Why developers deserve to pay for the cladding crisis

In recent months, Michael Gove has been upsetting not only the house-building industry but its defenders, too. The Levelling-up Secretary has been accused of ‘blackmail’ by online newspaper Cap X, which compared his actions to ‘Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey’. The Telegraph mocked him up on a wrecking ball Miley Cyrus-style, and several trade press articles have accused him of ‘declaring war’ on the industry.

The reason? Gove has ordered housing developers to pay for ‘life safety’ remediation measures on blocks they built, which have been found to have serious fire safety defects in the aftermath of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire – regardless of whether they were to blame for the flaws or still own the building.

This order comes on top of a couple of new taxes – a 4 per cent boost to corporation tax and a forthcoming levy on new building projects – aimed at extracting money to fix problem blocks. All of this adds up to a lot of money – north of £5 billion over the next decade – to come from the house-building industry to fix dangerous buildings.

Builders have not been given much of a choice about whether they sign up to Gove’s plan – last year, he passed legislation which awarded him the power to effectively bar companies from building new homes if they didn’t. This would have shut down building sites and frozen income. It was a threat which left (most) builders in a position where they had no choice but to accept.

The builders say this is all too much. While most were happy to make some provision for contributing to fixing blocks they built and still owned, this will open them up to much wider historic liability. Shouldn’t they just pay for those where they were to blame?

The problem with this argument is the difficulty in figuring out exactly who is ‘to blame’ for the thousands of blocks around the country that still need fixing. Take an imaginary, but representative, building found to have combustible cladding on the upper floors, combustible insulation on the lower floors, timber balconies, missing fire breaks and internal defects which would allow smoke and flame to spread unhindered from flat to flat. Who is to blame for this block?

The balconies and cladding may well come down to defective government guidance which failed to ban them. The insulation might be the fault of the company that made it, the architect that specified it, the specialist subcontractor that fitted it, the building control officer who signed it off or (in most cases) a combination of the above. The missing fire breaks might come down to workmanship or design, and it will take a pretty detailed analysis to say for sure. The internal defects may be down to the original construction, the way the building has been maintained in the years since or both.

It should be obvious that any effort to establish who is truly to blame will be little more than a decade-long exercise in enriching construction lawyers. In the meantime, the building will have remained unfixed, which means the fire risk will have persisted and everyone who lives in it will have been unable to sell and move on with their lives. Now multiply this one case by the 10,000 or so buildings involved in the crisis and you can see why asking those who are ‘to blame’ to pay is no solution at all.

Some might say we should simply forget about these risks, fit fire alarms and sprinklers and carry on. But we have tried that too. Leaving to one side the obvious danger of failing to prevent a future catastrophe, insurers and mortgage lenders simply don’t accept blocks with these defects in their portfolio. That means they need fixing ­­– at least if you want people to live in them. And that means someone has to pay for the fixing.

What Gove has done is find a responsible party with deep pockets, grant himself leverage over them and soak them for as much as he can get. The developers may howl, but practically this crisis needs money up front and there is no painless way to get it.

Builders are right to say Gove should be doing more to get funds from others as well. Product manufacturers are a particularly culpable party and yet to pay a penny. But the size of the remediation job the country faces (conservative estimates put it at £15 billion) mean that any other sources of funding will need to be in addition to the builder’s contribution, not in place of it.

It is also worth saying that the industry has had six years to make this right on its own terms. The government spent the first few years after Grenfell limply calling on developers and freeholders to ‘do the right thing’ and pay the costs without taking the (legally available) route of shifting them to residents.

From the earliest days of the cladding crisis, the industry was warned that government was ‘ruling nothing out’ if the industry didn’t fix the problem themselves. The industry effectively gambled on this being an empty threat and it has now lost.

While builders did pick up the tab for a few blocks which they still owned, they were also very willing to let their former customers pay where liability could be denied. The awkward truth is that the position they bemoan finding themselves in now – paying the tab for someone else’s mistakes – is one they had been happy for their former customers to face.

Builders also brush over the fact that our legal system places an obligation on them to ensure the walls of homes they built ‘adequately resist the spread of fire’. This is not caveated by excuses about dodgy contractors, dishonest marketing from product manufacturers or even faulty government guidance. It is a responsibility which belongs to them.

It was their own lobby in the 1980s which pushed for this loosely worded approach, insisting industry was better placed than a bureaucratic state to know how to achieve it. Forty years on, they cannot blame others. They built the homes, they took the profits and they deserve to be handed their slice of the liability.

The best thing they can really do is eat it quietly and try to make the money back by building more homes. Doing so remains a highly profitable enterprise. Hopefully, this time, they will try that little bit harder to make sure what they build meets the basic standards of life safety. Knowing that they will be the ones to pay if it doesn’t can only help focus their minds.

Humza’s latest gaffe has cost him a finance secretary

Dear oh dear. It seems the newly-elected gaffe-prone First Minister of Scotland has blundered once again. Shortly after announcing that former social justice secretary – and Sturgeon’s old chum – Shona Robison would be his deputy, Humza Yousaf spoke to Kate Forbes about her place in his new cabinet. Widely expected to give her a top job, if only for appearances, the former finance secretary was said to be less than happy when he proposed to, er, demote her to rural affairs. She was so displeased in fact that she reportedly told the FM ‘where to stick it’, and promptly quit the government thereafter. So much for party unity.

Yousaf’s questionable decision-making hasn’t escaped the scrutiny of shrewd political commentators or even his own supporters. Safe to say, they’re less than impressed…

‘If it’s true that Humza has offered a woman whom almost half his party supported, not to mention a majority of the electorate, a major demotion, then that’s a truly stupid start to his time in office,’ writes journalist Ruth Wishart. 

‘[It is] an inexplicable own goal for ‘Team SNP’,’ comic Fred MacAuley grumbled, while commentator Euan McColm summarised: ‘What a dunderheid move’.

As reported by Kieran Andrews of the Times, even Yousaf’s own supporters have been left grimacing. ‘If he had got 70 per cent [of the vote] that’s fine, but this is cack-handed,’ said one, while others described the move as ‘politically flat-footed’.

‘What a cheek,’ one senior SNP figure cried of the offer. ‘This move is going down like a cup of cold sick with the members,’ says another.

Former SNP minister Alex Neil has called the offer an ‘insult’ while ex-politician Joan McAlpine has described the move as ‘so obviously a demotion’, leaving Forbes with ‘no option but to go’. 

And while SNP MP Joanna Cherry reacts to Forbes’s resignation – ‘what a shame’ – political commentator Kenny Farquharson writes soberingly: ‘FM pushing Forbes out is a sign of weakness, not strength. I would respectfully suggest keeping 48 per cent of your party on side is more important than pandering to the Greens.’

Meanwhile Westminster leader Stephen Flynn is still insisting that the idea the SNP is ‘eternally divided’ is ‘not true’. Optimistic to the end, eh?

Kate Forbes quitting is a nightmare for the SNP

Kate Forbes has reportedly quit the Scottish government after new SNP leader Humza Yousaf offered her the job of rural affairs secretary. Given that Forbes has been finance secretary for the past three years, and a junior finance minister for two years before that, it’s a fairly transparent play: humiliate her into quitting government altogether. 

After all, it would be the equivalent of Rishi Sunak reshuffling Jeremy Hunt to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Arguably it’s worse, because Forbes spent years rebuilding relations with the business community, which had been good under Alex Salmond but fell off a cliff once Nicola Sturgeon took over. It is widely understood that Forbes was the last remaining SNP minister that business leaders had any confidence in. Yousaf has exacted his revenge on a political rival but at a price to the relationship between Bute House and the nation’s entrepreneurs. 

Now, some will say that Forbes, a Highland MSP, ought to have taken the rural affairs job and used it to improve the lot of those parts of Scotland that were neglected under Sturgeon’s government. But rural affairs is not going to be a priority under Yousaf either. He’s a city boy. He loves cities so much that he represents one while living in another. He shows no particular interest in or understanding of rural Scotland. That he considers the rural affairs post a demotion with which to punish an opponent is perhaps an indication of the regard in which he holds this brief. For Forbes to have taken it under these circumstances would have been to acquiesce in an act of disrespect for communities that have been disrespected more than enough by the SNP. 

For now, she is remaining loyal in public:

Forbes was tough on Yousaf during the leadership contest, highlighting his record of consistent failure as transport, then justice and latterly health minister. She warned that ‘continuity won’t cut it’ and that it would be ‘an acceptance of mediocrity’. These were hardly veiled references to a man who has been responsible for more policy, political and personal gaffes than almost any other minister in the SNP’s 16 years in power. He has now made her pay the price for challenging him rather than allowing him to inherit the crown from Sturgeon uncontested. 

It is an early and unfortunate sign that Yousaf intends to take to Bute House all the worst qualities of his decade on the ministerial benches. The short temper, the surliness, the snidery, the uncontrolled ego. A wiser, cooler head might have considered the very tight leadership results – Yousaf only won on second preferences, 52 to 48 per cent – and decided it was prudent to keep his opponent close to him. 

As it is, he’s humiliated someone who came within the margin of error of being elected SNP leader and waved her off to the backbenches. That’s either a very brave call or a very stupid one, and Yousaf isn’t brave. 

In his victory speech on Monday, Yousaf pledged to heal the party’s divisions. The leadership contest itself was fractious but so too were recent rows over gender law reform and putting male prisoners in women’s jails. Treating Forbes as he has is bound to rub salt in these particular wounds. 

Yousaf, like Sturgeon before him, is very much a creature of the political-media-activist bubble and Forbes, a fiscal moderate and social conservative, is unpopular in that bubble. But nearly half of SNP members liked her enough to entrust her with their vote for party leader and de facto head of the independence movement. If you were one of these members, it will be hard not to feel that, in dismissing Forbes, Yousaf is dismissing you too. 

A running theme in the leadership election was the need to regain public trust in the SNP’s ability to run the Scottish government competently. That reputation has taken a hit in no small part thanks to Yousaf, who as health secretary has presided over the worst A&E waiting times on record, as well as missing SNP-imposed targets on everything from cancer treatment to mental health support for children. 

In seeing to it that Forbes returns to the backbenches, he has denied his government the only SNP minster with a reputation for competence. We can’t yet know what impact that will have on his efforts to pull the Scottish government out of its various crises, but it’s hard to imagine it helping. 

Forbes’s barbs evidently hurt Yousaf, a politician who is highly sensitive to criticism, and her exclusion from the government will please those for whom her heresies on progressive identity politics outweigh her talent for connecting with floating voters. But failing to keep her on the team is a mistake. The government will pay the price for it. The party will pay the price for it. In the long run, Humza Yousaf might too.

Kate Forbes quits government after Humza Yousaf’s job snub

Humza Yousaf announced on Tuesday, after being voted in by 71 MSPs as Scotland’s First Minister, that Shona Robison would be his deputy. The long-term friend of Nicola Sturgeon will now help Yousaf decide who he will appoint to his cabinet, a decision that will set the tone for the next year and a half of his leadership. 

While earlier it was unclear what Yousaf would offer Kate Forbes, it was on Tuesday evening revealed that Yousaf’s main competitor has been offered the rural affairs portfolio. Rejecting this offer, Forbes has now quit government and will go to the back benches. 

Now it has been confirmed that Ivan McKee, Forbes’s original campaign manager at the start of the leadership contest and former business minister, has left the Scottish government after being offered a job that he saw as a demotion.

Did Yousaf anticipate this? Earlier in the day he told journalists that ‘I’ve not spoken to [Forbes] about a final offer yet. I’m going to finalise our cabinet and our government. Of course I would want her to be part of my government.’ But the former finance secretary would be taking a demotion by going to rural affairs, something Yousaf would indeed be aware of. In fact, many senior SNP figures assumed that Forbes would receive a top role in his cabinet to promote the appearance of unity after a particularly fractious leadership race. And the new First Minister’s supporters aren’t all thrilled by this turn of events, with some describing the move as ‘politically flat-footed’.

This decision may leave Yousaf treading dangerous waters. It would be unwise to forget that almost half of all those members that voted would have preferred Kate Forbes to be their first minister over him. Any snub to her will send a signal to these voters that he is not as serious as he made out yesterday about party unity – or their priorities.

It adds insult to injury after an awkward Chamber session on Tuesday afternoon for the runner up in the leadership race. As had been predicted by Yousaf throughout the leadership contest, Forbes’ ‘personal attacks’ have benefited the SNP’s opponents. In making his case for First Minister, Alex Cole-Hamilton, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats (who have four MSPs in Holyrood), said that while most ‘in this chamber will reject my candidacy’, Scotland can’t ‘settle for continuity and mediocrity’. All eyes on Kate Forbes, she remained impassive. 

Conservative leader Douglas Ross made a direct reference to Forbes, describing her comments about her colleagues and party as ‘scathing’ – and pointed out that her opponents agreed with her. Forbes tightened her mouth. Labour leader Anas Sarwar cried that ‘more of the same is an acceptance of mediocrity’ and, just to twist the knife in, ‘continuity won’t cut it’. Eyes on her desk, Forbes didn’t look up.

At other points, there seemed a pleasant, conciliatory atmosphere in the Chamber that saw friendly fire exchanged between Yousaf and Sarwar, and the new First Minister and Cole-Hamilton, intimating a degree more cross-party unity in Scottish parliament may be within reach. However, this latest development suggests achieving unity in Yousaf’s own party may not happen any time soon. A source has said that after receiving Yousaf’s offer of rural affairs secretary, Forbes told him ‘where to stick it’. Former MSP Alex Neil has labelled the offer an ‘insult’ and ex-politician Joan McAlpine said ‘it was so obviously a demotion’ and that Forbes had ‘no option but to go’. 

Shona Robison has claimed that Forbes rejected the job offer in pursuit of a ‘better work-life balance’. Releasing a statement on Twitter this evening, Forbes says: ‘To the great credit of Humza Yousaf, the first official convo [sic] he had after Monday’s result was with me. He has been respectful, supportive and warm throughout. In whatever capacity I serve, I’ll support him. PS. After five long weeks, I’ll be delighted to see more of my family!’

But what will those members who supported Forbes think? The results of yesterday’s vote revealed just how split the SNP membership is – and how much it is at odds with the party’s senior politicians. With Forbes now leaving government, expect there to be trouble…

Four things we learned from the PM’s Liaison Committee meeting

The remarkable thing about today’s Liaison Committee is how unremarkable it was. During the ninety-minute session with the chairmen of the House of Commons’ select committees, the contrast with Boris Johnson’s box office battles could not have been clearer. Sunak sought to conciliate, downplay and comfort at every turn, seeking to offer warm words and switching his focus between the macro and the micro: matching MPs on specifics to assure them he was across the detail while taking difficult questions back to his first principles.

Child refugees? We have to stop the boats. If Northern Ireland is in the single market, why not Scotland? The 2014 vote remains in force. NHS pay? There will be funds – but we must halve inflation. It represented the wider approach which Sunak and Starmer are taking to politics in seeking a return to normalcy. Most of the Labour chairmen demanded more funding; most of the Tories asked technical questions. It’s the kind of setting which Sunak excels in – as evidenced by the frustration of some watching journalists at the dearth of real news lines.

The often technocratic discussions couldn’t have been further from the paroxysms of rage which Boris Johnson used to induce when facing such engagements and was if, anything, more low-key than Sunak’s first session back in December. That is a reflection of two things. First, Sunak’s decision to take such set-piece events seriously and demonstrate that he has ‘done his homework’.

But it also suggests that the select committee chairmen are also adopting a much less adversarial approach. A case in point was Sunak’s polite chat with Simon Hoare, one of Boris Johnson’s most vocal critics. The Northern Ireland Affairs chairman thanked Sunak for the Windsor Framework while neglecting to mention MI5 today upgrading the likelihood of a terror attack there. Similarly, Bernard Jenkin appeared to be in a much more emollient mood than he was at last week’s Privileges Committee meeting.

Still, we did learn some things from today’s Liaison Committee – other than the Prime Minister’s adeptness at presenting his controversial migration proposals as the epitome of good sense. Below are four takeaways from today’s session in parliament:

The PM’s message to China

Ukraine was one of the first subjects of the day. Sunak said that ‘I would not necessarily see it as a negative’ that UK missile stocks to Kyiv have been depleted, as ‘they were ultimately there to degrade and deter – primarily – Russian aggression. They are being used to do exactly that, they are just being used by the Ukrainians’. He pointed out that the government has increased defence spending by £5 billion and provided President Zelenskyy’s men with support worth £2.3 billion last year.

He also was asked about Beijing’s peace plan and said that he was glad that China claims to be supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity. However he added that it was ‘clear that Russia is dependent on China’ after Xi and Putin met in Moscow and that Beijing’s decision to abstain in a UN vote demanding Russia withdraw troops from Ukraine ‘does little for their credibility as a neutral party in this’.

Rwanda scheme difficulties

Diana Johnson, chair of the Home Affairs committee, proved to be one of the more effective interrogators today, politely grilling Sunak on his efforts to offshore migrant processing. She repeatedly asked the Prime Minister about whether or not the Home Office’s top civil servant has signed off the Rwanda policy as value for money; Priti Patel issued a ministerial direction to get it over the line in April last year. Sunak ducked the question, suggesting it has still not been signed off. He also demurred when it was claimed that flights to Rwanda carrying illegal migrants will take off by the summer – having told journalists at the beginning of the month that flights ‘could be’ as soon as then. Sunak told the committee that ‘no one has promised flights by the summer, what we’ve said is we will start flights as soon as we can after legal proceedings have been completed.’

HS2 will reach Euston

One area where Sunak was willing to overrule newspaper reports was on the question of whether HS2 will go to and terminate at Euston. He told Iain Stewart, the chair of the Transport select committee that ‘it shouldn’t be ambiguous’ that it will go ahead, in a mild rebuke to Michael Gove, who said on Sunday that this could not be guaranteed. Sunak added that ‘the aim is to deliver that station alongside the rollout to Manchester and to take the time now to get the right deliverability for that particular section’.

Sunak’s own vulnerabilties

Suank didn’t have many tricky moments at a particularly low-energy session but two stood out. The first was about childcare, when Cat McKinnell pointed out that under Jeremy Hunt’s new Budget scheme, six private childcare providers will be getting taxpayer funding – double the rate of individual childminders. McKinnell asked Sunak if he wished to declare an interest; it was left to Paul Waugh from the i newspaper to point out that Sunak’s wife reportedly has direct shareholdings in a business that runs Koru Kids, one of the providers which stands to benefit. It was a reminder that Sunak’s extensive family wealth has the potential to be a political liability for the Prime Minister.

The second difficult moment for Sunak came when Diana Johnnson asked about Suella Braverman’s use of language. She noted that the Home Secretary disagreed last week with Dame Louise Casey’s verdict that the Met Police is ‘institutionally racist’ and called it ‘an ambiguous, contested and politically charged term.’ But as Johnson pointed out, Braverman has had no such qualms using the term ‘invasion’ to describe arriving migrants. How, she asked, can one phrase be politically ‘charged’ but not the other? Sunak deflected but looked uncomfortable, in an exchange which highlighted another running theme of his premiership: being held accountable for others’ deeds and words.

Nikolai Patrushev, the man dripping poison into Putin’s ear

If I were to have to pick the figure in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle who scares me the most, it would have to be Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council and the closest thing there is in the Russian system to a national security adviser. Patrushev’s profile has grown steadily as both cause and symptom of the system’s drift towards nationalist imperialism, and he best channels the worst impulses within the id of Putin’s clique. Whenever he speaks, it is sadly worth listening.

After all, he does not just channel but shape those worst impulses. The Security Council itself is not the Soviet Politburo 2.0 that some assume. While it does bring together all key security-related officials, it is not a decision-making body. However, under Patrushev the Security Council secretariat has become one of the most powerful institutions in Putin’s state. Technically part of the Presidential Administration, in practice it is pretty much autonomous within its gated offices on Ipatevsky Alley, and Patrushev bows to no one but Putin.

Yet much like a Slavic Sir Humphrey to Putin’s Jim Hacker – because Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister are peerless guides to bureaucracies the world over – Patrushev also exerts a powerful, subtle influence over his master through his ability to control the information reaching his desk. When it comes to security affairs (which, to him, covers almost everything) it is Patrushev who largely frames the policy dilemmas to Putin and presents him with his options. Putin is notoriously prickly about being ‘handled’ but part of Patrushev’s talent is, like Beria to Stalin, knowing just how to manage such a dangerous tsar.

It is hard to know quite how far Putin genuinely believes some of the more outlandish claims he makes; with Patrushev the consensus among observers and those who have interacted with him is that he absolutely does consider Russia to be facing an insidious ‘Anglo-Saxon’ conspiracy to bring down the regime and even break up the Russian Federation. The more Putin has become entrenched in confrontation, then the more powerful Patrushev has become – and the narrower the gap between his personal views and state policy.

As a result, his occasional interviews in the Russian press – Patrushev is no publicity hound – have become indispensable harbingers. In his latest, in official government paper Rossiiskaya Gazeta, he reaffirms the line that the war in Ukraine is really only part of a wider struggle with Nato and the collective West, which ‘made Ukraine one big military camp.’ That we ‘send weapons and ammunition to the Ukrainian troops, provide them with intelligence,’ is presented not as assistance to a nation invaded by a hostile and brutal neighbour, so much as proof of our malign intent. Russia unleashed war, so the argument goes, to forestall war.

He also ratcheted up the rhetorical conflict, warning that ‘American politicians trapped by their own propaganda remain confident that in the event of a direct conflict with Russia, the United States is capable of launching a preventive missile strike, after which Russia will no longer be able to respond.’ Patrushev called this ‘short-sighted stupidity and very dangerous,’ which is true enough, but overlooks the fact that no one in the West is actually making any such claims.

When Patrushev goes on to claim that ‘Russia is patient and does not intimidate anyone with its military advantage,’ he is engaging in the classic, Soviet-era practice of claiming the other side is doing exactly what you are, especially as he adds that Russia ‘has modern, unique weapons capable of destroying any adversary, including the United States, in the event of a threat to its existence.’

It would be easy to write this off as just more of the usual rhetoric, but it is important precisely because of the way the Patrushev line has become mainstream for the Kremlin. We know Patrushev played a key role in the decision to seize, and then annex, Crimea in 2014 and then in the 2022 invasion. In those eight intervening years, his authority has steadily grown, and this has accelerated since February of last year.

Patrushev now has more of a role in foreign policy than foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. It was Patrushev who gave the main response to recent allegations that the Nord Stream 2 bombings may have been conducted by unofficial ‘pro-Ukrainian’ forces, implying that he still thought Washington to blame. He played a key role in preparing the ground for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Moscow, hosting Wang Yi, director of the Communist Party’s central foreign affairs commission, when he came to Moscow in February. He also continues to have a busy schedule of foreign trips, most recently to Cuba to meet both Miguel Díaz-Canel and former leader Raúl Castro.

Now, he is pushing an unexpectedly-reluctant Putin to deepen the militarisation of the economy and encouraging a more vicious crackdown on even the slightest hint of opposition. Patrushev, a year older than Putin, feared by many and an administrator rather than a politician, is not a likely successor to Putin. Instead, he is the evil vizier from the children’s stories, the shadowy figure whispering poison into the monarch’s ears. This is why he and his interviews matter. After each of his major, set piece interviews in the past year, policy has lurched in an even more authoritarian, militaristic and aggressive direction. Russia must be bracing for impact.

Rishi Sunak is pulling the rug out from under renters

Rishi Sunak is having a busy week. After announcing his crackdown on anti-social behaviour over the weekend, he set out a slew of new promises yesterday to ban laughing gas, increase fines for littering and give police powers to ‘move on’ what he deems ‘nuisance’ beggars. 

Among them was a proposal that would allow landlords to evict tenants with just two weeks’ notice if they are disruptive to neighbours through noise, drug use or damage to property. This would apply to all new private rental tenancies. Apart from the fact that two weeks is a very, very short amount of time for a tenant to find a new home, these things seem broadly sensible – after all, landlords are providing a house, but it’s not through goodwill: they deserve for their property to survive untainted, and genuinely disruptive tenants are difficult. 

These proposals were outlined last summer in a government white paper on the private rented sector. But Sunak’s new development is that potential eviction can be threatened to tenants whose behaviour is ‘capable’ of annoyance and disruption, rather than being limited to actual anti-social behaviour.

This is a worrying development which is set to be published  in the Renters’ Reform Bill, in conjunction with policies designed to protect tenants. This Bill includes a renewed commitment to abolish Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions (under which tenants could be asked to leave a property within two months, with no reason given), as well as including a ban on landlords raising their rents more than once a year. So far, so good. But the private rented sector is already heavily weighted in favour of landlords; there will need to be assurances in place to ensure that rogue landlords can’t use these new proposals to evict tenants quickly (a backdoor once Section 21 notices are scrapped), or to get around rules on raising rent by bringing in new tenants on a new lease. 

Cases of domestic violence are disproportionately reported as anti-social behaviour in the rental sector, while tenants with some disabilities or mental health problems may behave in ways some neighbours or landlords find a nuisance. Sunak must ensure that courts – who will judge whether the bar for eviction has been met – are aware of the circumstances of the tenants facing the loss of their homes. Those evicted from private rentals or social housing due to ‘nuisance behaviour’ who become homeless are likely to be classed as ‘intentionally homeless’ if they seek help from the council, which doesn’t guarantee them stable accommodation. In this situation, families with children are offered help (although the houses they are provided aren’t subject to suitability checks). But those without children – and who are not classed as vulnerable – become street homeless.  

Dropping the barrier at which landlords have the right to quickly evict tenants will also surely add to the strain on social housing. There are 1.25 million people on waiting lists for social housing at the moment and on Christmas Day, one in 100 children in Britain woke up homeless. Reducing the time tenants have to look for a new home – and to challenge an upcoming eviction – is only likely to increase the pressure on social housing and increase homelessness. 

Last summer’s white paper also took statements from tenants who said they were often reluctant to complain about flaws with a property ‘due to the fear of being evicted’. They said they would be more encouraged to complain if ‘they were reassured that they had another property they could move to after having complained, had protection and landlords… had greater accountability’. 

Polly Neate, chief executive of the housing charity Shelter, said of the developments: ‘Millions of private renters across the country currently live under fear of eviction, which can happen with only a few weeks’ notice and no reason given. It makes renting deeply unstable and turns lives upside down. The government has rightly committed to scrap these Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions in the long-awaited Renters’ Reform Bill.

‘Once these evictions are finally scrapped, we can’t allow new loopholes for unfair evictions to open up. Private renters deserve genuine security in their homes. Without clear guidance and safeguards in place, there is a real risk that the new anti-social behaviour grounds for eviction could be abused.’

Over the past ten years, I’ve lived in 12 rental properties across four cities. I’ve never missed a payment, never had a complaint against me as a tenant. Yet the mould in my bedroom in one of the flats was so bad I got pneumonia. I had to stay there; it was in Dublin and the rental market is so precarious, expensive and overcrowded that I had little choice but to recover in a cold, damp bedroom, swallowing awful pills the size of horse tranquillisers for a week straight. But there was little I could do to get my (well-meaning) landlord to address the issue – after all, it’s their house, I was just living in it. 

‘Everyone deserves a secure and decent home. Our society should prioritise this just like access to a good school or hospital,’ are the words taken from last summer’s white paper. But Sunak’s new proposals show that, at least for now, his priorities lie elsewhere.

Ask the expert: Rachel Fowler, Financial Planner at Charles Stanley, answers your questions

Inflation may be falling, but 2023 looks set to be another difficult year for the British economy. The Spectator’s economics editor Kate Andrews sat down recently with Charlotte Lambeth, director of private clients at Charles Stanley Wealth Managers, and The Spectator’s business editor Martin Vander Weyer, for a special virtual event on Spectator TV.

They discussed how in yet another year of high inflation, low growth and general economic turbulence, you can take control of your wealth and preserve it for the next generation. Following on from that discussion, Rachel Fowler, financial planner with Charles Stanley, answers some of your questions.

How much should I keep in cash?

It’s often sensible to keep back at least six months’ worth of your income need in cash, plus any planned capital spend for the next three to five years.

How to balance retirement income against avoiding inheritance tax

Often spending more can be a great way to reduce an inheritance tax liability, however this needs to be carefully balanced with making sure your income is sustainable and that you will have enough to meet your needs over the course of your lifetime. The best way to address this is with cash flow planning.

How do I help my children to grow up wealthy?  What’s the best idea you’ve seen?

There are lots of options for efficiently passing wealth down to children. Junior ISAs are a great starting point for under 18s and lifetime ISAs may be ideal for young adults; they offer a 25 per cent government bonus and are ideal for helping children on to the property ladder as well as potentially saving for retirement. 

Pension contributions for children can also help ensure long term financial stability and make fantastic use of available tax reliefs. Trusts and family investment companies provide long term planning opportunities for passing significant wealth down tax efficiently and setting future generations on a course for lifetime financial stability.

How to manage investments to keep up with inflation with minimal risk.

When thinking about investing money, it is always important to take a long-term view. Before investing, it is important to think about the timescale for investing, as well as the long-term objective for the funds. Seeking professional investment advice can help increase the chances of long-term growth whilst limiting risk. Maximising tax efficiency can be the best way to get more growth over the longer term. For example, making full use of ISA allowances, pension contributions and also using all available tax allowances.

Watch the full discussion on investment management between Kate Andrews, Martin Vander Weyer and Charles Stanley’s Charlotte Lambeth:

Gary Lineker scores a victory over the taxman

The good news just keeps coming for Gary Lineker. The Match of the Day host has won his appeal against HMRC over a £4.9 million tax bill. The taxman claimed Lineker was an employee of both the BBC and BT Sport – and that, as a result, he owed them money. But a judge ruled that Lineker was a freelancer and threw out HMRC’s case.

Lineker’s tribunal victory comes after he emerged victorious from his scrap with the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie over his tweets. The TV host was taken off the air after criticising the government’s asylum policy. But he returned to the show a week later after his fellow football presenters staged a boycott over Lineker’s treatment. Talking about the incident this week, Lineker said he ‘had a tear in my eye’ when he learned his fellow presenters Ian Wright and Alan Shearer had pulled out of the show.

Lineker is the BBC’s highest-paid star and earned about £1.35 million in 2020-21. His latest win is good news for his bank balance, given the possible repercussions if the decision had gone the other way. The crisps are on Gary tonight….

Why has the former Taiwanese president been cosying up to Beijing?

‘We must peacefully strive to rejuvenate the Chinese nation. This is an unshirkable duty for Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, one that we must work to achieve’. These aren’t the words of a Chinese Communist Party politician – but rather those of the former president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, who is on a ten-day trip to the People’s Republic. Ma’s first stop was Nanjing, where he called for friendlier relations between Beijing and Taipei, appealing to their shared Chinese ancestry. 

Ma’s visit just happens to coincide with the incumbent Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen’s own visit to the US later this week, where she’ll meet the new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The meeting is sure to irk Beijing, bringing back memories of 1995, when it carried out a series of missile tests in the Strait in reaction to a similar trip to the US made by a Taiwanese president.

Ma and Tsai’s coinciding trips symbolise Taiwan’s two alternative futures. The first, where Taiwan continues its trajectory of getting close to the US and other western democracies, trying to guarantee its own democratic values but vastly increasing the risk of an invasion by Beijing. Or the second, where relations with Beijing are stabilised but come at the cost of falling into the CCP’s economic and political orbit. Certainly, some on the Chinese side believe that Ma deliberately timed this trip to drive home this point to Taiwanese voters.

The timing is crucial because, in January, Taiwan goes to the polls for its presidential elections. Neither Ma nor Tsai will be running (the 72-year-old Ma has long left frontline politics, while Tsai will have reached her two-term limit by then). But if Ma’s party, the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang, takes back the presidency, Taiwan will be steered closer to that second alternative future.

Currently, the two parties are neck and neck in the polls, with half of voters undecided. They face a difficult choice.

Many Taiwanese voters feel increasingly distanced from China: polls show that a majority of voters identify as Taiwanese only, rather than any sort of Chinese, a proportion that only increases the lower the age group. Younger voters also tend to be more pro-democracy: in 2014, they protested against the Ma government’s increasing closeness to Beijing. In the last few years, what has happened to Hong Kong has resolutely put a stop to any credible talk of ‘one country, two systems’ – the Taiwanese see clearly that there’s only one country, one system, in the eyes of Xi Jinping.

And yet, it’s possible to believe in Taiwanese sovereignty without agreeing with the DPP’s approach, which seems to walk the island ever closer to war. Since Tsai Ing-wen’s initial election in 2016, Beijing has refused to speak to Taipei, and relations are only worsening. This culminated in the tense stand-off last summer, when former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island and Beijing set off days of military tests, even launching missiles over Taiwan. Taiwan seems to be on the precipice of war, a feeling consolidated by the recent extension of mandatory conscription from four months to a year. A January poll showed that half of respondents were dissatisfied with Tsai’s handling of cross-strait relations.

Domestic issues, especially Tsai’s botched procurement of vaccines during the pandemic, also continue to taint the party as a whole. In last November’s local elections, the DPP lost so badly that Tsai resigned her position as head of the party.

So democracy at the cost of war, or peace at the cost of liberty? The two presidents embody these different visions through their respective visits this week. It’s true that their successors will need to be more nimble and nuanced in their pitches. The KMT must draw some distance between themselves and Beijing (which may be why Ma is skipping Beijing on this trip). While the DPP must show they’ve heard voters’ concerns about any possible war. But the fundamental dividing line remains the same, which makes January’s election (as is so often the case with Taiwan’s national elections) a referendum on the island’s relations with China. Beijing is watching closely.

The Guardian cancels itself, at last

The world’s wokest newspaper is at it again. Few voices were more vocal about race and reparations in that statue-toppling summer of 2020 than the Guardian: the newspaper of choice for the self-loathing left. So it is some irony then that the paper’s owner has today had to issue an apology for the role that the Guardian’s founders had in transatlantic slavery. Whoops!

The Scott Trust, which owns the Graun, has announced what the paper is calling a £10 million ‘decade-long programme of restorative justice’, with ‘millions dedicated specifically to descendant communities linked to the Guardian’s 19th-century founders.’ It comes after academic research established that John Edward Taylor, the journalist and cotton merchant who founded the newspaper in 1821 had links to slavery, mainly through the textile industry, along with at least nine of his 11 backers who funded the Guardian’s creation.

Katharine Viner, the editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, has now issued a grovelling statement, declaring that:

We are facing up to, and apologising for, the fact that our founder and those who funded him drew their wealth from a practice that was a crime against humanity. As we enter our third century as a news organisation, this awful history must reinforce our determination to use our journalism to expose racism, injustice and inequality, and to hold the powerful to account.

Mr S looks forward to the usual suspects demanding the closure of the paper, given its foundation on the wealth of slavers. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes…

The tragedy of the Nashville school shooting

Three children and three staff have been shot dead at a school in the United States. The pupils who died at the Covenant School in Nashville were all just nine years old. The attacker was Audrey Hale, a 28-year old transgender ex-pupil, who was armed with three guns, including a semi-automatic rifle. Hale was shot dead by police during the incident yesterday morning.

America’s tragedy is that such appalling incidents just keep happening. Only last week, a 17 year-old wounded two support staff at a high school in Denver; in February, three students were fatally shot at Michigan State University; in January, two teenagers were killed in a ‘targeted shooting’ at an educational institute in Des Moins.

But this latest atrocity in Tennessee has made headlines, even in the UK, amid speculation over Hale’s gender identity and whether it may have been a significant factor. Hale, who was born female, used the pronouns ‘he/him’ on a LinkedIn profile. Local police chief John Drake said ‘resentment’ at attending the school might have played a role in the attack. According to Drake, police ‘feel that she (Hale) identifies as trans, but we’re still in the initial investigation into all of that and if it actually played a role into this incident’.

Amidst plenty of speculation, the police must be given time to ascertain the facts of the case. But this is made harder, given the focus on which gender Hale identified as. Drake referred to Hale using female pronouns. Meanwhile, USA Today announced that ‘police on Monday afternoon said that the shooter was a transgender man. Officials had initially misidentified the gender of the shooter’.

Does this matter? I might be transsexual but I am also a teacher and I care far less about the misgendering of a perpetrator than I do about children being shot dead in their school. Schools are places of learning but they are also environments where children should feel safe, and be safe. But yesterday, three primary school pupils – in England they would be in Year 4 or Year 5 – went to school and never came home.

Police released their names as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney. These were two girls, and a boy, who had their lifetimes to look forward to. Now, they are dead. Killed alongside them were teacher Cynthia Peak, 61, headteacher Katherine Koonce, 60, and school caretaker Mike Hill, 61. They are the people we need to remember, along with their families who are left bereaved – and another school community that has to process such a dreadful atrocity.

Starmer bars Corbyn from standing for Labour again

Et tu Keir? Starmer might have (twice) campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister, but that hasn’t stopped the current Labour leader from brutally turning on his onetime ‘friend’ in his relentless quest to reach No. 10. Starmer announced yesterday that he would be submitting a motion to Labour’s ruling body to bar Corbyn from being the party’s candidate at the next election, on the grounds of his past record in the 2019 election. And today that motion sailed through Labour’s National Executive Committee, passing by 22 votes to 12. Bye bye Jezza…

Mr S was intrigued by Starmer’s decision to focus on political (electability) rather than moral (antisemitism) reasons as the basis for his motion to bar Corbyn. But allies of Corbyn have admitted to the Times that the drafting of the proposal drastically curtails the grounds for legal action against Labour. That leaves him with little option but to retire or run against the party – something that would mean his expulsion as a card-carrying member. Labour is understood to have modelled the wording of its motion to bar Corbyn on a 2021 High Court ruling. The court ruled that Labour could not be forced to run a left-wing candidate it did not judge to be in the best interests of the party, with Liverpool’s Anna Rothery losing that case following her exclusion from the contest to be the mayoral candidate.

Game, set and match to Starmer. Still, it doesn’t do much for his image as a supposed man of principle. After all, as, er, Islington’s Labour branch has pointed out, Starmer was elected on a pledge in 2020 that ‘members should select their candidates for every election.’ If he can’t keep his word to party members, why should the public trust him eh?

The genius of Lana Del Rey

Over the past few years, Lana Del Rey has been engulfed in acclaim: Variety’s Artist Of The Decade, the first recipient of Billboard’s Visionary Award and Rolling Stone UK’s endorsement as ‘the greatest American songwriter of the 21st century’. Bruce Springsteen has named her ‘one of the best’ and Courtney Love called her a ‘true musical genius’. And now, with her long-awaited ninth studio album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd released last weekend, the critics have not held back. From the Guardian to the Financial Times, Del Rey’s new album has collected a string of 4- and 5-star ratings.

But to call Del Rey’s journey a bumpy one would be an understatement. Just over a decade ago, the release of her major-label debut album Born to Die, defined by its dark lyricism against lofty orchestral-pop soundscapes, was panned. ‘Awkward and out of date’, Pitchfork branded the album, before likening Del Rey’s melancholy to ‘a fake orgasm’. Critics doubted the authenticity of Del Rey’s sixties Hollywood-inspired femme fatale theatrics. And if her lyricism received the occasional praise, her vocals did not. ‘Her voice is pinched and prim, and her song doctors need to go the fuck back to med school’, wrote Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield. 

Despite the reception, her allure still captured the attention of many listeners, myself included. I’d occasionally feel like her defence solicitor, which proved tough when the singer would boast that her ‘pussy tastes like Pepsi cola’ and she ‘wears her diamonds on Skid Row’ (‘Cola’), while provocatively whispering ‘money is the reason we exist’ (‘National Anthem’). But Born to Die was, in my view, a blueprint for a nameless genre: a wily critique of the American dream, rooted in irony.

Her following albums peeled back more layers, but the theme remained. Whether it was the psychedelic rock addressing the throes of an abusive relationship on Ultraviolence (2014), the airy vocals and twangy strings underscoring an agonising romance on Honeymoon (2015) or the piano ballads accompanying the bittersweet fluctuation between the Californian dream and its reality on Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019), Del Rey’s lyricism defies any single reading. The sometimes flawed Americana she explores isn’t exclusively geared to those physically in the United States, or wishing to be. Rather, Del Rey’s take on the American dream is a scrutiny of perfection and our emotional ideals. Del Rey embraces the human battles: balancing hope with despair, lust with heartbreak, liberty with constraint. 

There came a tipping point. In the spring of 2020, her long-brewing dissatisfaction with her critical reception led Del Rey to unleash her ‘Question for the culture’ Instagram essay:

‘Now that Doja Cat, Ariana, Camila, Cardi B, Kehlani and Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé have had number one songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating etc – can I please go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money – or whatever I want – without being crucified or saying I’m glamorizing abuse??????’

Del Rey advocated for softness, for the woman who would sometimes assume the passive or submissive role in relationships, and find herself overshadowed by stronger women. To little surprise, an online backlash followed – most notably unfounded accusations of racism, ‘white fragility’, a ‘Karen’ attitude – and her intentions were quickly discredited. Her concern remained, however: popular culture is often less receptive to transparency. But Del Rey sought to break the mould, rather than fit into it.

And it’s evident. ‘Venice Bitch’ was a nine-minute ballad destined to never find its way onto radio airwaves; she wailed like a saxophone on ‘Living Legend’. And now, the 16-song Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd may just be her chef-d’oeuvre. At points Del Rey’s vocals decouple from the instrumentals, and her backing vocalists false start; she cackles, exhales, screams, sneezes; we hear her vape crackle. She has let loose. Bizarre, maybe, but it’s a welcome antidote to the disposable melodies of many of her peers.

No doubt it’s a somewhat challenging listen. But that’s its virtue. A big portion is Del Rey seeking answers and wisdom in her family. With the orchestral opening track, ‘The Grants’, we see a different approach to romance and her femininity. She questions her chances at motherhood, confronting the realities of biology’s clock on ‘Fingertips’, a five-minute track that the singer warns ‘isn’t good, but explains everything’: ‘Will I have one of mine? Can I handle it if I do?’ She compares herself to the closed and forgotten Jergins Tunnel under Ocean Blvd in Long Beach, California throughout the title track: ‘I can’t help but feel somewhat like my body marred my soul. Handmade beauty sealed up by two man-made walls … when’s it gonna be my turn?’

The seven-minute track ‘A&W’ is a favourite. With its gentle acoustic opening, reflecting on her absent biological mother during childhood and over-sexualisation during adulthood, a soft-spoken Del Rey plunges us into the dark, calmly asking, ‘if I told you I was raped, do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?’ Moments later, the folk-pop shapes into a seductive and heavily produced trap sound, with Del Rey’s screaming ‘it’s lit’ and rapping about ‘Jimmy’ and ‘cocoa puff’ (cereal brand or cocaine cigarette?).

Del Rey has long been misunderstood. But rather than succumbing and sacrificing her sincerity, she’s taken it in her stride. The result is the perfectly messy poetry of Ocean Blvd.

Will Kate Forbes’s attacks come back to bite Humza Yousaf?

Humza Yousaf is now officially the First Minister of Scotland, after Holyrood voted in favour of him taking over from Nicola Sturgeon. Yousaf secured the votes of all his 71 SNP colleagues and Scottish Greens. 

The process in Holyrood allows other candidates to nominate themselves for the role too, so the party leaders of the Scottish Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats each put themselves forward and gave short speeches in favour of their candidacy. In practice, this was largely an opportunity for those three MSPs to set out their attack key lines on a new First Minister. All of them declared the SNP as being past it.

Liberal Democrat Alex Cole-Hamilton said there was ‘more water behind this government’ than lay ahead of it. Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross described Yousaf as working ‘part-time’ when he was health secretary and claimed a ‘post-SNP Scotland is now in reach’. Scottish Labour’s leader Anas Sarwar attacked the Tories, saying the country was in the grip of a ‘cost-of-living crisis created in Downing Street’. He argued that ‘we need a first minister for all of Scotland, not a first minister for half of it’ and attacked Yousaf’s continuity candidacy and ‘broken political party’. All three brought up the health service and its performance as one of the key challenges that the new FM faces.

Yousaf spoke last. He repeated his line yesterday that this is the ‘privilege of my life’. His first few remarks were personal: he said it was significant that a majority of MSPs were led by people of colour ‘and no one bats an eyelid’. He then paid tribute to Nicola Sturgeon, saying she had built an ‘international profile’ for her role.

Yousaf described his performance in government as being ‘tested in what people will agree have been some of the toughest roles we have got’. This is quite different framing from the ‘failing upwards’ line of his opponents. While MSPs voted, Yousaf waved at his children in the public gallery. 

Sitting five rows back was his main rival for the job, Kate Forbes, who spent much of the session smiling and chattering briefly to colleagues who popped by to commiserate with her. Yousaf then walked round to her to embrace her and the pair held a conversation so animated it almost appeared choreographed. It was also very carefully positioned right in the line of the press photographers in the gallery above. 

When Yousaf faces his first stint at First Minister’s Questions on Thursday, Forbes’s presence will likely loom even bigger: her attacks on her government colleague during the contest make the perfect quotes now for the SNP’s opponents. 

Painful memories: Deep Down, by Imogen West-Knights, reviewed

‘What are you like with enclosed spaces?’ Tom asks his sister Billie before they head into the maze of tunnels under Paris. Away from the ‘tourist bit’ of the catacombs – the part filled with bones moved from the city’s cemeteries – is an extensive network of claustrophobic pathways beneath the everyday, visible level of the city. As the setting for the climax of Imogen West-Knights’s subtle and compelling debut Deep Down, it is certainly fitting: in the wake of their father William’s death, the siblings begin to explore hidden and submerged memories from their childhood.

The two are not close. Billie, who has a ‘plain, mashed potato sort of face’, lives in London, while Tom (a failed actor, whose only success was in a Christmas advert) has moved to Paris to work in a bar. After their father’s sudden death in America, where he was living with his new wife, the pair come together.

What initially seem to be the hallmarks of any repressed family – an inability to discuss death; tensions between divorced parents; a repeated insistence that everyone is ‘fine’ – become, as the novel unfolds, something far more disconcerting. William was not just angry; he was abusive. The violence at home is seen through the eyes of the siblings as children. There are scenes of ‘goo spattered all over the floor’, interrupted by a policeman ‘wearing a chunky black vest thing’, and dramatic arguments where the most tragic result is a lack of ice creams ‘in the shape of Sonic the Hedgehog’. These domestic dramas are quietly devastating.

Alongside this narrative of a family torn apart is another theme. West-Knights considers the oddities of modern life for people in their twenties and thirties – from sharing a rented flat with a girl who once threw ‘farewell drinks before going on a three-week holiday’, to endless obligatory debates about the best Tesco meal deal. These nods to contemporary existence can feel shoehorned in, as though needed to make the story seem more relevant.

Deep Down is full of ambiguities. There is uncertainty about William’s violence (or his ‘illness’) and about the siblings’ relationship and how they will move on after his death. But about the author’s talent there’s no doubt.

Find the lady: Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías, reviewed

The plot sounds like an airport thriller – or a Netflix mini-series pitch. In a proud and staid riverside town in north-west Spain, where ‘each individual played the role assigned to him’, live three women. One is a merciless terrorist killer: Magdalena Orúe, or Maddy O’Dea, half-Spanish, half-Northern Irish, a warrior on long-term loan from the IRA to the Basque separatists of ETA, but now either retired from the armed struggle or quietly brewing fresh mayhem.

A mothballed secret agent, one of those ‘nasty angels’ who ‘never forget what everyone else forgets’, arrives in ‘Ruán’ in 1997 on an off-the-books mission hatched in London and Madrid. Our narrator, Tomás Nevinson (an Anglo-Spanish spook with an uncanny ‘talent for mimicry’, encountered in Javier Marías’s previous novel, Berta Isla), must identify and eliminate the culprit on the orders of his sinister spymaster, Bertram Tupra. Why? To punish past crimes, thwart future deaths, or simply because it feels to the superannuated spy so ‘unbearable… to be outside once you had been inside’?

Marías, who died, aged 70 last September, began his career as a screenwriter for his black-sheep uncle Jésus (Jess) Franco, a prolific director of trashy B-movies in Paris. Marías matured to become perhaps the most refined, sophisticated and erudite stylist in modern Spanish letters. But he never lost that taste, or gift, for the pot-boiler’s rough trade. His later novels of espionage, subterfuge, masquerade and betrayal (notably, the extraordinary Your Face Tomorrow trilogy) connect our subtle, ever-shifting thoughts and words to the visceral or violent drives and impulses behind them. That pulpy undertow of genre intrigue – stronger than ever in this, his final novel – channels a sort of shared narrative unconscious. Beneath our fancy ruminations, untamed beasts and monsters dwell. Sooner or later, they surge out of the unburied past, that ‘intruder impossible to keep at bay’. In Marías’s domain of secrets and lies, ‘everything bad comes back’.

Which of an outwardly blameless trio of provincial ladies might be the Maddy O’Dea who planned the ETA car bombs that slaughtered and maimed scores of victims in 1987: Inés, a rangy ‘giantess’ and hard-working restaurateur; Celia, an effervescent school colleague of Tomás (who takes a cover job teaching English); or María, the beautiful, bored wife of a pompous property magnate?

Marías harks back at intervals to the dark machinations of Tupra and his shadowy outfit on the fringes of British intelligence. Yet much of the novel unfolds as a droll, waspish comedy of small-city manners as Tomás embeds himself (literally, with one of his targets) in Ruán. Along the way, Marías explores the meaning of justice, the persistence of revenge (still ‘a beating pulse in the world’), and the ethics of preventive execution as a counter-terror tactic. When history’s ghosts rise from their graves, ‘You have to keep shovelling on the earth’. Eventually, Tupra hands doubting Tomás an ultimatum: liquidate one candidate, or the defenders of the realm will neutralise all three.

The novel benefits from another wonderfully supple and companionable translation by Margaret Jull Costa. Her 30-year involvement with Marías’s work, remembered in a touching afterword, grew into one the greatest author-translator partnerships of the age. As ever, Marías – who first came to literary prominence through his spectacular translation of Tristram Shandy – weaves his beloved English canon into the novel, from the ubiquitous Macbeth to Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, with its warning that ‘any action/ Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat/ Or to an illegible stone’. Add these multiple echoes to the fluency and versatility of Jull Costa’s prose and Marías’s novel feels as inextricably bicultural as its narrator.

Admirers like to praise the baroque, serpentine, recursive style that Marías perfected over 16 full-length fictions. For sure, he loves to take a notion for a long, winding walk strewn with literary or historical allusions (we begin with Anne Boleyn’s beheading ‘on a still-cold English day in May’). His often labyrinthine syntax catches the way that minds still meander and gyrate amid passion, treachery and deceit. Proust meets Le Carré, the critics’ cliché ran, and it’s not entirely wrong. Even over its 600-plus pages, however, Tomás Nevinson rolls forward with a satisfying momentum.

Sink into the tidal flow of Tomás’s monologue, and it tugs you along fast. The suspense stems not only from his quest to uncover a butcher of innocents, but from the creeping, then cascading, nature of his trains of thought: like those end-of-the-pier games where a fractionally mobile penny suddenly triggers a jackpot avalanche. Tomás often dwells on memory, private and historical, as it moulds character and guides – or impedes – action. After another nod to Macbeth, he wonders: ‘In the vast land of afterwards, what does anything matter?’ Marías seeks, and finds, good answers for that.

The fall of the Berlin Wall promised Europe a bright future – so what went wrong?

Homelands is Timothy Garton Ash’s first book since Free Speech, published in 2016, and is an account of Europe from the second world war to the current war in Ukraine, blending history, reportage and memoir. 

Unsurprisingly, given how well-travelled the author is and how extensive his contacts are, among its great strengths are the personal encounters, experiences and anecdotes it relates. We learn, for example, of the Romanian pastor who, on hearing that Garton Ash is from Oxford, asks in all seriousness whether he has met John Henry Newman. A jailed Erich Honecker reaches into the pocket of his prison pyjamas to give Garton Ash a card ‘on which his secretary had typed a telephone number’. When he dials it, it goes straight through to the chancellor’s office.

Helmut Kohl asks him in an interview whether he realises he is sitting opposite the direct successor of Adolf Hitler – the last chancellor of a united Germany. The Hungarian prime minister Arpad Gonz says he could cope with 40 years of communism but wonders how he’s going to manage one year of capitalism. Meanwhile, Bronislaw Geremek, insists that Garton Ash takes away with him ‘a bottle of Czech vodka called Stalin’s Tears’, as ‘a Polish foreign minister can’t keep Stalin in his office’. A Russian-speaking Ukrainian refugee from Mariupol laments: ‘We saw the Russians as our brothers – and then they came to murder our children.’

Also outstanding are the vivid turns of phrase. Railway lines are ‘varicose veins of Nazi evil’; and the author notes how changes to European borders resulted in whole countries being ‘shunted around against their will like cattle’. Two expressions keep recurring: ‘the memory engine’ and ‘post wall’. We hear of politicians, such as José Manuel Barroso and Javier Solana, who saw membership of the then EEC as cementing the escape of their respective countries from dictatorship in Portugal and Spain. ‘Post wall’ is an allusion to the fact that the fall of the Berlin Wall did not mean conflict had ended in Europe, with the wars of Yugoslav succession starting just two years later.

Garton Ash is more than happy to admit mistakes, his own included. He is an enthusiast for European integration, still clearly disconsolate about the UK’s Leave vote in 2016, and wry about having once been foreign editor of The Spectator, which he describes as ‘the most Eurosceptical publication in Britain’, and which he clearly regards with affectionate exasperation. He believes, however, that the push towards the single currency in the early 1990s paid insufficient heed to public opinion, not least the failure to have a referendum on the abolition of the Deutschmark in Germany, which distracted the EU from more effective engagement with the conflict in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He said so at the time, but rebukes himself for having dropped that objection when the single currency appeared to be going well. 

He is also sceptical about any notion of historical inevitability. He convincingly presents the fall of the Berlin Wall as ‘an exceptional, one-in-a-million piece of historical luck’. On the other hand, he argues, the belief that the West could lose the Cold War in the 1970s helped the West to win it. This utter lack of complacency is one he contrasts mordantly with the complacency that he believes led to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, not least the West’s failure to reduce its energy dependency on Russia after the seizure of Crimea in 2014. Meanwhile, he is adamant in rejecting the argument posed by those, whether on the anti-American far left or the isolationist right, who assert that the conflict was triggered by Russia’s fear of encirclement, which began with the West supposedly reneging on a promise not to expand Nato membership eastward. He notes how Russia on several occasions accepted Nato membership for the Baltic states and former Warsaw Pact countries.

The same lack of inevitability applies, he believes, to Brexit, not least given the 4 per cent margin of victory for Leave. Had Michael Gove put loyalty to David Cameron before his Euroscepticism, had Boris Johnson campaigned for Remain, and had Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong Bennite Eurosceptic, not been Labour leader, then Remain, he argues, might have won. As for Brexit’s protracted aftermath, the irony of Garton Ash becoming ‘the European petitioner’, and Danuta Huebner, a Polish MEP and former European Commissioner, saying of the UK ‘We have a common objective to get rid of them in March 2019’ is clearly a painful one for him.  

Homelands is an elegantly written piece of contemporary history by one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals.

There was no golden age for Muslims in Nehru’s India

It’s a little-remembered fact that the Indian subcontinent once had the world’s largest Muslim population. Numbering 95 million, they were almost a quarter of India’s total population. Partition in 1947 still left them as the world’s largest Muslim minority, at 15 per cent of Hindu-majority India. More than 70 years later, no single study has successfully explained the consequences of that transition. This latest attempt, though often original and incisive, fails to bridge that gap, partly because it ends in 1977, thereby largely ignoring the major turning point that brought to power India’s current Hindu-chauvinist rulers.

The underlying premise of the book is a rather arbitrary division of Indian Muslims into two neat categories: Muslim nationalists, who opted for secession and Pakistan; and nationalist Muslims, who stayed on and did a Faustian deal with the Hindu-majority Congress party to retain their orthodox personal law. What that view fails to explain is how so many diverse Muslim intellectuals and politicians travelled back and forth between these two poles. A prime example was Jinnah, once loyal to India’s nationalist Congress as its ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim goodwill’, but who ended up as the founder-leader of Pakistan. The binary model completely fails to explain this cultural anomaly of a whisky-drinking, pork-eating Muslim clad in Savile Row suits founding a theocratic state. 

Pratinav Anil is unsparing in his critique of the Congress party’s Hindu-majoritarian arrogance, which alienated Jinnah and so many other Muslim intellectuals. Those Muslims who stayed on in India, most of them unable to migrate, had to be grateful for second-class citizenship, denied fair political representation in India’s first-past-the-post electoral system, their lingua franca of Urdu starved of public funding.

The Faustian bargain for Muslim acquiescence was Islamic sharia law becoming enshrined in India at the very moment it was being jettisoned in Muslim countries, including even Pakistan. Anil mentions my own secularist father’s doomed attempts as a member of India’s Constituent Assembly, backed by women’s representatives, to push through a common civil code, the bugbear of Muslim clerics.

This book successfully punctures the myth that the secularism of Nehru’s India was a golden age for Indian Muslims. The rhetoric of secularism never trumped the reality of religious sentiment, given primacy in India’s constitution. Most telling of all were the mass pogroms that Indian Muslims have frequently endured since independence, some orchestrated by Congress itself, others by more extreme Hindu groups. As chilling as the numbers killed has been the often cynical Machiavellian use of communal riots by political mafias out to commandeer votes.

Where Anil is far less even-handed is in his dismissal of almost all Muslim agency as a ploy by aristocratic elites, called ashrafs, to hog the loaves and fishes doled out by Congress, feathering their own nests at the expense of the poor Muslim masses. ‘Postcolonial India may have been an inhospitable place for ordinary Muslims,’ he says, ‘but the Muslim rentier perhaps had never had it so good.’ He attributes much of this success to clever lobbying:

If adequately apologetic and suffused with nationalist rhetoric, a petitioner’s letter could make functionaries see reason. In a setting where literacy was at a discount and hierarchical deference everywhere, what ultimately mattered was the possession of a rather scarce political resource, an epistolary fluency in effect the preserve of the upper class.

What this ignores is the wider Indian political reality in which elite advantages of wealth, education and caste have trumped socio-economic need almost everywhere.  Why would Muslim society be the exception? Muslim intellectuals, some committed Marxists, have been at least as active as their Hindu counterparts in organising socialist protest movements. Focusing on the misleading size of a few princely pensions, much devalued by inflation, Anil ignores the near-annihilation of the Muslim lesser gentry by Nehruvian land reforms.   

He is especially harsh in his judgment of campaigns by Muslim elites to defend the autonomy of Aligarh Muslim University, founded at the start of the 20th century to redress Muslim educational disadvantage. Aligarh is no more elitist than most other universities founded by India’s myriad castes and communities. It’s all too easy for a Hindu academic ensconced in Oxford to blame Aligarh’s beleaguered custodians for fighting to defend their autonomy.

A final word on this book’s very distinctive and arcane vocabulary. Emic, carceral, prosopography, heteroclite, cathexis, chiliastic, coupure, transhumance, partocracy, propaeduitic, acephalous, epigoni, peripeteia – surely that kind of language is best avoided by even our most scholarly academics.

Our struggle to concentrate is nothing new

Our ruined attention spans seem to be the consequence of a recent fall from grace. Big Tech was our tempter. Having tasted its dopamine, we got hooked on its likes and notifications.

But while the digital attention economy is new, the struggle to concentrate is not. Caleb Smith’s elegant anthology of American anxieties over attention begins with the perplexities of Henry David Thoreau in early19th-century England. Believing that the ‘mind can be permanently profaned by attending to trivial things’ and that a commercial age allowed ‘no sabbath’ for our thoughts, Thoreau fled Boston for a shack on the quiet borders of Walden Pond. But he found distraction lurking even there: the fish in its depths were disturbed by the rumble of passing trains.

Because a physical escape from modernity was impossible, it was vital to rise above its harmful buzz. Alongside Thoreau, Smith introduces us to a host of his contemporaries, both famous (Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass and Emily Dickinson) and obscure, who were united by a fear of losing their minds. In crisp but plangent meditations on brief passages from their writings, he shows how they tried to still the clamour of the world by attending to it in calmer and more disciplined ways.

These anxious souls seem to resemble us in their yearning to live in the moment, even if they never had to hide a Twitter password or shut up smartphones in a drawer. Yet these appearances are deceptive. This ‘genealogy of distraction’ is instructive precisely because its figures had different, perhaps deeper, worries than ours.

Smith, whose upbringing in evangelical Arkansas acquainted him with the strange joys and baleful power of American Protestantism, is wonderfully sensitive to its social and psychic hold over 19th-century life. Americans once fretted about waning powers of concentration mainly because they yearned to ‘attend upon the Lord without distraction’. He dwells on the lurid sermons of clergymen because their dread of Satan’s wiles generated insights into the distracting magic of cheap print. While many of them were concerned only with the plight of white minds, Smith’s book also highlights the numerous black Christians who vindicated, against racist scepticism, the ability of all people to pursue education, concentration and salvation.

In a deeply Christian culture, even people who had left that faith behind wrote about powers of mind in religious ways. When William James suggested how a distracted brain escapes the ‘shell of lethargy that wraps our state about’ and returns to the world because ‘an energy is given, something – we know not what’, he described an infusion of grace in the language of psychology. When Walt Whitman asserted in Leaves of Grass that ‘the scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer’, he shocked the prudery of his time, but was still writing in what now seems an embarrassingly devotional mode. His manly stink made the case that our bodies are the vehicles of, rather than obstacles to, our exaltation.

Yet Whitman and Thoreau were unusual in being free spirits. The obsession with mental rehabilitation was more often a symptom not of individual liberty but its absence. Smith, who has taught literature to prisoners as well as to Yale students, is all too aware that disciplines of intention appealed to penitentiaries and juvenile reformatories as a means of turning unruly souls into single-minded workers. Middle-class revivalists likewise urged their hearers to become ‘business Christians’, who studied their accounts as carefully as their Bibles. On the other hand, the institution of slavery scrambled the moral parameters of attention: for enslaved people, daydreaming was a kind of muted resistance, which their demonic overseers sought to extinguish through incessant watchfulness.

Any reader of Foucault will find this emphasis on the pervasive psychic manipulation of people by institutions depressingly familiar. But Smith evokes the volatility of individual minds in this fallen world with a pathos and wit lacking in his theoretical influences. He feels, above all, that we can still learn from a past he has taught us to find strange. We cannot solve our misgivings about our disintegrating present by fine tuning how we feel or think about it, just as the purist regimens of Smith’s reformers were no answer to the ravages of industrialisation. Even Thoreau, a patron saint of modern mindfulness, got bored with practising his ‘habit of attention’ at Walden Pond. His performative gazing at trees and rocks was a ‘constant strain’ on his senses, leaving him to yearn for a ‘true sauntering’ of eye and mind.

This gloomy yet humane book shows why a preoccupation with our mental hygiene can be a consolation, but also a trap. There are worse things in the world than losing our focus.