When will the world wake up to the persecution of Nigerian Christians?

More Christians are killed in Nigeria for their faith than anywhere else in the world. Of the 5,621 people murdered worldwide in 2022 for their belief in Christ, almost nine in ten died in Nigeria, according to the charity Open Doors. On average, this equates to 14 Christians killed every single day last year in Nigeria. Many more Christians are being kidnapped, and there is little sign of this terrible violence ending any time soon.

Such horrifying figures are hard for us in the West to comprehend; we take freedom of religion – a protected right enshrined in law – for granted. But despite the unending and seemingly escalating cycle of persecution, few outside Nigeria seem to care.

The devastating reality for many Nigerians is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Nigeria is the most populous nation in Africa with 216.8 million people – just over half are Muslim, and there are 100 million Christians. Mass displacement of those fleeing violence could eventually lead to a humanitarian catastrophe in West Africa.

Already many Nigerians are choosing to leave their homes. There were more than 2.2 million internally displaced people (IDP) in Nigeria at the end of 2021, according to the UN. Others – driven out by attacks carried out by jihadist groups like Boko Haram – are leaving the country altogether.

Although Christians face the brunt of terror, they aren’t alone in living in fear. An All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) report, Nigeria: Unfolding Genocide? Three Years On, released this week, details the horrific tide of violence sweeping Nigeria. It recounts the fate of a Sufi Muslim musician accused of blasphemy in Kano state: his family home was burned down, and he was found guilty of blasphemy, receiving the death sentence in 2020. The conviction was later overturned by a higher court in 2021. In April 2020, the head of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, Mubarak Bala, was arrested and prosecuted in relation to alleged blasphemous Facebook posts. Last year, he was sentenced to 24 years in prison.

But the authorities are not always so rigorous in cracking down. It has now been over a year since the Pentecost Sunday attack on St. Francis Catholic Church in Owo (Ondo State) on 5 June 2022, in which 50 Christians, including children were slaughtered, and the priest abducted. No one has yet been brought to justice.

Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) is thought to be responsible, but they are not the only group that Christians live in fear of. Aside from the seasoned AK-47 toting jihadists of Boko Haram, ‘radicalised’ Fulani herdsman are responsible for much of the land grab related carnage targeting Christian farmers in the country’s Middle Belt region.

‘One of our major concerns is the lack of media coverage of the people suffering so much and in such great need in the Northern and Middle Belt regions of Nigeria,’ says Baroness Cox, who has personally witnessed the immediate aftermath of Islamist attacks on villages, having narrowly escaped a Fulani gunmen ambush herself in 2016. Cox, who is president of Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART), which supports civilians in the Middle Belt region, says the horrors faced by Christians there often go unreported:

‘This lack of media coverage means that many people in the international community are often ignorant of the acute needs of the civilians – who are often left unreached, unhelped, and unheard.’

The 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls by Boko Haram made international headlines, thanks to the intervention of Michelle Obama, and the accompanying hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. Yet the kidnappings of girls and clergy since has failed to capture the same level of international attention.

But what, if anything, can outsiders do to stymie the unending cycle of Christian persecution, described by the Archbishop of Nigeria as ‘genocide in slow motion’? In December 2020, the International Criminal Court (ICC) concluded that there was reasonable ground to believe that Boko Haram and its splinter groups (in addition to Nigerian security forces) had committed crimes against humanity and war crimes. Catholic peer Lord Alton informs me the next step should have been to request authorisation from the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber to open an investigation into Nigeria.

Whether this happens remains to be seen. But, in the meantime, more and more Nigerian Christians are losing their lives.

The days of ‘our’ NHS are over

Have you noticed something? Whether it is the nurses, who are no longer striking, the junior doctors, about to spend three days on the picket line in pursuit of their 35 per cent pay claim, or the consultants, threatening a two-day walk-out which they may choose to spend topping up their income in the private sector rather than shouting slogans outside their hospital – it’s all about them. 

They are exhausted, they are suffering from ‘burn-out’, their work brings on mental health issues. Their pay has – hardly uniquely – lagged way behind inflation, their working conditions are intolerable. No one respects them or their hard work, they’re threatening to follow their zillions of colleagues who have left for a better work-life balance by an Australian beach. By now, you can probably recite their list of grievances by heart. You might also have figured out that someone, quite a lot of someones, are missing from the picture.  

Yes, it’s you and me – the patients. Every now and again, some highly articulate medical representative is prompted by a helpful interviewer to say that of course they regret the inconvenience to those whose operation or cancer treatment will be postponed, but it’s all in a greater cause. Real live patients rarely feature as more than a distant afterthought. Our NHS? Not really; it feels a lot more like their NHS.   

I write as someone who recently, and reluctantly, spent eight days in three instalments on the other side of this noble front line. I emerged with a painfully pinned and subsequently infected left ankle, a sturdy metal frame to hop around on, and the echoes of a plea that I had screamed silently to myself every day of my medical detention: will someone please tell me what is going on?! 

There is a neat little mantra, applied to situations as different as medics dealing with patients in the NHS to any hint of peace talks on Ukraine, which promises ‘nothing about you, without you’. The principle here is that those at the centre of the action should be kept abreast of what is going on and given their say.

This was so very far from my experience at one of this country’s premier teaching hospitals that I mostly just lay back (in so far as the infernal hi-tech bed would allow) and let everything happen. I was left to hope against hope that somewhere a great mind was at work, handing down decisions to an ever-changing cast of medical and other staff – decisions that were truly in my, and my fellow patients’, best interests. 

As I say, I hope that was so, because it was not always evident. Days came and went without anyone taking the slightest interest in why I was there. Admissions and discharges passed without my having any idea who had given the instruction, who was deciding what would be done, what had been done, or what medicine I was being given and why. 

When I plucked up the courage to seek some answers, the questions were either waved away as the preserve of ‘the doctor’ – unnamed. Other information, even if it was as basic as my latest temperature and blood pressure readings, was divulged as grudgingly as a nuclear secret. Details of my ‘bowel movements’, on the other hand, and those of my fellow patients, were eagerly solicited within everyone’s hearing. 

In the long corridor outside the ward hung what I (misguidedly) had assumed might be a message of goodwill towards patients. What it was, or at least read like, was almost the opposite: a message to staff, long on their contractual and professional rights, short on any obligations, and with an assurance that they should be treated with respect at all times. I may be wrong, but I don’t recall even the barest acknowledgement that the whole point of their efforts might actually be the patients. 

This might help to explain why, on occasion, some of us patients could be, I regret to say, a little short on the respect. There were some cheery gems among the staff. But it was often hard for a hospital novice, such as I was, to divine who was responsible for what, and in particular who – if anyone – was in charge.

There seemed no routine beyond the four-hourly blood-pressure/temperature, and mealtimes. Day or night, there was a regular half-hour delay between someone pressing their buzzer and the arrival of the bed-pan or commode they had asked for. Sometimes they had to ask more than once; staff don’t like that. 

The loos could have done with more attention to hygiene, their condition not helped by waste bins with sealed tops and pedals that few with a foot injury (this was an orthopaedic ward) could open. A malfunctioning bedside light, a loose hand grip by the loo, a slippery floor – these were perils, but always someone else’s problem, and as such rarely fixed. And just try getting a toothbrush or the wherewithal to wash your hands. I had been admitted as an emergency, had nothing for an overnight stay, and lost count of the times I had to ask for such basics. 

More worrying were the actual, or near, mistakes. On two occasions – in just eight days, remember – I was almost given the wrong medicine. The first time, I noticed that one of the pills in my little paper cup looked much bigger than any I had been given before, so I asked what it was. It turned out not to be for me.

The second time, a nurse came over, all enthusiastic, saying I was due for an injection. When I asked what it was, it was something the doctor who had admitted me the previous day had instructed to be discontinued forthwith because of side effects. I saw him do it on his screen, but the change still hadn’t filtered through to the nurses on the ward nearly 24 hours later. 

In terms of instructions, the computer was king. The system seemed crotchety and not everyone knew how to use it. But without a doctor’s instruction, on screen, nothing medical was done.

Once, there was an unexplained delay between a doctor inspecting my leg and the wound being dressed. The wait was apparently for a computer instruction. When I asked the nurse why the doctor had not just asked her to do the dressing, she said: ‘The doctors don’t talk to us; the doctors don’t talk to us at all’. And, so far as I could observe from my limited stays, that was true. It may be peculiar to this particular hospital, even to this department, but the two carried on as though in different worlds.  

The only people who seemed to know exactly what they were doing and why were those who brought food and hot drinks – and those at the very top, the most senior consultants. I was fortunate enough, on just one occasion, to have one stop by my bed. It was after I had crossly asked her more junior colleague why no one had thought to tell me that my scheduled operation wasn’t happening for more than 24 hours after it had been scheduled – and no, it was nothing to do with strikes. 

The next wave of these NHS strikes will soon be upon us. But very little that I saw during my stays will be remedied by more staff or more money. To me as a patient and a tax-payer, the evident waste of time and facilities has to be a cause for despair. Covid may have brought seven-day working, but this hospital at least has snapped back into a Monday to Friday routine, with consultant-lite nights and weekends. 

As for the top-heavy, overpaid management so many staff complain of, that maybe so. More conspicuous from this patient’s perspective, however, was the opposite: a patent lack of direction and basic order a gigantic machine such as a hospital surely needs, along with a basic recognition of what the hospital and its staff are there for. A recent study by the Institute for Government supports what I saw.

I veer between wishing someone would impose a hospital equivalent of martial law, with clear lines of accountability and discipline, and thinking that perhaps it is time for us patients to go on strike. The pity is that it might be quite a while before anyone in ‘their NHS’ actually noticed. 

Now I’m 64: my tips for a happy old age

On my 20th birthday, I locked myself in the bathroom of my bungalow in­­ Billericay and cried. Having achieved my dream – becoming a published writer – at the tender age of 17, I thought it was all downhill from there. Yes, some of this had to do with marrying the first man I had sex with; the idea that I was only ever meant to do the deed with him alone appalled me beyond words. But there was also a general feeling that my value was in some way intrinsically bound up with my extreme youth.

Fast-forward to the day I turned 60, when I woke up in an Art Deco flat with the sea at the bottom of the street, married to a man (third time lucky) who could still make me laugh after a quarter of a century. After some years in the wilderness (albeit a very luxurious wilderness, having been living the high life for a decade due to selling my house to a developer for a lot of money) I had a newspaper column and a book contract. You bet I felt smug.

By the end of that year, I’d lost my book contract and my column and was effectively a pariah, having committed the very senior crime of misbehaving on Twitter rather in the manner of a drunk and disorderly OAP in charge of a rogue vehicle. But – like a catchy song with a false ending – yesterday I celebrated the birthday which the Beatles saw as the number epitomising old age: 64. Not only am I unbothered by what I lost, but as I contemplate the trail leading into the unknown forest of senescence, I feel perkier than I have at any point since the turn of the century.

I’m far from unique in becoming happier with age. The ‘happiness curve’ is the popular term given to the 2008 University of Warwick/Dartmouth College survey of two million people in 80 nations which found a consistent pattern following a U-shaped curve, with happiness higher towards the start and end of our lives. One of the survey’s directors, Professor Andrew Oswald, put it plainly: ‘By the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20-year-old.’

Though one size doesn’t fit all – I am a wicked old lady whose morals may not suit many – these are things you might consider trying if attempting to relocate your mojo:

• Cull your friends. Hearing the same people say the same things over and over is very wearing. When I became a pariah I lost a proportion of my friends involuntarily, but they were generally the kind you don’t notice are gone until a third party tells you the glad tidings. The pleasure of my own company during lockdown gave me the initiative to lop off yet more, leaving a lovely space for new ones who ‘spark joy’, to quote Marie Kondo on household items.
• Volunteer. A cliche, but there really is nothing like it. When I gave up cocaine in 2015, I started work at the local Mind shop; I’ve never missed drugs, but if I couldn’t volunteer I’d be bereft. As there’s a severe volunteer shortage, that’s unlikely.
• Be a believer. I can’t help laughing at all those atheists who are so scared of death. If you can’t believe in a religion, be a Stoic: as with the getting of faith, a real life-changer. When I look back at the awful person I was five years ago, I can barely recognise the screeching, squawking, pound-shop diva as the lovely serene me of today.
• Don’t identify as young. It’s lovely to feel full of the joys of spring when you’re over 60 and thus in the winter of your life: 0-20 spring, 20-40 summer, 40-60 autumn. But it shouldn’t necessarily follow that one feels the need to pose on Instagram with one’s clothes off, as Madonna did last year. And now she’s had to cancel her world tour because she’s done herself a mischief!
• Lose that weight now. As your body seizes up from ‘wear and tear’ you won’t get many more chances – do you really want to be winched out of your flat when you die? I’ve been as thin as a rake and as fat as Jabba the Hutt and, though I was happy as both, they are equally dangerous as we age. Those of us with zero willpower have never had it so good; I can take the lowest dose of those new-fangled semaglutides on a Monday and still be looking at cakes in patisseries as dispassionately as if they were boxes of birdseed on a Friday.
• Never care what people think of you. On the contrary, when criticised you should laugh in their faces and offer them more fuel. The freed-slave philosopher Epictetus said: ‘If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: “He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone”.’ To see ourselves as others see us – while taking into consideration that their observation may be clouded by envy or other impairments – and not to care is far more likely to bring happiness than the desire to be validated by strangers.
• Don’t ever envy the young – especially not now. They have far less sex and make far less money than we did when we were hard-bodied, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young things – no wonder they’re depressed.
• Don’t be romantic. ‘The One’ rarely exists – ‘The Queue’ is far more prevalent. Most of us have it away with the people we find attractive until we find one we prefer – or until no one else wants us any more. We all lose our charms in the end, so if you don’t want to be single, pin a decent one down by the autumn of your days or you’re liable to find that that the cupboard is bare. But if you miss the love-boat, don’t be too bothered; there’s nothing wrong with being single – or so I’m told.
• Be a bit reckless – it can keep you true to yourself. The recklessness which made me lose my column and my book contract is one of the things which keeps me so lively; looking at some of the pathetic PR puff pieces many of my successful rivals write, I’d rather give up, stack shelves and thus do something more useful and thrilling for a living.

That’s about it; as I’ve said, once you hit 60, you’re in the winter of your life, despite feel-good platitudes about ‘golden agers’. Death will probably be your next really big life-event, unless you’re Mary Wesley whose first novel was published when she was 71. That winter might be short or it might be long, but by making it there, you’ve achieved a thing which practically no one did 100 years ago, while a 60-year-old today can easy be looking at another couple of decades to grow older disgracefully in.

Whether a SKI (Spending Kids Inheritance), a YOLOAP (You Only Live Once Old Age Pensioner – mine) or just a regular Silver Surfer (like the lovely old lady I heard on the bus telling her friend on the phone ‘Wrap up warm and meet me at the cyber-cafe!’) the beautiful Camus quote – ‘In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer’ – is ours. Find your invincible summer and no matter what the duration of the final season, we’ll rock up to heaven – where feet never swell and no one makes noises when sitting down/standing up – with a smile on our wrinkly old phizogs.

Julie Burchill and Daniel Raven’s play Awful People – about sex, race, class and the generation gap – plays on Brighton Pier on 22 September; tickets here.

How to survive summer in Andalusia

Early on in his biography of the novelist Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader quotes a hilariously misanthropic letter Amis wrote to the poet Philip Larkin, one of his closest friends. Amis, at the time in his early thirties, was complaining about a three-month stint he and his family – including his son Martin, then five years old – spent abroad, as required by the terms of the Somerset Maugham Prize, which he won in 1955 for his first novel, Lucky Jim (Martin would also win it in 1973 for his debut, The Rachel Papers). Clearly not impressed with his surroundings in Portugal’s Algarve, Amis listed a ‘sort of basic kit’ of things he thought necessary for a visit to the country in the mid 1950s:

1: a DDT [mosquito] spray with a half-gallon storage tank; 2: a placard saying in Portuguese WHAT THE F***ING HELL ARE YOU STARING AT?; 3: a crate of detective novels; 4: a jar of pills which promote constipation; 5: a solicitor as travelling companion…

As I face my ninth summer living in Andalusia (jeans folded away, duvet removed from bed, red wine stored in fridge, air-conditioning unit dusted off), Amis’s grumpy letter got me thinking about what you need to bring or to know if you’re visiting Spain’s most southerly region during the hottest months of the year. You won’t necessarily require items four or five from his survival ‘kit’, and you certainly won’t need item three, implying as it does that there’s not a great deal else to do. But number one is a good idea (unfortunately), and number two (in Spanish, obviously) could be handy if you’re staying in tiny rural villages – although a slightly less combative tone is recommended.

Apart from that, here are a few other tips that might be useful to survive a summer visit to Andalusia:

Be near water

I can’t overstate the importance of being near water during an Andalusian summer, even if it’s just your hotel’s rooftop plunge pool. If you’re in the east, make for Almeria’s Cabo de Gata-Nijar Natural Park, especially the Playa de los Genoveses and the Playa de los Muertos (despite the latter’s wonderfully morbid name, there are no skeletons in the sand), both of which are flanked and backed by volcanic rock and high dunes. Take all food and drink as there are no facilities.

On Andalusia’s Atlantic coast, in the province of Cadiz, the star beaches are Playa Bolonia and Playa Zahara, both of which are completely unspoilt and made for sunset picnics. If you’re in Malaga, I wouldn’t recommend La Malagueta, the main urban beach: it’s dirty, overcrowded and the portaloos are harrowing. Instead, head east, where you’ll find more spacious playas, fantastic fish restaurants and plenty of chiringuitos in La Cala del Moral and Rincón de la Victoria (20/25 minutes in the car or on the M260 or M160 buses). Alternatively or in addition, venture inland to the turquoise lakes of El Chorro (an hour’s drive north from Malaga), where you can also tackle the Caminito del Rey, a hiking trail pinned to the cliffside 100 metres above the water.  

Eat and drink right

Top summer dishes, especially on the coast, include pescaito frito, a platter of battered deep-fried cod, prawns, anchovies, squid and whatever else came in on the boat that morning, served with wedges or lemon and chips (patatas fritas); salads topped with hard-boiled egg, tuna, carrot, sweetcorn and anchovies, dressed with Andalusia’s world class olive oil; skewers of plump sardines cooked on beachside BBQs (espetos de sardinas, a Malaga speciality); grilled meats (carnes a la brasa) served, again, with heaps of chips unless you specifically request otherwise.

The best summer drinks are small draft beers called cañas that stay cold and crisp (pints turn lukewarm within minutes); tinto de verano (red wine mixed with lemonade), not as potent but just as refreshing as sangria; dry white manzanilla sherry; and intimidating measures of gin poured over ice and finished with a splash of tonic. A lot of places will also ask whether you want your red wine frio (chilled) or del tiempo (room temperature) – and when the mercury is nudging 40°C, believe me, you want it frio, weird as that might seem. Incidentally, if you hear a Spaniard making fun of fish and chips, as they’re fond of doing, remind them that a suspiciously similar dish also features on Spanish menus.  

Time your visit to coincide with a feria

Running from Seville’s Feria de Abril just after Easter until the celebration of the grape harvest in Jerez de la Frontera in early September, summer in Andalusia is a non-stop party season. Every village, town and city hosts its own feria (fair), most of which take place in July and August. The next big one is in Malaga from 12 to 19 August and features a vast recinto (fairground) on the outskirts of the city with rollercoasters and pop-up bars and restaurants in marquees called casetas, as well as celebrations on and around Calle Marques de Larios in the Old Town.

During the day, buy a bottle of the feria’s signature drink, a sweet white wine called cartojal (you’ll get little paper cups with it) to sip as you weave among the brightly-coloured flamenco dresses, join the impromptu street parties and enjoy live bands on the Plaza de la Constitución. A siesta will be required to re-energise for the night session on the recinto, where the casetas shake with flamenco until breakfast. Take hard currency, because a lot of the casetas, even in big cities, don’t take cards.

Observe the siesta hours

If there’s one thing you might have to tell yourself repeatedly during a trip to southern Spain in the summer, it’s this: ‘I am not a bum for sleeping in the day.’ The notion of lying in a darkened, air-conditioned room after lunch is an alien – or unnecessary – one to a lot of British visitors, but it’s essential during July and August, for two main reasons. First, the hottest part of the day falls between about 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., when temperatures of 35°C or more make sightseeing an ordeal; and second, everything happens later in Andalusia in the summer, so you’ll get more out of your day if you restart it at around 5 p.m., perhaps with a coffee and a plate of churros (sweet, donut-like snacks served with cups of melted chocolate for dipping). Refreshed, you can then join the paseo – evening stroll – just before sunset (when everyone emerges from their air-conditioned lairs), enjoy a couple of drinks and then eat dinner when the Spaniards do – i.e from about 9.30 p.m. onwards. Also bear in mind that most shops (big supermarkets excepted) close between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. and aren’t open on Saturday afternoons or at all on Sundays, and that a lot of restaurants close around 4 p.m. and don’t re-open for supper until 7 p.m. The 24-hour culture simply hasn’t caught on in Andalusia.

Discard rigid notions of time

Time takes on an Einsteinian elasticity in Andalusia, especially in the summer, when the intense heat slows everything down. The Spanish day is divided into two hazily-defined halves: the morning (la manaña, also the word for ‘tomorrow’), which runs from breakfast to early afternoon, even though it’s technically correct to start saying buenas tardes to people after 12 p.m.; and the afternoon (la tarde) which begins around lunchtime (2-4 p.m.) and incorporates what’s thought of as the evening in the UK before at some point morphing into la noche (there is no Spanish word corresponding to ‘evening’ in English). Epic lunches – especially on summer weekends – exemplify this lack of rigidity, which again might require adjustment if you’re visiting Spanish friends. I moved here with a typically British attitude to the midday meal, according to which you leave the table when you’ve finished and move on to the next part of the day, with no lounging about after dessert. I’d never experienced a sobremesa (literally,‘around the table’), an unnervingly elongated post-lunch session, usually fuelled by spirits, that at some point blends into pre-dinner drinks, which in turn lead smoothly into dinner.  

If you’re curious, attend a bullfight

The corrida de toros or ‘running of bulls’ (there’s no literal Spanish translation for ‘bullfight’) hails from Andalusia and is still an integral part of the region’s culture. During the summer, every town and city holds at least one – and often several – as part of its feria. Tickets in the plaza de toros fall into two price categories, the most expensive being in the sombra (shade) and the cheapest being in the sol (sun). The extra 10 or 15 euros is worth it: not even factor-50 suncream or a massive parasol will protect you entirely from three hours under the Andalusian summer sun.

Supported by their respective teams, three toreros will kill two bulls each and the award system works as follows: one of the animal’s ears is given to the torero for a good performance, both of them for a very good performance and two ears and the tail for something truly exceptional. Even rarer is an indulto (pardon), where the bull is judged to have performed so well that it is let out of the ring alive. Take a white handkerchief to petition the bullring’s president for ears, a cushion for the concrete seating and a cool bag full of beer. A.L. Kennedy’s On Bullfighting provides a thought-provoking introduction to this controversial spectacle.

Why Madonna still matters

In my day job, I work with children. Well, OK, they’re in their twenties, but when they ask me who my favourite musician of all time is, and I say Madonna, they usually look blank. That funny-looking woman who had a few hits in the 1980s? Meh, what about Taylor Swift?

Madonna may not have topped the charts for a few years, but for me and many other women of my generation, she is the greatest. And she always will be, in a way that the pop stars of today – derivative, airbrushed, on-message and PRed to the max – can only dream of. She changed the world of music, she changed lives and even now, in my forties, I still look to her as an inspiration – which is why I was so concerned last week when the news broke that she had spent several days in intensive care with a bacterial infection.

At 64, Madonna is the bestselling female recording artist of all time; she has sold 300 million records in her 40-plus year career. She continues to release albums every three or four years. Before her hospital admission she had been preparing to begin a seven-month, 45-city world tour. Contemporary radio stations that ignore her in favour of younger artists are missing a trick, as she is still making both first-class dance-pop bangers and addictively beautiful slow-tempo tracks. To pick out just two from her recent albums: ‘Turn Up The Radio’ is a fantastic dance track that has lifted me out of a low mood more than once; ‘Ghost Town’ is a haunting evocation of the beauty of having a soulmate which I first heard with my equally music-obsessed ex and which, five years after we broke up, still revives a sadness.

So what, you might say, she’s just a singer who’s made some good tunes and become very rich as a result. But there is so much more to Madonna than that. She moved to New York at 19, alone, and the five years she spent there before becoming famous were a time of grinding poverty and knockback after knockback as she struggled to make it big. She lived in cockroach-filled apartments in dangerous neighbourhoods, worked a series of low-paying jobs, was sexually assaulted at knifepoint and at times was homeless. When her father came to visit her he was so appalled by the squalor she lived in that he begged her to come home. But she refused; she wouldn’t give up. She clung to her dreams and ambitions with a tenacity that, given some of the conditions she endured, seems almost superhuman. How many of us can say that we would do the same? I certainly would have fled home at the first sign of all those six-legged housemates. But when you see someone you admire show that level of determination, and eventually succeed, it helps you to find a strength of your own. I can remember how upset I was when a man I was involved with told me to give up on my journalistic dreams: ‘The industry’s dead,’ he told me. ‘Retrain as a translator.’ Madonna didn’t retrain, and I wasn’t going to either; and he was out of the picture by the time I finally got published in the national press.

Yet that very strength of character has meant that Madonna has often been criticised for not conforming to traditional expectations of what a woman should be like. She has always been outspoken – taking on everyone from the Catholic Church to George W. Bush – sexually confident and even aggressive, and the latter especially means she has developed a reputation of not always being the nicest person. But in a world where women are still told to ‘be kind’ at their own expense, even, or perhaps especially, when their rights conflict with the desires of men, I think we need to see more women who don’t prioritise being ‘nice’, who aren’t afraid to state their opinions honestly, make trouble and stand their ground.

People don’t tend to mind opinionated women who have the ‘right’ views – Dua Lipa knows she’ll win points for criticising the government’s stance on refugees. Madonna has never had the right views. She was a vocal supporter of gay rights in the 1980s when homophobia was much more rife than it is now and Section 28 was still in force. She spoke out against the stigma surrounding HIV and Aids at a time when sufferers sometimes died alone because their families did not know they were gay. Yet there she was, on the Jonathan Ross Show, telling the world that being HIV positive was nothing to be ashamed of. A leaflet on safe sex was provided with every copy of the Like A Prayer album when it came out, and it included the line: ‘People with Aids, regardless of their sexual orientation, deserve compassion and support, not violence and bigotry.’ That may seem uncontroversial now, but I can remember the 1980s and it wasn’t then. It’s easy to forget the intensity of the fear, suspicion and prejudice that existed then and how against-the-grain her stance was. It could have ruined her career.

But it didn’t. Seeing a woman who is outspoken, argumentative, and with a lot of the ‘wrong’ opinions, helped give me the confidence to be honest about who I am (a left-leaning Leave voter, so everybody disagrees with me). Madonna has continued to take flak throughout her life over everything from her much younger boyfriends to the quality of her singing, and she doesn’t cave in – she just carries on doing what she wants to do. Every time I’m made to feel I need to shut my mouth and switch off my brain, I think of Madonna, who has never shut hers and never will.

Madonna is living proof that you don’t have to be ‘nice’ – people-pleasing, appeasing, uncontroversial – to do good. She has donated millions to numerous medical and children’s charities, including Aids and breast cancer charities, and paid the huge medical bills of friends diagnosed with Aids, most notably her former flatmate Martin Burgoyne, whose bedside she was at when he died. She has founded two charities – the Ray of Light Foundation, which supports education for girls in poorer countries, and Raising Malawi – and has raised four adopted children as well as two biological children, for much of the time as a single parent.

Madonna isn’t all good, or all bad. And this is why her fans love her. She’s a megastar, but we see ourselves in her. Like all women, she makes bad fashion choices, has insecurities about her appearance (hence overdoing it just a bit on the fillers recently), dates unsuitable men and has struggled to find the perfect partner. Like all mums, she’s had difficulties with her teenage children. Like all career women, she’s had failures and flops, made bad choices and wrong moves. Like all unmarried women over the age of 30, she’s written an embarrassing book about her sex life – OK, maybe that’s just her.

But again and again, Madonna bounces back from very public criticism, ridicule and failure, puts it behind her and moves onto something different in a way that ought to inspire each of us who’s messed up in a smaller, less public way. She never lets it get the better of her. And if she can overcome her mistakes and go on to new successes, then so can I.

Get well soon, Madonna. You’re needed now as a role model as much as you ever were – maybe even more.

Is this really the best Labour can offer teachers?

Bridget Phillipson was appointed Labour’s shadow education secretary in November 2021. After 18 months in the role, she has now finally unveiled Labour’s ambitious new idea to help tackle the teacher retention and recruitment crisis: use the tax raid on private school fees to fund a £2,400 welcome bonus to every teacher who has completed their two years of training.

This is a classic case of copying someone’s homework, except – no surprises – it wasn’t very good the first time round. The Conservatives have already increased the starting salaries of newly-qualified teachers to £30,000. Teaching unions have already overwhelmingly voted to reject a one-off payment. The government has already tried giving bonuses to maths teachers, chemistry teachers, physics teachers, modern languages teachers, on top of generous, ever-growing training bursaries.

Yet still teacher vacancies have doubled in the last two years. Still nearly one in five teachers who qualified in 2020 have since quit. Even the behemoth Teach First has just signed up its smallest cohort in five years. Has Phillipson been caught at the back not listening?

There are three simple reasons Bridget’s bright idea won’t work. Firstly, £2,400 in a cost-of-living crisis is unfortunately, really not that much money: after income tax, national insurance, pension contributions and student loan, this ‘bonus’ equates to roughly 0.002 per cent of a deposit for a modest flat in London. 

Secondly, it’s hardly a long-term strategy: stay for a third year, take the golden hello and then wave a hasty goodbye. 

Finally, the problem with education, education, education is workload, workload, workload. Anyone who has spent any time in an actual school will know that there are far more pressing problems facing teachers than pay: punitive inspections, chronic underfunding, poor behaviour, ever greater expectations, growing class sizes, lack of parental support, the pressure of league tables, the explosion of mental health issues and other learning needs, to name a few. 

If a bucket is leaking, you don’t fill it with more water: you fix the bucket. The same logic needs to apply to teaching. These problems aren’t insurmountable; they just require a level of creativity and imagination that apparently surpasses our politicians, who prefer to try the same thing over and over again but expect different results. 

For example, why not instead use the £50 million budgeted for teacher ‘bonuses’ to pay for more planning and marking time for classroom teachers in the schools and areas where they are most likely to quit? Too often schools are forced to prioritise quantity over quality when it comes to planning teachers’ timetables; they max out teaching time so that all marking, planning and admin has to take place outside of school hours, and there is no time to reflect or hone classroom practice. 

Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Some schools are now offering compressed hours, where teachers are paid full-time but only teach four days a week, with the fifth day dedicated to non-teaching tasks that can potentially be done from home. One academy offers staff the opportunity to take three days off in a row during term time; another offers staff the chance to work from home if they are not teaching rather than insisting they come in.

More flexible working arrangements like these would be attractive to all demographics: Gen Z, with their more mindful approach to work-life balance; middle-career teachers with young families or childcare needs; or older teachers who may not have the emotional and physical stamina they used to (over the last decade the number of over 50s teaching has reduced from 25 per cent of the workforce to under 19 per cent).

Alternatively, use the money in other ways: for example, could we incentivise teachers by writing off student loans in some way, perhaps gradually over time in relation to years of service? Or could we use the money for subsidised housing for teachers who work in disadvantaged areas, as one way of tackling geographical disparities between schools? When I did my teacher training, Teach First paid for us to stay in private student accommodation in London for six weeks; this was a great way to develop support networks, encourage diversity of applicants and was also just good fun. One academy chain recently built 100 homes for teachers to stop them being priced out of London; could a similar idea be rolled out on a larger scale?

I’m a teacher, not a policymaker, and I don’t know the answers to these questions. However, I firmly believe there must be more exciting, more interesting conversations we could be having around education rather than continuously dangling one-off payments in front of teachers and wondering why they don’t take the bait.

If this is Labour’s big education idea, then it is a dreadfully uninspired one: repetitive, ineffective, and – every teacher’s least favourite word – boring.

The NHS isn’t underfunded

We’re going to hear a lot about the NHS this week: mostly tributes and praise – and even a few prayers – all in recognition of its 75th anniversary on Wednesday. The loudest criticism you’re likely to hear will be about underfunding – which is not the fault of NHS officials, really, but rather the fault of politicians who set the health service’s budget. The NHS is only falling short on patient outcomes, the logic goes, because it’s being denied resources in the first place.

Is it really? New data published by the OECD this afternoon pops some of those birthday balloons. It reveals that the NHS actually remains one of the best-funded healthcare systems in the world. The numbers for 2022 are in, and as The Spectator’s data hub shows, the UK ranks sixth on the list for health expenditure as a percentage of GDP.

The UK ties with the Swiss healthcare system – often held up as a gold standard for both funding and outcomes – by spending 11.3 per cent of GDP on healthcare. Countries across the world, known for getting far better outcomes than the NHS – including Denmark, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, the list goes on – are spending less.

This much money being funnelled into the NHS is nothing new. In 2021, the NHS was thought to be the fifth-best funded system, according to the OECD. But the revised figures today bump it up to third place.

Additional Covid spending (and recovery money) has seen the NHS’s place on these charts jump in recent years. Unsurprisingly, spending as a percentage of GDP was higher for the majority of countries in 2021 than it was last year, as the pandemic was still at its peak. But back in 2019 the UK was already spending well above the average OECD on healthcare: 10 per cent of GDP, compared to the average of 8.4 per cent.

Make no mistake: in the UK, this money is being funnelled into the NHS. There is ‘no evidence of widespread privatisation of NHS services,’ according to the King's Fund’s report, published just a few months ago. The amount of money being spent on private provision not only remains in the single-digits: it remains at similar levels in 2019-20 as it did in 2012.

So with internationally high levels of funding going into the health service, what explains its inability to deliver outcomes its neighbours manage to achieve? What more is needed, exactly, to make the patient experience in the UK look more like the plethora of countries that are spending less yet getting better results? These are just a couple of the many questions that should perhaps be asked this week, amidst the celebrations for our NHS.

The ‘New Conservatives’ are useful for Braverman

How unhelpful are the New Conservatives to their party in government? They insist that they’re fully supportive of Rishi Sunak, but today’s 12-point plan to cut net migration isn’t exactly a love letter to the Prime Minister.

Someone who does seem rather less annoyed by the new caucus is Suella Braverman, who as luck would have it was taking Home Office Questions in the House of Commons this afternoon. One of the members of the new caucus, James Daly, had a question about ‘what steps she is taking to reduce net migration’, and the Home Secretary replied:

Net migration is too high, and this government are determined to bring it down. Indeed, that was one of the reasons why I voted and campaigned to leave the European Union in 2016. Last month, I announced measures to reduce the number of student dependants coming to the UK, which has soared by 35 per cent, and to stop people transferring from student visas to work visas. We expect net migration to return to sustainable levels over time, and immigration policy is under constant review.

Daly followed this up with one of the points in his group’s plan, amending the minimum salary requirement for the skilled worker visa scheme, to which Braverman talked about the need for employers to ‘recruit more people who are already here, rather than advertising abroad so much’. She then clashed with shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper over whether she supported ‘her own social care visas or not’.

My understanding is that the Home Secretary does not mind the arguments that are being made today by her backbench colleagues. They are particularly helpful in her ongoing standoff with the Treasury, which has always had a more liberal attitude to high net migration than the Home Office for the simple reason that it is pretty handy for the economy. Braverman and Jeremy Hunt last clashed in May over the shortage occupation list, which eases visa rules for sectors with particular labour problems. The struggle of a Home Secretary to get colleagues to back net migration targets with policy as well as words is eternal – just ask Theresa May, who had the same fights when she had the job. But what’s also at stake now is the Tory manifesto, which Sunak is under pressure to make as tough as possible on immigration, particularly to compensate for the likelihood that he won’t meet his pledge to ‘stop the boats’.

Parliamentary police officer purged every six months

These days, the reputation of the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection (PaDP) Unit is at a low ebb, following the scandals over its former members David Carrick and Wayne Couzens. A review of the wider force found it was institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic, with the PaDP singled out for particular condemnation. In March of this year, Politico reported that the unit’s officers had received 439 complaints in 2020, 2021 and 2022, including a total of 264 by members of the public.

Now, Mr S has done his own digging and it transpires that every six months an officer on the parliamentary unit is being removed from duty due to allegations of criminal activity. According to a Freedom of Information request by The Spectator, ten officers were removed from their post and either suspended or given restricted duties following criminal allegations between March 2021 and April 2023. Four of these officers were either dismissed or would have been dismissed, had they not resigned due to a misconduct hearing – the equivalent of one every six months.

Five of the ten cases were removed from duty owing specifically to sexual offences. The Metropolitan Police told Mr S that the force ‘has launched its strongest doubling down on standards in 50 years’ and that since September ‘we have increased the number of gross misconduct hearings by more than a third and the number of officers dismissed for gross misconduct by more than 50 per cent.’

An elite section in the Metropolitan Police – talk about an oxymoron.

Virginia Woolf doesn’t need a trigger warning

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Americans, apparently. Or at least that’s the conclusion Vintage US seems to have drawn. The publishing house has slapped a new edition of Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse, with a trigger warning, alerting US readers to its potentially upsetting content. (Vintage UK hasn’t followed suit.)

The warning, reported in the Daily Telegraph, doesn’t mention anything specific, probably because you’d have to strain yourself to find anything particularly offensive about this philosophical, semi-autobiographical novel about a well-to-do family’s holidays on the Isle of Skye. Instead, it just warns hypothetical, easily offended readers about how old – and thus potentially terrifying – the novel is:

‘This book was published in 1927 and reflects the attitudes of its time. The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not intended as an endorsement of cultural representations or language contained herein.’

Apparently, Vintage US put an almost identical warning on its recent edition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It seems that any novel of a certain, er, vintage is now deemed perilous to today’s readers, who are all apparently unaware that writers in previous eras held somewhat different views to people today, or that fictional characters can sometimes be a bit nasty.

It isn’t just Vintage, either. Penguin recently put a trigger warning on Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, warning us that the novel contains ‘prejudices that were commonplace in British society’ when it was first published in 1945. Remarkably, Penguin also felt the need to pronounce that those views were ‘wrong then’ and ‘wrong today’. That these prejudices were articulated in the novel by Uncle Matthew – a cartoonish, intentionally unpleasant xenophobe, wont to bang on about ‘bloody foreigners’ – made the trigger warning look even more ridiculous. He is hardly the dashing, amiable hero of that story.

Trigger warnings, like most bad things in this world, began life on elite American university campuses. The idea, at least originally, was to support those suffering from PTSD, alerting them to content in a text or film that might ‘trigger’ their symptoms or force them to relive past traumatic experiences. To this day, proponents defend trigger warnings on the grounds that they are about shielding the genuinely vulnerable from psychological harm, not warning everyone away from difficult material.

The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly, this is actually probably a terrible way to treat people with PTSD. This is a point author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been making for years. ‘According to the most basic tenets of psychology, the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided’, he says. Secondly, blanket warnings on books, by definition, prime all readers to look upon them suspiciously – fearfully even. They prime us to take offence.

The upshot of all this is encouraging people to be wary of reading. In particular, to be wary of reading anything that wasn’t written five minutes ago and that doesn’t perfectly reflect all of our contemporary (and so obviously morally unimpeachable) views. The notion that one might learn from the past, that perhaps long-dead writers knew something we don’t, something we’ve forgotten or unlearned, is dismissed out of hand these days. They used to say the past was a foreign country. Now we treat the past like one of those countries the Foreign Office issues travel warnings about. Like Libya. Or France.

We should reject these patronising trigger warnings. But we also need to challenge the culture that gave birth to them: one in which we are all considered mentally fragile, in which great literature is reduced to the crudest of political purity tests, and in which the past is caricatured as one long, uninterrupted horror.

The unedifying Yilin Wang vs British Museum row 

If you visited the British Museum’s new exhibition China’s Hidden Century a fortnight ago, you’d have seen a substantial section on the revolutionary woman poet Qiu Jin, with substantial extracts from her poems in Chinese and English displayed in a giant projection. What you might not have noticed was that the translator was not credited anywhere in the physical exhibition. But Yilin Wang, whose translations of those poems appeared in the exhibition, did. 

Indeed, Ms Wang, who has won awards for her poetry and has an extensive record as a translator, was more dismayed than that. Not only was she not credited: she hadn’t even been consulted by the British Museum about their use of her work. She was rightly angry.  

Not for nothing is #namethetranslator a popular hashtag on social media. Translators often go uncredited in book reviews and even on book covers. Their work is often undervalued, and it is sometimes ignorantly imagined that a literary translation is not a creative work in its own right. 

It’s a major oversight that an exhibition of this kind could use a translator’s copyrighted work without approaching them for permission. Translations of Chinese poetry do not sprout spontaneously from the ground, like dandelions, to be picked ad lib by passers-by. So it is hard to understand how, unless mounting the physical exhibition was left in charge of a teenager on work experience, Ms Wang’s translations can have been acquired and exhibited without it crossing a single person’s mind that they were a professional writer’s copyright material. 

The British Museum has blamed ‘human error’ and claimed, slightly bromidically, that ‘every effort’ was made to secure proper permissions. We know, though, that they knew the translation was Ms Wang’s because credit is given for her translations in the exhibition catalogue. We also know she’s not all that hard to ‘reach out to’ because her personal website is the second hit for her name in Google. So this was a serious goof – as the people I’ve spoken to at the British Museum have been happy to admit.  

What followed, though, has made it all so much worse. Ms Wang initially raised her complaint on Twitter two Sundays ago. Since the British Museum (BM) has form, as some will see it, with nicking stuff from foreigners and putting it on display, online anger was not slow to grow. I can imagine whoever logged into the British Museum’s social media account first thing that Monday morning will have immediately felt their hair spontaneously burst into flames.   

As far as I can piece it together, the BM emailed Ms Wang that same Monday apologising, asking her to sign a retrospective permission slip and offering to pay and credit her for her work. She did not reply to this email that day. She points out that there is an eight-hour time difference between her home in Vancouver and the UK, and says that at the time she was consulting the Society of Authors about her position.  

The following day, the BM unilaterally took down the whole section of the exhibition involving her translation, and the day after that they issued a statement saying that they had done so in accordance with Ms Wang’s wishes. This she disputes, saying she thinks that they ‘deliberately misrepresented what has happened by telling journalists that I demanded that my work be removed from the exhibit’. The BM sees its haste in taking down the translations as a courtesy; Ms Wang sees it as the exact opposite. 

The BM’s position is that, absent any direct communication, they acted on a tweet in which she said: ‘I am demanding all my translations to be removed from the China’s Hidden Century exhibit and all materials pertaining to the exhibit (including the exhibition books, all video/photo/display materials, all signage, all digital or print materials such as brochures, and anywhere else where translations have appeared), unless the museum makes a proper offer to compensate me and the compensation is given immediately.’  

Into that ‘unless’, I imagine, a world of legal argument could be poured. And, heaven help us, it yet may be. Ms Wang has started a legal crowdfunder seeking £15,000 to sue the British Museum for copyright infringement and at the time of writing is already a third of the way there. The decision to remove the section of the exhibition is now being cast as the ‘erasure’ of two women writers of colour, so accusations of racism and colonialism have entered what began as a dispute over copyright and it has taken on a culture war viciousness.  

Me, I’m the Panglossian sort always prepared to see, in the first instance, a cock-up rather than a racist/colonialist conspiracy. I find it truly hard to imagine that anyone at the BM really did think, great, we can save a few hundred quid by stealing this person’s translations: nobody will notice and if they do, to hell with them. In the clumsiness of their subsequent moves – above all taking the exhibit down before they’d had a conversation with the translator, saying it did so at Ms Wang’s request, and then (as she claims) flatly refusing to put it back up again – I see not a calculated slight or erasure so much as a large organisation in a blind panic at finding itself the object of a Twitterstorm that touched painfully on its tenderest reputational sore points. I’m imagining a bull trapped in a china shop with a swarm of angry bees. 

The result? Nobody is happy. The translator feels the museum has been condescending, that it insulted her in its initial approach by ’emphasising how other contributors let them use their work for free or at a low cost’, and that the current situation is ‘the worst possible outcome’.  

When I contacted Ms Wang she told me that ‘what frustrates me the most is I have no say […] If it’s truly an accident and they want to take things to redress, they should be asking me what I wish that they do to fix the situation and respect my very reasonable wishes’. It would be nice to imagine that such an accommodation could still be made, though legally I suspect she’s on stronger ground insisting the exhibition be taken down than insisting it be reinstated.   

Meanwhile, the curators of the exhibition have been and continue to be abused and insulted online, the British Museum’s reputation is being dragged though the stinky stuff, and its many visitors are deprived of the chance of learning about Qiu Jin’s life and poetry and of reading Ms Wang’s learned and artful translations.    

What are the conclusions to be drawn from this ugly affair? The first thing is that, yes, it really is a moral obligation to #namethetranslator. The second is that social media howl-rounds can undoubtedly move organisations to action – but that they tend to have their own momentum and may not be the best and calmest spaces in which to litigate such a dispute.  

Would the BM have acted less hastily had they not been in the middle of a Twitterstorm? Would Ms Wang – the initial offence admitted – have been more likely to have been given satisfaction had the whole conversation been conducted through the usual channels? I can’t pretend to know the answer to either of these questions, but it’s hard to see at this stage how it could conceivably have gone worse. 

Bank of England: ‘any gender’ can be pregnant

Talk about getting your priorities right. As ministers battle to get inflation down from the double digit highs of earlier this year, it seems not all at the Bank of England are preoccupied with this struggle. For it has today been revealed that staff at Britain’s central bank – whose main job is to keep inflation at just two per cent – have been spending their time drawing up new, right-on pregnancy guidelines. The main takeaway? People of any gender identity can become pregnant, apparently.

In its submission last year to Stonewall (who else?), the Bank of England boasted about how its new ‘family leave’ policy, introduced in June 2021, included the phrase ‘birthing parent’ to mean mother. The Bank’s parental bereavement leave policy meanwhile ‘talks about parents without specifying gender’. The term was instead taken to mean ‘the parent who is/was pregnant with the child but includes persons of any and all gender identities.’

According to the Times, the document also detailed the Bank’s commitment to gender-neutral lavatories, stating that it planned to ‘upgrade’ its facilities. That included a commitment to ensure that the seventh floor of its headquarters in London offered only unisex lavatories. All this was done at a time when the Bank was wilfully complacent about inflation, with the Monetary Policy Committee keeping the Bank Rate at 0.1 per cent in November 2021 despite CPI inflation already being 5.1 percent and rising.

So much for the wisdom of the ‘Old Lady of Threadneedle Street’. Or should that be ‘Old Person’…?

Ministers say Sue Gray breached Civil Service code

Sue Gray did break the Civil Service code, according to a Cabinet Office investigation released by the government. The Partygate prober-in-chief has today been found to have breached the guidelines which she did so much to uphold during her six years as head of the government’s, er, Proprietary and Ethics team. Gray began negotiations with Labour in October of last year and thus violated the rules whereby individuals must declare all relevant outside interests to their line manager as soon as they arise.

Government advice states that individuals ‘should err on the side of caution when considering what to declare but the onus is on the individual to consider what might be relevant and declare it.’

Jeremy Quin, the Cabinet Office minister, said a civil inquiry found a ‘prima facie’ breach of the code about outside interests to be clear and transparent – meaning an apparent contravention of the rules based on first impressions. In a damning written ministerial statement, Quin confirmed that:

Given the exceptional nature of this case and the previous commitment by ministers to update the House, I can now confirm that the Cabinet Office process looking into the circumstances leading up to Ms Gray’s resignation has been concluded. As part of the process, Ms Gray was given the opportunity to make representations but chose not to do so. This process, led by the Civil Service, found that the Civil Service Code was prima facie broken as a result of the undeclared contact between Ms Gray and the Leader of the Opposition.

So much for ‘Mr Rules’, eh Sir Keir?

Red Wall MPs go up against Sunak on legal migration

Rishi Sunak is facing calls from the latest Tory caucus – ‘the New Conservatives’ – to take a series of steps to clamp down on legal migration. The group, made up of MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, formed last month and largely features MPs with so-called Red Wall seats.

Members include Tory rising star Miriam Cates as well as Lee Anderson (this has raised eyebrows as Anderson is deputy party chairman, which would usually prevent an MP joining a backbench pressure group). For their first policy push, the New Conservatives have released a 12-point plan which they claim would allow the government to cut net migration to Britain from 606,000 to 240,000 by the end of 2024.

The measures suggested include stopping graduating overseas students from staying on in the UK for up to two years to find work (Boris Johnson relaxed this in 2019) and cracking down on the dependents a student can bring by closing the route that would allow family members access to the jobs market. They have proposed closing temporary schemes that grant eligibility for worker visas for industries, such as the care sector, deemed to be in urgent need of staff. They are also calling for the main skilled work visa salary threshold to be raised to £38,000.

The policy reflects the debate that has been taking place internally in recent months between the Home Secretary Suella Braverman and the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, backed by Education Secretary Gillian Keegan. Braverman has pushed for more measures to crack down on legal migration but has faced opposition from the Treasury because the economy relies on foreign labour in many sectors.

So, will the new group see any of their ideas adopted? It’s notable that ministers are not trying to slap it down. Speaking this morning, culture secretary Lucy Frazer agreed with the principle of the UK becoming less reliant on foreign labour – particularly in the care sector – pointing to Friday’s NHS workforce plan as an example of ways the UK can train up more workers.

However, there is likely to be disagreement is over the timing. Sunak has said legal migration is ‘too high’ but suggested that getting it below the number he inherited (around 500,000) would be his target for the next election. As part of his plan to do this, in May he announced that his government would remove the right of some international students to bring family members into the country.

These MPs clearly want him to go further – and it’s likely Braverman would agree. However, in government there is concern about the impact such steps would have on the economy as well as the state of social care if taken quickly.

Biden can’t ignore the Taliban’s terrorist links for ever

President Joe Biden is either not being briefed on what is going on in Afghanistan, or more likely choosing not to believe what he is being told. In an unscripted aside at the end of a press conference on Friday he said, ‘Remember what I said about Afghanistan? I said al-Qaeda would not be there. I said we’d get help from the Taliban. What’s happening now? What’s going on? Read your press. I was right.’

The president was not right. In fact, he was wrong. What he was referring to was a commitment by the Taliban to support operations against international terrorists operating in Afghanistan. Not only has that commitment been broken, but links between the Taliban and al-Qaeda are said to be ‘strong and symbiotic,’ with al-Qaeda now ‘rebuilding operational capability’ from its base in Afghanistan. So close are the ties that the Afghan ministry of defence now uses al-Qaeda training manuals.

This has all been outlined in a UN report published last month which could not have been clearer:

Promises made by the Taliban in August 2021 to be more inclusive, break with terrorist groups, respect universal human rights, grant a general amnesty and not pose a security threat to other countries seem increasingly hollow, if not plain false, in 2023.

Biden appealed to people to ‘Read your press’; that UN report was indeed reported in the press, including the (US-government funded) Voice of America news network only four days before he spoke. It was published under the headline: ‘Taliban flouts terrorism commitments by appointing Al-Qaeda-affiliated governors.’ It is hard to know how this was missed by his staff.

The disconnect between the president’s wishful thinking and reality is caused by his continuing need to justify the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and its consequences. They have not only been terrible for the people of the country, ending all opportunities for women and girls, but turned Afghanistan once again into a crucible for international terrorists.

The UN report says that more than 20 groups now operate under Taliban protection, with secure training camps and passports for fighters. This is all in plain sight.

Some of the training camps full of foreign fighters can be seen in former international bases close to the centre of Kabul on the Jalalabad road. Many of the groups are opposed to governments in neighbouring countries, including China, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, developing into what the UN calls a ‘serious threat to Central Asia in the longer term.’   

The threat has ended the illusions that other countries who were prepared to work with the Taliban, opening embassies and looking for commercial opportunities, may have had. Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran have all downgraded their embassies. The former Iranian Ambassador to Kabul, Mohammad Reza Bahrami, tweeted that the ‘inevitable deepening of internal rifts between the Taliban factions’ made recognition less likely. They are all now planning for a different future, realising that Taliban divisions may fracture their power.

The UN report suggested that units, including suicide bombers, have been brought back to Kandahar. This is, of course, where Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhunzada’s power base lies and this redeployment may be an attempt to defend him, as Akhunzada fears opposition from the Haqqani network, who control Kabul. Arguments over diminished takings from the drugs trade after the Taliban successfully imposed a ban on poppy growing will increase later this year when stocks diminish.   

The West is making a big mistake if the narrative of a potential post-Taliban future for Afghanistan is to be written by Iran, Russia and China. Other countries in the region are searching for clients who may provide an alternative to the Taliban. Nevertheless, there has not been much western government support even for non-violent opposition groups, trying to keep the flame of reform alight, let alone for the armed groups who are now taking on the Taliban.

American citizens do not all share the defeatism of their government. A former head of Afghan special forces, General Sami Sadat, has spent most of this year in the United States, getting support from veterans’ groups and others, as he puts together plans for a fightback. He has described Biden’s stance on wanting Taliban support against terrorists as ‘moral bankruptcy’. Biden’s blindness to reality means that a coherent American approach is not likely in the short term.

France’s riots are fuelling division over Europe’s migrant crisis

The riots that have ravaged France in recent days have given Eric Zemmour a second wind. The leader of the right wing Reconquest party has been on the airwaves and in the newspapers, saying, with a touch of schadenfreude, ‘I told you so’. 

In a television interview on Saturday evening, Zemmour explained that the reason he entered politics in late 2021 was because of what he described as the Republic’s twenty-year policy of ‘crazy mass immigration’. It was the issue on which he campaigned during last year’s presidential and parliamentary elections. Unlike Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party, Zemmour barely mentioned the cost of living crisis; immigration and Islam were his main agenda.

His twin obsessions didn’t pay off. He received 2.4 million votes in the first round of the presidential campaign – a long way off his expectations. Not one of Reconquest’s 500 candidates was elected to parliament in the legislative elections. 

Zemmour and his lieutenants spent last summer in reflection. Should they broaden their horizons or maintain their focus on immigration and Islam?

The surge in migrants crossing the Mediterranean into Europe last summer, and a series of violent attacks committed in France by foreigners, made up their mind: stick to the existing strategy. ‘We are waging a civilisational war to preserve our age-old identity, which is threatened today by the combined effect of uncontrolled immigration and an Islam that seeks to conquer,’ declared Nicolas Bay, vice-president of Reconquest, in September. 

A month later France was shocked by the murder of 12-year-old Lola, allegedly raped and murdered by an Algerian woman who should have been deported. Then in January an Algerian man stabbed six people at the Gare du Nord, and last month a Syrian asylum seeker ran amok with a knife in an Annecy playground, wounding four babies and two adults. 

These atrocities, coupled with a European migrant crisis that shows no sign of being brought under control, had already reinvigorated Zemmour and his party. The events of the past week – that Zemmour described as somewhere between ‘riots and war’ – are, he says, evidence that he was right all along. 

While the United Nations and France’s magistrates’ union blame the riots on the ‘racism’ of the police, Zemmour says there is only one culprit: immigration. ‘Over the last 20 or 30 years, we have continued to receive hundreds of thousands of people from North Africa and [sub-Saharan] Africa,’ he said.  

Zemmour reiterated what he had said during last year’s presidential campaign: that the first thing he would do as president is ‘stop the flow of migrants’. 

The man who is president, Emmanuel Macron, should have been discussing the migrant crisis at an EU summit on Friday. Instead he was forced to cut short his trip to Brussels to attend a crisis meeting in Paris as the riots worsened. 

He didn’t miss much. The summit ended as most EU summits on migration always end – in an impasse. ‘I’m really, really not happy,’ muttered Slovak Prime Minister Ludovít Ódor. 

There was no joint statement issued by member states and even an attempt by Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni to broker a deal failed. The discord was led by Hungary and Poland, who object to the relocation scheme whereby countries will have to accept a set number of migrants or otherwise face a €20,000 (£17,000) fine for each one they refuse.  

It’s an ill-conceived scheme that will do nothing to diminish the numbers of migrants coming to Europe from Third World countries. Frontex, the EU’s border patrol agency, believes that the only answer is to prevent the migrants from reaching Europe in the first place. So does Zemmour. 

He was an outlier last year on immigration, but in recent months both Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and the centre-right Republicans have toughened their position on the issue. On Saturday, Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, called for ‘a halt to immigration [and] the deportation of foreign criminals and delinquents’. In a television interview on Sunday, Eric Ciotti, leader of the Republicans, claimed that ‘immigration bears a heavy responsibility for this chaos’ as many of those arrested ‘are of foreign origin’. 

Zemmour has become an immigration influencer in France, and it may not be long before his zero migration policy is adopted by other right-wing parties in Europe. Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy PM, was quick to attribute the mayhem in France to, amongst other things, ‘years of errors and ideological follies in terms of immigration, especially Islamic’.  

Alice Weidel, the co-leader of Germany’s AfD said that the violence in France is a ‘glimpse into the future of Germany, which just like Macron, refuses any examination of those coming into the country’. 

What’s happening in France means Europe’s migrant crisis is more divisive than ever. It is even less likely to be resolved any time soon.

Why tech bros love fighting

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the maaaiiin event of the eeevening. In the red corner, fighting out of Boca Chica, Texas, Eeeeelon ‘the Execuuutioner’ MUUUSK! And his opponent, in the blue corner, fighting out of Palo Alto, California, Maaaark ‘The Madman’ ZUCKERBEEERG! 

Sadly, we might never get the fight between Elon Musk of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Musk has said that he would be ‘up for a cage fight’ with Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg then responded simply: ‘Send me location.’ The internet erupted. UFC legend Georges St-Pierre offered to train Musk while UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones announced that he would be ‘Team Zuck’. Bookmakers started taking bets. 

Alas, Musk’s mum has said it isn’t going to happen, the spoilsport. It might seem a bit embarrassing for a 52-year-old multi-billionaire to get pulled out of a fight by his mum but in fairness one of the best MMA fighters of all time, Khabib Nurmagomedov, retired in 2020 because he had promised his mother that he would. 

What’s going on in the mega-rich nerd community? Brawny Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky challenged his peers to a bench-pressing contest, saying, somewhat menacingly: ‘I’ve been waiting for these physical battles in tech.’ Perhaps the trend is just a means of grabbing some good PR from male customers. But there does seem to be a new emphasis on physicality, for want of a better word, among the uber-wealthy. Take Jeff Bezos. Amazon’s founder was once a pasty schlub but transformed himself into a jacked man’s man with rippling muscles.  

The wealthy love testosterone supplements, as Melissa Chen has written in The Spectator World. And why wouldn’t they, when the steep expense is a non-issue and the best doctors in the world are on hand to monitor their health? To some extent, their interest in being more manly needs no special explanation because most men would try to be more manly if they had access to the top trainers, the top nutritionists and great, er, supplements. Bezos bulking up and snagging himself a buxom celebrity girlfriend is not a billionaire thing. It’s a man thing. 

But what about mixed martial arts in particular? I think to some extent one must credit – or blame – Joe Rogan. Rogan, and his gigantic podcast, illuminated how many men are really still teenage boys. Many men cling to a boyish assemblage of interests that span gadgets and technology to face punching. Both Zuckerberg and Musk have appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and both retain a slightly gawky teenagerish image. Musk’s obsessions, cars and space rockets, are decidedly adolescent. While Zuckerberg no doubt wants to shed his reputation as the archetypal nerd (if not an actual robot).  

There’s more to it than this, though. The uber-rich tend to be very driven, focused people (so are countless people who aren’t billionaires, of course, but that doesn’t make this less true). It’s not an improbable leap to transfer an obsession with technical and financial data to optimising workouts or the techniques of a jiu-jitsu bout. Of course, exercise also plays a powerful role in clearing the mind. 

Yet I can’t help wondering if something a bit darker lurks beneath these physical pursuits. Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos etc are pursuing the increased technologisation of society. Zuckerberg has been developing the ‘metaverse’ – a sort of immersive virtual world that looks comically unappealing. Musk has been working on Neuralink – an attempt to build implantable brain-computer interfaces that will ‘improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude’. 

How do these tech bros feel about their dehumanising technologies? Musk has suggested that the Unabomber ‘might not have been wrong’ about the dangers of technologisation – and while Musk’s public pronouncements should be taken with a fistful of salt given his deep attention-seeking instincts, there might have been some amount of sincerity involved. Certainly, he has been very active in warning of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. 

Perhaps the appeal of lifting and martial arts has something to do with a desire to feel more human – maybe even atonement. Historically, some Christians have pursued ‘redemptive suffering’ through physical acts like self-flagellation. Could finding oneself with one’s face buried in a sweaty crotch as a man attempts to rip one’s leg off have some of the same appeal? Perhaps not. But even so, we deserve to see this fight. It’s the least that our sterile and machine-managed age deserves. 

Move over Brighton: is Folkestone the next coastal property hotspot?

As the recent heatwave simmered on, tempura oysters were being washed down with chilled rosé on the beachfront tables at Little Rock, an offshoot of Folkestone’s Michelin starred Rocksalt restaurant. Looking from the shipping container that houses it past a handful of palm trees down the long shingle beach, a huge crane punctuated the clear blue sky above the bright white curves of the town’s biggest new development.

The Folkestone Harbour and Seafront Development Company is hoping to woo a wave of home-buyers to the Kent Channel town’s seafront, with the first phase of 1,000 new homes planned along the beach. The seaside resort and port, in the same vein as Margate and Hastings, has been trying to rebrand itself as a thriving arts centre. In its narrow cobbled Old High Street – once Charles Dickens’s favourite – boarded-up shops have been replaced with a Creative Quarter full of colourfully painted galleries, studios and retailers.

The area around the harbour, including the Harbour Arm, has also emerged from decades of decline and neglect to offer food pop-ups, spruced-up walkways and even a champagne bar at its lighthouse.  The decommissioned Victorian Folkestone Harbour train station and tracks are now a New York ‘High Line’ style stretch of milling people and musicians; the Goods Yard has become a hub of container eateries with a big TV screen showing sporting events; and the world’s first purpose-built multi-storey skatepark, F51, opened last year. 

Sir Roger De Haan, non-executive chairman of Saga Group, the town’s principal employer, heads up the development company that has been behind all of this. He grew up in the town, where his parents ran a hotel, and is fiercely passionate about securing its future by injecting a mix of new creative, sporting and education facilities – plus those 1,000 homes.

‘Back in 2004 Folkestone had no tourists. Like many seaside resorts it was in rather a sad state and needed to reinvent itself,’ he says. ‘It’s taken years [of planning and failed masterplans] to reach this stage, but now the harbour has a new purpose.’ His company has clearly done much for the town already, regenerating dilapidated sites that had attracted antisocial behaviour, such as the former Rotunda amusement park and the Marine Parade, Folkestone’s most crime-ridden street five years ago. 

Despite this, not all the locals are sold on the arrival of so many new homes on the beachfront, which will mean construction sites for years to come and a changed dynamic for the town. Critics complain that family townhouses at Shoreline Crescent cost from £1.8 million, two-bedroom flats from £685,000 and one-beds are £495,000 – though 8 per cent of the scheme will be affordable housing, and owners will not be allowed to rent them out on Airbnb.

The average property in Folkestone sold for £293,210 last year, with the average flat at £202,070, according to Hamptons using Land Registry data. The former is a 27 per cent increase since 2019, which is a bigger rise than Brighton, though Folkestone remains nearly £200,000 less expensive.

Will some house-hunters come to Folkestone instead? The high-speed train from Folkestone to London St Pancras at 55 minutes is actually faster than those from the capital to Brighton – and there’s easier access to France via Eurotunnel. Folkestone also has two grammar schools and residents can walk straight out on to the beach with paddleboard or sea-swimming tow float.

With the ACME-designed white ceramic tiled curves taking on the pinkish sunset hue, its rooftop terraces giving views to France on a clear day and show homes stylishly dressed by the 8 Holland Street design studio, the Shoreline Crescent development is without doubt slickly done. But it is not a project aimed at local first-time buyers, admits the board director who shows me around. It is launching amid a mortgage crisis, but he says: ‘Most buyers will probably be older and will not need a mortgage.’

According to the analyst PropCast, 47 per cent of all the second-hand properties for sale in Folkestone are currently under offer, down from 69 per cent a year ago, which makes it a cooler market but not too bleak. And some new-builds are selling. Just behind the Leas Lift, a funicular ‘water balance lift’ that will be restored to provide easier access to the clifftop, is the Grade II-listed Edwardian Leas Pavilion that had also fallen into disrepair. More restoration will be accompanied by 91 luxury apartments – starting from £395,000 – by developer Gustavia and the Belgian Life Tree Group, with completion expected next year. Local downsizers have already been buying at Leas Pavilion, along with a handful of south London second-home owners and some investors.

It’s in the West End of Folkestone, the expensive part of town, where large period houses in the wide, leafy streets around the hub of independent shops known as ‘Bouverie Village’ can cost £1 million-plus, though most properties are nearer £500,000. Leas Pavilion will allow long-term rentals, but not Airbnb, says James Brine of Strutt and Parker, who reports that 30 per cent of the apartments have sold. ‘Folkestone in improving, albeit at an early stage,’ he says.

With thin pickings for Airbnb investors Folkestone might follow a different path – for better or for worse – than Brighton or Hastings.

Confessions of a mid-life rollercoaster addict

My heart is racing, my breath ragged and my stomach threatening to send back the burger I ate for lunch. But as the safety harness I’m wearing is released and I lower my shaking legs to the ground there’s only one question on my mind: when can I experience it again?

My name is Antonia and I am a 44-year-old rollercoaster addict. I am hooked on rides that command queues of over an hour yet are over in seconds; that hurl me upside down, haemorrhage my bank balance and have spurious science-fiction names. In less than two years I have been to England’s twin temples of hair-raising attractions – Alton Towers in Staffordshire and Thorpe Park in Surrey – six times, battering my senses until I drive home in a stunned but satisfied stupor.

In mid-life, this is unusual, as Toby Young pointed out in The Spectator recently, writing that, after a trip to Alton Towers with his 14-year-old son, he realised he no longer enjoyed ‘the floating sensation you get in your stomach when you’re descending a steep incline and your internal organs are suddenly weightless’. He concluded: ‘At 59, I’m too old.’

But I’m just getting started. I have my children to blame, of course. In 2021 my daughter, Rosie, then ten, was invited to Alton Towers with a friend. Before that, a Brighton Pier merry-go-round was the pinnacle of her funfair exposure – but by the end of the day, her terror had turned to pride that she’d managed Oblivion, a ride that drops vertically into a hole. ‘It was brilliant,’ she whispered on her return, lest her already envious younger brother Felix overhear.

Too late. Felix immediately commenced a fierce campaign for a family trip. ‘Fine,’ I eventually relented, as I foraged the supermarket for two-for-one Alton Towers ticket offers on cereal boxes (tip: you rarely need to pay full price entry). ‘But I’m not going on anything scary.’

I’d never harboured a desire to go on a rollercoaster as a child, and post-pregnancy, even so much as a garden swing could set off my motion sickness. But as we approached Wicker Man, the park’s £16million newest horror-themed ride, shame at the prospect of being outdone by an eight-year-old somehow propelled me on.  

As we made the agonisingly slow, creaky climb to our first drop I thought I was about to have a panic attack. Hurtling down the track with the force of a Formula 1 driver on steroids, I was convinced I was going to die. After opening my eyes and realising I’d survived, however, I felt, if not yet joy, a sense of accomplishment. Staggering off Thirteen, another rollercoaster that concludes, terrifyingly, with the carriage and track in a freefall drop, my newfound confidence eclipsed my nausea. By the end of the day, I was buzzing. 

There is science behind the appeal. By causing physical signs of fear such as a pounding heart, faster breathing and the release of stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol, rollercoasters create a thrill that, on an evolutionary level, makes us feel ‘alive’, explains Professor Brendan Walker. A self-styled ‘thrill engineer’ involved in the design of both Wicker Man and Thirteen, Walker says that ‘whereas in the wild, we truly were faced with real dangers, the job of a theme park is to create the perception of danger’.

Rollercoasters also trigger the release of endorphins and serotonin, feel-good neurotransmitters other adults might seek in a glass of wine. Perhaps it is no coincidence that after I stopped drinking last year, the joy I derived from white-knuckle rides grew. As the sign to the entrance of Thorpe Park, a deceptively dreary looking site off the M25, points out: ‘No drugs or alcohol, our rides are thrilling enough!’

While the unpredictable motion of rollercoasters is thrilling for children, it’s usually more unsettling to adults who’ve long since left their days of somersaults and handstands behind. On some rides, such as Alton Tower’s Spinball Whizzer (which, as the name suggests, rotates you 360 degrees in your seat) I do feel, as Toby Young put it, that I’m being ‘tossed around like a tennis ball in a tumble dryer’.

Yet although anyone with high blood pressure or heart problems should steer clear, braving a ride can reap surprising health benefits for other adults. A study in the US National Library of Medicine found those with asthma reported more regular breathing during and after rides, while in 2016 research in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association said the jerky motions of a rollercoaster could even dislodge kidney stones. Hearing too can apparently be improved. A 16-year-old girl who had been deaf in one ear for two months after flying found her hearing returned after going on Alton Towers’s Rita, a 60mph ride that accelerates so fast it feels more like a rocket launching than a rollercoaster. Her doctors, writing in the Indian Journal of Otolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery, thought the change in air pressure combined with extreme gravitational force could have cleared her inner ear.

As with all drugs, tolerance builds, and so I fork out for ‘fast track’ access, tripling the cost of entrance but allowing us to jump queues and binge Nemesis, Swarm, Colossus and Galactica – names that should have no place in the forty-something vernacular.

Do I question my sanity as I strap in surrounded by riders a quarter of my age? Absolutely. But then the cogs start to whir, the adrenaline builds and I think: this sure beats Happy Valley and herbal tea for entertainment.

Rishi Sunak needs to turn his attention to mental health

Will the government meet its NHS target? Health Secretary Steve Barclay was asked about this when he did the broadcast round this morning, arguing that even though there were record waiting numbers, the government had successfully reduced the longest waits. But as Fraser wrote this week in his Telegraph column, Rishi Sunak is having to face up to the chance that he might miss this (and most of his other) five ‘priorities’ which he said the British people should judge him against at the next election.

But voters might be paying a little less attention to another area of care where things are visibly going backwards: mental health. When I interviewed former Liberal Democrat health minister Norman Lamb and Tory MP and former mental health minister Jackie Doyle-Price this morning on Times Radio, both felt that the government had dropped the ball somewhat. Both argued that over the past decade there had been huge improvements in access to mental health and that the political establishment had finally been taking its place within the NHS seriously after what Lamb called a ‘conspiracy of silence’. But Doyle-Price added: ‘Actually, we were making lots of progress, but it does seem to have ground to a halt. And I would suspect that’s largely due to the consequences of the pandemic, and as Norman alluded to, the focus is on tackling waiting lists.’ She said: ‘If the Prime Minister and the health sector have different priorities, then it’s going to slip down the to-do list if you like.’

It’s not just about lengthy waits to access mental health care, or patients still having to travel hundreds of miles across the UK for a bed on an acute ward. This week Barclay announced the first ever full public inquiry into mental health in the NHS, putting the existing inquiry into deaths in Essex on a statutory footing. It’s by no means the first inquiry into mental health failings: those stretch all the way back to the Ely Hospital inquiry in the late 1960s. Inpatient settings have changed a fair bit since then (through at a gelatinous pace, with two decades elapsing between ministers saying they wanted to shut down asylums and the first full closure of one). But many of those reports have found the same problems right up to the present day, including staff shortages, lack of experience and a lack of attention paid to keeping suicidal patients safe. Little seems to change. 

There is also the not-insignificant matter of the Mental Health Act reform, which has been in the offing since December 2018 when an independent review of that legislation was published. However, that new Bill doesn’t seem close to reaching the statute books. There has been no commitment from ministers to getting it enacted before the next election. This doesn’t just represent a policy failure. It also means that the people who were asked to relive their trauma to the independent review to demonstrate how much the system of treating serious mental illnesses needs to change may feel as though they went through that ordeal for nothing – which is both ethically wrong and also something that risks those patients suffering further mental distress. 

Even when governments have been very engaged in trying to improve mental health care, they have found it hard to make much progress. If Sunak isn’t particularly concerned about it as a policy area, it doesn’t have much hope of getting the attention it needs.