coronation is one of the reference points in our liberal democracy by which the public square is kept open to voices of religion. This is as far as possible from demanding a theocratic state, but rather a recognition that a healthy version of faith needs to be vigorously articulated, or else lethal versions will be left free to flourish in a vacuum.

How heavy is King Charles’s crown?

Uneasy lies the head

In a 2018 BBC documentary Elizabeth II commented on the weight of the crown at her coronation, complaining that if you wore it for too long ‘your neck would break off’. What will be the burden on Charles III’s head?

– At the moment of the coronation Charles will wear St Edward’s Crown, made for Charles II in 1661. That weighs 2.07kg. Prior to 1911 it weighed 2.6kg – although both Victoria and Edward VII were spared having to wear it.

– However, for his departure from Westminster Abbey that crown will be removed and he will wear the Imperial State Crown instead, which weighs 1.06kg. 

– By contrast, most full-face motorcycle helmets (just about the heaviest thing people wear on their heads in day-to-day life) weigh between 1.3kg and 1.7kg.                                  

Screen queen

The coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 is recorded as being watched on TV by 20 million Britons – although how much they could each see is questionable. There were only 2.14 million television licences at the time, and many sets had tiny screens. Is it true, as is often claimed, that the coronation sparked mass TV ownership in Britain? Number of TV licences and percentage increase on a year earlier:

1947 14,500

1948 45,500 (214%)

1949 127,000 (179%)

1950 344,000 (171%)

1951 764,000 (122%)

1952 1.45m (90%)

1953 2.14m (48%)

1954 3.25m (52%)

1955 4.5m (38%)

Bundles of energy

How has energy production and demand in the UK responded to the energy crisis?    Last quarter 2022 relative to 2021:

Production

Coal -39%

Oil -7.6%

Gas +16%

Electricity +11%

Demand

Coal -16%

Oil +11%

Gas -7.6%

Electricity +11%

Source: Dept for Energy Security and Net Zero

Clearing the air

Is air pollution in Britain getting worse? Average concentrations found at urban monitoring sites in microgrammes per cubic metre:

2012

Particulates (PM 2.5) 12

Nitrogen dioxide 27

Ozone 55

2022

Particulates (PM 2.5) 8

Nitrogen dioxide 16

Ozone 65

Source: Defra

On looking without seeing

Guadix is a windy, dusty town on the slopes of the dry side of the massive ridge that is the Sierra Nevada in Andalusia, Spain. These slopes are the rain-shadow badlands of the province of Granada: a place few foreign tourists visit. The other side of the mountain, the Mediterranean side, is called the Alpujarra and seems a world away: verdant, flowery slopes with orchards, pastures and little whitewashed villages clinging to them: a landscape and people made famous by the English travel writer Gerald Brenan, who lived there.

But our side could not be more different. I say ‘our’ because my partner and I own two cave houses in Guadix, and often stay. We love the town, partly for its workaday ordinariness; but it’s not without history (going back to Roman times), civic pride, a scatter of fine buildings and a lively cultural life.

Last Friday we saw an early evening concert advertised: a Brahms sonata for piano and clarinet, and a piano quintet by Dvorak. We decided to go. The young musicians were local, and the venue was a beautiful salon on the upper floor of the ancient building that serves the town’s college of music. The flyer called the concert ‘Evocaciones’. For me, that title said more than it can have known.

The concert started at 8 p.m. It was a warm evening, and I was by a big window. To my left was the salon, the musicians, instruments, and an audience of about 50 people beneath a lofty, beautifully carved ceiling. To my right, beneath the window, was a little square.

It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that in this, the last hour of daylight, the sky was dark with thousands of swifts, just arrived over the mountains from Africa. They winged around the square and past my window, amazingly never hitting it or crashing into each other, calling with continual high-pitched chirrups on a single note. No ornithologist, I’ve no idea what they were achieving by this frenzied behaviour, but round and round they went, wheeling, diving, cheeping and climbing, at tremendous – almost sickening – velocity. Were they feeding? Was this mating behaviour? Were they simply in high spirits, celebrating landfall after the Sahara and the ocean? Perhaps they were snapping up insects, but this looked more like a party than a hunt. These birds were very, very excited. By what I could not tell.

Within, the concert had begun: the Brahms sonata, opus 120, first. A young lady, Pilar García Cifo, played the clarinet with accuracy and grace. On the piano Pedro José Gavilán Guirao led with assurance. The audience were rapt, remaining so throughout. Within that salon we were – audience and musicians – in a world of our own, with a focus of our own: the music. We could hear the swifts but had screened out their music – except perhaps for me, right by the window.

And could these birds hear our music? Theoretically, yes, loud and clear; but how were they hearing it – which is tantamount really to asking what theywere hearing? Not the music we were listening to. They were hearing (and probably screening out) a kind of strange noise. The clarinet is not known in swift-world, and these sequences of notes would not, to them, carry the familiarity with shape and form, the evocation of musical pleasure, the meaning, on which a European composer can rely in his audience.

Our music was not saying anything to these birds, any more than their chirruping said anything to us. Only in one sense could we hear each other; in another not at all.

And now, outside, a new event. A heavy portable plinth on which stood a decorated Christian cross was making its way across the square, carried at shoulder height by the Catholic faithful.

I’ve since done a little elementary research into this, but cannot say I’m much the wiser as to its meaning. After Easter, it seems that in Andalusia, and particularly in the Granada region, 3 May marks what’s called the Festival of the Cross; and during the preceding weekend mobile crosses are made, lavishly decorated, and carried around the towns on their plinths, the culmination being the festival itself. The cross proceeding beneath my window was one we had seen stationary in Guadix’s main plaza, with many gathered around while a band played. Now (I suppose) it was being walked through the town to reach a wider audience. Apparently it makes numerous appearances, quickening the drumbeat of religious excitement (as it were), in the days leading up to the festival.

All of which is packed with meaning for those I saw following the cross through the square beneath me, but meant nothing at all to me or the swifts above. The birds and I must be counted as witnesses to this performance without really seeing it – because we were unable to share the feelings of those involved or the people watching them. The ritual was undoubtedly saying something but, oblivious to its meaning, the swifts and I could not hear it.

The birds, the music concert and the followers of the cross were at this moment coinciding: same time, same place; yet in three different worlds, conscious of each other only in the most primitive sense, but not hearing the same thing, not seeing the same thing. There was no shared meaning.

The graphic artist M.C. Escher became famous during my college days for his mathematically inspired pictures of logical impossibilities, such as hands drawing themselves. But the one I loved best depicts water on whose surface flat leaves float in two dimensions, in whose reflection we can see trees and sky, above and beneath whose surface a fish, blind to what’s above, swims. Escher called it ‘Three Worlds’ (1955). This drawing is not of an impossibility, but a reality. Or rather three realities, each blind, deaf, dumb to the other’s meaning. For me at the concert in Guadix, ‘evocations’ was the right word.