The next SNP leader will double down on economic delusion

Humza Yousaf is the continuity candidate. Kate Forbes is the fresh start candidate and Ash Regan is the Braveheart, director’s cut, candidate. As far as character positioning goes, it’s quite clear where each potential new first minister of Scotland stands.

Digging deeper, clear policy differences have emerged between the three. Yousaf wants to directly challenge the UK government in court over its blocking of gender reform, where as Forbes and Regan would drop the issue. Forbes and Yousaf have intimated they will adopt a gradualist approach to independence, where as Regan insists she will somehow engineer separation talks with the UK government if pro-independence parties win more than 50 per cent of the vote at the next Westminster or Holyrood election.

There is one important point of consensus emerging however: when it comes to the economic case for secession, all three candidates signal they will continue to indulge in post-truth politics in the hope of convincing a majority of Scots to break away.

Exhibit one is the answers they have given when questioned about the veracity of Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) statistics, the Scottish government’s annual assessment of overall revenues raised in Scotland versus overall public spending. SNP supporters despise the numbers because they show Scotland running persistently high fiscal deficits.

Last year’s figures showed the country running a double-digit deficit in 2021-22 of over 12 per cent of GDP. This compares with just over six per cent for the UK as a whole. Spending in Scotland was almost £2,000 per person higher than the UK average.

Independent economist Richard Marsh, who undertook research on behalf of Nicola Sturgeon’s Sustainable Growth Commission and who is a member of two Scottish Government expert groups advising on statistics and modelling, recently produced a report in which he demonstrated that a Scottish exit from the UK would lead to significant fiscal consolidation.

Marsh points out that the average net fiscal balance over the last ten years accounted for almost 11 per cent of Scotland’s economy, with the corresponding figure for the UK sitting at just over five per cent. ‘An independent Scotland would need to reduce the net fiscal balance to a share of the economy at least to the point where it was similar to the UK,’ says Marsh. 

That fiscal consolidation could be achieved via hefty spending cuts or a combination of spending cuts and tax rises. If it were done via spending cuts alone then the fiscal consolidation required to keep government finances sustainable would result in a loss of £15.7 billion of output, £9.6 billion of gross value added (GVA – another measure of economic activity that nets off materials, energy etc used as production inputs), £6.4 billion of income (wages), and 164,900 full-time equivalent jobs, according to Marsh. A more balanced fiscal consolidation, using a combination of tax rises and spending cuts, would lead to a loss of £14.2 billion of output, £8.6 billion of GVA, £5.5 billion of income and 149,000 job losses. 

But those are just the numbers in relation to fiscal consolidation. Taking account of other economic negatives relating to, for example, the introduction of trade friction with Scotland’s biggest export markets – the rest of the UK – leads Marsh to estimate an overall impact of over a quarter-of-a-million jobs lost, a near £30 billion hit to economic output, and a loss in GVA of over £16 billion. Secession means the Scottish economy shrinking by at least ten per cent. Talk about shock treatment. This would be the kind of economic catastrophe it would take years, if not generations, to recover from.

Back to the leadership candidates and their thoughts on the GERS numbers – which was Marsh’s starting point for assessing an independent Scotland’s position and was also the starting point of the Sustainable Growth Commission. In a Q&A with pro-independence organisation Business for Scotland, all three candidates were asked if they would commit to producing alternative GERS numbers for a hypothetical independent Scotland. SNP members at hustings events have also pressed them on this. 

‘It is not only the fact that GERS cannot predict the finances of an independent Scotland, but GERS also does not give an accurate indication of the current situation,’ said Forbes.

‘The only function GERS serves is to demonstrate that the Union and UK economic policy continues to fail Scotland,’ said Yousaf, adding he agrees an alternative is needed. 

Regan’s response was gobbledygook but seemed to suggest hypothetical GERS numbers under an assumption of Scotland operating its own currency would be favourable for the independence case. 

It is telling that the candidates have resorted to discrediting GERS while hinting they might produce an alternative report designed to bolster the cause of independence. It seems the next first minister will indulge in the same fantasy-based campaigning that ultimately contributed to Nicola Sturgeon losing her credibility. The truth is there is no rational economic case for breaking away. The SNP lost that argument long ago.  

Besides, if they want an authentic projection of an independent Scotland’s fiscal position then Richard Marsh has already done the work. Letting reality get in the way of a good story is not in the SNP playbook, however. Better to stick with delusion. It’s what the people, or at least some of them, demand.

Drab by comparison to the film: Bonnie & Clyde, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

The murderous odyssey of Bonnie and Clyde is a tricky subject for a musical because the characters are such loathsome wasters and their grisly ambition is to fleece poor people at gunpoint during the Great Depression. They’re famous for stealing from banks but they changed tack once they realised that grocery stores and funeral parlours were easier to rob. The little guy was their real target. In this revived musical, written in 2009, the principal figures have no redeeming qualities at all. Bonnie is a beautiful brain-dead popsicle who dreams of becoming a poet or a movie star. Nowadays she’d be ranting on TikTok from the front seat of an SUV. Clyde is an amoral thug who shoots dead anyone who comes between him and his greed. His chief aim is to outdo the questionable achievements of Al Capone. The pair killed 13 people during their reign of terror and this gory headcount is announced in the opening scene, which also features the notorious ‘death car’ whose bullet-riddled coachwork is one of the story’s enduring symbols. Since the audience knows the ending before the story gets started, the only source of interest is in the journey itself. And it’s less than thrilling.

The gang’s opponents, the cops who struggled to arrest them, are portrayed as a bunch of swaggering, heartless oafs who bicker among themselves while the criminals roam free across the midwest murdering bank clerks and the odd detective. Much stage time is spent on Clyde’s hapless brother, Buck, who tags along and tries to get the couple to quit crime and settle down in the suburbs. Since we know he fails, his mission is hard to care about. The great Hollywood movie from 1967 overshadows this production whose lead actors, Frances Mayli McCann (Bonnie) and Jordan Luke Gage (Clyde), can’t possibly match the rock-star glamour and charismatic playfulness of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. It’s drab by comparison. The costumes are fine to look at but that reflects the swashbuckling bravura of 1930s stylings. The tunes, by Frank Wildhorn, are pretty decent. As are Don Black’s lyrics. It feels like an effective factory-made musical created by the best brains available. Nick Winston’s direction moves things crisply along. It has a pulse but not a heart.

Farm Hall is the unexciting title of the debut play by Katherine Moar whose work relies on the transcripts of bugged conversations. In the summer of 1945, Germany’s leading nuclear physicists were held under house arrest at Farm Hall, a mansion near Cambridge, where their table talk was recorded by British intelligence. Moar has added some flourishes of her own and she appears to know exactly how cranky middle-aged men speak and interact. The first scene is a theatrical in-joke. The exiled boffins decide to investigate the mysteries of English culture by holding a read-through of a popular wartime comedy, Blithe Spirit. Noël Coward’s absurdist plot and his frivolous dialogue are coldly dissected by the literal-minded scientists who fail to find anything funny in the play.

After this light-hearted opening, a bombshell lands, literally. The boffins learn that the Americans have solved the countless technical challenges of creating an atomic weapon. Hiroshima and Nagasaki lie in ruins. The news is emotionally devastating for Otto Hahn who discovered nuclear fission – he feels like a mass murderer. The other scientists wrangle over the research work of the 1930s which might have delivered Hitler the bomb. Some made blunders or worked inefficiently but these slackers are now transformed into heroes. Their failures may have saved millions of lives. And the boffins whose theories turned out to be correct are forced to contemplate how close they came to handing Hitler the ultimate murder weapon.

Werner Heisenberg, the biggest name in the play, delivers a marvellously oblique speech half-admitting that he pursued erroneous theories because he knew it was morally right to get the science wrong. But it’s only a half-admission. Possibly he’s rehearsing his defence against the accusation that he actively supported Hitler’s quest for a nuke. What he really believes is uncertain. And uncertainty is, of course, Heisenberg’s best known principle. It’s a treat to see a new play that doesn’t revisit the author’s troubled childhood or raise complaints about tough times in urban ghettos. Even better, this is a show with the intellectual self-confidence to use a very limited palette. All we get is a handful of tetchy German brainboxes discussing particle physics and critical mass but the result is a gripping human drama. It might easily have been twice as long. Director Stephen Unwin has matched a tremendous script with a first-rate cast led by Forbes Masson (Hahn) and Alan Cox (Heisenberg). David Yelland plays the aristocratic Von Laue with a care-worn, melancholy grandeur. His sweetly sonorous voice is a tone-poem in itself.

Full list: which MPs will vote against Sunak’s Brexit deal?

This afternoon MPs will get the chance to register to vote on the ‘Stormont brake’ aspect of Rishi Sunak’s revised Brexit deal, with No. 10 treating this as a vote on the Windsor Framework as a whole. Labour have said that they will back the Conservatives in the voting lobbies so there is no danger of ministers losing the vote. However the government still hopes to keep the rebellion as small as possible. The DUP have now confirmed that all eight of their number will not support Sunak, with James Duddridge becoming the first Tory to add his name to that list.

DUP:

1. Sir Jeffrey Donaldson
2. Ian Paisley Jr
3. Sammy Wilson
4. Gregory Campbell
5. Paul Girvan
6. Jim Shannon
7. Carla Lockhart
8. Gavin Robinson

Conservatives who will vote against:

1. James Duddridge: ‘I’m not going to negotiate away my principles, nor is the Government going to be able to polish a little brown thing’
2. David Jones: ‘It’s creating a situation where the UK could be subject to all the obligations of EU membership without any benefits and there’s no purpose in doing that.’
3. Boris Johnson: ‘The best course of action is to proceed with Northern Ireland Protocol Bill’
4. Iain Duncan Smith
5. Liz Truss
6. Andrea Jenkyns: ‘Hear hear Boris Johnson, right behind you’
7. Peter Bone: ‘Fails all the tests’
8. Priti Patel: ‘I will not be buying shares on the government’s smoke and mirrors’
9. Mark Francois: ”I personally will vote against it although I can’t speak for the whole of the group’
10. Simon Clarke
11. Jacob Rees-Mogg: I ‘will not find it possible to support his Majesty’s Government’
12. Adam Holloway

The European Research Group has ‘strongly’ advised its members to vote against today.

Conservatives who have criticised the deal:

1. Nadine Dorries: ‘Huge quantities of smoke, mirrors and spin at play’
2. John Redwood: ”I’m a government supporting MP who normally likes to obey the Conservative whip. But I don’t see how I can in this situation’
3. Greg Smith: ‘This is status quo at best, potentially a step backwards’
4. Craig Mackinlay: ‘What I have read thus far I am unimpressed with’

If you’re anywhere near Edinburgh, get a ticket: Scottish Opera’s Il trittico reviewed

It does no harm, once in a while, to assume that the creators of an opera actually know what they’re doing. Puccini was clear that he wanted the three one-act operas of Il trittico to be performed together and in a particular order. Promoters and directors have had other ideas, and between the wars it was apparently common to perform the triptych’s comic final opera, Gianni Schicchi, in a double bill with Strauss’s Salome, which must have been an interesting night out. Come for the necrophilia, stay for the lulz.

But Scottish Opera’s new production presents Il trittico in the form the composer intended, and what d’you know? It works. Four hours (including intervals) is hardly excessive – we’ve all binge-watched longer box sets – and in return you get the full Puccini once-over: from the noirish slow burn of Il tabarro, through the emotional wringer of Suor Angelica and out into the comic sunburst of Gianni Schicchi. Puccini eases into his solid-gold showstopper ‘Il mio babbino caro’ at exactly the point that a Broadway composer would deploy their ‘11 o’clock number’: the tune, in other words, that you get to take home.

In Scotland, it arrives shortly before 10 p.m., but in every other respect David McVicar’s staging is as handsome, as entertaining and – when performed as well as this – as faithful a Trittico as Puccini could have hoped. I say faithful: all three operas have been updated to a generic postwar period (we’re given the date 1971 in Gianni Schicchi but Il tabarro and Suor Angelica could be anything up to three decades before that) and settings that could be Paris or Florence but might equally – judging from the shipyard cranes and baronial towers of designer Charles Edwards’s backdrops – be Glasgow itself.

The main point is that it’s naturalistic, and full of visual delights: whether the barge slipping through oily waters in the opening tableau of Il tabarro or the mildewed chaos of Buoso Donati’s decrepit merchant palace in Schicchi. McVicar populates the stage with sharply drawn characters and details (keep an eye on Buoso’s stash of girlie mags, kept under the bed next to his chamber pot). It’s a vivid physical counterpoint to the taut but transparent sounds that Stuart Stratford draws from the orchestra: muted trumpets as switchblades in Il tabarro, and basses chanting like confessors beneath Sister Angelica’s agonies. Such atmosphere, and such subtlety of colour: Stratford’s conducting reminds you why Diaghilev rated Puccini so highly.

But still, the audience gave a quiet sigh of pleasure when Francesca Chiejina, a gloriously sunny Lauretta, sang ‘Il mio babbino caro’. She has a voice like a particularly succulent Rioja, and as Sister Genovieffa in Suor Angelica she’d already melted all resistance – a really nice bit of cross-casting. Richard Suart’s cameo as the physician in Schicchi was another inspired touch, while the presence of Louise Winter as La Frugola and Karen Cargill as the Princess in the two preceding operas gives some idea of the general strength in depth.

Roland Wood was Michele in Il tabarro, confining his pain within stark, charcoal-black vocal lines until the final deadly rupture. Then he turned himself inside out as Schicchi: a donkey-jacketed Teddy Boy with an exuberant line in vocal bluster. And Sunyoung Seo, a yearning, heartsore Giorgietta in Il tabarro, pushed her voice to (but not beyond) snapping point as Angelica, in a performance so raw, and yet so dazzling in its concentration, that… well, it does no-one any favours to invoke Callas, no matter how remotely. But Seo spared herself nothing, and lifted a richly enjoyable night of opera into something that burned itself on to the memory. If you’re anywhere near Edinburgh this weekend, you should do whatever it takes to get a ticket.

At the Wigmore Hall, the 17 players of the Basel Chamber Orchestra squeezed themselves around Kristian Bezuidenhout’s fortepiano for a programme of Mozart and J.C. Bach, plus – an outlier for this period-instrument ensemble – a new suite of short, moody musical sketches by the Slovak-Swiss composer Iris Szeghy. Mozart was the main story here, though. With a fortepiano rather than a harpsichord the familiar percussive attack was absent from the texture, and although Bezuidenhout spoke about Mozart’s own creativity at the keyboard, his own contribution simply vanished, inaudible, beneath some particularly buoyant and gutsy ensemble playing.

Alina Ibragimova was the soloist in Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto – dancing around the orchestra, but less than entirely surefooted, intonation-wise, in this low-vibrato environment. The final item was the 18-year-old Mozart’s Symphony No.29 and at last it sounded as if everyone had ditched their inhibitions. There’s something miraculous about these early masterpieces of Mozart’s late adolescence; something irrepressible and Apollonian. The horns whooped the roof off in the final bars, and it felt good to be alive.

The rise of the modern British B-movie

If there’s a phrase that captures the frantic energy of the modern British B-movie, it’s the concept of the ‘heart attack shoot’. And Rhys Frake-Waterfield knows more about it than most.

‘It’s not unusual to spend more than 12 hours on set,’ says the happy-go-lucky thirtysomething director during a short break from promoting his new low-budget slasher. The breakneck pace means that the shooting of an entire feature can be wrapped up in weeks, thus ensuring the project is as cheap as possible.

Cutting corners is a necessity. ‘On Winnie the Pooh, we tried to save time by not reshooting any scenes,’ he says. ‘Unless the actors made a really glaring mistake, we would just stick with the first take.’ True to the old B-movie ethos of the 1960s, the focus is on bringing the product to market at ungodly speed.

If you’ve been on YouTube recently, you may have seen a trailer for Frake-Waterfield’s Winnie the Pooh – or Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey to give it its full name. More than 15 million people have viewed the viral trailer, in which an adult Christopher Robin returns to Hundred Acre Wood with his university girlfriend, only to find that his childhood companions have morphed into bloodthirsty assailants dressed in Slipknot-like boiler suits.

Like the B-movies of yesteryear, Blood and Honey is deliberately kitsch. But Frake-Waterfield insists the film isn’t meant to be a joke. Which is just as well, given that it may be on the verge of becoming one of the most successful underdog films in history – at least in terms of profitability.

‘Last time I looked, box-office sales were about £5 million – although that’s without any of the US cinemas,’ he says. Not bad, then, for a film that cost ‘much less’ than £100,000 to make (like most B-movie directors, Frake-Waterfield doesn’t disclose his entire budget, though he proudly tells me that initial filming cost just £23,000 and took only eight days).

Blood and Honey might be the most successful modern B-movie released this year, but it’s far from the only one. In a typical year, otherwise unknown directors across the UK pump out dozens of low-budget – yet often commercially resilient – films, typically working across three genres: horror flicks, gangster films and modern-day westerns.

While many of these films are made on shoestring budgets – almost always less than six figures – they have a number of things in their favour. Like more mainstream franchises, many of these B-movies command loyal – if niche – fan bases that can greatly lower the risk of a commercial misfire. Which means distributors are willing to put up cash in advance.

Take the independent gangster-film market. After a procession of testosterone-laden films about football hooligans became unlikely hits in the early 2000s, enterprising producers responded by flooding the market with cheaper imitations. Thanks to a savvy marketing strategy – including gaming the supermarket DVD charts and securing cameos from minor celebrities – many managed to make money.

Films about real gangsters did particularly well. Over the past 15 years, there have been eight full-length films (the latest of which comes out this year) about the ‘Essex Boys’ – a notorious trio of ecstasy-pushers whose eventual murders became tabloid gold in the 1990s. The limited source material meant that many of the films were reduced to retreading the same folklore – a tactic reminiscent of the Gospels. But fans lapped them up regardless.

B-movie horror directors, meanwhile, benefit from a healthy indie scene playing to nerds across the UK. At this month’s Glasgow FrightFest – now in its 18th year – Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey was the main feature, beating a Lithuanian slasher flick to the top spot.

It helps that B-movies benefit from widespread tax incentives – the result of a string of governments keen to turbo-charge Britain’s creative industries. Some of the schemes are notoriously generous, like the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, which lets backers deduct much of their investment against their income tax (although this has been tightened in recent years).

From time to time, less scrupulous operators have pushed these to the limit. Ten years ago, a gang of five associates were jailed for an audacious VAT fraud after massively inflating the costs of their film to cheat the Treasury out of more than £3 million. On paper, the film had cost nearly £20 million; in reality, it had cost less than 10 per cent of that.

Of course, tax perks alone aren’t enough to make a film profitable. Instead, the most successful B-movie producers engage in an almost Darwinian pursuit to find new ways to cut costs – and then roll these out across future projects. ‘There’s definitely a creative genius to it,’ says one assistant director, currently recovering from a spell on a heart attack set.

This highly competitive approach can be a barrier to newcomers. ‘I definitely made a few mistakes I won’t be repeating in future,’ says Patrick McKnight, whose debut feature The Irish Mob – made for less than £100,000 – was released this month. ‘We shot a lot of scenes with actors wearing branded clothes, for example. Which meant I had to spend months in post-production tweaking the logos in every shot.’

One common trick to keep budgets down is to blag freebies where possible. ‘It was literally beg, borrow or steal – well, not steal as such but you know,’ says McKnight. ‘A friend of mine is an estate agent so he was able to find an office we could shoot in on weekends, when the tenants weren’t using it.’ Did they pay for any locations? ‘Not that I can remember.’

As you can imagine, missteps do occur. Last year, an independent film-maker caused a stir in Great Yarmouth – my home town and no one’s idea of a creative hotspot – when he descended on the seaside town to make an independent gangster film called Hit Men. Months later, local Facebook groups were awash with traders and businesses claiming to have been left out of pocket (or worse) after supporting the project.

‘They were a complete bunch of cowboys,’ ranted one landowner, claiming that he returned to his property to find piles of rubbish everywhere and a number of his second-hand cars damaged. Other suppliers – including jobless locals offered roles as runners and junior production staff – say they weren’t paid. Attempts to chase up accounts have proved unsuccessful: not least because the company is registered to a vacant office block in Great Yarmouth.

For his part, the film’s producer admits that mistakes were made, laying the blame at the feet of a distributor who pulled out of the project, leaving a cash shortfall. He insists that – as with his previous films – any suppliers will be paid when a replacement distributor is in place (at the time of the writing, Hit Men is still awaiting such a deal).

Who would buy a film like Hit Men? You might be surprised. For all their Oscar-chasing pretensions, the big streaming services have proved partial to British B-movies. In 2021, Netflix quietly added two indie films made about the infamous Kray twins to its catalogue. Both are pitifully low-budget and have been panned by critics, but that isn’t the point.

Netflix knows better than anyone that there’s a market there: after all, one of its most streamed films, Legend, is about those same Krays. It might be a £20-million blockbuster starring an A-list actor – and thus a world away from the B-movie imitations – but there’s nothing to stop its all-powerful algorithms pushing the cheaper films on viewers who have watched Legend and are in the market for another fix.

After the cinematic success of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, Frake-Waterfield remains confident that his work will end up on a streaming network before long (‘Although we can probably rule out Disney+,’ he adds). Like most B-movie directors, though, he’s already turning his attention to his next film. When completed, it will be his 35th.

‘Thanks to the buzz around Blood and Honey, we’re going to have ten times the budget next time,’ he says. ‘Probably more than that.’ For the B-movie scene, things are looking up. In the streaming age, film-making is more of a numbers game than ever, and there are plenty of directors who like those odds.

The UK is right to refuse entry to a Quran-burning activist

Nobody came well out of the Quran-scuffing incident at Kettlethorpe High School in Wakefield last month. Following calls from Islamic fundamentalists for severe measures to suppress any insults to Islam, the headmaster of the school concerned largely took their side rather than dismiss the incident as the school triviality it was; the council that employed him was equally pusillanimous. The police also chose to appease the hotheads by initially recording an entirely inadvertent cause of offence as a hate incident: only later it seems, with bad grace, did they condescend to gently reprimand a child over death threats to the boy who had dropped the book. 

It is hard to see all this as anything other than a threat to liberalism and democracy, and as presaging the reintroduction by the back door of a kind of blasphemy law we got rid of in 2008. One person who agrees wholeheartedly with this assessment is right-wing Danish politician Rasmus Paludan, founder of the Danish Stram Kurs party and well-known attacker of Islam, who is determined to keep the controversy going. A few days ago he announced his intention to visit Wakefield and publicly burn the Quran there in protest at the subversion of democratic values. 

This was not to be, however. Tipped off by Labour MP Simon Lightwood, the government acted quickly: Tom Tugendhat announced in Parliament on Monday that Paludan was persona non grata and would not be allowed into the UK. 

At first sight, this seems rather illiberal. No religion ought to be given the power to constrain political discourse or behaviour in order to protect its adherents from being scandalised, and no government should help it by silencing its critics. If a Wakefield resident was to burn the Quran publicly in protest at the pretensions of the fundamentalists (something, incidentally, that can now cause you to be arrested on serious public order charges by police increasingly desperate not to appear anti-Islamic, as happened some years ago), we should fight to protect his right to free speech in the same way as we would if he had been a secularist or left-winger who had burnt a Bible or an American flag. But if so, why not do the same for Paludan? Or are we now keeping people out because of their political opinions? 

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. In fact Tom Tugendhat’s swift action was entirely right, and needs to be commended. 

First, although Simon Lightwood’s objection to admitting Paludan was that he saw him (correctly) as a far-right Islamophobe holding unpleasant views on race, this is not why we are excluding him. Paludan is by all accounts an undesirable and unsavoury character: he has a history of knowingly and bumptiously provoking disorder when speaking in public.

Secondly, there is an important but subtle difference between exercising free speech and political agitation in someone else’s country. We should not refuse admission to a person merely because they hold, and might outspokenly express here, political views that many find very unpalatable. It would be very worrying if, for example, a Labour home secretary were to exclude Jordan Peterson as an undesirable alien, or a Tory to declare unwelcome far-left figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. But most countries accept that political activism tips the balance. There is no doubt as to which side of this line Paludan’s stunt would have fallen. 

In short, however free visitors are to express their political views in this country, it remains important that we make it clear that this must stop short of direct agitation or intervention. Indeed this has long been our practice; as long ago as 1971, the then Conservative government controversially, but rightly, excluded the far-left German political agitator Rudi Dutschke on the basis that he had been engaging in unjustified political subversion, and then robustly defended its action in Parliament. In short, if there are protests to be made against UK government policies, these should be made by our voters, or at least those resident here, and not by peripatetic political pundits from other jurisdictions. 

Not only is this right and sensible: it is also in the government’s interest. The person it showed the door this week was frankly a bit of an irrelevance: a rather silly far-right rabble-rouser who will soon be forgotten. But in future it may want to keep its powder dry to deal with rather more important and potentially harmful characters. Were there to be further mass demonstrations in favour of, say, Black Lives Matter or any number of other progressive causes, there is a very strong argument for saying that we are very happy to allow these, but that we will do our best to prevent them being led or whipped up by agitators brought in from abroad for the purpose. 

Having reached the moral high ground in the case of Rasmus Paludan, we will be in a good position next time we are faced with demands for entry from some left-wing firebrand. It will make it much easier politely to tell them that they, like him, are unwelcome, and to mention that what is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. 

Is it game over for Boris Johnson?

I don’t know about you, but it’s getting rather tiresome for me now. The Boris Johnson saga, that is.

Did he knowingly mislead parliament about rule-breaking lockdown parties in Downing Street? Very probably. Though perhaps not certainly, if one places any credence in his argument that nobody in authority definitively told him boozy post-work gatherings in Downing Street offices were prohibited. So on that front everything depends on what standard of proof of deliberate deceit the privileges committee decides to work to.

If it throws the book at him, will he survive any recall petition or by-election in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, or indeed hold the seat at the general election? I’m guessing yes. As someone with extended family living out that way, I’m always struck by the residual sense of affection felt for him by many voters there.

He may be a rogue, but he is their rogue and they will not take kindly to hatchet-faced Harman and her humourless heavies seeking to drum him out of politics. But could he rise again to the very pinnacle of Tory politics, either as prime minister or at least as leader of the opposition after the next election? Well, steady on.

As the person who first raised the prospect of the ‘Bobby Ewing scenario’ that nearly played out in the autumn after Liz Truss self-immolated, I am fully aware that Conservative politics has developed a fondness for rash moves.

But Johnson’s devoted band of parliamentary brothers and sisters, as well as his cult followers in the party’s activist base, are now looking faintly ridiculous. The prospect that Rishi Sunak will be brought down before the general election, possibly as a result of horrible local election results in May, has receded. 

Even some devoted Borisites will admit privately that Sunak has had a decent few weeks that have seen him play a big role in the downfall of Nicola Sturgeon, secure new terms of trade for Northern Ireland that are an improvement on what went before and set about tackling the Channel boats phenomenon with a degree of grit they did not anticipate. It turns out that there may be method in his sanity. 

The idea that Tory MPs will go back to the answer they first thought of by restoring Boris to lead the party into the next election after having lurched through Truss and Sunak is off the table. So what about his chances after that election, if Sunak has lost to Starmer and stands down?

On that score, the betting markets now already make Kemi Badenoch slight favourite ahead of Johnson and that chimes with the views of Tory grassroots members I talk to. They will be wanting a fresh start under someone who can make Conservatism mean something again. ‘The trouble with Boris,’ says one erstwhile fan, ‘is that everything always ends up being about him.’

Badenoch by contrast is seen as representing a coherent core of genuinely Conservative ideas and as having the willpower and charisma to sell them to the masses.

So whichever way the privileges committee report goes, and whichever way the general election goes, Johnson is a long shot ever to get back to Downing Street. His fate, more likely, is to be remembered as one of a quick flurry of three-year premiers: Brown 2007-10, May 2016-19, Johnson 2019-22. 

Unlike the other two though, at least he won a parliamentary majority at a general election. And while Brown can argue that he played a central role in limiting the damage during the emergency phase of the global financial crisis, May achieved almost nothing. She had the proverbial ‘one job’ and didn’t manage to get it done.

Johnson in his prime achieved more than either of them, rescuing British democracy by straining every sinew and braving every establishment blow to ensure the people’s verdict from 2016 was finally implemented. His overall Covid record is not too shabby either, when the booze-ups are set aside and it is looked at in the round. And he saw the Russian threat to Ukraine with a brilliant clarity that eluded other European leaders for months.

But it was a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man. And the hour is now passed. The premiership is off the table, so if his ambition is still unquenched he will need to turn his attention to securing a better job than that.

Why adults should read children’s books

During a recent family trip to South Africa, there was one book from my holiday reading pile that I simply couldn’t put down. It had everything: suspense, mystery, humour, fantasy, plot twists, heroes, villains and, ultimately, a happy ending. It also contained talking animals, unicorns and fauns. Because this wasn’t the latest bestselling crime or psychological thriller – my usual genres of choice. It was The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the children’s story by C.S. Lewis that I’d first read almost 40 years earlier.

Given that I have a nine-year-old son who adores books, you might imagine that my motivation for re-reading it was to do so aloud to him. Not so. At the time, the two of us were devouring the latest in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series together at bedtimes. But, at 49 years old, reading children’s books curled up on my own has become my guilty pleasure. As C.S Lewis himself once said: ‘A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.’

Sales of kids’ books continue to soar (how many are purchased by adults for themselves, I wonder?), and the UK’s children’s publishing market is expected to be worth £802 million by the end of this year. Small wonder when, according to the National Literacy Trust, regularly reading to little ones has ‘astonishing benefits for children’ including comfort and reassurance, confidence and security, relaxation, happiness and fun. When I read aloud to my son every evening – as I have done since he was born – it’s all about doing so in silly or characterful voices to enhance whatever mystery or hi-jinks the story requires. It builds the loveliest connection between us, and lines from some of our favourite tales have made it into our family’s lexicon. We chat about the characters and rate the books out of ten as we go along.

But as more and more of us seem to be discovering, reading children’s literature as adults can elicit benefits for us, too. It is said to help boost creativity, reduce stress, promote escapism, unleash our imaginations and reconnect us to our own childhoods. Children’s books are one of life’s great levellers. One friend, Katie, recently confessed that picking up her old collection of Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch (discovered in her parents’ loft when they downsized) had helped her to cope with a health scare. Another friend, Claire, confided that she is reading her way through Julia Donaldson’s extensive titles as a joyous antidote to a job she loathes. When a third, Sarah, was bereft after her mum’s death, she found comfort in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books which they’d read together when she was a child. It prompted me to order copies of Blyton’s Wishing-Chair and Faraway Tree series, which transported me back to being at primary school, gloriously unbridled by adult woes.

In Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old And Wise, author and Oxford fellow Katherine Rundell surmises that children’s fiction ‘helps us refind things we may not even know we have lost’, taking us back to a time when ‘new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before the imagination was trimmed and neatened [by adulthood]’.

Dr Louise Joy, an associate professor at Cambridge University, has also spoken and written about the subject, concluding that: ‘Reading children’s books as an adult enables us to retrieve an earlier, original part of ourselves – a way of thinking; a set of thoughts or feelings; a sense of who we are – which lies forgotten, dormant beneath the surface. The discovery that the very same thoughts and emotions can be accessed all over again, with all their original potency, is extraordinary. It is at once an exhilarating return to the familiar and at the same time a disturbance – a momentary alienation from who we have become. Nostalgic and troubling in equal measure, the experience of reading children’s books can be a uniquely affecting source of solace and illumination, one which reaches backwards in time and yet also forwards, reminding us of what it feels like for it all still to lie ahead.’

Reading children’s books for my own pleasure as an adult reminds me that one of my favourite things to do as a little girl was to visit the library in the small market town where I grew up. My parents were avid readers and Mum would take my brother and me there every few weeks. I recall it being hushed and calm all year round, and particularly cool on hot summer days. The chief librarian was a middle-aged woman with a lisp and wiry hairs on her chin, at which Mum always warned we must not point. In those days – the 1970s and 1980s – books were special gifts at Christmas and on birthdays, and in between we relied on those treasure-filled shelves in the children’s section of the library.

My latest purchase for myself is The Wind in the Willows. When it landed on the doormat and I read the opening few pages, I was transported back to reading it as an 11-year-old in my childhood bedroom. There are times I don’t feel like reading the latest thriller by T.M. Logan or Sabine Durrant, or books loaded with wisdom by Michelle Obama or Trevor Moawad (all of them currently in my pile). Sometimes only the simplicity, wonder, hilarity and often bonkers nature of children’s books will cut it. If I need to activate my chuckle muscle (as my son calls it), I’ll read his beloved Oi Dog! series by Kes Gray, or the Mr Men books, and if I need a bit of quintessentially English comfort then Paddington usually does the trick.

Of course, hidden beneath the whimsical titles and bright covers of titles old and new are philosophical quotes from which we can learn whatever our age. During lockdown I re-read Winnie-The-Pooh and printed out a quote from it which I still have on my desk, for those days when I doubt myself: ‘You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.’ Words as wise for adults as for kids.

Another quote which serves me well when life gets stressful and I feel my face permanently set in a scowl is from Roald Dahl’s The Twits: ‘A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly… if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.’

The current furore around some of Dahl’s classics being edited to remove words deemed ‘offensive’ decades after they were written has brought children’s literature to the fore again. Last month the Queen Consort appeared to wade into the debate when speaking at a Clarence House reception to celebrate the second anniversary of her online book club, the Reading Room, encouraging the assembled writers: ‘Please remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination. Enough said.’

Delving into children’s books is a magical, transformative indulgence, whatever your age. And even though not all of them have happy endings, they are hopeful – which is something we all need in our serious, grown-up state.

The hidden charms of Montenegro

The first thing you should know about Montenegro is that it is wildly more dramatic than you might imagine. It would be frankly rude not to pull up on its precarious mountain roads and gawp. In summer the Adriatic shines; in autumn the mountains compete with New England for glorious, rich colours.

The second thing you should know is that there is a relaxing lack of big-hitting sights. And anything you do want to do won’t take long. Even the most beautiful and Venetian of the tiny Balkan state’s towns take an afternoon at most to peruse, leaving plenty of time for lingering coffee stops and long fish lunches in the family konobas strung along the coast (which, if you were pushing it, you could drive end to end in around three hours).

The third thing you should know is that the Montenegrin’s signature snack, the savoury pastry borek, comes in four flavours – ‘meat, cheese, cheese or cheese’ – and bakeries will have run out by lunch.

Fuelled on early morning borek from a bakery in the old royal capital Cetinje, we make a first stop at Montenegro’s regal mountain, Lovcen, before navigating a spaghetti of roads to meet Milena Milic, who runs a small group of boutique hotels around the Bay of Kotor and who is championing Montenegro to give its more prestigious neighbour Croatia a run for its money attracting tourists.

The hotels grew out of her husband’s family grocery business and the pair have managed through successive crises: the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, Covid and more recently the sudden drop in both Russian and Ukrainian tourists who would normally spend summer on the Adriatic coast.

The Casa del Mare hotels are unassuming but immaculate. Where we stay in Kamaneri the balconies look out on the twinkling bay, and there is a rooftop garden to enjoy in summer. At the hotel’s beachside restaurant, Milic sticks to local food from her long list of local contacts: fig and sage grappas, the area’s signature cuttlefish ink risotto, tuna caught up the coast at Bar and dry-aged for 21 days. 

She raises an eyebrow when we say we plan to swim in the sea outside of the summer season. Montenegrins – a huge water polo-playing nation – consider any water temperature under 24°C a crime. Instead she directs us to Catovica Mlini, a fish restaurant in and around an ancient mill that has belonged to the same family for 300 years. Take it as you will that both Novak Djokovic and Bruce Forsyth are among more recent guests.

Around the rest of the bow-shaped Kotor coastline, the towns have a forgotten appeal. Kotor town itself is stalwart and proud; sleepy Prcanj is dominated by an outsized church; and Perast’s decrepit palazzos conjure up their own fairytales. In Herceg Novi, hundreds of tiny flights of stairs will draw you into sleepy sunny courtyards, several dominated by humming coffee bars.

Svetlana Dapchevich, general manager of Villa Geba, 60km down the coast, tells us that every beach in Montenegro is different – ‘even all the pebble colours are different’. At Sveti Stefan, the peculiar peninsula that was commandeered as a national hotel in 1936, pushing the remaining families on to the mainland opposite, the beach is pale terracotta.

It’s not possible to stay in the Aman Resorts-owned hotel there at the moment (and it would cost you the better part of £5,000 for a few nights) due to a dispute over beach rights. But staring out at it from Villa Geba, which is perched in the village facing it, is more than compensation. As Dapchevich says, better to look out at one of Montenegro’s most photographed spots than be on the island looking back at the far more normal village.

Certainly Geba is set up for taking in the view, with an infinity pool set into its smooth Romanesque terrace and floor-to-ceiling glass on all floors. I spend most of breakfast sipping Mariage Frères tea and staring languidly at Sveti Stefan’s rust pink roofs under which Marilyn Monroe and Orson Welles have stayed.

Beaches and their pebbles aside, one of Montenegro’s more surprising emerging assets is its wine scene. Tucked in and around the mountains of Lake Skadar, southern Europe’s largest lake, are tens, perhaps hundreds, of tiny family vineyards. Almost immediately upon arrival in Virpazar, the main gateway town to the Lake Skadar National Park, we put on the hiking boots and set off on a mind-bendingly scenic (and affordable) wine-tasting tour.

Misko Lekovic, whose family has been in the Skadar area for 14 generations, is typical of the area, if a little better set up for customers than most. He produces around 3,000 bottles of Chardonnay each year at his Garnet winery, timing the harvest precisely to capture a zesty tartness before the grapes dry up too much in the Montenegrin heat.

But the real crowd-pleasers, he says, are his red and rosé varieties which are made with the local Vranac grape. The red is known as ‘black wine’ such is the depth of the colour, he tells us as we sit under his dripping veranda in the village of Godinje, a heritage site that Lekovic campaigned to protect, sampling his homemade olive tapenade along with slugs of Vranac.

Like all the Montenegrins, Lekovic is hardened by the history of the area but intensely proud of what his country has to offer. And the next day, floating among the water lilies in Lake Skadar when the sun re-emerges, I can’t help but think that I’m glad we squeezed in a trip before the secret gets out too far.

Succession and the rise of ‘eat the rich’ entertainment

Farces, satires and straight slapstick comedies about extremely wealthy people have made popular entertainment for centuries. In film, the most notable example is Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), in which a group of upper-middle-class French people gather at swanky events, culminating in an affair that ends in a mistaken identity shotgun death, one that will be reported to the police as ‘nothing more than an unfortunate accident’.

HBO’s Succession, which returns to Sky Atlantic with a fourth season on Monday, has followed an even wealthier group of people, even more self-absorbed, distorted and cut off from the outside world than Renoir’s overzealous swingers and servants whistling past the future graveyards of Vichy. Jesse Armstrong has created an iconic family with the Roys: Brian Cox’s Logan, the dying lion; Jeremy Strong’s Kendall, the heir apparent who just can’t cut it; Sarah Snook’s Shiv, defter than her brother Kendall; Kieran Culkin’s Roman, the cocky baby brother with zero ambition; and the eldest child, Alan Ruck’s Connor, whose irrelevance to the family business is made clear without any real exposition.

What makes Succession brilliant as a television show is how much it’s able to communicate with so few words. In just three short seasons, there have already been several indelible moments: the Roy family bodyguard reassuring Kendall that no one will ever know he was in that car with that kid on ketamine, which flew off a bridge, only to have him rein Kendall in during one of his many attempted takeovers with the chillingly delivered: ‘I know you.’ Similarly, there’s Logan backhanding Roman in the face in a fit of rage, and by the next episode telling his youngest son: ‘I just want you to know that’s not something I do.’

Decades of abuse, trauma, neglect and the wrecking power of largesse are expressed in Succession without flashbacks or elaboration. Who is Logan’s late sister Rose, and why is she off limits for discussion? Holly Hunter plays Rhea Jarrell, a potential saboteur-cum-gold digger at the end of season two: after some conniving by the (adult) kids, is it her toast to Rose that sours Logan on her permanently? We still don’t know why a simple toast, a misunderstanding, could destroy what looked like a promising affair.

Much of Succession is an elusive mystery wrapped inside perhaps the smartest class criticism on TV. It demonstrates  why ‘eat the rich’ has supplanted #MeToo as the genre du jour. Culture wars are ephemeral, but bank accounts are not. I don’t know how much sympathy the average person has for blacklisted Hollywood actresses – only so many people are going to get excited watching Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan in She Said as the New York Times reporters who took down Harvey Weinstein. But since Succession debuted in 2018, movies and television shows mocking and examining the rich have flourished, from The White Lotus to The Menu and Triangle of Sadness, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year. (The dramatic implosion of FTX and the travails of Sam Bankman-Fried are probably being pitched to showrunners as this goes to press.)

But nothing so far has surpassed Succession. Not even The Menu, directed by Succession executive producer Mark Mylod. Ironically, it’s the camera work in Mylod’s film that’s most striking; it’s Succession’s weakest point by a wide margin. I understand the mockumentary aesthetic, however corny by now, but does every other shot have to be out of focus? HBO needs better focus pullers. Then again, unlike The Menu, they don’t have Peter Deming, the man who shot Mulholland Dr., Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: The Return and Scream 2 and 3. All of these ‘eat the rich’”’ films, including the widely praised White Lotus, look much better than Succession, but it’s the writing that makes that show stick. No wonder a Deadline writer’s first question for Mylod in a recent interview about The Menu was about Succession: ‘Do you have the season four scripts on your phone?’

He may or may not. All we know is that back in the boardroom, Tom came out on top at the end of last season, by double-crossing his wife Siobhan (the pointedly nicknamed Shiv) and her incalculably cruel siblings. Tom secured himself a trusted, high-level position in patriarch Logan’s life – unlike his real offspring, cut off after their attempted patricide in arbitrage. (With me?) We watch them well up as the modest Midwesterner moves up in the world without the begrudging help of his wife, a woman who asked if they could have an open marriage on the night of their wedding. ‘I’m not a hippy, Shiv’: in his response, you can read all Tom’s modesty, lack of cool, frustration, exhaustion and heartache. He may want to be wealthy, but he just wants his wife to be his wife, not a libertine.

What puts Succession over the top is its capacity to show the complexity in the fact that oppressed and abused people often do the same to those beneath them. Tom acts subservient, almost effeminate, in scenes with Logan but he treats Cousin Greg less like an errand boy and more like a monkey. When Tom finds out he’s not going to be the fall guy for a corporate scandal that would have sent him to prison, he destroys Greg’s office in a fit of adolescent ecstatic relief. However much the audience cries for its characters, Succession makes sure that they’re used almost strictly as punchlines.

This article was originally published in The Spectator‘s World edition.

What can we learn of George Eliot through her heroines?

‘I have… found someone to take care of me in the world,’ Marian Evans wrote to her brother in 1857, three years after setting up house with George Henry Lewes. Professing herself ‘well acquainted with his mind and character’, she requested that the modest income from her father’s legacy should in future be paid into her husband’s bank account. A reply from the family solicitor forced her to acknowledge that ‘our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond’. The funds were paid accordingly, but all contact was severed.

Very soon, money from Evans’s novels – written under the pseudonym of George Eliot – also began pouring into Lewes’s bank account. This was helpful, as he remained responsible for Agnes Jervis, the woman he’d married in 1841 and couldn’t divorce, since he had condoned her adultery. Eliot was actually entitled to hold on to her money, precisely because she wasn’t married. But as the couple’s letters were buried with her, we can only guess why she didn’t. She said: ‘My writings are public property: it is only myself… that I hold private.’  However, the letters to the brother and the solicitor do survive – in Lewes’s hand.

Clare Carlisle teaches philosophy at King’s College, London. Her previous books include studies of Spinoza, and Kierkegaard – who wrote the admirably succinct: ‘Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it.’ Eliot’s philosophy of marriage emerges as more diffuse, if equally inconclusive. Carlisle shows her learning more from Spinoza, whose Ethics she translated during her first months with Lewes. Spinoza argued that if two people sharing ‘the same nature’ lived together, they would become ‘a double individual, more powerful than the single’. Eliot often referred to this doubleness in describing her bond with Lewes – which cost her dearly in terms of other relationships. During their years together she rarely visited the homes of others, and only invited to her own those who signalled their desire to come. It is hardly surprising that marriage figures so prominently in the novels she began to write at Lewes’s suggestion: it was the only relationship she really inhabited after 1854.

The two shared a ferocious work ethic, but did they share the same nature? Not in any obvious sense. Carlisle describes Eliot as being ‘melancholy and earnest’, and Lewes as ‘cheerful and brazen’. Years into the marriage, when Eliot was asked about the origin of Edward Casaubon’s character in Middlemarch, she gently indicated herself. That admission – much less well-known than Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ – gives ballast to Carlisle’s suggestion that Eliot borrowed from Lewes for the character of Dorothea’s pragmatic younger sister. It is lovely to think of the author pouring herself into the depiction of a vain and desiccated clergyman, and drawing on her partner (who was described by George Meredith as a ‘mercurial little showman’) for the matronly and commonsensical Celia. Autofiction begins to look like thin gruel in comparison.

The unexpected success of the relationship between the woman later described by Henry James as ‘a horse-faced bluestocking’ and the man Jane Carlyle christened ‘the Ape’ is testament to the talent of one and the good character of the other. That is the version that both Eliot and Lewes curated in her lifetime, and from which few have dissented. They stand out as much the happiest couple of the five Victorian marriages Phyllis Rosedepicts in her Parallel Lives (1983) – a key text of second-wave feminism at its most inclusive and forgiving.

Earlier critics have sometimes taken Eliot to task for her reluctance to stand up for herself, or champion women’s suffrage, and for grabbing, within two years of Lewes’s death, and only seven months before her own, at married respectability with Johnny Cross, a wooden banker 20 years her junior. Modern readings suggest that Lewes’s takeover of Eliot’s life (monitoring her correspondence, managing her money and shielding her from the society he himself continued to enjoy) could be construed as coercive and controlling as well as nurturing and protective. Carlisle alludes to, but does not endorse, this interpretation. Her style is exploratory, and she immerses herself in the novels, offering close readings of one wretched union after another. She spends less time on the couple’s life at the Priory, the regency villa in St John’s Wood to which the Leweses moved in 1863. This marked the beginning of 15 years of quasi-respectability, when the world came to visit on Sunday afternoons – usually without the wife.

Spinoza’s philosophy, Carlisle explains, also shows ‘why a partnership might diminish a couple’s power, rather than enhance it. Our porous boundaries and susceptibility to influence can be both a blessing and curse’. By the time we get to Middlemarch, Eliot has moved on to Hegel, and writes a novel which ‘confirms that desire and destruction are thoroughly entwined’. We may doubt whether we need Hegel to throw light on Middlemarch, but perhaps Carlisle’s implication, not quite spelt out, is that we might better understand Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage by way of the characters Tertius Lydgate and Rosmond Vincy.

It is one of the many miracles of Eliot’s novels that her immense learning did not get in the way of her depictions of life. The exception to this is usually agreed to be Romola. Contemporary critics admired her portrait of late-15th-century Florence, but readers, then and now, have baulked at it. Carlisle shows an academic’s appetite for the dense and difficult by not acknowledging Romola to be either, and instead concentrates on the circumstances of its composition.

Lewes had sold the novel to a new publisher for a vast sum, to appear in parts. Eliot was uneasy about the arrangement. ‘Decisions have been made,’ she wrote in her journal, and on one occasion, when Lewes was out of the room, she apologised to John Blackwood, the publisher she had left, and to whom she subsequently returned. Carlisle connects this rare glimpse of disharmony in the Lewes ménage to an analysis of Romola’s own anguished swings between the duties of resistance to tyranny and obedience to her tyrant husband.

While Eliot guarded her privacy, her novels explored themes of sacrifice, deceit and restraint. Her heroines are studies in the impossibility of having it all – Dinah Morris abandons her startling gift for preaching early in her marriage to Adam Bede; Maggie Tulliver gives up her lover for her brother, and dies anyway; Dorothea renounces ambition; Romola learns there is no compensation for a failed marriage, and Gwendolyn Harleth, who is made for love, learns to live without it. Or did Eliot’s sense that ‘worship [of Lewes] is my best life’ enliven her imagination of marriages in which the parties so quickly fell out of love and confidence into knowledge and disillusion?

Carlisle’s account of Eliot’s life with Lewes left me hungry for more. What part, for instance, was played by the dog, mentioned once, name of Pug? Did they both dote on it, or was it a bone of contention? Ditto servants: how long did they last, what were they like, and who managed them? Eliot, whose novels Carlisle describes as surging with the successful ‘effort to connect thought and feeling’, once wrote of Herbert Spencer that his theories were undermined by ‘an inadequate endowment of emotion… there is a vast amount of human experience to which he is as good as dead’.

I feel something similar about the lacunae in this generally absorbing book. What even is a philosophy of marriage that doesn’t acknowledge the domestics?

Did the sinking of the Blücher in 1940 affect the outcome of the war?

In the conclusion to this forensically detailed book, the authors, one a naval historian, the other a retired naval officer who served in the Oscarsborg fortress outside Oslo – the cornerstone of the story – during the Cold War, ask: ‘What would have happened if Hitler had not unleashed his dogs of war on Norway in April 1940, or if Blücher had not been sunk?’ To which of course they reply that we shall never know.

They do, however, posit that in the worst case, Churchill might not have become prime minister, and the evacuation from Dunkirk would not have been the success it was. That’s not entirely new, but it’s not always remembered – Dunkirk especially – or at least not outside the authors’ Norway. The Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square isn’t merely a thank you.

Operation Weserübung, the German invasion of neutral Denmark and Norway, began in the early morning of 9 April. It wasn’t war, said Berlin, but ‘military measures for the protection of the neutrality of Denmark and Norway’. The claim was faintly plausible, as Britain had been trying vigorously to mount a naval blockade to weaken German industry, which was dependent on the import of iron from northern Sweden through the Norwegian port of Narvik. The claim didn’t wash as far as Denmark was concerned, but invading Norway without first neutralising Denmark would have been perilous.

While Denmark quickly capitulated, however, Norway fought. Her forces had been mobilised for some time, not least because of the Soviet threat following the invasion of Finland, and the implications of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Hitler had expected the Norwegian government to surrender, but if not, Vidkun Quisling, the head of the fascist Nasjonal Samling, would stage a coup d’état.

As with Denmark, the key to success would be a coup-de-main operation against the capital, putting the king and his government in the bag. But Oslo was not Copenhagen. To land troops in the heart of the capital meant a long approach up the Oslo fjord, much fortified since the near-war with Sweden at the turn of the century. The German high command had to assume that either the Norwegians wouldn’t oppose the landings, or else they could take them by surprise. But for surprise, all they could rely on was darkness. Full marks for boldness, none for professionalism. The Norwegians were seasoned sailors, unlikely to leave the outer fjord unobserved, and powerful searchlights covered the narrow approaches to Oslo.

Leading the German taskforce was the battlecruiser Blücher, laid down in August 1936 in contravention of the Versailles Treaty, launched in June 1937 and completed in 1939, shortly after the outbreak of war. She had since been engaged in sea trials and training exercises, and hurriedly pronounced ready for service with the fleet on 5 April 1940. But the Kriegsmarine was not the Royal Navy, which one way or another had been continually at sea since 1914. Officers and crews may have been technically proficient, but they hadn’t acquired much fighting seamanship, as the cruiser Graf Spee had discovered in December.

Blücher was accompanied by the heavy cruiser Lützow, the light cruiser Emden and several other troop-carrying ships, darkened and showing no flags; they were spotted in the early hours of 9 April and their progress up the fjord reported, although no positive recognition could be made. In the end it would fall to the commander of Oscarsborg fortress at the southern end of the Drøbak Narrows, the entrance to the inner Oslo fjord and the capital’s harbour, to make the call – the 64-year-old Colonel Birger Eriksen. Contrary to standing orders to fire warning shots first, Eriksen, reckoning that a darkened warship must reasonably be taken as enemy, and, calculating that the fortress would only be able to fire one salvo and one spread of torpedoes, gave the order to open fire. The interlocking secondary batteries followed suit.

The effect was devastating:

Large parts of the [Blücher’s] central superstructure and the battery deck and armoured deck became an inferno as ammunition and explosives from the Army stores detonated, set off by burning aircraft fuel and explosions from the torpedo workshop. Efforts to contain the fires were futile.

On the first day of her first operational sortie, Blücher was sent to the bottom, and with her the decapitation strategy. The royal family and government were able to escape north, and thence to London to continue the fight. The hapless British-French-Polish landings between Trondheim and Narvik to counter the invasion precipitated the ‘Norway debate’ in the Commons in May, from which Churchill emerged as war leader. The Norwegian army and navy continued fighting until 10 June, however. An active campaign on the strategic right flank, not least the Kriegsmarine’s continuing losses, could not but have been a concern to Berlin during ‘Fall Gelb’, the invasion of the Low Countries and France in May.

It is a gripping story, well told, and with excellent photographs and maps.

The bittersweet comedy of ageing: Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories, by Lore Segal, reviewed

Every family has its folklore. Apparently, as a five-year-old, I was on the floor playing when I looked up at my grandmother and told her matter-of-factly that she ‘was not the kind of granny I had been expecting’. I’m not quite sure what my foetal presumptions had been, but she is far from the hackneyed image society reserves for older women: no blankets or twee knitting for Norma. Sharp, glamorous, her face alive with mischief, she is a lady who lunches, a nonagenarian who shared stories, gossip and advice amid a riot of laughter.

She would be familiar with much of the gentle drama in this collection of Lore Segal’s stories, which revolves around five women in their nineties dining on a monthly basis together. But, unlike my granny’s lunches, Segal’s meals contain more namedrops than food, and often leave you wanting more.

Born in 1928 to a Viennese Jewish family, the author was evacuated to England on the first Kindertransport mission, aged ten, and bounced from home to home – an experience which informed her autobiographical first novel, Other People’s Houses. She was reunited with her mother, and ended up in New York, but her father died before the end of the war, interned on the Isle of Man as a German-speaking alien. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, displacement and loss echo through Segal’s work.

Readers will recognise the structure of Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories from Segal’s Pulitzer-finalist novel of inter-woven tales, Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2007). Here, five stories which appeared in the New Yorker between 2007-22 are presented, together with a host from other publications and six previously unpublished pieces. It makes for an uneven read.

‘Dandelion’ is a beautiful vignette, which opens like a flower as the narrator recalls a childhood hike with her father in the days before the second world war, and how she moved from bliss to embarrassment and, looking back, regret. The Holocaust squats in the background of many of these stories, and comes to the fore in ‘Making Good’, about a ‘bridge-building workshop’ that brings together Jews and ‘the children of the Hitler generation’ to ask (in a roundabout way): for what are we responsible, for what can we atone?

It is an example of Segal’s tendency to put a crowd of people into a small space, such as a room or a restaurant. The trouble is that while some characters are drawn deftly, others barely exist, save to muddy who is speaking or why. Take the collection’s opener, where the five ‘ladies’ are crammed in with a lot of others. We struggle to get a real sense of the relationship between the women. In the end, the story has more characters than pages.

But Segal’s best is very good, and comes when tracing the rhythms and bittersweet comedy of aging, of lives after loss. In the title story, Lotte, a once ‘witty friend’ whom the years have pickled into an abusive ‘angry old person’, is moved into a care home against her will. The tale unfolds as a heist to free her, but really it is a failed heist against old age. Lotte may effectively be a prisoner in Green Trees, but the rest are locked in their vulnerable lives, unable to drive, or to remember tasks, or rely on their bodies.

It is a spare, moving portrait in miniature, offering a glimpse of what we might expect ‘around the corner we can’t see around’. But as both my grandmother and Segal’s collection show, expectations aren’t always met.

Living in a state of fear: a haunting memoir

The Fear, a memoir by the author and artist Christiana Spens, opens with an account of the most Parisian of existential crises. A ‘newly heartbroken philosophy graduate’ in ‘the city of Sartre and de Beauvoir’, she is too depressed to get out of bed: ‘It was as if standing was falling, too pointless even to attempt.’ Finally driven outside by hunger, she ends up ‘wandering around a French supermarket wanting to die’. She finds temporary relief in stealing a housemate’s Diazepam pills, but the escape she longs for is love: ‘Nothing worked the way love did’; it was ‘the ideal, the solution, the cure’. Her consciousness of being ‘one more cliché in a city full of them’ only intensifies her agony.

But this book is anything but an assortment of clichés. It roams so widely – narratively, emotionally, intellectually – that it’s almost impossible to categorise. It is a memoir – a powerfully affecting tale of devastation and survival. But it is also a tour around a prodigious array of topics related to the theme of fear. On one page Spens explores the ways in which terrorism is ‘mythologised’ to serve the aims of the powerful; on another she finds a kind of spiritual dimension in masochism, calling it a search for ‘peace and the disintegration of our own egos’. She considers the work of figures from Jacques Lacan to Lana Del Rey, Edgar Allan Poe to Patti Smith. A formidable bibliography includes Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche (although, curiously, no Kierkegaard, the great philosopher of anxiety).

In case it isn’t already obvious, Spens trained as an academic. She recounts how, after completing a PhD on depictions of terrorists in the media, she realised she had been ‘using thinking as an escape from feeling’. Indeed, for all the cerebral energy in this book, its heartbeat is the intimate story that begins, for the reader, with that breakdown in Paris – and which began, for the author, with a series of earlier traumas.

The details are bracing. Her father, sick with cancer through most of her childhood, was ‘always on the verge of death’. One boyfriend was abusive; another died of a crack and heroin overdose. At 19, she was the victim of a serious sexual assault. No wonder she fell prey to what clinicians might call PTSD, but which Spens, giving the condition a philosophical inflection, calls ‘the Fear’ – a ‘haunting, compelling thing… rendering us passive and tormented… and yet fascinated by the depths of its darkness’.

Light begins to break into the narrative when, in her mid-twenties, just a few days after her father dies, Spens discovers she’s pregnant. Once addicted to the analgesic of destructive romance, she finds in her son a ‘new love’ that ‘transformed everything’. Little by little she learns to live with, and even sometimes transcend, the Fear. ‘We eventually find ourselves, and then one another,’ she comes to reflect. ‘The world does not have to be a terrifying place, at least not all the time.’

But Spens doesn’t patronise her readers with a glibly redemptive narrative arc. In one of the book’s most charged moments she goes back to the neighbourhood where she was assaulted a decade earlier, seeking catharsis but finding only a complex mixture of relief and disappointment. There is an allegory for the paradox of much memoir writing here: an attempt to leave the past behind by revisiting it.

‘So can we learn to live with our fears and wounds, and yet live victoriously and nobly?’ Spens asks. The fact she has survived to tell her sometimes harrowing tale, and to pose such a question in the form of this graceful book, is a victory in itself. But The Fear is ultimately brave enough not to provide any simple answers.

The remarkable prescience of Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) produced what his biographer Hugh Brogan called ‘the greatest book ever written on the United States’. Among the most remarkable things about this work – Brogan was referring to the first volume of Democracy in America, not the more abstract second volume – is that Tocqueville’s journey to the United States lasted just nine months, and was undertaken when he was in his mid-twenties, never to return. Yet the book’s publication, when Tocqueville was still only 29, made him an instant celebrity.

The young French aristocrat was especially pleased by its reception in America, where an unauthorised edition was published in 1838. He wrote to his friend Gustave de Beaumont, with whom he’d made the trip, about a review by a Harvard professor called Edward Everett:

What particularly impressed me was the praise for my impartiality and above all for the great truthfulness of my portraits… I was afraid that I might at times be making monumental errors, principally in the eyes of the people of the country.

The acclaim was not universal, of course, and several scholars have subsequently taken aim at Tocqueville’s reputation, accusing him of making sweeping generalisations based on a whistlestop tour in which he rarely ventured beyond the company of the social elite. ‘A fact usually omitted in discussions of Tocqueville is the shallow empirical basis of his study,’ wrote Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books in 2004. Tocqueville has been upbraided for failing to notice the rapid industrialisation that was taking place during his visit, as well as being indifferent to the suffering of the black population, a sin he repeated on a later visit to Algeria, where he praised French colonialism. Even at the time, American critics took issue with his warnings about ‘the tyranny of the majority’ – a constant danger in a democracy, he thought – and attributed it to his having witnessed the presidency of Andrew Jackson, whom he met in Washington and was unimpressed by. 

Jeremy Jennings, a professor of political theory at King’s College, London and an expert on the history of French political thought, has set out to rescue this reputation. In a magisterial biography, he retraces the footsteps of Tocqueville, not just across America, but on his other foreign excursions – always with a notebook in hand and driven by a voracious intellectual curiosity. Thus, we accompany the pioneering political scientist, who briefly served as minister of foreign affairs in the short-lived Second Republic, on his trips to Canada, England, Ireland, Switzerland, Algeria, Italy and Germany. We soon discover it wasn’t just on his trip to America that Tocqueville was able to see beyond the view from the carriage window and into the heart of the society he was travelling through.

To be sure, the Comte de Tocqueville, who inherited a castle in Normandy, was not always able to transcend his own biases as a Catholic nobleman (although he lost his faith as a teenager). For instance, he thought the more direct version of democracy that had emerged in Switzerland was less likely to endure than the elaborate representative government he encountered in the US, describing it as ‘the most lax, powerless, blundering and incapable [system] that one could imagine’.

He also believed that the philosophes of the French Enlightenment had been too quick to declare the Christian faith incompatible with the scientific and democratic revolutions sweeping the world, taking much comfort from the piety of nearly all the people he encountered in America. ‘When I arrived in the United States, it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eyes,’ he wrote to his friend Ernest de Chabrol in 1832.

The most astonishing thing about Tocqueville’s work is how many of the observations he made about the new social and political order he saw emerging in the first half of the 19th century have endured. His prediction that democracy in one form or another would eventually replace the desiccated systems of government that characterised Europe’s ancien régime – that it was the destiny of all the world’s civilised peoples, not just the English-speaking, to embrace democracy – was remarkably prescient. Even more impressive was his grasp of its shortcomings, prefiguring Churchill’s judgment that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

It’s true that by today’s standards he was not as alive to the injustices of the America he journeyed through as he might have been, neglecting to scold his hosts on their treatment of Native Americans as well as the enslaved black population. But, as Jennings points out, he was far from indifferent to it. He referred to slavery as ‘the most formidable of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States’, and in a deleted passage from the first volume of Democracy in America he wrote: ‘The Americans are, of all modern peoples, those who have pushed equality and inequality furthest among men. They have combined universal suffrage and servitude.’

He was also sensitive to the suffering he encountered elsewhere, remarking on the extraordinary inequality that characterised Victorian England, as well as the indignities inflicted by the British on the Catholic population of Ireland. Yes, he defended France’s conquest of Algeria and travelled to the interior in the company of the French army, but he was disgusted by Napoleon III’s attempts to create a replica of his uncle’s empire, and was hardly alone among 19th-century political theorists in having a blind spot about colonialism.

Was he right about ‘the tyranny of the majority’? Most western democracies have proved reasonably adept at defending the rights of minorities, putting legal and constitutional protections in place that serve as bulwarks against demagoguery, although there were several glaring exceptions in the 1930s. But when Tocqueville alerted his readers to this risk, he was thinking as much about the psychological cost of challenging the majority view as he was of the political difficulty. He recognised that in a society characterised by ‘equality of conditions’, in which political questions were decided by a majority vote, there was an absence of alternative sources of authority, which made it hard for mavericks and dissenters to survive.

For Tocqueville, this was the explanation for the extraordinary uniformity of opinion he encountered in America. He wrote in Democracy in America:

In the United States, the majority takes charge of providing individuals with a host of ready-made opinions, and thus relieves them of the obligation to form for themselves opinions that are their own. I know of no other country where, in general, there reigns less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.

Many American readers, then and now, objected to this criticism; but for most Europeans who’ve spent time in America it is obviously true. I remember going there as a graduate student in 1987 and being struck by the fact that there was a greater range of political opinions among the ten students I’d studied PPE with at my Oxford college than there was in the whole of the Harvard Department of Government. Since then, with the triumph of the Great Awokening, the lack of viewpoint diversity in America’s universities has only got worse. For anyone seeking to understand this phenomenon, Democracy in America is still essential reading.

The scholarship on Tocqueville is voluminous, and retracing his journey across America has been done several times. But Jennings’s book is the first to exhaustively follow him on his travels outside America as well, and provides a highly readable introduction to the work of one of the 19th century’s most insightful political theorists, as well as a persuasive defence of his ideas.

Foreign Office blows £2.5 million on ‘disinformation’ index

‘Cuts’, ‘retrenchment’ and ‘savings’ are very much the buzz words over on King Charles Street. There’s lots of talk about ‘fierce and draconian’ reductions in foreign aid spending with James Cleverly warning that ‘money is tight.’ So Mr S was surprised to discover that the Foreign Office will spend at least £2.5 million on the controversial ‘Global Disinformation Index.’

What’s that, you might ask? The GDI is a (supposedly) non-partisan, non-profit which aims to provide ‘independent, neutral and transparent data and intelligence to advise policymakers and business leaders about how to combat disinformation.’ The British-based outfit recently hit the headlines on the other side of the pond after ranking leading American publishers among the ‘most risky’ sites in the United States. It published a 27-page risk assessment report in December in which the New York Post was found to have ‘frequently displayed bias, sensationalism and clickbait’, a view which, er, its staff understandably don’t share.

Another of the supposed worst offenders was the libertarian magazine Reason and the conservative magazine the American Spectator. All of the sites deemed the ‘ten riskiest online news outlets’ among the 69 studied by the GDI were right-leaning, prompting concerns of political bias. Funny that! Republican congressman Ken Buck has now written to the Secretary of State Anthony Blinken demanding answers as to why Blinken’s taxpayer-funded department is ‘paying foreign (and domestic) entities to perform what is essentially censorship is troubling.’

Over here, there has been a far more muted reaction to the report, thought the Times did pick the story up at the beginning of March. The Foreign Office insisted to the paper that the GDI has made ‘a significant contribution to countering harmful content from hostile state and non-state actors’ and added that ‘the FCDO does not fund the GDI’s activities in the US.’ Still, they are funding the same organisation which is pumping this stuff out – and the Foreign Office are by no means stingy in their largesse. In response to a written question by Philip Davies MP, the FCDO was forced to admit it has spent just shy of £2 million between 2019 and 2022, ‘with a further £600,797 during the current financial year.’

John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, told Mr S that:

Taxpayers are bound to wonder whether funding such a far-removed quango is the best use of their money, especially at a time when household budgets are squeezed thanks to sky-high tax bills. Disinformation is an emerging threat but chucking money at faceless bureaucrats risks duplication and overreach. Ministers should think twice before committing millions to unaccountable global bureaucracies.

One for the chopping block next time there’s a spending review perhaps?

Boris versus Cummings: Round XII

Quick, nurse, they’re at it again! Boris Johnson’s evidence to the Privileges Committee today has re-started the longest running war in Westminster, after a temporary cessation of hostilities. Johnson savages his former No. 10 advisor Dominic Cummings in his submission, referencing the Vote Leave guru and his infamous Substack no fewer than ten times during his 52-page submission.

Suffice it to say, none of those references are complimentary. Johnson torches his onetime confidante in his testimony, declaring that Cummings ‘cannot be treated as a credible witness’ as he ‘bears an animus towards me’. He writes that ‘it is not clear what, if any, work the Committee has done to test the credibility of what is now said by Dominic Cummings, including his animosity towards me’ and ‘that there is no evidence he was told that any gatherings broke Covid rules other than what Dominic Cummings now says.’ Johnson concludes that

there is no evidence at all that supports an allegation that I intentionally or recklessly misled the House. The only exception is the assertions of the discredited Dominic Cummings, which are not supported by any documentation.

Ouch. And now, true to form, Cummings has fired back on his aforementioned Substack. He writes darkly that ‘I’m in the middle of writing my own statement to the official inquiry’ before saying he’s looking forward to how ‘the Trolley tries to lie his way to safety’ tomorrow. Cummings then says that ‘the chances of him returning this year’ are overrated as Sunak:

Can use the vast trove of material in PET (the part of the Cabinet Office that deals with scandals) to smash the Trolley up. Much remains unpublished. And remember that useless Lord Geidt didn’t even bother investigating all sorts (he didn’t interview key people who actually knew what was going on). So if Sunak’s team is crashing, there’ll be people in No10 who’ll think ‘we may be doomed but we’ll finish the trolley off’. And spads who’d relish it will be helped by officials who don’t want the trolley smashing around again as they prepare for Starmer.

Good to see that, in these uncertain times, at least one constant feud remains…

Does it matter if Putin uses a body double?

Was it Vladimir Putin or wasn’t it? ‘Vladimir Putin’ was certainly shown on television being helicoptered into Crimea this week, meeting ‘the people’ and driving himself around reconstruction sites in the devastated city of Mariupol.

In the wider world, though, there was widespread scepticism that it was the real Russian President. Clips were posted on social media showing the supposedly different chin-line and puffier cheeks of the latest ‘Putin’, while even the BBC injected a note of doubt into some of its despatches, using words like ‘reportedly’ to qualify his (potential) visit.

There have long been rumours that Putin uses a body-double – although it is also possible that his apparently different facial features are because of medical treatment. If Putin does use a double, he would not be the first Russian leader to do so, nor the first national leader worldwide.

Long before Putin, Stalin was one of those reputed to have deployed a double, largely for security reasons. Hitler, too, along with North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un. And Saddam Hussein. You get the drift here of the sort of leader likely to use such a deception, or the sort of leader propagandists would like to present as likely to use one. For many, Putin (now more than 20 years at the helm of Russia) would clearly fit the pattern. It should be said though that while dictators and autocrats dominate the market for political doubles, General Montgomery notably had a ‘double’ which allowed ‘Monty’ to rally the troops in two places at once.

It is not hard to divine why a national leader in a country with no democratic constraints and no free media might think it a good idea. Being somewhere, while simultaneously not being somewhere, is both the perfect security precaution, and an excellent economy of time.

I wonder, though, how far the scorn attached to the (reported) use of body doubles is really justified. How much does it really matter whether it is the real Putin or a false Putin who was in Mariupol?

Of course, there are ways in which it does matter whether the leader is appearing in person or not. If the real Putin did not go to these Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, this suggests that the Kremlin judged the security situation to be less than ideal, or that Putin’s health was not up to the trip, or that he had more important things to do.  

Whether it was a genuine Putin or a false one, however, the message conveyed by the trip was the same. The Kremlin clearly wants to show that Russia is in charge in Crimea and particularly in Mariupol, that the remaining population is not in revolt, and that rebuilding is proceeding apace.

This was an important message to get across to the Russian domestic audience, where support for the war may or may not be waning. But it might also have been designed for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, too, ahead of his state visit to Moscow this week – to show that Russia has made gains in Ukraine, which it is consolidating, and to counter western reports to the effect that Russia is losing.

To an extent, all political messaging is artifice. The Kremlin’s priority was to show that Russia was in charge in this occupied territory here and that the President could move around as he chose. And this is what the footage showed, regardless of whether the Putin shown driving the car was real. It is worth adding that the real Putin really likes driving, to the point where, before the war, it became a bit of a signature activity for him, whether it was opening a new road across Russia; demonstrating a new Russian car marque; or inaugurating the road bridge to Crimea. Showing him at the wheel was another way to give this visiting ‘Putin’ authenticity.

That said, it is unclear if body doubles will be useful for much longer. The whole concept already has more than a whiff of obsolescence. At a time when a young Abba can appear holographically on a London stage to universal applause, the days of physical doubles are surely numbered. In politics, too. Almost a year ago I was at an election rally in France, where the dark horse for president, Jean-Luc Melenchon, appeared as a hologram to hold forth simultaneously in 11 cities across France.

So the career prospects of aspiring Putin-doubles may be limited. Technology moves on. For many, however, the hologram could be the ultimate bad news, facilitating a ubiquitous Putin – for everyone, everywhere, forever.  

ERG criticises Sunak’s Brexit deal – but could still back it

What scale of rebellion will Rishi Sunak face on his Brexit deal? There had been hopes in Downing Street and the whips’ office that this could be in single figures when the deal is put to a vote tomorrow.

However, the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson has said his party – all eight MPs – will vote against (notably, the Ulster Unionist party today described it as ‘an important stepping stone’), leading to concerns that Tory Brexiteers could follow suit. Today, the European Research Group (ERG) met to discuss its ‘Star Chamber’s’ legal findings – and it doesn’t make for pretty reading for the Prime Minister.

The group – led by chairman Mark Francois – accused Sunak of promising more than the Windsor Framework really offers. Speaking after the meeting, Francois spoke of the 30-strong group’s key criticisms which include a fear that the Stormont brake (the aspect MPs are being asked to vote on), meant to provide a mechanism for Stormont and the UK government to say no to new EU single market rules, is ‘practically useless’. This is on the grounds that it would have a ‘very narrow application in theory’ and ‘allows the EU to take “remedial” countermeasures’. However, even if the UK unilaterally chose to override parts of the Northern Ireland protocol bill, the government would be at risk of countermeasures for breaching an international agreement. The ‘Star Chamber’ report also criticises Sunak’s claims over the ‘green lane’ on the grounds it won’t apply to all ‘at risk’ goods and also raises concerns that EU law will still be supreme in Northern Ireland.

The document is long in its criticisms, which is why it’s rather curious that Francois’s announcement was not accompanied with a pledge that the ERG will vote against the deal. Instead, he suggested that the group may not vote unanimously – with a further update to follow. This points to how opinion is divided among Tory Brexiteers. As I reported when the agreement was first unveiled, in an initial meeting over the framework, figures such as Bernard Jenkin were downbeat, questioning the differences between UK and EU versions of the text and asking whether Sunak has oversold it. Yet others argued that, given the deal was undeniably an improvement on the status quo, it was hard to make a case against it. This is what it comes down to – should the Windsor Framework be judged on whether it is an improvement on what has previously been agreed or whether to take issue with it as an agreement in of itself.

While Sunak would like the group to back the deal, its opinion does not carry the same weight as it did back in the Theresa May years. Not only has the parliamentary arithmetic moved in the Prime Minister’s favour, many Leave-voting MPs – such as former ERG chair and current Northern Ireland minister Steve Baker – see the framework as a palatable way to close a bruising chapter between the UK and Brussels.

Does Boris Johnson’s partygate defence stand up to scrutiny?

This morning, Boris Johnson’s response to the accusations against him was published in a substantial dossier to the Privileges Committee. It comes just a day before the unprecedented hearing that is likely to determine his political future.

This submission was a long time coming. In its interim report, published on 3 March, the Committee noted that it had first written to Johnson asking for his version of events as long ago as 21 July last year. Spectator books editor Sam Leith – who worked with Johnson in his former role as Daily Telegraph comment editor – suggested that this late submission was very much ‘on brand for the great man’.

What do we learn from the 52-page dossier? Well, Johnson accepts that he misled parliament. His main contention seems to be that this was not deliberate and that he ‘could not have predicted the subsequent revelations that came to light following the investigations by Sue Gray and the Metropolitan Police’.

Johnson and his advisers have also made some punchy arguments about the committee’s processes, focusing on a number of procedural issues. Johnson argues that the committee’s proceedings go beyond their remit and that it is potentially biased, complaining about the ‘partisan tone and content’ of the interim report.

None of this seems hugely convincing and, based on my two decades working as a senior parliamentary lawyer, I would suggest that some of Johnson’s defences are simply hyperbolic.

The attacks on process by his counsel, including on the standard of proof which should be used by the committee, are not new. This line of attack was also used by the late Lord Lester QC during the inquiry into his conduct in 2018 in the Lords. In a report issued by the House of Lords Conduct and Privileges Committee, the civil standard of proof (essentially that the allegations are more likely than not to be true) was accepted to be the appropriate one. It is far from clear this case merits any special treatment.

Given the consequences for Johnson, the committee will want to be sure that it has strong evidence to back up any finding. It has already acknowledged that, since the allegations are serious, ‘evidence to be relied upon should be of especially high quality and cogency’. The submissions it has received have each been backed by a statement of truth, equivalent to an oral statement under oath. Attempts to portray the hearing as being akin to a criminal process by some commentators are disingenuous; Johnson faces no criminal sanctions.

The more general attacks on the committee rather give the impression of someone trying to get their retaliation in first. Any recommendation made by the Privileges Committee will have to be endorsed by the Commons, and I envisage that the complaints about fairness are very much designed for that audience. After all, if one has a strong case, one rarely attacks the very tribunal which is about to hear it.

It is quite shocking the lengths to which some of Johnson’s supporters have gone in an attempt to smear the committee in advance of tomorrow’s hearing. Fervent Johnson loyalist Nadine Dorries has spent the past few days making her case on Twitter, saying that the committee’s chair, Harriet Harman, has a ‘strong position of bias’. Elsewhere, Jacob Rees-Mogg labels it a ‘political committee against Boris Johnson’.  

The committee has made a number of significant changes to its procedures to ensure transparency and fairness. This includes, for the first time in my experience, holding its evidence session in public. It has also appointed a former Court of Appeal judge to provide it with advice; has provided Johnson with all the witness evidence that it has received; and has published an interim report in which it has set out the substance of the case against him. The original chair, Sir Chris Bryant, recused himself after making intemperate comments about Johnson – precisely to avoid any claims of bias.

It is notable that on 16 March, the Leader of the House, Penny Mordaunt, was forced to defend the Committee on the floor of the House, stating that it was ‘doing this House a service’ and that it should be ‘permitted to get on with [its] work without fear or favour’. She said ‘a very dim view will be taken of any member who tries to prevent the committee from carrying out this serious work, or of anyone from outside the House who interferes’ adding, cryptically: ‘On a personal level, an even dimmer view will be taken of anyone from the other place [the House of Lords] who attempts to do similar.’ It is not entirely clear whether this was aimed at some of Johnson’s more devoted followers in the Lords (who have compared the committee to a kangaroo court), or his leading counsel, although I would like to think it was the former.

In addition to the attacks on process, Johnson’s evidence states that he acted in ‘good faith’ and suggests that he was under a general assumption, at the time, that events were compliant with Covid ‘rules and guidance’ at the time. At best, this may assist him in refuting the fact that he deliberately misled the House.

The challenge that Johnson will face tomorrow is that, as well as the four separate occasions that the committee has suggested that he may have misled the House (whether inadvertently, ‘recklessly or deliberately’), it has also highlighted the fact that the former prime minister ‘did not use the well-established procedures of the House to correct something that is wrong at the earliest opportunity’. This is contrary to the 1997 Resolution of the House on ministerial accountability to parliament. If Johnson is unable to rebut this interim conclusion, then such a finding could well amount to a contempt of parliament in its own right. His initial attempt, in the submission, where he argues he could not say anything while investigations by the police and Sue Gray were ongoing, appears fairly weak.

None of this means that his political career is necessarily over. The former prime minister has a knack for wriggling out of the tightest gaps, earning him the (not entirely flattering) nickname ‘the greased piglet’.

Even if the committee finds that Johnson has committed a contempt, the type of sanctions that it can recommend include anything from requiring him to apologise to the House, to proposing a suspension of ten days or more which could, in theory, lead to a recall petition and a possible by-election in his constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Given that its recommendation must be approved by the House of Commons, I would be surprised if the committee opted for the nuclear option unless it had very cogent evidence that Johnson had deliberately misled the House on these matters.

One prediction I am happy to make, whatever the outcome of the hearing, is that everyone in Westminster will be watching tomorrow afternoon.