Is Donald Trump really going to be arrested?

How will it look, for the health of American democracy, if the former President Donald Trump is put in handcuffs next week over charges that he paid ‘hush-hush money’ to the porn star Stormy Daniels? 

The man himself seems to be bracing for legal persecution over what he calls ‘The Stormy Horseface Daniels Extortion Plot.’ He says he expects to be arrested on Tuesday and blames his ’sleazebag’ former lawyer Michael Cohen, who claims Trump paid him £230,000 to pay off Daniels and another woman called Karen McDougal, who was voted America’s second ‘sexiest playmate of the 1990s.’ 

Trump has always denied the allegations and says the whole Daniels case is ‘ancient and now many times debunked.’ Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has been investigating whether Trump’s alleged payments broke state law. Trump’s campaign say that Bragg is a ‘George Soros-backed Radical Left Democrat Prosecutor.’ 

Trump has called on his supporters to ‘protest’ – which hysterical media opponents have immediately interpreted as another call for violence a la January 6th. And so the silly dance goes on. 

Team Trump argue that the 45th President’s corrupt political enemies and the deep state have ‘weaponised’ the justice system against him. The language sounds hyperbolic but it isn’t altogether wrong. What else do you call it when a political figure is prosecuted so vigorously on so many fronts, often on what seems to be thin evidence? 

Trump, the American Berlusconi, has a chequered past, no doubt, and a bizarre relationship with reality. But there’s also no denying that eight years of attempts to prosecute him on manifold fronts – Russia, Ukraine, tax, incitement to violence, hush money, fraud, and more – have so far failed, even if he has been impeached twice.  

Yet the prosecutions and the stories around them go on and on, like a sort of tabloid Huit Clos. Porn stars! Secret Documents! Attempted Insurrection! And then nothing changes and Americans will probably still have to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential elections. 

In the coming days, further indictments and allegations against Trump are expected – chiefly over his ‘hoarding’ of classified official documents at Mar-a-Lago. This story went strangely quiet for a few weeks earlier this year as it emerged that Joe Biden has also been guilty of hanging on to classified files he should have returned – going back to his time as a senator. 

The facts of the Trump Files Story and Biden Files Story may be different, but Trump supporters will understandably feel aggrieved if their man is prosecuted over something Joe Biden did too. 

The wheels of justice in America grind slowly. But they grind towards always never-quite prosecuting Donald J Trump. But this isn’t really about justice and everyone knows that. It’s about politics. And the political dynamics of the legal ‘Get Trump’ story are intriguing – in that they end up suiting Biden and Trump. 

Joe Biden, for all his cant about Trumpism endangering democracy, secretly wants Donald Trump to run. The White House team clearly think their best chance of re-election is to face Trump again in 2024. Therefore Biden probably doesn’t want his Attorney General Merrick Garland to put Trump behind bars. The ideal for Biden would be for Trump to be endlessly caught up in legal recriminations but never to taken down convincingly. Which funnily enough is exactly what seems to be happening. For Trump and his fans, meanwhile, the endless prosecutions only prove that the deep state is out to get him, which is why the Donald is so keen to mention the ‘hoax’ indictments at every turn. 

It’s all theatrics, in other words, a legal shadow-play which most people don’t believe, but which helps both Democrats and Republicans validate their prejudices. Biden vs Trump, the 2024 edition, could be the most ugly and dishonest election yet. 

Are we failing to learn lessons from the Holocaust?

Ninety years ago this week, the acting chief of the Munich Police Department held a press conference. The new man had been busy. On assuming office a few days earlier, the chief had tried to get to grips with what he saw as acute political unrest in the city by authorising a wave of mass arrests. The primary targets were leading figures in the Communist Party and paramilitary groups made up of trade unionists, liberals, and social democrats. According to the chief, it was no longer possible to guarantee the security of such people, and so scores of them were unceremoniously taken into so-called ‘protective custody’.

However, a new problem had emerged. The round-ups were performed with such zeal that the city’s prison cells were now bursting at their seams. A radical solution was required. The answer, the chief told the press that Monday, lay on the grounds of an old munitions factory in a town 12 miles north of the Munich. Here, in a place called Dachau, was soon to open a camp where individuals “who threaten the security of the State” could be concentrated. Two days later, on Wednesday 22 March 1933, around 200 prisoners arrived to a watching crowd. Nazi Germany’s first concentration camp had officially opened. The police chief had reason to be pleased: Dachau would become a springboard for the expansion in power and influence of a paramilitary group that he led, named the SS. In the process, his name – Heinrich Himmler – would become a crimson stain on the annals of history.

Today, Dachau has become what Christopher Dillon calls ‘a linguistic shorthand for the nameless horrors waiting beyond barbed wire throughout the Third Reich’. Alongside other terms and phrases like ‘the camps’, ‘gas chambers’ and ‘the Nazis’, places like Dachau and Auschwitz have entered everyday language and acquired cultural potency. This reflects how as a society we have come to believe the historical period these words come from has meaning, significance and relevance for us today.

But familiarity with these terms, does not necessarily equate to widespread understanding of the history that they come from and refer to. Two years ago, a study of Holocaust knowledge and awareness in the UK found ‘a surprising lack of awareness of key historical Holocaust facts’. This data followed a national study by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education of 10,000 11-18 year olds in 2016, which revealed many young people as having gaps in their basic historical knowledge of the Holocaust and troubling misconceptions about the Nazi past. For instance, as well as superficial understandings about the experiences of groups targeted by the Nazis, young people were also found to have erroneous ideas about who the Nazis were and who was responsible for the Holocaust. Meanwhile, although ‘concentration camps’ were prominent in students’ thinking, they had partial and incomplete understandings of the camp system, differences between camps, and the existence of camps beyond just Auschwitz.

After a generation of Holocaust education in this country, with events like Holocaust Memorial Day in our national calendar for over 20 years, how can this be? Part of the answer lies in how the Holocaust has traditionally been taught in schools. Another factor is that pressures on teachers have impacted approaches to teaching and learning. A third reason is that the condition of our collective knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust and the Nazi period reflects how we are choosing to remember the Holocaust, in schools, in public education spaces, and in wider society.

All of this matters partly because, in the historian Dan Stone’s phrase, the Holocaust is an ‘unfinished history’ and our memories of it bear scant resemblance to historical reality. Dachau is a case in point here; how many people are likely to know, for example, that the camp came into existence because of the regime’s brutal repression of political opposition? Or that those early inmates initially found themselves not in the camp of our imagination, but in a largely run-down site guarded by policemen? To be sure this soon changed, and the evolution of Dachau into an instrument of systematic terror is emblematic of the development of the concentration camp more broadly. As Nikolaus Wachsmann has shown, between 1933-1945 around 2.3 million people were at some point incarcerated in the concentration camp system, with some 1.7 million losing their lives.

Knowing the details of this history of violent persecution and how it relates with the policies of mass murder during the Second World War is important. It is vital for the past and for those people in that past; morally and ethically, we need their actions and experiences accurately represented. It is equally important for us in the present; we need to be able to talk and debate in a way which is informed by the perspectives that history can offer.

Only by teaching the next generation about the horrors of what unfolded 90 years ago can young people acquire insights from the past – and help ensure that, when we say ‘never again’, we really do understand what we are committing ourselves to.

This week’s Privileges Committee could decide Boris’s fate

Boris Johnson was reselected on Thursday night as the Conservative candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency. Yet the future of his parliamentary career could be decided this week when he appears before the Privileges Committee. The former prime minister is facing a Commons inquiry into whether he knowingly misled parliament over partygate, the alleged Covid rule breaches in Downing Street during lockdown.

On Wednesday afternoon, Johnson will appear before the seven MPs who make up the committee. The panel is led by Labour’s Harriet Harman along with four Tory MPs – Charles Walker, Bernard Jenkin, Alberto Costa and Andy Carter, one more Labour MP Yvonne Fovargue, and the SNP’s Allan Dorans. Johnson will face questions as to what he knew and when with the initial report by the committee (which has been gathering evidence) finding that members of Johnson’s own team struggled to argue that the gatherings were within the rules.

Johnson will mount a defence of himself – arguing that he was following the advice of his team in the comments he made on partygate in the Commons chamber and that it was reasonable to act on the information and guidance he was given by senior members of his team. His legal defence has been led by Lord Pannick KC, who has previously questioned the committee’s decisions. Pannick is expected to accompany Johnson to the session on Wednesday. Johnson’s MP backers have gone further, suggesting that the whole inquiry amounts to a ‘kangaroo court’. The fact that Sue Gray – who led the original investigation into partygate – has been offered a role with Keir Starmer’s team has been cited as further evidence of the establishment being against Johnson.

Yet if the committee finds against Johnson, he could soon face a big parliamentary problem – even if he and his supporters find success in the media. The worst case scenario for Johnson is that the committee finds him guilty as charged and recommends a Commons suspension as punishment. If the recommended suspension amounts to ten sitting days or more, then Johnson would be vulnerable to a recall petition. If signed by more than ten per cent of his constituents it would trigger a by-election. Johnson currently has a majority of around 7,000.

If the committee recommends a suspension, MPs would have to vote on it first to approve it. When former Conservative MP Owen Paterson faced such a suspension in 2021, Johnson decided that Tory MPs ought to vote against it – but later U-turned under pressure. Rishi Sunak has already said that in such a scenario, MPs would have a free vote so could vote how they like on the issue.

However, given the opposition would back such a measure and many Tory MPs remain scarred by the Paterson debacle, the odds would not be good for Johnson avoiding punishment in such a scenario. It’s why the former prime minister and his supporters will be doing everything they can in the coming week to try to avoid it getting to that point in the first place.

The whole SNP project is now in danger

And so the Nicola Sturgeon years end with neither a bang or a whimper but with one pitiful desk-clearing after another. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and the chief executive of the SNP, has announced his resignation. It comes after Murray Foote, the party’s chief spin doctor, walked on Friday. He had been rubbishing media reports that the party’s membership rolls had shrunk by 30,000 since 2021. 

Then, Ash Regan, a candidate in the leadership contest to replace Sturgeon, questioned the integrity of that process and demanded the membership numbers be made public. Backed into a corner, SNP HQ released the figures, which showed a drop in members of 32,000 over the last two years. In his resignation statement, Foote said he had been ‘acting in good faith’ in issuing ‘agreed party responses’ to journalists on behalf of HQ, but it had ‘subsequently become apparent that there are serious issues with those responses’. In drawing an ethical line where he has, Foote may be the only figure to come out of this episode with his reputation intact.

Foote’s departure was preceded by the announcement that Liz Lloyd would be leaving government. Lloyd is Sturgeon’s long-time right-hand woman and previously served as the First Minister’s chief of staff. However, there was disquiet when it was reported earlier this week that, despite being a Scottish government special adviser, she was advising the leadership campaign of Humza Yousaf, widely seen as Sturgeon’s favoured replacement. Lloyd said yesterday that it had ‘always been my intention’ to exit the Scottish government when Sturgeon does. 

‘It takes decades to build a political party but days to destroy one,’ Alex Salmond tweeted yesterday. The fall of Sturgeon, and perhaps with her the New SNP that she fashioned, has indeed been precipitous. We can trace it back to a number of events. There was the unanimous Supreme Court ruling that Holyrood could not legislate for a referendum without Westminster’s permission. 

There was pushing the unpopular and hardline Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill through the Scottish parliament, with the concerns of women’s rights campaigners and SNP MSPs brushed aside. Then, when the Bill was blocked by Westminster for fear it could change how UK law operates, there was fresh anger: all that political capital expended for nothing. There was ongoing disquiet about the party’s financial arrangements, including a police investigation into how £667,000 of supporters’ donations, raised for a ring-fenced independence fighting fund, was ultimately spent. 

Then there was the sheer emptiness of the Sturgeon policy cupboard. In eight years as First Minister, she pledged but failed to close the educational attainment gap, introduced but failed to meet ‘legally binding’ NHS targets, oversaw the worst drugs death figures in Europe, and commissioned two ferries now five years overdue and three times over budget. The impression was growing inside her party that she had allowed her coalition with the Scottish Greens to compromise the SNP’s governing agenda, with critics citing the GRR Bill, a chaos-ridden deposit return scheme and the breaking of a pledge to dual the A9, a fatal car crash hotspot that runs through several SNP-held constituencies. 

Since announcing her resignation, Sturgeon has had to watch as contenders to replace her trash her legacy. Yousaf now stands as the final, desperate hope of the regime. If they can drag him across the finish line in this race, he can be expected to continue Sturgeon’s approach of kicking independence into the long grass while reorienting the party around elite priorities, closed-door policy-making, and the whole panoply of progressive identity politics. This is the New SNP, and while it has coincided with big electoral wins for the party, it hasn’t brought independence an inch closer and has clearly cost it a significant number of members. 

The New SNP project is now in danger. If Yousaf’s main rival Kate Forbes wins the leadership contest, Sturgeon will be politely but firmly retired and the party refocused on voters’ priorities, competent governance, and building a credible case for independence. If Forbes wins, there will be a lot more desk-clearing to come. 

SNP chief executive Peter Murrell stands down amid party crisis

First, it was Nicola Sturgeon. Now her husband Peter Murrell has resigned as SNP chief executive after a scandal about covering up a fall in party membership numbers. He quit after being told that unless he did so by midday he’d face a confidence vote. That this happened on a Saturday lunchtime shows the disarray now engulfing the SNP hierarchy.

It started yesterday when Murray Foote resigned as SNP parliamentary communications director. He said he had been misled (perhaps by Murrell himself) when he rubbished reports – calling them ‘drivel’ – that SNP membership had slid from 103,884 to 72,186 amidst frustrations about Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill. If Foote quit for having unwittingly misled the public, what are the implications for Murrell?

‘Responsibility for the SNP’s responses to media queries about our membership number lies with me as chief executive. While there was no intent to mislead, I accept that this has been the outcome,’ he said in a statement. ‘I have therefore decided to confirm my intention to step down as chief executive with immediate effect. I had not planned to confirm this decision until after the leadership election. However as my future has become a distraction from the campaign I have concluded that I should stand down now, so the party can focus fully on issues about Scotland’s future.’

Murrell implied that this had nothing to do with him being Sturgeon’s husband and also running the party during a leadership election: there are Chinese walls, he implied. ‘The election contest is being run by the national secretary and I have had no role in it at any point’.

But the party now has plenty more to focus on, including whether its hierarchy has created a culture where membership declines are not merely covered up but falsely denied – as well as questions about who else needs to go. This is not just about Sturgeon, but the whole apparatus around her.

And that appears to be how Kate Forbes sees it: ‘Many of you, like me, will be hurt and bemused by the extraordinary turmoil in our party over the last days,’ she said in a statement prior to Murrell’s resignation. Pete Wishart, an SNP MP, has also called for the ‘broadest possible inquiry’ into the membership cover-up after Foote announced he was leaving due to ‘serious issues’ with ‘agreed party responses’ he had been issuing.

During the first week of voting for the next party leader, the SNP party machine has come under very visible scrutiny – and it hasn’t fared well. Now we see the leadership battle turning into an internal crisis with three key SNP figures having resigned within the last 24 hours and even calls for the leadership contest to be halted.

Ash Regan’s campaign team has been instrumental in ensuring recent revelations surfaced. She saw Yousaf as the candidate of the SNP machine and has been gunning for that machine. With the support of Kate Forbes, she released an open letter to Murrell requesting that up to date membership figures be released. When they were, the cover-up was exposed.

In his resignation statement, Murrell says he had no intent to mislead – but that’s hard to reconcile with what happened. A story in the Sunday Mail described the SNP membership as having fallen by about 30,000, to which the SNP response was emphatic: ‘It’s not just flat wrong, it’s wrong by about 30,000.’

Was this one rogue briefing? No: Chris Musson of the Scottish Sun was advised by SNP HQ in February that ‘we don’t offer a running membership total as it fluctuates daily. It shouldn’t be too far off our latest published number, which was just over 100,000.’ In fact, they had lost almost a third of their membership since 2021.

After Regan’s campaign team piled on the pressure, SNP HQ’s hand was forced: figures released on Thursday revealed that the party membership had fallen by 31,698. Since 2019, the SNP’s membership has fallen by 43 per cent.‘It takes decades to build a political party,’ tweeted former first minister Alex Salmond, ‘but days to destroy one.’

The collapse began last night when head of media Murray Foote announced his resignation. ‘Acting in good faith and as a courtesy to colleagues at party HQ,’ Foote wrote, ‘I issued agreed party responses to media enquiries regarding membership. It has subsequently become apparent there are serious issues with these responses.’

Hours before, Nicola Sturgeon’s strategic policy and political advisor Liz Lloyd – a hugely influential figure – announced she too would be resigning from government after Regan’s campaign team raised concerns about her role in Yousaf’s campaign. Reports emerged earlier in the week that she had been providing advice to Yousaf, which Regan’s campaign said could be breaking party rules.

A spokesperson for the Scottish government said that this was not the case, that ‘special advisers are permitted to assist with party leadership elections, in their own time, while still employed by the government’. Lloyd quit her job anyway. 

Having previously bashed the Conservatives for their own sleaziness and lack of honesty, it isn't a good look for the SNP to be facing multiple resignations linked to integrity issues.

All of this makes the race harder for Yousaf: he can now be cast by his opponents as the puppet of a collapsing mafia when a new broom is needed. A number of members will have already sent in their votes but given recent revelations, Regan is threatening legal action and wants the contest stopped. After all, those who have already voted may reconsider their choices with this new information. Yousaf used his status as the ‘continuity candidate’ at the start of the race to get voters on side, pledging no radical shift in the party direction. The last few days have made 'continuity' look like a far riskier option.

Poland, 1968: the last pogrom

‘Are you Jewish?’ the officious-looking Dutch diplomat asked my dad. ‘Yes’, he said, realising at that very moment, everything had changed. He was no longer Polish; the culture he had been born in, the citizenship he held, the language he spoke, the country he loved – it all meant nothing. He was just Jewish. He couldn’t be both. The diplomat stamped my father’s papers and he left for a new life in western Europe.

Up to 20,000 Jews, including my mother, were hounded from Poland at the end of the 1960s. They were accused of supporting Israel in a virulent anti-Semitic campaign led by the communist government. This anti-Jewish campaign was ostensibly sparked in 1967 by the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours, supported by the Soviet bloc. But in truth, the campaign was the result of a power struggle inside the governing Polish United Workers’ party. In an effort to curry nationalist favour, Władysław Gomułka, Poland’s de facto leader, publicly castigated the last remaining survivors of the Holocaust as a ‘fifth column’ for rejoicing in Israel’s war victory. Jews were purged from government, leading institutions, academia and the military.

In factories, workers spontaneously passed anti-Zionist resolutions, while local branches of the communist party and even sports clubs purged Jewish members. Like the previous generation, they left their homes, possessions, and in some cases sick and elderly family members. There was physical violence too, especially against students protesting against the communist regime in March 1968 and calling for democratic reforms. My uncle was one of them; he was expelled from university, arrested, beaten and eventually had to flee the country. Others were tortured and drafted into the army, as the regime particularly targeted Jewish protesters. Ordinary Jews were said to be conspiring with ‘Jewish Stalinists’, ‘Zionists’ and, grotesquely, ‘German neo-Nazis’.

In the end, more than half of Poland’s Jewish community was forced into exile. My grandfather had survived the Holocaust by pretending to be a Polish Catholic, exchanging his Jewish-sounding surname Finkel for what he believed was the more convincingly Polish Korski. When the war ended he reverted to Finkel but couldn’t find any work. So he changed it back to his fake name and got a job that day.

It’s been our surname ever since, a reminder of the importance of flexibility but also of the enduring nature of hatred. When, in 1945, my grandfather tried to make it to France where he had studied before the war, he was caught and expelled back to Poland. He concluded that there were anti-Semites everywhere and at least he knew the Polish ones. A year later, Polish soldiers and police officers, as well as average citizens, attacked a group of Jewish refugees in Kielce, killing 42 and wounding 40. My grandparents tried to leave again but were denied the right to travel abroad.

Instead, my grandfather began building the new socialist Poland. This was a Soviet country, one that promised to eliminate the injustices of the past. That sounded pretty appealing to many Holocaust survivors. He served in the Communist party and in various government jobs, negotiating the deal for Fiat to build a car factory in Poland. So much a party man, Henry Korski was even trusted to travel to the West in the 1950s, visiting Spain in 1962 and Italy in 1963 with his son, my father. When a colleague of his was accused of spying for the West and eventually executed for treason, my grandfather was investigated but cleared of all suspicion. His commitment to Poland was clear.

This was what made the events following the Six-Day War so traumatic. Suddenly my grandfather and his family were reduced, once again, to just being Jews. Not Poles. Not communists. Not people, deserving of respect. The medal my grandfather received for his work saving a collapsed mine was worthless. The years of service, irrelevant. They were just Jews.

First, my grandfather lost his job, then my father was expelled from the Communist Youth Movement and was eventually pushed out of university. My father recalls telling his mother as she sat shell-shocked in their small apartment, struggling to come to terms with having to flee for the second time in her life: ‘We are sitting in a nice warm room, but the fire is raging outside; we have to leave’.

Even though the Polish government wanted the Jews to leave, doing so wasn’t easy. The government was arguing that Jews were Israeli agents and would, accordingly, only grant people the right to leave for Israel. However, Israel didn’t have diplomatic representation in Poland, so people had to go to the Netherlands Embassy to get visas. That is how my father found himself in front of a Dutch diplomat being asked the question that changed his life.

My father managed to borrow the money to buy my family plane tickets to Vienna. From there they could decide where to go next. My grandfather wanted to return to France, my grandmother wasn’t keen on going to Israel, and had already Sweden rejected their asylum application. The Korskis eventually set off hoping to make it to Australia where friends had gone. But every step of the way was complicated. At the airport, Polish border guards tried to bar them from getting on the plane and, when they eventually relented because of pressure from the other passengers, the guards made my grandparents leave valuables behind. A final kick from a regime that wanted Jews gone.

In the musical Fiddler on a Roof, Tevye the milkman says in one scene: ‘Dear God… I know, I know we are the chosen people. But once in a while, can’t you choose someone else?’ Many Polish Jews must have felt like Tevye. My father’s family eventually made it to Vienna and, after several days of living as stateless refugees, unexpectedly received asylum from Denmark where they eventually ended up. My mother’s family has a similar story. They ended up in Sweden. Eventually both families made a good life for themselves. ‘We were thrown out to paradise,’ my father once joked. He saw his old friends suffering behind the Iron Curtain and then through the difficult transitions of the 1980s and 1990s.

I was born in Denmark into an idyllic life: cosseted by the Danish welfare state, protected by the US Cold War security guarantee, and raised by a family who, however comfortable they made their lives through hard work, knowing that everything could change immediately; that they might need to pack their bags in the middle of the night and flee. Ask my mother today and she will be able to tell you exactly where she will flee and what possessions she will take with her (currently Canada).

What has always struck me is how little this last pogrom is known, even among Jews. So this month my friends Daniel Schatz, Philip Boyes, Rene Rechtman and I – all children of expelled Jews – are launching an archive to collect the testimonies of those Jews that were expelled. The end of more than 700 years of Jewish Polish history deserves attention. I have a personal interest in making sure my family’s history is known. But I also think the pogrom carries an important lesson for the modern world.

The current Polish government prefers to argue that the events following the Six Day War were the acts of the communists, not the acts of Poland. The country, they argue, was occupied. In 2018, Polish President Andrzej Duda half-apologised to Jews driven out of the country, saying he regretted the ‘shameful act’ and asked ‘for forgiveness’. This was an important and welcome statement. However, he also made it clear that ‘the Poland of today, my generation, is not responsible and does not need to apologise’. 

For many Jews outside of Poland, this stretches credulity. Thousands of people, including ordinary Poles, participated in the ostracisation. Some who perpetrated the crime continued to climb the professional ladder. General Jaruzelski, for example, was Defence Minister in 1968 and led the anti-Jewish purges in the military. Later he became president and, even after the fall of communism, received a full state pension.

Most Jews who left have not been looking backwards or seeking reparations. But some continue to harbour resentments, passing it on to their children. I am at ease with, and indeed proud of, my Polish heritage. But I know too that the best way to heal the wounds that many still feel is not to caveat any apology. It is dangerous to pretend the events of the past have nothing to do with the present, lest we want to become blind to the horrors that can still happen. When people talk about just being anti-Zionist rather than anti-Semitic, I can’t help but think of my family whose lives were upended because of a similar conceit. Not all of Gomulka’s enforcers were raging ideological anti-Semites – but they didn’t have a problem using anti-Semitism as a political tool when it suited them, and knew even then the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism was fatuous.

The Dutch diplomat asked my father a bureaucratic question. She needed to know what he was in order to know if she could process his asylum application. But the question became so much more. It’s proof that being Jewish isn’t just another identity. It is what we can always be reduced to. It’s who I am when everything else can be stripped from me. And it’s why it’s important that this last anti-Jewish pogrom is more widely known.

What can save Credit Suisse now?

It would be enough to buy Tesco twice over. Or Barclays, with almost enough change left over to buy Lloyds as well. Even by the standards of the financial markets 50 billion Swiss francs (£45 billion) is a lot of money. And yet, as it turns out, it is not enough to save Credit Suisse.

The Swiss government is searching around increasingly desperately for a way to fix the embattled bank, including this weekend a merger with its traditional rival UBS. But in the end it now looks inevitable that it will have no choice but to take it over and wind it down in the most orderly way possible. Credit Suisse is beyond rescuing. 

With rumours of its impending collapse swirling through the markets last week, the Swiss National Bank finally decided it had no choice but to step in with a rescue plan, On Wednesday night, it offered the bank a Swf 50 billion lifeline, enough money it hoped to prop it up while it management tried to work out a way of rescuing it. It was a lot of money, almost 6 per cent of Swiss GDP, or double the amount that Gordon Brown committed to rescuing the Royal Bank of Scotland during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. And yet, within a day the rescue was already unravelling, with Credit Suisse’s shares tumbling once again. On Friday, the shares fell another 10 per cent and were back close to the mid-week lows. 

This weekend, the Swiss government and regulators are trying again, with reports of a merger with UBS. It may be forced into rescuing its rival, but it is clearly being hustled into the deal, and shows no enthusiasm for it. After all, UBS could have bought Credit Suisse at any point over the last five years if it wanted to. Zurich, where both banks are headquartered, is a smallish town, and it is safe to assume that UBS’s senior executives know enough about the state of their rival not to go anywhere near it if it can possibly be avoided. Indeed, UBS’s shares were also down by 10 per cent last week, as investors started to grow nervous that it might be made to sort out the mess. 

In reality, it is hard to see that Credit Suisse has any future left. Once confidence in a bank evaporates, it is virtually impossible to ever win it back. With years of scandals and mismanagement behind it, Credit Suisse has clearly run out of time. Even a 50 billion lifeline from the Swiss central bank has not been enough to save it.

A merger with UBS will be the last throw of the dice. If that fails as well, as it well might, there will be few options left other than a full state takeover, and a gradual winding down of its operations. It will be hugely expensive for the Swiss state, and will end up costing a lot more – but trying to keep it alive no longer looks like a realistic option.

Make Sex Wild Again

The notorious Infowars host Alex Jones once opined that he didn’t like the government ‘putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay’. CNBC called this a ‘disturbing and ridiculous conspiracy theory’, and Jones is noted for wild and sometimes actionable claims.

But if we read ‘gay’ in the colloquial sense, as offensive shorthand for ‘feminised male’, Jones’s assertion contains a glimmer of truth. Chemicals really are going into the water that so disrupt the endocrine systems of small aquatic creatures, including frogs, that males sometimes undergo sex reversal or adopt homosexual behaviour. It’s just that the synthetic estradiol that damages fish and amphibians isn’t being added to the water as a sinister government conspiracy. 

The truth is more banal: traces of estradiol are peed into the sewage system by every woman who uses hormonal birth control, and this compound is difficult to remove in sewage treatment. So if you’re on the pill, it’s not the government messing with frogs’ sexual behaviour. It’s you.

The catastrophic ecological impact of hormonal birth control is one of the many cognitive dissonances in liberal feminism, a movement that generally prides itself – at least superficially – on alignment with progressive causes including concern for the environment. But the lure of consequence-free sex is so powerful that no matter how often the ecological destructiveness of the pill is reported, this fact somehow never seems to register in the popular consciousness. It’s the only way we can go on viewing as ‘consequence-free’ something that in fact has serious consequences – just largely borne not by humans, but by frogs and fish.

That doesn’t mean there are no consequences for us, though. After 50 years of its reign, the figures are in: the pill’s effect on the delicate social ecology of sexual relations has been every bit as bad. The pill plays a central role in opening the door for a host of figurative poisons, which have percolated into every facet of our intimate relations. And on both ecological and social fronts, many feminists simply choose to look past these side effects, because progress means individual autonomy at any price.

In the view of internet historian Katherine Dee, changing attitudes to the pill stand in for wider concerns about the sexual revolution. Many young women from across the political spectrum, she argues, internalised the contemporary ‘liberated’ approach to sex – but have, as Dee puts it, come to feel they were ‘duped’.

Increasingly, such women are blaming hormonal birth control for a slew of side effects. They’re looking for alternatives, too: videos with the #naturalbirthcontrol hashtag on TikTok have been viewed more than 30 million times.

On the face of it, the complaints are about biological side effects. But we can also read, beneath this, a broader statement: the pill is making me miserable. And this is a far broader critique. For in de-risking sex, this technology has made it ubiquitous, and in the process stripped desire of anticipation, excitement and mystery: emptied it of eroticism. In its place we’re offered an increasingly coarse, commodified and grotesque landscape of all-you-can-eat lust.

This marketisation of sexual desire has been under way now since the 1960s. And digital culture has accelerated the ways we’re able to buy sexual stimulation or sell ourselves as commodities. The resulting hellscape of sexual anomie is the true face of what calls itself ‘sex-positive’ feminism, a movement that doesn’t seem to have prevented Gen Z from slumping into a ‘sex recession’. Indeed, it may even be driving it. Pornography degrades the capacity for mutual pleasure: Dr Harry Fisch calls porn ‘the single, largest non-health issue that makes relationships crumble’, linking porn over-use with erectile issues and inability to orgasm.

This phenomenon is known as ‘death grip syndrome’. Pervasive digital access to porn is leading to a widespread societal indifference to sexual stimuli. As @gotsnacks_ puts it on TikTok ‘I’m booty’d out’. Or, in the case of those older women of my generation who were the first to walk into full-spectrum sexual ‘liberation’, we might say brutalised to the point of no longer wanting to remain silent.

Former Playboy columnist Bridget Phetasy describes this experience in an essay titled ‘I Regret Being a Slut’. Here, she recounts how when she was younger, ‘I would have said one-night stands made me feel “emboldened”. The truth, though, was that “I was using sex like a drug”‘. Phetasy reports that she now regrets all but a handful of her youthful sexual encounters, nearly all of which were ‘either meaningless or mediocre (or both)’ and most of which ‘left me feeling empty and demoralised. And worthless.’

In her view, the greatest damage she did to herself lay in the indifference she cultivated, as a cover for how unhappy it made her feel to be treated as worthless: ‘I told myself I didn’t care,’ she writes. ‘I didn’t care when a man ghosted me. I didn’t care when he left in the middle of the night or hinted that he wanted me to leave. The walks of shame. The blackouts. The anxiety.’ Eventually, she recounts, she hit rock bottom when she received a text message that read ‘Goodnight baby I love you’ – swiftly followed by another that read, devastatingly: ‘Wrong person.’

By today’s standards, Phetasy and I merely dipped our toes in the shallows of what the sociologist Anthony Giddens called ‘plastic sexuality’. Since then, the collateral damage has grown steadily worse. The expectations set by free-access porn now routinely result in teenage girls enduring acts they don’t enjoy in exchange for the barest signs of affection. A BBC Scotland survey suggested that over two-thirds of men under 40 have spat on, slapped or choked their partner during consensual sex – with many indicating that this was inspired by porn consumption. And fetish practices far more extreme than slapping or choking are now so mainstream that magazines for school-age girls write about ‘kink’ for their youthful readers. This percolates out into real life, with young women on social media recounting experiences of abuse perpetrated in the name of ‘kink’. 

None of this would be possible unless, in the name of freedom and progress, we’d accepted a view of women as sterile by default with fertility as an optional extra. Even for those women who somehow avoid violent or degrading sexual demands, default sterility means continual pressure to accede to loveless sex. The problem Virginia Ironside discovered in the 1960s – that being on the pill made it hard to refuse sex – has only grown worse since, with many women now ‘consenting’ to unwanted sex largely out of politeness.

None of this is in women’s interests. ‘Liberation’ shouldn’t mean violence and casual hook-ups with a 10 per cent chance of orgasm. Phetasy now denounces the culture she imbibed, which reduced ‘sex-positivity’ to a promiscuity that left her empty and demoralised. Crucially, she argues: ‘You can still be sex-positive and accept that for you sex can’t be liberated from intimacy and a meaningful relationship.’

I’m less courageous than Phetasy in describing my own adventures in ‘liberation’. All I’ll say is that she speaks for me as well. I don’t think we’re outliers, either: as Louise Perry puts it in her 2022 The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: ‘Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering’. The torrent of acclaim Perry’s book received across the political spectrum suggests that there are many other women out there who feel the same.

We can’t simply stuff the technology back into its box. But we can – once again – lead by example by rejecting it. Don’t take the pill. Don’t encourage your friends to take the pill. Quite aside from harming aquatic life, and facilitating the pervasive pornification of mainstream culture, the pill causes mood issues, weight gain and libido loss. It’s also a crucial precondition for bad sex, because it de-risks casual hook-ups. Why would you take a pill that makes you fat, miserable and sexless?

Objectors may point out that this raises a coordination problem. If mainstream sexual culture now assumes that women will by default be sterile and sexually available, then how is any heterosexual woman who refuses this dynamic ever to find a partner? Won’t men simply pass them over for someone who plays by the usual rules? 

Not necessarily. Katie, a researcher from Washington, DC, says that in her experience, dating while refusing birth control was ‘not at all awkward or weird’. Rather, in her view, it serves to filter out frivolous would-be partners: ‘If you’re serious about it, and they’re serious and thoughtful too, then it’s not an issue.’ That is, the men for whom it’s a dealbreaker are those who anyway only wanted sex: ‘If they were focused on things that were solely about a physical relationship – sure that’d make it hard.’ Katie’s principles have evidently not proved an obstacle to finding a partner: she recently married.

Other objectors might accuse me of trying to legitimise a conservative ‘purity culture’ under the guise of feminism. And it’s true that religious conservatives have long been critical of the pill. But while my reactionary feminist prescriptions – rejecting the pill and casual sex – are similar, I’m not arguing for female ‘purity’ in the sense of imagining that women could or should somehow remain free of sexual desire. Indeed, the ‘purity’ approach seems mainly to incentivise rebellion: Phetasy’s story began with an upbringing in which she was taught to prize this ‘purity’, to fear sex and to be ashamed of her own desires: ‘My burgeoning sexuality would unfold as a reaction to these repressive religious orthodoxies, old-school notions of sexual status, and trauma.’ 

I don’t want to re-tread timeworn arguments about some imaginary state of feminine purity. Women get horny. Get over it. We aren’t going to heal the dissociative harms of the sexual revolution by embracing a different kind of body dissociation and faking a ‘purity’ few of us feel.

Instead, we must heal our polluted erotic ecologies by rewilding sex. In the field of conservation, ‘rewilding’ refers to practices such as reintroducing apex predators or reducing intervention in a landscape, such that complex ecologies are able to re-emerge and find equilibrium again. In one famous example, reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the United States resulted, via a complex chain of inter-species interactions, in a river changing course. 

Applying a similar mindset to our sexual ecologies means a similar willingness to make space for dangerous elements of the natural order. Specifically, we need to recognise that ‘risk-free’ heterosexual sex can only be had at the cost of reproduction. And eliminating that biological purpose takes much of the dark, dangerous and profoundly intimate joy out of sex.

Pornography itself is a reliable guide to what’s truly forbidden. And the volume of content that now focuses on either the idea of procreation, reframed as ‘breeding fetish’, or on physical evidence of pregnancy, such as lactation, reveals perhaps that even the most fundamental organismic urge – the drive to reproduce – has not been abolished by opt-in fertility, but merely commodified. If we can reclaim this profound facet of our nature from its capture by Big Porn, we stand a chance of reclaiming the charge, and the intimacy, of sex from a ‘booty’d-out’ culture grown numb to even grotesque stimuli. 

But this also means reclaiming the danger. To restore that danger, we must acknowledge that for all but the small minority of same-sex-attracted people, desire and reproduction can’t be disaggregated, any more than ‘self’ and ‘body’. Shorn of its connection to the source of life itself, that darkness and danger will find twisted expression in depraved fetishes and sexual violence. By contrast, consensual, genuinely consequential sex is profoundly intimate: not least because a woman who refuses birth control will be highly motivated to be choosy about her partners. Pregnancy risk is, after all, a cast-iron reason to reject having sex with anyone out of politeness.

The most direct way for women to reclaim this beneficial sexual self-discipline now is by saying ‘thanks but no thanks’ to the technology. While this means, for those who take this path, an explicit insistence on sex only in the context of trust and intimacy, it doesn’t necessarily follow that women should refuse sex before marriage. But caveat emptor: if you’re playing with this kind of fire, outside the context of a committed relationship, you’d better be absolutely certain you can trust your male partner.

If you are sure of that trust, there’s a strong likelihood you’ll enjoy sex more when you do have it. In a lifelong partnership, the possibility of conception can itself be deeply erotic. And one of the open secrets of ‘natural family planning’ methods is that sex really is better when you don’t disrupt it with artificial hormones. Studies have shown that women’s sexual libido peaks just before ovulation, a cycle that makes perfect sense from the perspective of what sex is ultimately for – but if the menstrual cycle is disrupted by hormonal birth control, this effect disappears. And if you don’t want to conceive a baby, having sex anyway assumes a level of faith in your male partner’s self-control that on its own implies real intimacy.

And along with the pro-pleasure, pro-love case for rewilding sex is the pro-embodiment one. Rejecting birth control is the first and most radical step women can take, in healing the disconnect introduced by technology between us and our own bodies, in the name of freeing us from sex difference. As Abigail Favale notes, relying on cycle tracking to manage fertility increases women’s awareness of our fertility cycles, and with it attunement to our own bodies. In this sense of increasing our agency in terms of fertility awareness, and bringing women into harmony with our own embodied existence, rejecting the pill is not less but more empowering.

The true, deep wildness of sex can only be reproduced, in the sterile order of de-risked consumer sex, by the stylised violence of ‘BDSM’. Add the real, material ‘power exchange’ of fertility back into sexual intimacy, and I’m willing to bet the popularity of ‘kink’ would evaporate overnight. Or, rather, return to its proper place. In turn, then, we might see fewer incidences of girls passing out in a rear naked choke-hold and fewer incidences of death from ‘rough sex’; fewer injuries; perhaps also fewer men driven to ever more extreme stimuli in search of the one thing that’s truly forbidden: sex with the real danger left in.

We can have this again. To get there, we reactionary feminists must reject the totalitarian sexual–industrial complex. We can reclaim our sexual cycles, our capacity for eroticism, our attunement to our own bodies, and our right to refuse exploitative, loveless and degrading approaches. And in refusing this degraded parody of our most intimate embodied experiences, we can open ourselves to better ones – not with The One, but with a one: someone who is willing to step up – solidarity, intimacy, family and building a life together.

This is an edited extract from Mary’s book, Feminism Against Progress, which is published by Forum press.

Did Covid really originate in Wuhan’s seafood market?

There is new evidence pointing to the origin of Covid being in the seafood market in Wuhan. That, at least, is the substance of a breathless piece published in the Atlantic. Specifically, Katherine Wu, the journalist who wrote the piece, had evidence suggesting that ‘raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019’. Notice: ‘could have’, that old fallback of hype and spin.

Wu went on to claim that ‘it’s some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses’.

The claim is sadly what we ‘experts’ on this topic call a ‘grotesque exaggeration’. First, it’s not new: we reported that raccoon dogs were on sale in that market in our book Viral, which came out in 2021. Second, it shows that the raccoon dogs were there, not that they were infected with the virus. Third, the data behind the story are unavailable for inspection, having been deleted after they were briefly glimpsed by one scientist who appears to have grabbed them without permission of the author of those data.

The data appeared recently on a genetics database called Gisaid, in the form of a dump of DNA from various samples taken in the seafood market in early 2020. Rumour has it that it was put there by George Gao, the head of the Centers for Disease Control in Beijing, or one of his colleagues, as part of the back-up to a forthcoming publication.

Dr Gao, who has played a cautious and intriguing role in the story of the pandemic’s origin so far, appears not to have granted permission for his data to be grabbed and analysed in this way by Flo DeBarre, a theoretical evolutionary biologist at France’s CNRS. But whether he minds we don’t know. Chinese scientists don’t respond to journalists (I’ve tried). Nor is Dr DeBarre being very forthcoming. On Friday she tweeted: ‘[To journalists] We were not planning to communicate results before our report was finished. Finishing the report is my current priority. I won’t give interviews before the report is published.’ Yet somebody gave the unfinished, unanalysed, unverifiable story to the Atlantic.

Dr Gao was one of the key people who first shocked me into investigating this story. Although on 22 January 2020 he had confidently announced that ‘the origin of the new coronavirus is the wildlife sold illegally in a Wuhan seafood market’, four months later he changed his mind: ‘At first, we assumed the seafood market might have the virus, but now the market is more like a victim.’ His ruling out the market combined with other revelations led me and my co-author, the molecular biologist Alina Chan, to dig deeper and eventually write a book. We think a lab leak is more likely than the market, but we don’t claim any certainty.

As far as we know, Dr Gao also still thinks that the market was not the source. He published a preprint a year ago in which he stated that ‘no virus was detected in the animal swabs covering 18 species of animals in the market’. These animals tested included bamboo rats and other species known to be susceptible to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. No raccoon dogs, but as I said we did know that raccoon dogs had been sold illegally in the market in recent years.

We found this out in June 2021 when a paper appeared detailing a two-year study of the illegal wildlife being sold in markets in Wuhan – a spectacular and useful coincidence. We immediately contacted two of the authors, Xiao Xiao and David MacDonald, and were taken aback to be told that it had taken them many months to get their data into the public domain. After two rounds of review at one journal, the paper was deemed by the editors to be of insufficient general interest. The next journal took seven months to approve its publication. That the study had found that no pangolins were on sale in the market was apparently thought inconvenient to the prevailing (now discredited) theory that pangolins were the source.

The authorities may have missed these illegal animals in the market, although not necessarily: the authors of the study told us that November, when the pandemic probably began, was a quiet time in the illegal wildlife trade and the numbers sold in Wuhan were anyway small.

Raccoon dogs can catch Covid, but so can bamboo rats, cats, dogs and other animals that were tested. So finding this species – actually it’s a relative of foxes that just looks like a raccoon – does not change anything. Finding its DNA in the same sample as the virus, as this latest evidence is claimed to have done, is more interesting but still far from conclusive. Dr Gao and his colleagues found the virus in 64 places in the market, mostly in the sewage, on the ground or on doors. But in every case it was the human form of the virus, not a close animal cousin as you would expect if there were an infected animal. Hence Dr Gao’s remark about the market probably being a superspreader location.

The episode reinforces a bizarre trend in which a small group of western virologists with ready access to the media, who are desperate not to concede that the pandemic might have begun in a virology laboratory, are far more certain that the pandemic began in animals in that market than Dr Gao or the Chinese authorities now are. The latest story may eventually prove to be a game changer, but it is not helpful that it comes with the imprimatur of that well known pair of scoundrels, Dr Spin and Mr Hype.

A morally simplistic kids’ film: Extrapolations reviewed

We are all, of course, pretty well doomed. We know that because Al Gore told us so in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But just in case we didn’t get the message, the producer of that film, Scott Z Burns, has come up with a series of dystopian mini-dramas, Extrapolations, which are supposed to give us a window into the future. The series, the first three episodes of which have just dropped on Apple TV, is the latest in a genre which has given us The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up.

The good news is that we have at least 47 years left, because 2070 is the date of the last of the dramas reaches (we will have to wait until 21 April for that one). Given that that episode is entitled Ecocide, however, that may be just about our lot. But in the meantime, the future looks reassuringly familiar. Come 2037 and the world will still be being ruined by capitalist bastards who pretend to be green (and who are now out to cover the melting Arctic with upmarket condos), COP meetings will still be ending in inaction and climate rag-haired protesters will still be preaching the end of times. The only difference is that by then they won’t just be glueing themselves to the roads; they will be self-immolating in front of motorists – something which I suspect will have your average van driver on the M25 crying bring it on!

A decade further into the future, and most adults will still be too preoccupied with their busy lives to appreciate the peril we are all in – then, as now, only gobby children will have the insight to realise this (or at least the gobby children who aren’t confined indoors because of a new medical phenomenon known as summer heart). We will, however, by then have learned how to communicate with whales – or rather the world’s one remaining humpback whale. Sadly, though, this creature isn’t much of a conversationist; hectoring humans is about as far as she goes. In fact, she seems a bit like Greta Thunberg wrapped in blubber – she’s terribly angry when she discovers she has been deceitfully wooed by the recorded call of a male humpback whale who died years earlier. Whales, she says, don’t lie to each other.

By now, half the world’s species have gone the way of the dodo; though one corporation is making a song preserving them in the form of DNA, so that they might be brought back to life one day when the climate has calmed down. And the climate really has gone quite bizarre. The entire world seems to be gripped by forest fires and drought – which is pretty impossible. If the weather is hot in one place, promoting the rapid evaporation it must be cool and rainy somewhere else – the water vapour has to come down somewhere. In 2037, the US suffers 41 hurricanes in a single year, the last of which pretty well wipes out Miami – all the more remarkable given that, as of 2023, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records that there has been no increase in the number of landfalling hurricanes in the US in the past two centuries.  

In its moral simplicity, Extrapolations comes across as a great big kids’ film – although the liberal sprinkling of the ‘f’ word suggests that this isn’t its target audience. The heroine even says ‘f*ck’ while talking to the whale, though sadly the whale doesn’t seem to pick this up. Whales don’t appear to have swear words any more than they lie to each other. If only they did go about effing and blinding about the poor quality of today’s plankton, these films would be a lot more entertaining than they are.

Ross Clark is the author of Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won’t Even Save the Planet)  

Mental health: an anatomy of a very British crisis

No victory is ever final in politics – and the wrecking-ball of lockdowns now seems to have destroyed almost every success of the 2012-20 welfare reforms. The workless numbers are again as bad as they they were under Labour. People who stopped working during lockdowns never quite got back into it and the UK has done a worse job than almost any other country at rebuilding its post-pandemic workforce.

In 2009 I was filling Coffee House with attacks on the Labour government for keeping so many on benefits. And the story now? See below. Remember, this joblessness is not induced by recession and layoffs but incubated by welfare to produce mass worklessness amidst something approaching a crisis in lack of workers. And this in spite of record immigration.  

So what’s going on? Look at the below: it’s a chart showing how the monthly number signing on long-term sick has doubled on pre-pandemic levels: almost 5,000 people a day. Yes, a day. And mental health is the biggest single complaint, behind 41pc of claims.

Before the pandemic, just under 8 per cent of the working-age population was claiming some kind of sickness benefit. In a devastating prediction (that I’d recommend anyone trying to understand this issue should read) the OBR now says (p108-9) it will rise to 12 per cent in a few years. This is unprecedented and vastly costly – in terms of human life and cash (the cost has been revised up by £8 billion in the last four months). So this means virtually no indigenous growth in the workforce: we'll be relying on immigrants who will be arriving (says the OBR) at a net rate of about 245,000 a year.

Long-term sickness is back with a vengeance. The below graph shows two decades of progress wiped out - importantly, the spike started in Jan19, not during or after lockdowns.

Why the new wave of sickness? If it was Covid-related, then the phenomenon would be seen worldwide – but this is concentrated in the UK. This will be a mix of bogus mental health claims, genuine sickness being treated where it may have gone unnoticed before (due to the stigma) and a genuine rise in mental health caseloads. We can say for sure that this is not a phenomenon limited to welfare claimants. Let’s look at the number taking antidepressants:

All of this feeds into the number signed off sick (broken down by duration):

If you take the number of sick notes and multiply it by the lower estimate of the number of days signed off, you get about three million a week. I’d say this is economically significant, and ought to be factored in when we talk about the cost of treating mental health.

Another side of this is eating disorders: typically a young woman (or girl) who has been losing weight, is seen by a GP and referred for psychiatric treatment (usually a combination of talking therapy and medication). And make no mistake: this is serious. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate for any mental disorder. Incidentally, this is the only chart I've come across where an increase coincides with lockdown: the other trends in mental health and sickness benefit predate it.

We’re now getting away from UK economic workforce and more into the territory of children’s mental health. Here’s another graph I found, showing a 20 per cent rise in under-18s seen by mental health services (there's no earlier data)

But while there has been a spike in all of the above, there hasn’t been a spike in hospital admissions for patients who have self-harmed.

Another metric held by NHS hospitals is self-poisoning, which is trending downwards.

So the increase in referrals and antidepressants is not reflected in hospital admissions. It's a complicated picture. We will now keep constantly these graphs updated on a new section of the Spectator data hub). One article that changed my own thinking on this was a recent Bloomberg column by the historian Niall Ferguson (worth the Bloomberg subscription price to read on its own).

'If no one in your circle of family and friends is mentally ill, count yourself lucky — or maybe you’re just deluding yourself. In my intimate social network, I can think of at least six cases. I’m not talking just about relatives or friends or the children of friends who say they are depressed. I’m talking about medically diagnosed mental illness requiring treatment. Three cases of chronic addiction. Two cases of severe eating disorder. One case of attempted suicide. And those are just the ones I know about….The big mental health pandemic of our time is the one that is driving tens of millions of adults to shorten their lives by suicide or by an addictive intake of alcohol and drugs that amounts to slow suicide.'

This may not be a political talking point any time soon, given how terrified politicians seem to be about this topic. But we plan to do much more on this in The Spectator in the coming weeks and months.

Is this the man who will one day take over from Putin?

Boris Ratnikov, a former KGB officer and retired chief advisor to Russia’s security service, gave a remarkable interview back in 2016. Ratnikov, who died in 2020, claimed his boss had penetrated and read the mind of Madeleine Albright while she was US Secretary of State in the mid-1990s.

Ratnikov said his superior officer used a photograph to penetrate Albright’s subconscious where he discovered her secret thoughts about the priority of removing Siberia and the Far East from Russian territory.

The senior intelligence official in question was Georgy Rogozin, a top KGB officer between 1969 and 1992, who became deputy chief of president Yeltsin’s security service. Rogozin conducted secret experiments trying to use telepathy, clairvoyance, hypnosis and astrology to infiltrate the CIA and the US government. While based in the Kremlin, the KGB general dealt in the occult, made up the souls of the dead and believed he could penetrate people’s subconscious by using photographs. His technique was to lie down and fall into a hypnotic state through which he could communicate with Albright, and hence read her mind, infiltrate her soul and discover her secret agendas.

Based on these methods, Rogozin sent a report to his deputy Ratnikov with an exciting ‘revelation’ about US foreign policy. 

‘In Albright’s thoughts, we found pathological hatred of the Slavs’, recalled Ratnikov. ‘She (Albright) was outraged by the fact that Russia has the largest mineral reserves. In her opinion, in the future, Russia’s reserves should be managed not by one country but by all of humanity under the supervision of the United States…Also, based on the thoughts of Albright, it followed that the US Army would use some kind of chemical and biological weapons in Yugoslavia with warheads containing radioactive elements’.

Needless to say, the US Secretary of State never advocated – privately or publicly – the stripping of Siberia. It was a fabrication. But her ‘secret thoughts’ suited Putin’s agenda that the US was intent on global domination, destabilising Russia and thereby securing access to its valuable oil and gas reserves.  

In normal times, the hallucinations of a dead Kremlin and KGB psychic would not be taken seriously. But, in 2015, Nikolai Patrushev – Russia’s second most powerful man and its senior national security official – told Kommersant magazine: 

‘You probably remember the statement of the former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright that neither the Far East or Siberia belongs to Russia’.

Of course, Albright never made any such statement. Her ‘comment’ was the fantasies of the deranged former KGB and Kremlin official. Patrushev must have known the ‘statement’ was a lie, because at the time – in 1997 – he was head of Internal Security of the FSB, Russia’s security service. And so his repetition of such a falsehood provides an insight into his approach to foreign policy.

Today, Patrushev remains Russia’s most influential and important advisor to president Putin and is an unrepentant, unrelenting, ruthless advocate of the war in Ukraine. Indeed, he is even more hardline than his close friend and accomplice. As secretary of Russia’s National Security Council, Patrushev accused the US of pursuing a hidden agenda to bring about ‘the collapse of the Russian Federation’. 

The Ukraine war has cemented his influence over Putin and he remains the favourite to succeed him as president. For Mark Galeotti, the author and expert on the Kremlin, Patrushev has long been the ‘devil on Putin’s shoulder whispering poison into his ear’.

Born on 11 July 1951, in Leningrad, Nikolai Patrushev grew up during the height of the Cold War.  After studying physics and mathematics at Leningrad High School No.211 and then engineering, he enrolled in the KGB in 1974. The following year he joined the counter-intelligence unit of Leningrad Oblast where he first met Putin. They harassed dissidents and hunted futilely for spies and then parted waves as Patrushev was promoted and Putin was transferred to Dresden, East Germany.  

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Putin returned to Leningrad, now known as St. Petersburg, while his former comrade became head of counterintelligence of the FSB (in essence spying on the CIA).  In 1998, Patrushev and Putin were reunited in the Kremlin as deputy head of president Yeltsin’s administration (in effect deputy chief of staff). At this time Patrushev, a year older, was more senior in the ranks, but Putin was closer to Yeltsin and so rewarded with the coveted job as head of the FSB.  

Meanwhile, Patrushev was appointed head of Economic Security of the FSB – a crucial role where many of the ‘Siloviki’ (‘men of force’ from the security services) learned their trade. He was also Putin’s deputy and from April 1999, they formed a formidable partnership despite different personal characteristics. Patrushev is the hard-drinking, tough-talking, outspoken Siloviki; whereas Putin is ascetic, does not drink, strategic and measured in his thoughts and comments. But they both share an intense hostility to the United States and a conspiratorial view of the world.

Patrushev regards the US as decadent, imperialistic and counter to his conservative authoritarian world view of traditional values. He is replaying the Cold War. And this view underpins his approach to the Ukraine war. ‘US leaders have designated a goal of global domination’, he said in 2016. ‘In this regard they do not need a strong Russia. On the contrary, they need to weaken our country. One cannot rule out they may want to achieve this goal through the collapse of Russia.  This will give the United States access to a wealth of resources which, in their opinion, Russia possesses unjustly’.

This paranoia and revival of Cold War rhetoric reinforces the power and takeover of the Kremlin by the FSB hawks since 2006. It also explains their authorisation of assassinations of critics overseas, increased cyber espionage, poisoning of opponents, influence and disinformation operations and brutal warfare against dissidents and former Soviet republics.  

A running theme is a nationalistic siege mentality. Bizarrely, Patrushev described the ‘Russophobia’ in Ukraine as part of a Western propaganda campaign dating back to jealous European authors smearing Ivan the Terrible. 

‘Western Russophobia did not arise yesterday’, he said in 2021. ‘She has a very long story. They (authors) tried to denigrate our country many centuries ago. Take Ivan the Terrible who in the West is for some reason called ‘Terrible’. The ‘black legend’ about him as a cruel tyrant entered the circulation during the life of a King by Western chronicles who wanted to divert the attention of Europeans from what was happening in their own countries. They did not like that the Russian Tsar did not recognise their political and moral leadership’.

In fact, any objective historian would accept that Ivan the Terrible was a brutal tyrant who used terror as a political weapon. He was also the first Tsar to set up a secret police. Known as the ‘Oprichniki’, it was an instrument to enforce autocratic rule. As in Stalin and Putin’s Russia, most of the treason that it swept away existed only in the mind of its ruler, the Oprichniki and FSB. Ivan the Terrible oscillated between periods of sadism, prayer and repentance; after a seven year reign of terror, his secret police was disbanded.    

Disinformation is, of course, not new in Russia. The Bolsheviks regarded deception and influence operations as an integral weapon in their armoury in 1917. ‘We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit and withholding and concealing the truth’, declared Lenin. ‘There are no morals in politics. There is only expedience’. A fellow Communist Commissar agreed:

‘To tell the truth is a pretty bourgeois habit whereas for us to lie is justified by our objectives.’ 

And fake news and forgery were deployed throughout the Cold War on an industrial scale.  

Today, in Ukraine, false propaganda is an integral part of Russia’s strategy. They adhere to Sun Tzu’s edict that ‘all warfare is deception’. A revealing insight into Patrushev’s use of disinformation occurred during an interview with Kommersant in June 2015. ‘We all remember the phrase used by the Americans to describe Russia’s closest neighbours’, he said. ‘They called them ‘front-line states’, unambiguously showing that the ‘front line’ goes along our state border. Against that background, it has been announced the Nato command is planning to deploy a contingent of up to 30,000 people here’.

This was classic Patrushev distortion speak. He was referring to a decision four months earlier to increase the size of the Nato Response Force (NRF), a rapid reaction corps. ‘Altogether the enhanced NRF will count up to around 30,000 troops’, announced the Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. And here lies the planting of the disinformation – Nato’s plan was not to deploy 30,000 troops on the Russian border. It merely increased the number of forces allocated to the NRF – if required – while leaving the troops involved based in their own countries. Nato does not even have its own soldiers – individual member states provide troops as requested by Nato’s commanders. The NRF units remain in their home country until summoned by Nato.

And so Patrushev’s claim that 30,000 Nato troops would be deployed on the Russian border was demonstrably false. The issue is whether he misunderstood Nato’s very public statements or deliberately lied. Patrushev has been head of Russia’s National Security Council since 2008. He was director of the FSB and has been a senior intelligence official for the past 30 years. And so he is the best-informed national security official in the Kremlin. He was not speaking in the heat of the moment, and so the only possible conclusion is that he explicitly lied about Nato’s plan for the NRF.

As the Ukraine war becomes entrenched, Patrushev evokes memories of the Soviet victory against fascist Germany in World War Two as a way of enhancing Russian nationalism and support for the invasion. When asked about Ukraine’s request to close the Russian border, Putin’s closest advisor compared the potential blockade of the Donbas to the siege of Stalingrad. He branded the Ukraine government a fascist junta and conjured up conspiracy theories about ‘neo-Nazi criminals’ who would be used ‘for the purpose of using them in other countries for organising coup d’etats and sabotage missions’.

But the focus of Patrushev’s world view is the USA – or ‘the main adversary’ as the KGB used to refer to it. 

‘The USA is trying to prove that Russia is a party to the conflict in Ukraine’, he said earlier this year. ‘But it is not. The United States itself is the initiator of the conflict in Ukraine. Through a coup they brought people (in Ukraine) under their control. It was they (USA) who initiated all these events. Barack Obama acknowledged this in one of his recent interviews’. 

In fact, Obama merely said the US could act as a mediator in any change of power in Kiev.

The chilling prospect of Patrushev succeeding Putin is very real. The National Security Council chairman is only 71 years old and remains at the apex of the elite inside the Kremlin. For Patrushev – who has been a friend and confidante of Putin for almost 50 years – the escalating tension with the USA and Ukraine enhances his power base. He relishes the conflict and rejects the West’s notion that the world fluctuates between conflict and peace. Like Putin, he believes that war is a continuation of politics by other means. And the invasion of Ukraine is merely one part of their war on the West.   

Mark Hollingsworth is the author of ‘Agents of Influence – How the KGB Subverted Western Democracies’ which will be published by Oneworld next month.

The ‘sham subculture’ sparking panic in the Kremlin

Their two countries may be at war, but Russian and Ukrainian police have a common and apparently formidable enemy. That is, judging by their efforts to infiltrate groups of 13- to 17-year-old kids sporting long black hair and hoodies emblazoned with a picture of a spider on the back.

The so-called PMC Ryodan – a fan club dedicated to the Japanese anime series Hunter x Hunter, featuring a criminal gang – may be many things, but a private military company it is not. On 22 February these fans gathered at a Moscow mall and were confronted by a rival group who picked a fight with them, offended by their weird clothes.

There are conflicting reports about what sparked the fight: according to one account, one of the fans was assaulted by a skinhead who told him it was time to kill all the ‘nefory’ – or ‘neformaly’, nonconformists. According to another, two groups got into a skirmish over mall chairs. The video went viral, police got involved, and suddenly Russian cities were back to the days when football hooligans sought out ‘neformaly’ and beat them up for sport.

Why some of these kids started calling themselves PMC, or private military company – given that all evidence points to the fact that they are usually the victims, not aggressors, in these mall brawls – remains unclear. The consensus is that the abbreviation was used in jest and then spread like wildfire over Telegram channels and group chats. The fact that Ryodan fought back against their attackers and won also played a role.

But by that time, authorities didn’t bother with the nuance. Given that youngsters in black clothes and long hair were getting involved in violent fights, it was time to arrest them, no matter who was actually starting the fights. By March, a moral panic was born: Russia’s Duma convened to discuss the issue, pointing the finger at ‘unfriendly countries’ trying to destabilise Russia and the Kremlin calling the fan group a harmful ‘sham subculture’.

Had Russian authorities deliberately tried to fuel the flames of this ‘subculture’, they could have done no better than focus federal scrutiny on groups of youngsters in black hoodies. In Moscow, this was yet another vestige of the Soviet Union reborn: a government that sees the main threat to itself as long-haired hippies and people wearing thread bracelets. Back in the 80s, these ‘neformaly’ were pitted against the ‘gopniki’ – poor, working-class thugs.

Even stranger was that Ukrainian law enforcement exhibited the same Soviet-style reaction. Kyiv police posted a statement denouncing the subculture as coming from Russia, releasing videos with teenagers admitting unknowing involvement in what they came to conclude was a Russian plot to ‘destabilize’ Ukraine. And just like in Russia, police began summoning hundreds of young people and warning their parents.

So a group of kids, provoking skinheads by their sheer existence, has come to be regarded as a tool of mutual destabilisation by both Russia and Ukraine. What gives?

In a way, the answer lies with the conflict dynamics of the groups themselves. Just like the ‘neformaly’ and ‘gopniki’, both came to define themselves in opposition to the other. Some in Ukraine, which has been fighting off Russia’s unprecedentedly brutal invasion for over a year now, will understandably see a Russian threat lurking behind every spider. That so much of Russian society does the same is a product of its own aggressive war-time propaganda.  

But what is interesting here is the readiness with which the Russian youngsters themselves began applying the PMC moniker. They seemed to have done so as a joke, simply to reflect the bizarre news culture and war that they are constantly bombarded with, and yet muzzled from even talking about due to Russia’s repressive laws.

Thanks to the efforts of its ex-convict founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the real PMC Wagner has been flaunting its bizarre competition for glory with the regular Russian army for months now. It remains formally unrecognised by Russian law, but news of its exploits are blasted across state channels and social media. And yet just this week, the State Duma approved another bill criminalising criticism or discrediting the Russian volunteers – including PMC Wagner – that are fighting in Ukraine.

This is the bizarre, surreal reality that Russian young people now live in, and one wonders how they process it. ‘No one talks about the war,’ a Russian teen told me. ‘Most are against it, but people try to not to take anything too seriously.’ And so, sublimated beyond recognition lest one ends up saying something illegal, the government and disastrous war it is waging has become the butt of a joke.

Was Leonardo da Vinci’s mother a slave?

There is great excitement in Italy, which has spilled over into the British press: Carlo Vecce, a professor from Naples, has discovered documents in the archives of Florence that appear to indicate that Caterina, the mother of Leonardo da Vinci, was a baptised slave who had been brought all the way to Tuscany from the Black Sea. She was not, as has often been assumed, a local woman of modest origins.

Leonardo was born in April 1452, and a few months later a domestic slave of Leonardo’s father, also named Caterina, was given her freedom. The documents do not take up a great amount of space, so he has filled out the story with an imaginative romance about the life of Leonardo’s mother, only revealing the facts right at the end of a vigorous and imaginative 500 page novel cleverly entitled Caterina’s Smile (Mona Lisa’s husband also makes an appearance as a slave trader). This is not the usual way historians publish their discoveries; but the book, published this week, is already a runaway bestseller in Italy. 

Vecce has uncovered a document showing that she was a Circassian, from the lands on the eastern side of the Black Sea. The question still arises whether it is a detail of any significance. This was a time when quite a few Italian princes were of illegitimate birth, though their mothers were generally not slaves. If this book raises awareness that the history of slavery is not, as proponents of Critical Race Theory insist, primarily about the horrific trade in African slaves carried across the Atlantic on slave ships and condemned to a short, over-worked life in sugar plantations, then it will have achieved something very valuable. Moreover, Caterina and her Circassian contemporaries were not black slaves but white ones. Skin colour was often mentioned in the medieval documents that record the sale of slaves: olive-skinned slaves were not as desirable as white. But, irrespective of skin colour, it is an unpleasant story.

Italian merchants from Venice and Genoa were already exporting thousands of slaves from the Black Sea two centuries before Columbus reached America. They were male and female, adults and children, Russians, Tartars, Bulgarians, Georgians. But the most prized slaves were fair-skinned Circassians who were carried to Egypt and Syria aboard Genoese ships and recruited into the Mamluk guard, if strong and male; and sometimes recruited into the bed of the sultan and his courtiers, if beautiful and female.

Many of these captives had been caught up will-nilly in the civil wars and other conflicts that wracked the lands bordering the Black Sea. They were carried off into slavery before being sold to Italian merchants based in Crimea. A fifteenth-century writer named Pero Tafur describes how the slave traders would strip their captives naked, whether they were male or female, announce a price and make the slaves parade in front of potential clients, who would have the chance to inspect their body for defects.

Child sale by parents was frequent. In the fourteenth century, the great Italian poet Petrarch thought that the famous grain trade from Ukraine, active even then, had been supplanted by the slave trade: ‘from where until recently huge quantities of grain would be brought every year into this city, today ships come laden with slaves, sold by their parents under pressure of hunger.’

The age of the children was often stated in the sale contracts – sometimes eleven or twelve, but sometimes less than that. Yet parents might be strangely ambitious for their children when they sold them, especially if they were strong and healthy boys who stood a chance of recruitment into the elite Mamluk guard in Egypt, composed of Black Sea slaves. Newly arrived, we are told, some of these children dreamed of becoming sultans of Egypt, and that actually happened. This meant that Genoese merchants were supplying elite troops to the Muslim enemies of the Christian crusaders. For the merchants, as with all slave traders, profit came first.

Caterina was lucky to be freed and then to be married off to a local craftsman in the Tuscan countryside. Italian towns like Florence and Genoa contained hundreds of domestic slaves, condemned to a life of drudgery in their master’s house, or sexually misused. Even the fact that they were baptised by their masters did not automatically release them from slavery. Church law forbade non-Christians from owning Christian slaves, but did not forbid Christians from doing so. A very different set of values obtained five hundred years ago, and the idea that one person could legally possess another was generally accepted – something we wholeheartedly reject today. To say that is not to say that current generations carry responsibility for the moral outlook of our distant precursors, as modern activists loudly insist.

SNP spin doctor Murray Foote resigns

Well, well, well. It’s been a tumultuous time for the SNP recently, and no one knows that better than their own spin doctor Murray Foote. But it all seemed to prove too much this evening as he announced his shock resignation. Standing down after four years of spinning for the party, Mr Foote issued a rather, erm, coded statement.

Acting in good faith and as a courtesy to colleagues at party HQ, I issued agreed party responses to media enquiries regarding membership. It has subsequently become apparent there are serious issues with these responses. Consequently, I concluded this created a serious impediment to my role and I resigned my position within the SNP Group at Holyrood.

This comes after Mr Foote slammed ‘wholly inaccurate’ rumours that the SNP’s membership had decreased by 30,000 as ‘drivel’. But yesterday the party cracked under pressure from Ash Regan’s campaign team, which forced them to publish their membership figures, revealing quite an incredible exodus – of 30,000. Now SNP MP Pete Wishart has called for the ‘broadest possible inquiry’ into the matter. Did this U-turn in party messaging cause a metaphorical punch or two to be thrown between colleagues at SNP HQ? Mr S can only guess…

This isn’t the first time Mr Foote’s career has made its way into the limelight. The former Daily Record editor was also the brains behind the controversial anti-independence ‘Vow’ front page that many credit with swinging the referendum. Quite a jump, then, to spinning for the largest pro-independence. Murray Foote has always denied that his new job was anything to write about, saying he was always ‘sympathetic’ towards independence. He’s certainly got a funny way of showing it…

So what lies in store for Murray Foote next? And what for the future of the SNP? If haemorrhaging members wasn’t concerning enough, the nationalists should take their own staff quitting as a duly-timed wake up call.

Two big-priced tips for Uttoxeter today

If it feels like this column is appearing far more regularly than usual, that’s because it is. Normally a Friday-only offering, there have been four daily previews for the Cheltenham Festival and now this one to make it five columns in as many days.

It’s been tough going finding winners this week but we got there in the end (Iroko tipped at 9-1 in the 5.30pm today). Today we return to a more standard weekend fare, and I have a strong fancy for the big race of the weekend.

I put up two horses last week for the Boulton Group Midlands Grand National at Uttoxeter (3pm) last weekend and they have both been declared and are now trading much shorter than seven days ago.

I am very happy with both bets but there is a horse in the race now that I have been waiting to back next time out for a couple of months. Initially, it looked as though SECRET REPRIEVE would run in the Kim Muir Challenge Cup at the Festival on Thursday but in the end he bypassed that race to run at Uttoxeter tomorrow instead.

Secret Reprieve won me a lot of money when he landed the Welsh Grand National in January 2021 after it had been postponed due to the weather.

Since that race, which clearly took its toll on the horse, he has taken some time to return to form but Evan Williams is a master at being patient and getting his horses back to their best for a big pot.

Secret Reprieve’s last run on New Year’s Day, when he was third at Cheltenham, was very encouraging and he can make his presence felt tomorrow off a rating of just 132, that’s 2 lbs less than he ran off when successful at Chepstow 26 months ago. Take the 10-1 each way with one of the several bookies offering these odds and five places, including bet365, Paddy Power and Betfair fixed odds.

Iron Bridge and Gustavian are horses that could go on to make their mark in future but I am going to take a chance on a horse at a much bigger price in the Extra Furlong With Trinity Create Novices’ Handicap Chase (3.35pm). 

Once again the horse, DANS LE VENT, is trained by Evan Williams and it is the step up in trip from two miles last time out to three miles tomorrow that he is key. He was a decent handicap hurdler last season and his rating of just 128 is very fair over the bigger obstacles.

It may well be that, at the age of ten, Dans le Vent is past his best but at the price I am happy to take that risk. Bet on him each way at 33-1 with Paddy Power or Betfair, paying three places not four unlike other bookies offering shorter prices.

In the end, we had a modest profit for three of the four days this week. That’s it for now, and for a whole week. I will back next Friday as per normal.

2022-3 jumps season, running total + 44.9 points.

Pending bets:

1 point each way The Galloping Bear at 14-1 for the Midlands Grand National, paying ¼ odds, four places.

1 point each way Notachance at 33-1 for the Midlands Grand National, paying 1/5^th odds, five places.

1 point each way Secret Reprieve at 10-1 for the Midlands Grand National, paying 1/5^th odds, five places.

1 point each way Dans Le Vent at 33-1 for the Uttoxeter 3.35pm, 1/5^th odds, three places.  

1 point each way Corach Rambler at 20-1 in the Aintree Grand National, paying ¼ odds, four places.

1 point each way Lifetime Ambition at 33-1in the Aintree Grand National, paying 1/5 odds, five places.

1 point each way Any Second Now at 20-1in the Aintree Grand National, paying 1/5 odds, five places.

Settled:

1 point each way Hill Sixteen in the Becher Chase at 11-1, paying 1/5 odds, six places. Unplaced (7^th). – 2 points.

2 points win Annsam at 8-1 for the Howden Silver Cup. Cancelled meeting. Stake returned.

1 point each way Eldorado Allen at 20-1 in the King George VI Chase, paying 1/5 odds, 3 places. Unplaced (4^th).  – 2 points.

1 point each way The Big Breakaway in 20-1 for the Welsh Grand National at 20-1, paying 1/5 odds, five places. 2^nd. + 3 points.

1 point each way The Big Dog at 12-1 in the Welsh Grand National, paying ¼ odds, four places. 3^rd. + 2 points.

1 point each way Grumpy Charley at 12-1 in the Newbury 2.25pm paying 1/5 odds, five places. 1st + 16.4 points.

2 points win Midnight River at 5-1 for the Cheltenham 1.55pm, with Skybet. 1^st. + 10 points.

1 point each way Coconut Splash at 12-1 in the Cheltenham 1.55 on Sunday, with William Hill, paying 1/5 odds, six places. Unplaced (P). – 2 points.

1 point each way Sir Ivan at 20-1 in the Sandown 3pm tomorrow, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Lord du Mesnil at 8-1 in the Warwick 3pm race, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Dubrovnik Harry at 8-1 in the Kempton 2.40pm race, paying 1/5^th odds, 7 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Mister Coffey at 15/2 for the Doncaster 3.15pm, 1/5 odds, five places. Non Runner. Stake returned.

1 point each way Back On The Lash at 7/1 for the Cheltenham 12.40pm, 1/5 odds, five places. 1^st. + 8.4 points

1 point each way Empire Steel at 12-1 in the Sandown 3.30pm, paying 1/5 odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points. 

1 point each Small Present at 25-1 for the Grand National Trial (Haydock 2.40pm) paying 1/4 odds, four places. Unplaced – 2 points.

1 point each way Homme Public at 9-1 for Ascot 3pm, paying 1/5 odds, four places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Party Business at 20-1 NRNB for the Pertemps Network Hurdle Final, paying 1/5 odds, five places. Non Runner. Stake returned.

1 point each way Benson at 16-1 in the Morebattle Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, five places. 1^st. + 19.2 points.

1 point each way Monviel at 17/2 for the Imperial Cup, paying 1/5^th odds, six places. 5^th. + 0.5 points.

1 point each way Saint Segal at 20-1 NRNB for the Grand Annual, paying 1/5^th odds, five places. Non Runner. Stake Returned.

1 point each way Elixir de Nutz at 20-1 NRNB for the Plate Handicap Chase, paying 1/5 odds, five places. Non Runner. Stake Returned.

1 point each way Doctor Bravo at 22-1 for the Sky Bet Supreme Novices’ Hurdle, paying 1/5 odds, four places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Nassalam at 20-1 NRNB for the Ultima Handicap Chases, paying 1/5th odds, five places. Unplaced. – 2 points. 

1 point each way I Like To Move It at 20-1 for the Unibet Champion Hurdle, 1/5 odds, three places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Metamorpheus at 16-1 NRNB for the Boodles Juveniles Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places. 6th. – 2 points.

1 point each way Mister Coffey at 25-1 for the National Hunt Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, three places. 3^rd. + 4 points.

1 point each way Camprond at 20-1 NRNB for the Coral Cup, paying 1/5th odds, five places. 3^rd. + 3 points.

1 point each way Elixir de Nutz at 14-1 for the Grand Annual Chase, paying 1/5 odds, five places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way French Dynamite at 14-1 NRNB for the Ryanair Chase, paying 1/5th odds, three places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Dashel Drasher at 28-1 for the Stayers’ Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, four places. 3rd. + 4.6 points.

1 point each way Gin Coco at 14-1 NRNB for the County Hurdle, paying 1/5 odds, five places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Hewick at 20-1 NRNB for the Cheltenham Gold Cup, paying 1/5^th odds, three places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Royal Pagaille at 50-1 NRNB for the Cheltenham Gold Cup, paying 1/5th odds, three places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

1 point each way Magic Daze at 11-1 for the Mares Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, three place. Refused to race. – 2 points.

1 point each way Might I at 10-1 NRNB for the Martin Pipe Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, five places. 4^th. + 1 point.

1 point each way Iroko at 9-1 for the Martin Pipe Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, five places. 1^st 

My gambling record for the seven years: I have made a profit in 13 of the past 14 seasons to recommended bets. To a 1 point level stake over this period, the profit of has been just over 469 points. All bets are either 1 point each way or 2 points win (a “point” is your chosen regular stake).

What has Putin done with Ukraine’s missing children?

Vladimir Putin’s crimes against Ukraine are often facilely compared with those committed by Hitler’s Nazis during World War Two. As Gary Lineker has crassly demonstrated, the unique crimes of National Socialism are the gold standard of evil that careless people reach for all too easily when they wish to comment on, or criticise, a contemporary issue.

In one under-reported way, however, Putin is indeed imitating the hideous crimes Nazi Germany carried out in Eastern Europe’s badlands 80 years ago: by abducting Ukraine’s children from their parents and taking them abroad. An arrest warrant has today been issued against Putin by the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Among the war crimes Russia’s leader is accused of is the unlawful deportation of children. Unrestrained by either the internationally recognised rules of war, or simple human decency, Russia has deported thousands of young Ukrainians from their homes and families.

Estimates of the numbers involved vary wildly. Ukraine’s presidential advisor for children’s rights and rehabilitation, Daria Herasymchuk, has said that nearly 14,000 children have been taken by Russian troops and deported to Russia. Russia has previously said that the abductions are, in fact, ‘voluntary evacuations’ of children. But the United Nations has said reports of this barbarity are ‘credible’. The website ‘Children of War’, which catalogues the missing, claims that 464 children have died, 935 wounded and 378 children are unaccounted for – alongside the 16,220 it says have been deported to Russia.

Once in Russia, reports say the kids are either sent to special schools, where they are made to forget their Ukrainian language and heritage and raised as Russians, or – directly copying the Nazis – given to Russian couples on the pretext that they are war orphans.

Quite rightly, crimes against children, whether committed by individuals, or as a matter of state policy, evoke a special shudder of horror in us. They touch on deeply ingrained human notions of innocence, and what should be the sacred biological bonds between parents and their offspring.

The Nazis had a famously hypocritical attitude to sex, sexuality and child rearing – not least in the infamous Lebensborn (Fount of Life) programme devised by Heinrich Himmler’s SS. As I detail in my book, ‘Kitty’s Salon’, Lebensborn was intended by Himmler to preserve the ‘Aryan’ character of the German race. The aim was to offset the huge manpower losses caused by the war that the Nazis had launched. 

The programme adopted a two-pronged approach to the problem: SS officers were encouraged to mate with suitably ‘Aryan’ women outside the ‘bourgeois’ confines of marriage. The women would give birth and raise their racially ‘pure’ infants in special children’s homes run by the SS. 

While strict rationing was introduced for other Germans as the war turned against the Reich, the Lebensborn women and their babies were given extra portions of porridge which Himmler believed was the food that had built the British Empire.

The other aspect of the Lebensborn policy was the mass abduction of children who looked ‘Aryan’ from countries – particularly Poland – conquered by Germany. Children who fitted Nazi racist stereotypes, such as having blonde hair and blue eyes, were snatched off the streets and taken to be adopted by childless Nazi couples in Germany where they were passed off as war orphans.

It is this hideous Nazi policy that Putin’s invaders are carrying out in the eastern parts of Ukraine that they have occupied.

Putin has repeatedly said that he regards the Ukrainians as Russians. An officially sanctioned policy of mass child abduction is the logical extension of his goal of reestablishing a ‘Russian Reich’ in the territory of the old USSR. 

Lebensborn came to an end when the Nazis were defeated in 1945, although many of the kids abducted under the programme never returned to their homelands or found their families again.

Unless and until Putin is defeated, a similar tragedy is facing the lost and stolen children of Ukraine.

Cost-of-living crisis: what should politicians be doing about rising energy bills?

How can we keep energy bills down? It’s a question that has been at the top of the political agenda since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent gas prices soaring. With the government forking out eye-watering sums to guarantee prices for consumers and businesses, a longer-term solution has to be found. But are renewables the answer?

In January, The Spectator had the opportunity to discuss this issue, when we hosted a roundtable lunch (made possible by RenewableUK, the UK’s leading renewable energy trade association) at Old Queen Street. With a number of energy experts and analysts around the table, our editor Fraser Nelson and economics editor Kate Andrews sought to clarify the burning questions around UK energy security.

As CEO of RenewableUK, Dan McGrail has supported and advocated on behalf of over 450 companies to increase renewable electricity generation in the UK. The focus of reporting in this energy crisis has often been on the high profits of the oil and gas industry, yet renewable sources are also now subject to a windfall tax of 45 per cent, above that on oil and gas. Renewables companies say they haven’t made huge profits off gas prices as most of their power is traded a year in advance. 

Dan McGrail was keen to set the ball rolling discussing changes in government policy. He recalled the urgency with which Boris Johnson treated the speeding up of renewables, calling for a ‘vaccine mentality.’ In March, the British Energy Security Strategy, along with a newly appointed offshore wind champion reporting directly to the Prime Minister, seemed to send a clear message. Ten months later, ‘the supply side reforms that were in the British Energy Security Strategy, like speeding up planning, like reforming the grid: all of these things are still yet to reach the statute.’

That means Britain could be falling behind. He continues: ‘We’ve achieved a huge amount through successive governments’ ability to bring forward policy to enable the growth of renewables in the UK and accelerate the energy transition.’ Yet, with the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and the EU scrambling to respond, ‘we are now being overtaken by other countries.’

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, discussions about energy security have become more acute. But alongside security are serious questions about affordability. It is, we discovered, no longer the case that renewables are more expensive than fossil fuels. Dan McGrail told us that: ‘A megawatt hour of electricity coming out of a brand-new constructed wind turbine is about one-fifth of the cost of a megawatt coming out of the back of a gas fired power station when the cost of carbon is taken into account.’

Some might rightly question whether these costs are comparable: after all, they may not include the cost of producing the backup energy for when there is no breeze. Even so, we can use ‘levelised cost’, as a measure. That refers to the cost over the lifetime of a power station to produce a megawatt hour. Despite the government’s failure to update its 2016 data on this, the bottom line is still crystal clear from independent analysis. Tom Glover, UK Country Chair at energy company RWE, emphasised that ‘all of those models show that 70 to 80 per cent renewables are the lowest cost solution for delivering energy systems. The huge question is about where the remaining 20 or 30 per cent comes from. But I’ve never seen any report that says that’s not the lowest cost.’

And what of improving our energy security through fracking? Sam Richards, CEO at Britain Remade, explained that, regardless of government policy, this was always going to be a non-starter. ‘It’s a combination of the economics of fracking, the UK, and the geology of the UK. We’re not Utah, and the way that the fracking rigs are set up, you need hundreds or thousands of them in order to get the level of gas.’

How much has policy shifted in recent months?  Sam Richards agreed that there was a noticeable lack of urgency. ‘I don’t want to wind-splain to people, but it takes up to 13 years to get an offshore wind farm up and running despite the fact that the construction of the wind farm is a fraction of that time, like three years. We had various potential reforms in place to curtail that timeline, these appear to have been put on the backburner.’

Josh Buckland, a Partner at Flint Global advising on energy and sustainability, thought there had been less of a domestic change in policy. ‘I don’t think the policy regime is actually that different from Boris to Rishi. The thing that’s changed is the external environment: the US has had a massive intervention, a bunch of tax relief trying to pull in investment from European companies as well as elsewhere. You’ve then got Europe; Von der Leyen announced today this Net Zero Industry Act. It’s a competitive environment where the UK hasn’t quite stepped up now to offer something that’s as substantive.’

The UK has a huge natural asset in all this: the North Sea. Currently, the UK has around 13 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, and the government target is to reach 50 gigawatts by 2030. Pavel Miller, of SSE renewables, was keen to stress the opportunity this trebling in capacity offers. ‘That means a huge opportunity to develop a domestic supply chain, create jobs, and regional investment. Each year that there is delay to achieving that target, it means less jobs and investment, and higher priced electricity bills than necessary.’

That brought the conversation onto what is holding Britain’s renewables sector back. Charlie Jordan, Chief Executive of ScottishPower Renewables cautioned that: ‘In the UK, we’ve got the potential, but there’s a danger that potential is not realised. We’ve got the ambition set out: you mentioned the North Sea, but at the moment, they’re all just bits of paper. There’s a great appetite, but the supportive planning regime isn’t there.’

As to the windfall tax, Tom Glover argued that: ‘if we were making excess profits and the way it’s calculated is fair then, fair enough in the current crisis that we give some support to consumers, right? And I think that’s fine, but I think if you look at the Implementation and what it means for future investment, we’ve got windfall tax for 2028 (at least) overhanging investment yet assistance to the consumers is only for a year or two.’

The question is how it will affect investment. Delving into some of the technicalities, Andy Mayer of the IEA argued that ‘it does not relate to future investment because those are CFD schemes. The windfall tax hits the renewable obligation projects that constitute about 70 to 80 per cent of the industry, which we are overpaying their for wind power. Now, I appreciate there’s an investor certainty point, which is why would anybody in any industry to invest in the UK and the government seems to arbitrarily change the terms of tax on a regular basis, but the point is that we are overpaying dramatically for wind projects that were installed 10-15 years ago given their reward is linked to the price of gas.’

These CFDs are the Contracts for Difference Schemes, under which companies receive a fixed price for electricity. Dan McGrail was keen to clarify how this works: ‘If Tom and Charlie sell their electricity for £100 per megawatt hour and they have a contract for 50, they have to give £50 back to the exchequer. And that’s happening, hundreds of millions of pounds at the moment.’

For investors, Tom Glover told us: ‘The CFD regime is probably one of the best investment instruments you can have. This is the cheapest cost to the consumer, the biggest investment certainty drives lower return requirements for investors.’

Some renewables are sold according to these contracts, meaning higher energy prices yield to them no additional profit. Others are not, though not all have made additional profits. Pavel Miller was keen to clarify that: ‘Actually, companies like ours, you don’t sell their power on a spot market basis, they sell it ahead of time. So, if renewables generators are selling up to 2 years out, it’s not right to say that they have been making excessive profits from the higher prices on the day. The question for me is how they electricity markets are reformed in a sensible and considered way which keeps investment flowing into renewables.’

Tom Glover contended that ‘to the extent we’re making excess profits, [it’s] perfectly reasonable to have a windfall tax. The issue is first of all the term limit and second of all the mischaracterisation that it won’t affect future investment because at least 60 per cent of all solar projects are done on a merchant basis not under a contract for difference… So if you set a tax that takes away revenue for six years, and as you quite rightly said, give the indication that it’s there to stay, you have to reduce your expectation of future earnings from all future investments that aren’t under a CFD… it definitely has a negative impact on investment.’

The other key issue holding back renewables development is planning. Tom Glover noted that: ‘General opinions are all fully for renewables, at 75 to 80 per cent. There’s two problems. One is it’s great until we say we’re going to put a wind farm in your back garden and then it’s not in my backyard. Also, those people are a lot more vocal, you don’t write to your MP to say I’m quite happy.’

There was a consensus on a need for general planning reform, which is important both for solar and wind. Dan McGrail noted wryly that ‘the last six offshore wind farms that have been consented in Britain; all required the Secretary of State to overturn the Planning Inspectorate’s decision’.

Tom Gloverexplained the difficulties of getting a project approved. ‘You can’t have a development without some negatives. So, what we’re trying to do is make sure all our projects have a biodiversity net gain in its total. So, if it’s disturbing kittiwakes here then we’ll go and do some investment somewhere else to protect kittiwakes somewhere else. That’s quite hard in the planning framework for a planning specialist in one area to take that strategic view… and that’s one of the reforms that’s being suggested.’

For all these limits, Britain does have its own comparative advantage in renewables. Dan McGrail noted that: ‘We do have a fantastic area of dynamic engineering for example, which is pretty useful if you want to design a turbine blade. We’re also world leaders in composite materials. Offshore wind, over the last couple of years, is becoming a truly global story, particularly because of floating offshore wind, and that also plays into another area of UK comparative advantage, which is all about subsea engineering and technology cables: all of the expertise we’ve built up in offshore oil and gas over the last 40-50 years. If Britain wants to tap into a rich scene of economic opportunity outside its own shores, this is an area where it should focus.’

Bringing it back to politics, Dan McGrailreflects that ‘a lot of these factories and jobs in these new energy technologies will be in the industrial heartland that the government is trying to level up that are the swing seats that will decide future elections. And if as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act and other incentives in other countries, investment that was planned in some of those seats now goes elsewhere, I think that’s quite a big political problem.’ The question, then, is whether it might be a Labour party that gets those political dividends.

Can the UK economy outperform Russia?

First the good news. Unlike the IMF, which predicted in January that the UK economy would have a worse 2023 than even Russia, the OECD’s latest forecast has Britain outperforming Russia. Now the bad news: the OECD still predicts the UK to perform worse than any European country other than Russia. 

Its latest bulletin, published this morning, sees Britain shrinking by 0.2 per cent in 2023, compared with growth of 0.3 per cent for Germany, 0.7 per cent for France and 0.8 per cent for the Euro area as a whole. The Russian economy, by the way, is expected to shrink by 2.5 per cent. 

Why the negative outlook for the UK? The latest OECD report offers no specific analysis of the UK, although last autumn, when the organisation was predicting a slightly sharper contraction of 0.4 per cent in the UK economy over 2023, it spoke of falling consumer demand due to rising living costs, along with labour and good supply shortages.

If Britain does go on to under-perform in 2023 compared to the rest of Europe, however, it needs to be seen in the context of a relatively good 2022. The UK economy grew by 4.0 per cent in 2022 (entirely in the first half of the year), compared with 1.9 per cent for Germany, 2.6 per cent for France and 3.5 per cent for the Eurozone as a whole.

Looking ahead to 2024, the OECD expects the UK to continue to underperform the rest of Europe, growing by 0.9 per cent compared with 1.7 per cent for Germany, 1.3 per cent for France and 1.4 per cent for the Eurozone as a whole. Britain’s predicted performance for 2024 does represent an upgrade from the OECD, however – last autumn it was predicting only 0.2 per cent growth in 2024.

The OECD is still erring on the negative side compared with the OBR, however – which, as Jeremy Hunt mentioned in his Budget speech on Wednesday, now expects Britain to avoid a technical recession in 2023.

Should we take notice of any of this? Economic forecasting has such a lousy record that it is tempting to ignore anything the OECD or IMF say, or the OBR for that matter. It is instructive to look back at what the OECD was saying about Britain a year ago. For once, I am delighted to say, its forecast was not far off. In March 2022 it predicted that growth for 2022 as a whole would be 3.6 per cent (a little lower than the 4.0 per cent out-turn). It also predicted that inflation would peak at over 10 per cent in the autumn – which was in line with what actually happened.

Not, however, that I would bet on the OECD being right two years in a row. Forecasts aside, the actual data for the UK economy is a slightly improving story – with recession avoided, for now, and with inflation appearing to have peaked. But the wider picture is still of a country stuck deep in a trap of low productivity and low growth. It is far from clear how that can be remedied.          

Welcome to Big State Toryism

A million pounds is very small change in the context of wider government spending – especially compared to the £20 billion of extra giveaways Jeremy Hunt has announced for the next few years. But sometimes that small change tells you more about a government’s priorities, and its sense of direction, than the big announcements.

I suspect that was true in this week’s spring Budget. Alongside billions dished out for freezing fuel duty and extending the Energy Price Guarantee for another three months, the Chancellor also announced a government-sponsored prize, to run for the next ten years, ‘to the person or team that does the most ground-breaking British AI research’.

What’s so telling about this? It gives us very clear insight into how the government currently views the role of the state. First, it echoes a new trend of intervention, as seen with its biggest announcement: thirty hours of ‘free’ childcare. From daycare to AI, sectors will only thrive if the government is involved (government will now be responsible for paying 80 per cent of all childcare costs, up from 50 per cent), by picking winners and dishing out taxpayer cash to those who qualify. Second, this kind of gimmick shows just how far the Tory party has strayed from making the case for a less wasteful, leaner state.

This can be seen in the headline data, too. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that after this Budget, the ratio of public spending to GDP will ‘settle at 43.4 per cent, its highest sustained level since the 1970s’. In other words, welcome to Big State Toryism.

It’s not exactly a new concept: every Conservative prime minister since David Cameron has shied away from public policy that would actually reduce the size of the state. But at the very least, lip service was often paid to the idea of scaling back. No longer, it seems. Hunt’s Budget signals that the state is only going to do more: and despite his spending power dramatically tightening from 2026, there was no indication that plans are being made for Whitehall to scale back the areas it oversees.

Hunt’s Budget isn’t exactly Boris Johnson’s ‘cakeism’ agenda – in which you promise the world and no trade-offs are made. It was Rishi Sunak, when chancellor, who had to remind Boris Johnson time and time again that if he wanted all these giveaways, he’d have to pay for them. Now in charge, Sunak and Hunt are opting to find the money instead of scaling back the promises, which helps to explain why the tax burden will soon be approaching a post-war high. Tax receipts are higher and Hunt’s scope for borrowing proved much larger than expected – just shy of £40 billion – but more than five million people are the subject of fiscal drag (two million pulled into a higher rate of income tax, three million pulled into paying tax altogether).

As Katy Balls notes in her politics column this week, the plan remains to reduce the tax burden in a future fiscal statement, certainly before the next election. But as long as the government remains intent on expanding giveaways, that tax break can only be so big. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies Carl Emmerson said after the Budget, Britain is well on its way to becoming a ‘high tax economy’.

Meanwhile, despite Hunt’s pledge to get the debt-to-GDP ratio falling by 2027-28 (leaving himself ‘the smallest amount of headroom any chancellor has set aside against his primary fiscal target’, according to the OBR), the value of public sector net debt will continue to rise year-on-year. This raises questions about just how sustainable the public finances are, especially in the wake of rising interest rates.