Watch: GB News hosts clash over Russell Brand

It all kicked off on GB News this morning, following a joint Sunday Times and Channel 4 Dispatches investigation into Russell Brand, in which the news outlets accuse Brand of rape and sexual assault (Brand vehemently denies the allegations).

After the pair interviewed Labour shadow minister Jonathan Ashworth, GB News host Andrew Pierce brought up a tweet published by his co-host Bev Turner ahead of the investigation, in which she defended Brand, and said that he was her ‘hero’.

Pierce branded the tweet ‘shameful’, while Turner defended her position and suggested that Brand was a threat to the newspapers.

Things eventually reached a head, with Pierce repeatedly saying ‘shame on you’ to Turner and rebuking her for bringing up Covid all the time. 

Mr S suspects things might be rather awkward at the water cooler after that one…

Watch the clash here:

Who cares if this UCL academic ‘undermined’ Britain’s history?

There’s a long list of academics, some of whom are on the right, who have had their lives made difficult by fellow academics. Now, for a change, a left-wing academic is feeling the heat. 

Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a history lecturer at University College London (UCL), has been accused of ‘undermining the history of Britain’ without evidence. The allegation came after Bulstrode claimed in a paper that an English ironware maker, Henry Cort, stole his invention from slaves. Before conservatives engage in too much self-congratulation, however, they should stop and think carefully about whether this attack against Bulstrode is really something to celebrate. 

History and Technology, where Bulstrode’s article appeared in June, is a fairly typical abstruse academic journal of the kind you don’t normally expect to hit the headlines. But Bulstrode’s article has done just that. The gist of the piece is that Cort, an eighteenth-century ironmaster seen as pivotal to the Industrial Revolution because he developed a revolutionary and efficient means of turning scrap metal into pig-iron, had pilfered the whole idea. The technique, it was claimed, had been in earlier use in a Jamaican ironworks, and had been created and perfected by the slaves who worked in it. The process had later been noticed, brought to England and monetised by Cort, who had then used his connections to engineer the demolition of the original foundry, thus obscuring an embarrassing history and allowing his patent to provide convenient ‘false mirrors for imperial eyes’.

The Bulstrode thesis, if correct, is obviously very significant for our reading of imperial history. But is it right? Perhaps unusually, there has been some lusty pushback. The original article has been forcefully rubbished in another piece (available here), and also excoriated by a senior Oxford historian, professor Lawrence Goldman. Both suggested that Bulstrode’s idea is based on a partial reading of the sources, coupled with implausible inference piled on unsupported speculation. 

The matter has now, however, become public and personal. Dr Bulstrode’s university has been called on to investigate whether the article represents academic malpractice. The journal is, we are told, doing its own investigation. Dr Bulstrode is, in short, in hot water. Her defence is that she relied upon ‘a combination of shipping records, old newspapers and evidence in Jamaica’ and that her paper was peer reviewed.

‘The comments raised are now being reviewed by the journal,’ she said, ‘and should I be asked, or where new evidence arises I will work with the journal to strengthen the evidence or add any addendums as is usual in academic discourse.’

There can be no doubt where our sympathies should lie in this intellectual spat, and that is with Dr Bulstrode. This may sound odd, especially since very possibly indeed her critics are right and her ideas are ill-supported ideologically-tinted hogwash. But there are any number of reasons why, however much we don’t like attacks on this country’s history of imperialism which we see as unwarranted and probably politically motivated, we should see any movement to go further and possibly discipline her as highly dangerous.

For one thing, as everyone knows, universities now put immense pressure on their lecturers to publish, and especially to publish pieces they call ‘innovative’; that can mean expressing a view not found elsewhere that contradicts existing beliefs. Where they do so in good faith, and with closely argued reasoning, as Dr Bulstrode has done, any institution should think twice before intervening because someone else has disagreed forcibly or suggested that they have got things seriously wrong. The same goes for academic periodicals. 

Secondly, the fact that an academic’s view is seen to go beyond the available evidence, to contradict what looks like overwhelming proof the other way, or to emanate from a politically-loaded way of looking at historical facts, needs keeping in perspective. Far from being a knock-out reason to prevent or penalise publication, it can often amount to a rather strong argument the other way.

Intellectual life can be much enriched through suggestions that are, at least at present, impossible to support with irrefutable evidence and contain what looks like frankly outrageous speculation. There is a big danger in a safety-first intellectual atmosphere that demands meticulous support for every proposition advanced. This can discourage leaps of faith and (as happens all too often with peer review in the humanities) tends towards rejection of any academic article that in the reviewer’s opinion gets the balance of the evidence wrong. The result is a dreary academic monoculture where academics play safe and only write pieces where there is no evidence-bucking or speculation that might put in doubt the all-important acceptance letter. 

Thirdly, if we want to preserve any serious academic freedom, accusations of academic misconduct also need keeping carefully in check, and reserving for the most serious cases of fraud. No-one here is alleging any academic dishonesty in the sense of deliberately misstating evidence, suppressing some vital finding or inventing facts that are not there. The complaint about the Cort piece, even if it is right, is essentially about reasoning, balance and the proper treatment of evidence the other way: in short, an allegation of too little evidence and too much speculation. That is not malpractice. There is nothing wrong with a certain amount of tendentiousness and even at times outrageous speculation in the academic humanities. The cure for it, if one thinks that an academic has got things entirely wrong or provided wholly inadequate support for a view, is another article saying just that. 

If you are a right-of-centre academic feeling a touch of schadenfreude here, tread carefully. This week’s demand is for a left-wing academic to be censured on the basis that she has allegedly been guilty of speculative and politically-motivated misapplication of the plain evidence. Remember, however, that next week it might just be you.

Why did Sadiq Khan say I was ‘thick’?

Sadiq Khan thinks that I’m ‘thick’. That, at least, is what he told me during a fractious Mayor’s Question Time last week. The Mayor lashed out after I said he was ‘a bit slippy’. Khan then responded by saying: ‘Honestly chair, for someone who reads a lot, he ain’t half thick is he?’.

To be fair to the Mayor, he has since said sorry – and I’ve accepted his apology. But the exchange was a telling one: it reveals that Khan, who has been London’s Mayor since 2016, is rattled. And the backlash over Ulez (Ultra Low Emission Zone) is to blame. 

I’ve been digging away on Ulez for months. Khan has done a fantastic political job coupling the Ulez expansion to perceived improvements in air quality. I get that, it seems a no-brainer. Get polluting cars off the road and, hey presto, clean air! The trouble is the evidence on this is not as clear cut as Khan might like people to think. But what is already apparent is that the financial burden imposed on people and small businesses in outer London is significant.

Khan, unfortunately, does not take kindly to be told as much: if you try to get into that kind of detail, the Mayor deploys avoidance tactics, his modus operandi being to start hurling insults. There will be accusations that you’re a climate denier, far right, in the pocket of big business, a bit ‘thick’. You get the drift.

The Mayor has become a master at deploying such tactics during the monthly meeting with the London Assembly. Usually, it works well. Each political group is given a proportion of time relative to its number. The Conservative group has nine of the twenty-five Assembly members and so we get around 54 minutes, or only around six minutes each.  

Questions are sent to the Mayor’s office two weeks in advance, so on the day he’ll spend at least a third of your time reading out preprepared statements in answer. That leaves each Conservative member with roughly four minutes a month to scrutinise the Mayor on his £21billion budget. This is less than ideal. 

In those few minutes, you have to try and follow up on whatever question you’ve asked. It could be about the Met being in special measures, poor performance on housing delivery, Transport for London in desperate need of reform, the London Fire Brigade in special measures or, the cause celebre, the expansion of Ulez to outer London.  

As you sit, listening to the Mayor dodge your question and throw insults, you watch your time slip away. You plead with the chair to make Khan answer the question. The Mayor interrupts, explaining it’s Mayor’s Question Time and he can answer however he pleases. Another thirty seconds gone.

It’s clear what his plan is. Ever the political pugilist, it’s the verbal equivalent of the ‘rope-a-dope’.  He wants you to waste your time complaining or returning insults. It takes all your energy to stay calm and use the time you have effectively. To get the answer your constituents deserve. If you push on regardless, staying polite but focused, he gets increasingly annoyed. When he can’t wind you up with verbal jabs he goes for the uppercut.

What the Mayor doesn’t appreciate is that we see through it. We see the desperation to avoid proper scrutiny and the obfuscation. We see a Mayor who is increasingly panicked. A Mayor who is wildly unpopular in London and even more so in the Labour party. A Mayor who could lose London for Labour. 

So, when Khan called me ‘thick’, I just smiled and pushed on. Sticks and stones may break my bones, as they say, but names mean Khan’s in trouble.  

What Liz Truss’s big speech is really about

Liz Truss will take to the stage this morning for her first major intervention on the economy since leaving No. 10 last year. A year on from the mini-budget which saw the markets panic – and her premiership come to an abrupt end not long after – Truss will use her speech at the Institute for Government to argue that her original diagnosis was the right one: that the status quo cannot remain. The former prime minister will point to the fact there is agreement across the political divide that the lack of economic growth is a problem.

Truss will lay the cause of the problem on ’25 years of economic consensus’ that have turned the UK from a free market capitalist economy into more of a ‘corporatist social democracy’ in which state spending accounts for 46 per cent of GDP. She will say:

‘The fact is that since the Labour government was elected in 1997, we have moved towards being a more corporatist social democracy in Britain than we were in the 1980s and 1990s’.

While Truss is not expected to individually name any Tory colleagues, decisions made by David Cameron and George Osborne will be referenced. There’s also likely to be a thinly veiled jibe at Rishi Sunak – with Truss claiming he has spent £35 billion more than she would have as prime minister. It comes after Truss has taken umbrage with the narrative that she was as much a high spend Tory (through her energy pledge) than she was low tax.

In a sign that Truss still believes she was let down by some in her own party as well as various outside institutions, she will say the reasons her policies did not get implemented were down to ‘a reaction from the political and economic establishment which fed into the markets’:

‘I was effectively forced into a policy reversal under the threat of a UK meltdown’.

Truss is expected to return to her conference theme of the anti-growth coalition:

‘The anti-growth coalition is now a powerful force comprising the economic and political elite, corporatists, parts of the media and even a section of the Conservative parliamentary party. The policies I advocate simply aren’t fashionable on the London dinner party circuit.’

So, what is the reason behind the speech? Truss and her supporters were well aware that, as the one year mark passes on her mini-budget and various other key moments in her premiership, there would be vast commentary. It follows that she has wanted to get ahead and have her say.

As for her audience, it’s very unlikely No. 10 will pay much attention at all to Truss’s words, such as her call for ministers to set out a ten-year trajectory for reducing the size of the state as a proportion of our economy.

But convincing Jeremy Hunt on measures to put in the autumn statement is not her game. Instead, Truss could wield the most influence in the debate that will follow in the event of a Tory defeat in the general election.

In a sign, Truss’s focus is a Tory facing audience, she will attend party conference next month with plans for one intervention at a fringe event. Some of her Tory colleagues already seem receptive to what she might have to say. Speaking on Westminster Hour last night, Tory MP Danny Kruger said Truss had made mistakes but he was still sympathetic to her diagnosis. It is in a future battle of ideas that Truss’s call for the party to be more bold could have the most receptive audience.

Watch: Mark Carney takes a pop at Liz Truss and Brexiteers

Poor Liz Truss. Today is the day Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister had hoped to launch an impassioned defence of her legacy.

In a speech this morning marking the approaching anniversary of her disastrous mini budget, Truss planned to talk up her economic plan and attack her critics among ‘the London dinner party circuit’. But it looks like a member of that particular set has beaten Truss to it.

Former Bank of England governor Mark Carney said that Brexiteers wanted to turn Britain into ‘Singapore on Thames’. Instead, he said, Truss and her colleagues, delivered ‘Argentina on the Channel’ because of their misguided views on economics.

Carney’s withering verdict was delivered during a speech in Canada. Perhaps Truss might need to tweak her speech to refer to more than just the capital’s dinner party scene.

Russell Brand’s gags are coming back to haunt him

It has now officially all gone wrong for stand-up’s sex god. Ahead of Saturday night’s Channel 4 documentary about Russell Brand, and the newspaper disclosures in the Sunday Times, there was speculation that the witnesses could be opportunistic attention-seekers. The account of the first complainant appears to undermine that idea. On the same day as her alleged encounter with Brand, she apparently visited a rape crisis centre, according to medical records, and accused him of wrongdoing. If the case reaches court, her testimony could be hard for Brand – who strongly denies all the allegations against him, said his relationships have all been consensual and that he has ‘evidence directly contradict[ing] the narratives’ – to explain.

One oddity of the Dispatches documentary was the identity of the chief accuser: Brand himself. We saw him making gross statements in public that sounded like throwaway satire. On TV, he told a guest, ‘don’t be afraid of your own sexuality. Do be a bit afraid of mine though.’ He told an American chat-show host: ‘You don’t want to be around when the laughter stops.’

Brand was never censured for this banter. His fans laughed along. Why would a handsome, intelligent, rich and amusing superstar need to prey on women? His light-hearted attitude to rough sex had to be a joke, right? A spot of laddish exaggeration to titillate the gallery. He was excused because his audience regarded themselves as cynical, worldly sophisticates. A BBC clip showed him unequivocally denying sexual malpractice. ‘Don’t get so worked up about it,’ he said. ‘It’s only a rhetorical device, my dear.’ The questioner was Emily Maitlis. 

Brand is an anthropological oddity, a mass of contradictions. At first glance, he’s as sexy as Heathcliff. Those cavernous, tortured eyes, that brooding, sculpted profile, the dark crown of uncombed hair, and the ripped-open shirts that reveal a suntanned torso hugged by a silver studded belt. And physically he’s not intimidating. His vocal pitch is high, girly even, and his mannerisms suggest the fey and sexually inert Kenneth Williams. He’s a hunk who talks like a hair-dresser. He affects a dated Dickensian accent and he has a preference for scholarly vocabulary, and these quirks which place him in the harmless world of the music hall.

But is there another side to Brand? On stage he mimed having oral sex with a female who was evidently choking and weeping. He imitated the sound of her gag-reflex and joked about it causing her mascara to run. During his stint at BBC Radio 2, he made sexual remarks on air about a journalist.

‘She’s erotic that newsreader,’ drooled Brand in his lascivious, self-mocking way. ‘We’re going to get under that desk and we’re going to unleash hell on your thighs.’ 

Even more troubling was a telephone interview with Jimmy Savile who asked Brand to send over his sister for an assignation. 

‘I’ve got a personal assistant,’ said Brand helpfully, ‘and…anyone I demand that she greet, meet, massages – she has to do it.’ 

Savile sounded keen, unsurprisingly, and Brand asked him what costume she should wear. ‘Nothing,’ said Savile.

This locker-room jabber isn’t criminal, of course, but it profoundly damages Brand’s reputation to be heard joshing with Savile and referring to women like deliveries of meat.

A reckoning will follow across many sections of media. The world of stand-up comedy needs to straighten out its procedures. The Beeb is in hot water, yet again. Why did it consider Brand the sort of person fit to hire? Charles Moore, of this parish, made this point more powerfully than anyone. In 2010, he criticised the BBC for its handling of a Radio 2 broadcast in which Brand and Jonathan Ross made obscene and threatening telephone calls to the answering machine of the elderly actor Andrew Sachs. The calls were about how Brand had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter. The ‘joke’ wasn’t funny at the time. It certainly isn’t now.

The ‘naive cynicism’ of Russell Brand’s hasty defenders 

I can’t imagine that Channel 4’s investigative slot Dispatches has had such an audience in living memory. On Saturday evening, many thousands of people who seldom if ever watch terrestrial television – I was one of them – will have tuned in at 9pm, just like the old days, to watch a conventional broadcast. Most of these people will already have known the substance of what was in the programme, because it was a joint investigation with a good-old-fashioned newspaper – whose version of the story was published a few hours earlier and was eagerly and widely read online. Quite a moment for the so-called ‘legacy media’.

The gist of the reports, if any readers of Coffee House have managed to remain sheltered from them, is that the comedian turned ‘wellness guru’ Russell Brand has been accused of a range of offences – which he vehemently denies – from sexual assault and emotional abuse to rape, by women who had dealings with him in the Noughties.

Brand insists his relationships have been ‘always consensual’. But it’s the reaction of the people who have leapt to Brand’s defence that seems to me a bigger story, even, than the allegations against Brand.

Brand’s pre-emptive line of defence – he put a video out on his YouTube channel a few hours before the Channel 4 programme went out – appears similar to the one that Donald Trump routinely advances, that the misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate fell back on when clapped in irons, and that the GB News anchor Dan Wootton used when he too was facing allegations – which he denies – of sexual impropriety.

For Trump, his criminal prosecution was a politically motivated witch-hunt by the ‘Deep State’; for Tate, sex-trafficking charges in Romania were ‘the Matrix’ coming to get him; for Wootton, this was all happening ‘because GB News is the biggest threat to the establishment in decades and they’ll stop at nothing to destroy us’; and Brand, wondering whether ‘there was another agenda at play’, hinted that these were ‘co-ordinated attacks’ by the ‘mainstream media’:

‘I’m aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while, watch out, Russell. They’re coming for you. You’re getting too close to the truth.’

You’d think most sensible people would simply eye-roll this line of defence. But here’s the thing: in their many many thousands they did not. Social media filled with people wondering aloud why these women hadn’t complained back then, and chiming along with the line that Brand was obviously the victim of a hit-job because he posed such a threat to the ‘establishment’.  

What’s more, the charge was led by a catalogue of high-profile or relatively high-profile media or social media professionals. Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson; Roger Stone, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson; GB News’s Calvin Robinson (‘What is their motivation?’) and Bev Turner (‘This proves you are winning. You’re a hero.’); George Galloway (‘I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but I smell a giant RAT’); even the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson, before the reports were aired or published, mused that ‘my first reaction is to wonder why They [sic] are trying to silence the person’. Laurence Fox, grotesquely, quoted Pastor Niemoller. 

We don’t know, of course, whether or not Russell Brand is guilty of the allegations against him. He certainly strongly denies them. In working out whether the claims are correct or not, you can test the evidence. You can seek to pick holes in the reporting. You can, if you must, take the slightly absurd view that journalists shouldn’t report on allegations of criminality until the accused is safely in jail (ignoring though you will be the difficulties of getting sexual assault cases to trial). There are many ways to take an oppositional view of this sort of thing. But if your first reaction is to tap your nose and raise an eyebrow and, before you’ve even considered the report itself, to speculate about the motivations of the reporting, you’re a damn fool. This falls into the category that my old editor Charles Moore used to call ‘naive cynicism’: a phrase that nicely captures the self-complimenting logic of the conspiracy theorist.

If nothing the mainstream media says can be trusted by virtue of its being the mainstream media (and serving as one the agenda of the World Economic Forum, or the paedo-lizards, or Big Pharma, or the Neoliberal Establishment, or the Postmodern Marxist Deep State, or what have you), you are adrift in an entirely post-truth environment. You don’t know more than the ‘sheeple’ who watch the news and read newspapers: you know less. You’ll pick your guru, ‘do your own research’ down a YouTube rabbit-hole algorithmically serving you ever more conspiratorial content, and you’ll lose touch with the boring, fastidious, fact-based-and-needing-to-be-careful-not-to-be-sued work of professional reporters that might help you back to reality.

I haven’t seen a single piece in one of those boring and fastidious mainstream media outlets challenging the Sunday Times’s reporting, still less one making callow assumptions about its shadowy hidden agenda. But social media is crawling with the stuff. That’s a grave bifurcation. In one sense, those vaunting ‘independent media’ against the mainstream are right: old media really are fighting what sometimes looks like a losing battle with cranks on the internet.

You could conclude from this bifurcation that the mainstream media really is all in it together, and are working to suppress the truth-telling enemies of the establishment. Or you could conclude, as I do, that there is now a scarily large mass of ordinary people who’ll believe any daft thing if they’re told ‘the establishment’ is trying to suppress it; and that there are a number of social-media celebrities, from around the world and across the political spectrum, who should know better but are making a good living out of encouraging them. 

A driver’s case for 20mph limits

Speeding kills, we’re told. But in the right circumstances, exceeding the limit is no bad thing. Take motorways: few drivers seem to stick to 70mph, yet most journeys are perfectly safe. Indeed, when I’m behind the wheel, I like putting my foot down as much as the next driver. Fortunately in the 30 years since I passed my test I’ve been pretty lucky; I’ve clocked up two or three speed awareness courses, but somehow I’ve managed to keep hold of my licence.

Yet despite my run ins with the DVLA, I firmly believe there’s a case for 20mph limits in certain areas. This new speed limit has been rolled out on residential roads in Wales and parts of London, sparking a backlash from motorists. Perhaps, though, telling motorists like me to slow down is no bad thing.

Why? Because sadly we have become a nation of people who drive to the limits set for us, and some drivers then become fractious when they can’t. Rather than being encouraged to use our discretion, we like to follow guidance. Thus we determine the fate of milk not by smelling it but by reading the ‘use by’ date. Or we dial 111 and sit in a queue for a call centre instead of treating our children for some minor injury using our own judgement.

In short, our initiative has been eroded by decades of insidious if well-meaning safety-related advice. The result is that many of us have become infantilised. The dreaded words ‘health and safety’ have stymied our previously innate sense of agency. 

Which is why speed limits matter. Because you can’t expect people to drive to the conditions any more or necessarily make a rational assessment of the traffic situation. Instead many people see that ‘it’s a 30mph’ and expect to be able to do it willy-nilly, just like the way they throw away a perfectly edible piece of chicken.

And that’s why, if you happen to live in a town like I do – England’s smallest, Manningtree in North Essex (it’s so small you could carpet it, to borrow the joke from Arthur) – you would see the urgent need for a 20mph speed limit.

At the narrowest – the gap between our little Tesco and the charity shop – the high street in Manningtree is just three strides wide, so perhaps eight or nine feet, with narrow pavements either side. As a result, when a car goes by at 30mph – the ostensible limit – it feels like you’re a spectator at Silverstone, but without the crash barriers. 

In other words, it’s completely and utterly inappropriate to drive at 30mph there, yet quite a lot of drivers do, especially in the evening when the relative lack of other cars encourages some to stick the foot down. That’s when it becomes dangerous.

It’s a small miracle that no one has, to my knowledge, been killed on this stretch of road, and it’s surely only a matter of time until it happens. It’s a similar story for the rest of the roads in our tiny town, a place laid out when the Tudors were gadding about and the widest thing on the roads was the width of a pair of cart wheels.

Because I’ve got two young children, I became member of the town council and then I joined a campaign to get our town recategorised as a 20mph zone. Thanks to the brilliant efforts and determination of the group we got the backing of the town council which then submitted a request to the county council, supported by the county councillor, to implement the change. (It all took about six months, and it’s still up in the air; our fingers are crossed). But hopefully by reducing the speed threshold to 20mph it will at least make drivers think. 

Manningtree’s saving grace is a narrow 90 degree turn at the end of the high street – nature’s speed bump, but not every village or town is so lucky. And that’s why, much as we all might hate it, there is an unanswerable case for the judicious imposition of 20mph speed limits. 

Our acclimatisation to instruction and reliance on guidance rather than individual discretion coupled with faster, larger cars and our ever increasing population – 67.7 million now share our small island – mean that we have no choice but to adjust speed limits more precisely. The truth is our parameters of decision-making have been so narrowed that many of us are now unnerved when we are not told what to do. Hence there are directions on soap and people happily pour away millions of pints of perfectly drinkable milk each year. Of course we need 20mph zones.

Inside the weird world of real tennis

When John Lumley was a baby, his mother placed him in his carrycot at one end of the tennis court in the leafy village of Holyport in Berkshire, and drove balls at him. I should clarify that John was perfectly safe. The tennis in question was real tennis: the old-fashioned version of the game, which is played indoors, with a window at one end fitted with string netting. 

Nevertheless it’s easy to picture the infant John, secure behind that safety net, being jolted awake as ball after ball thudded into it, and waving his arms wildly in the way that babies do, before lapsing back into unconsciousness. Few sportsmen can ever have been so intimately introduced, at such a tender age, to the sport that would define their lives. 

Few, too, have grown up so immersed in it. John’s mother Penny was six times women’s world champion: hitting those balls at Holyport was part of her training. His father Colin was world number three. The couple met at a real tennis club. On the morning of their wedding, Penny played in the Australian Open. She played again the following morning and went on to win the tournament, before competing in the World Championship a week later, which she also won. John’s sister Tara is world number three in the women’s game. The baubles on the family Christmas tree include a real tennis ball. 

Now John has seized the world number two spot. Now he’s competing in the World Championship finals at Washington’s Westwood Country Club, which started on Sunday and will run until Thursday. ‘It isn’t by accident that I’m here,’ John tells me, when I get him on the line from Philadelphia, where he works as a coach. ‘This has been my life’s goal: to make it to this point.’ 

Before continuing, I need to explain one thing about real tennis. Although it’s a minor sport – there are roughly 11,000 registered players – it is also the most beautiful game in the world. I’m biased because I play it myself. And I know that there are millions of football fans who would disagree. But hear me out. 

Firstly, real tennis is real old. The game goes back to the time of the Tudors, who loved it. Henry VII played. Henry VIII played. So did the Stuart kings. In the 16th century, there were around 1,500 courts in France alone. Squash (b.1830s) and modern tennis (b.1873) are toddlers by comparison: the sporting equivalent of babies in carrycots, waving their arms. 

Secondly, real tennis courts are real handsome. Their fine architectural aspects are inherited from monastic cloisters. Hence the sloping ‘penthouse’ roof that stretches across both ends of the court and along one side. Hence the ‘timbour’, an angled buttress that juts out of the other side. Ditto that netted window, which is known as the ‘dedans’. Players may steer balls into, or onto, any of these features.

Thirdly, real tennis is real hard. If you hit a normal tennis ball, it flies. If you hit a real tennis ball, it dies – unless you find the small sweet spot in your wooden-framed racquet. And if you don’t, you feel it, since the balls are as solid as cricket balls. Cricket is a nice analogy since it’s hard to hit a perfect cricket stroke and comparably satisfying. With real tennis, the added beauty lies in the fact that that ball is coming back. 

This is part of the reason why, at 31, Lumley is just getting warmed up. ‘They always say you reach a golden period around 30. You have the experience. You still have the speed. I was never convinced by that. But now that I’m here, I can see it. Now I can have a bad day and still find a way to win.’ His opponent in the final, the American player Camden Riviere, is 36. 

There has never been a real tennis world champion in his early twenties. The popular explanation for this among players is that it takes a decade to learn to play the game well. They compare it to chess or they call it a cross between cricket and pinball. The long arc of Lumley’s professional trajectory bears this out. ‘John has been touted as a potential next world champion for a really long time,’ says Josh Smith, the head coach at Holyport. ‘Because of the depth of technical skill in the game, it takes a really long time to get to the top. And even longer to get to the top of the top.’ 

Smith tells a story to illustrate the point. Last year, Lumley was at a tournament playing Rob Fahey, who has been world champion a record 13 times. At one point, Lumley served and Fahey, now in his mid-50s, stepped in and ‘thundered’ his return, on the volley, into the wall on the far side, so that it angled off and buried itself in the dedans at the far end: an unplayable winner. No one applauded. The US crowd favoured the US-based Lumley. Watching from the gallery at the side of the court, Smith heard Fahey mutter, ‘It takes 35 years to perfect that fucking shot!’

Can it take so long? ‘John has been making steady progress, learning all the time,’ says his father Colin. ‘It’s a difficult game to get good at.’ According to Chris Ronaldson, Lumley’s mentor who was world champion in the 1980s, ‘The two primary reasons are that the ratio of skill to fitness required is much higher than with squash or tennis, and the more complex range of strokes and tactics takes longer to master.’ Real tennis is ‘infinitely more complicated’ than other racquet sports, says the women’s champion Claire Fahey. 

A fourth thing that makes real tennis the most beautiful game in the world is that it’s less about power than its rivals. Hit the ball too hard and it can smack the farther penthouse and fly up in the air, before flopping down and gifting your opponent a put-away. ‘There are different ways to be good at it,’ Lumley says. ‘You can be a power player or you can be a retriever.’

Lumley is a retriever. He is known as The Hare because he’s so quick about the court. Actually, there are two reasons for his nickname. The second is that he takes so much trouble over his hair. His pre-match routine begins with a shower and fixing his hair. He has an impressive black thatch, which he thickly gels and combs back like a Teddy Boy, before applying TREsemmé Ultra-Hold Hairspray. On court, that coiffure glistens. ‘The hairspray is where it’s at,’ he tells me. ‘You need good hairspray. And I always have a spare headband in the bag, in case the hairspray fails.’ 

Riviere is not so exquisite. By comparison, he looks almost scruffy. But don’t be fooled. The American is known as the Ginja Ninja. (What is it with real tennis players and their hair-based soubriquets?) This is in tribute not only to his colouring but also to his kill skill. A retriever par excellence, Riviere hasn’t lost to anyone apart from Fahey in years. And he hasn’t lost a set in months – except for one or two to Lumley.

Real tennis operates on a strict handicap system. Each player has a handicap, which is updated after every game they play. My handicap is -34, which means I’m about 800th in the world. Claire Fahey is at -4, which puts her in the top 25. John Lumley is at +10, which is extraordinary. But Camden Riviere, the Ginja Ninja, is way out ahead of the pack at +17. 

What this means is there’s a possibility, some would say a likelihood, that the finals will be a slow-mo whitewash. More like a test match than a Wimbledon final, they will take place over three days. It’s the best of 13 sets. A 7-0 victory to Riviere could be in the offing, and even then, if Lumley comes close to taking some of those sets, he will have done pretty well.  

Our man is a bit like Andy Murray facing Federer in his prime. Lumley won the British Open in 2021. He won the Australian Open in 2022. But he has never bested Riviere. 

‘John has got nothing to lose so he can come out swinging,’ says his mother Penny. ‘Hopefully Cam will be nervous. Cam has everything to lose.’ When I remind Lumley how he was once placed in the Holyport dedans, like a real tennis Moses, his laughter comes down the line from Philadelphia. ‘I love Holyport. It’s where it all began. Without Holyport, I wouldn’t be where I am.’

Shyly, I ask him how he hopes to overturn the odds and beat a man who seems unbeatable. ‘I’ve seen him have bad days,’ The Hare replies. ‘He just hasn’t had a bad day in a match recently.’

He goes on to confide that he has been adding new shots to his repertoire: stuff Riviere won’t have seen before. ‘I’ve changed my force. I’ve changed some stuff on the backhand side from under the Grille. I have a new shot from the serving end.’ When I press him, he reveals that he has also recruited the one man who knows how to beat Riviere: the great Rob Fahey. 

‘He’ll fly over to the States to hit with me for the last six days of practice. At that point, the hard work will have been done. It’s then getting used to the court and working on the game plan.’ Relentlessly upbeat, for once The Hare hesitates. ‘It’s going to be a big step. Everything is now that much bigger. I mean, I’m playing Camden. The crowd will be crazy. But I can’t wait.’

Live-stream coverage of the World Championships is available here. To find your nearest real tennis club in the UK, go to tennisandrackets.com.

Leave my pumpkin spice latte alone

It didn’t matter that it was 33˚C. Starbucks staff across Britain spent the beginning of September putting out pumpkin-themed menus, selling customers pumpkin spice lattes in pumpkin-shaped mugs, to be drunk alongside a slice of pumpkin-flavoured loaf cakes, a pumpkin seed cookie, or a brownie cut into pumpkin shapes and frosted in hazardously orange icing. Happy fall, y’all.  

The hot early autumn didn’t stop us obsessives: there is, inevitably, an iced pumpkin spice latte. The spice mix in question, of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, clove and sulphur-based preservatives doesn’t necessarily have to include any pumpkin. Instead, it refers to the spices put into a pumpkin pie. And that tells you something that’s obvious about pumpkin spice: this is an all-American phenomenon. 

Your British autumns have nothing on American fall. The two words might conjure up the same crisp mornings or the same ripe, earthy smell of dead leaves, but that’s where the similarities end. Fall means hay bales on the back of pick-up trucks, kids with their moms and dads out trick-or-treating, the brass fanfare of the NFL theme song on Thanksgiving morning. And pumpkin spice means all of that and more.

The word fall is beautifully literal and proudly banal – naturally suited as it is for the nasally, loud vowels of the American accent. If its simplicity is mistaken as a sign of American stupidity, we don’t notice, or at least don’t care. 

Fall and its associated products uphold our patriotic commitment to immoderation, even when sold in British shops and restaurants. For example, a grande (16oz) pumpkin spice latte served in a Starbucks here might only contain 39.3 grams of sugar to its American counterpart’s 50 grams, but it’s still packing a hefty hyperglycaemic punch. The British iced variety contains the same amount of calories as nine KitKat fingers.  

The idea of an autumnal dose of cinnamon or nutmeg is not terribly original, but few jewels of our culture are. Our genius is commercialising what is sacred to other cultures – like hotdogs from the Germans or democracy from the Greeks.  

Fall Inc. has turned the season into a consumer trend, a cable-knit arm of the pumpkin industrial complex. No single product has led seasonal creep quite like the pumpkin spice latte, whose offshoots include pumpkin spice-flavoured dog foods and protein powders and rakes in over $800 million in US sales. The pumpkin spice latte has supplanted the change in the earth’s axis as the authority on when summer ends, pushing it earlier and earlier each year. It’s quite a cultural achievement for the supposedly froufrou drink of basic white girls. 

Starbucks cashes in on our wide-eyed obsession (and the huge purchasing power of women, who control or influence 85 per cent of consumer spending in the US). Rather than bootlicking the coffee purists, the company keeps rolling out new drinks each fall with ever more complex flavours and names, like this year’s salted maple and caramel cream cold brew or iced apple crisp oat milk shaken espresso.

I don’t take much pleasure in ordering these Frankendrinks, especially because every word of my embarrassingly long order gets printed onto the side of my cup for all to see. I was once cut off mid-order – the barista could tell from the confused, searching look in my eyes that I, like every other twenty-something female, wanted a grande iced brown sugar oat shaken espresso. Others have not been so merciful when I struggled to remember the name of a seven-word drink.

But the minor humiliations don’t stop me – I’m a creature of nostalgia and these drinks don’t taste bad, either. I am, as Hillary Clinton once declared herself, a ‘pumpkin spice latte kind of gal’. Starbucks could reinvent itself into something cooler and more sophisticated, but why bother, when it’s beloved by those of us who are so happily unironic? Anyway, to dial down the cringe would be un-American. 

What happened to Ronaldinho?

Cast your minds back to 2005, a time when it was considered cool to record your favourite song to use as a ringtone on your phone, iPod Nanos were everywhere, the Crazy Frog drove every parent in the country crazy, and Ronaldinho was named the best football player on the planet.

A lot has changed in the 18 years since, The Crazy Frog has been permanently silenced, no one (except yours truly) still records songs to use as ringtones, and Ronaldinho has served time in prison. What happened to him, a man who was, for sheer entertainment value, arguably the best football player to ever walk the face of the earth?

The Brazilian legend, now 43, once appeared solely on the back page of newspapers. Today, you are more likely to see his name appear on the front pages. Recently the ex-footballer, real name Ronaldo de Assis Moreira, testified at a congressional hearing in his home country, where he denied involvement in an alleged £49 million crypto pyramid scheme that happened to bear his name.

The scheme, titled ‘18kRonaldinho’, promised daily returns on crypto. Unsurprisingly, the returns never materialized, and the whole scheme was found to have been constructed on a foundation of lies. Soon after, a lawsuit was filed against the firm, seeking £49 million in compensation.

An incredulous Ronaldinho claimed that he was never approached by the company, never partnered with the company and that the company used his iconic name and iconic image without his permission. Ronaldinho also claimed that rather than being seen as a culprit, he should be seen as another victim of the purported scam.

The football icon may or may not be guilty of participating in this potentially fraudulent scheme. That is for the court to decide. What is not up for debate, however, is his Icarus-like fall from grace.

Since retiring, his life has been what’s best described as tragicomedy. In July 2019, 18 months after hanging up his boots, 57 properties belonging to the star were seized. His two passports (Brazilian and Spanish) were also confiscated. Accused of unpaid taxes, Ronaldinho and his brother appeared before a judge, where they were ordered to pay sizable fines. After failing to pay, they had their passports suspended.

Then, in March of 2020, Ronaldinho and his brother were back in the news again. This time they were questioned by police in Paraguay. Rather incredibly, Brazil’s answer to Rodney and Del Boy had used fake passports to enter the country. Ronaldinho would end up serving 32 days in Paraguayan prison, and another 4 months under house arrest, albeit in a luxurious hotel. In the space of just a few years, the legend went from playing football in the Nou Camp to playing football in prison. 

For those who had the joy of watching Ronaldinho in his prime, there is little need to be reminded of just how good he was. Wearing that perpetual toothy grin, the attacking midfielder made a career out of humiliating his opponents. When Ronaldinho took to the pitch, nutmegs and stepovers were mandatory. Messi and Ronaldo aside, since his retirement some years ago, we really haven’t seen any other player come close to rivalling his brilliance, his sheer audacity to take on opponents and leave embarrassed defenders sitting on their derrieres. This is what makes his demise particularly sad, even pathetic.

In truth, Ronaldinho was always a wild one. In 2008, when he was playing for Barcelona and was at the top of his game, Pep Guardiola became boss of the Spanish giants. The first thing he did was place Barca’s best player on the transfer list. Why? Because Ronaldinho lived by a ‘play hard, party harder’ philosophy. With a penchant for late nights, booze, gambling, and loose women, Ronaldinho’s lifestyle did not sit well with Guardiola, best described as a fashion-concious Marcus Aurelius. Moreover, Guardiola supposedly wanted to protect Lionel Messi, who adored Ronaldinho, from the Brazilian’s bad habits. Pep’s decision affected both players in profound ways. Messi’s career flourished and Ronaldinho’s floundered. Although the Brazilian enjoyed success in Italy with AC Milan, where he played alongside greats like David Beckham and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, he never quite recaptured those glorious days in Spain.

When it comes to derailed careers, there appears to be something in the Brazilian water. Along with Ronaldinho, other superstars like Adriano, Deco, Robinho, and Pato have seen promising careers curtained by an inability to control their urges. So much potential. But, for these men, football always seemed to come second to samba, sex, and inordinate amounts of scandal.

Poland and Hungary could come to regret their Ukraine grain ban

The row over Ukrainian grain imports shows that politicians in Eastern Europe can be their own worst enemies. Five Eastern European countries – Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia, led by Poland and Hungary – failed to convince other EU member states that the existing ban on imports of grain from Ukraine, imposed earlier this year, should be extended beyond 15 September. As a result, at least three of them – Poland, Hungary and Slovakia – will now adopt their own restrictions, in defiance of the EU.

What is all too clear is that the countries seeking a ban, particularly Poland, have elevated short-term political considerations above their own long-term interest in Ukraine. Their push for an EU policy that would actively harm Ukraine at the worst possible moment, and a unilateral pursuit of the same plan, bodes ill for the idea that Europe’s centre of political gravity is finally shifting to the east. 

It’s true that Eastern European politicians were prescient about Russia’s threat. Poland’s leadership following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including its rearmament, deserves nothing but praise. The region’s economic take-off after 1990, driven by pro-market reforms, has been spectacular. On one metric of household consumption, Poland has already overtaken Spain and is on par with Ireland.

However, countries in Eastern Europe have a long way to go to project their influence in the EU or Nato – or, as the grain issue illustrates, to be effective advocates of their own interests. A recent meeting of the Three Seas Initiative in Bucharest, spearheaded by Eastern European countries, had little in the way of a substantive agenda – other than vague gestures at greater ‘connectivity’ within the region. More broadly, while they succeeded in getting France’s Emmanuel Macron onboard, Eastern European leaders have thus far failed to convince the United States to make a firm commitment to Ukraine’s membership in Nato, which would have been a major step towards ending the war.

The reason for this is not simply a lack of power or the condescension to which Eastern Europeans politicians are routinely treated in Western capitals. ‘New Europe’ has substantial heft in the EU – it holds almost a quarter of the total voting power, determined by population size. Add the Nordics into the mix and the proportion rises to over 27 per cent. However, even on matters that directly affect the shared interests of the Eastern bloc, that power is rarely used wisely or effectively. Aside from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which has long been viewed as a source of friction in the rollout of new sanctions packages, even some of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters have adopted short-sighted positions to cater to special interests at home. 

The ban on Ukrainian grain perfectly illustrates this. In Poland, the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) is up for re-election on 15 October and the party relies on support in rural areas. Low food prices would normally be welcomed in times of rampant inflation – except that downward pressure on agricultural prices harms local farmers, PiS’s key constituency.

The region’s economic success, too, comes with qualifications. A growth model based on a continuous inflow of foreign direct investment from the West – effectively turning the local Eastern European economies into extensions of Germany’s manufacturing sector – is slowly but surely exhausting itself. Without institutions supporting human capital and innovation (think world-class universities or venture capital ecosystems), economies of the region risk getting stuck in a version of the middle-income trap. 

If things go economically south in Germany – as it increasingly seems that they might – Eastern Europe will follow suit. Meanwhile, Warsaw and its partners, so keen to confront Brussels on its social and cultural liberalism and questions of national sovereignty, have largely failed to steer the EU away from policies that are likely to accelerate the continent’s economic downturn. These include the rush to decarbonise quickly and at any price, even if it means Europe’s and Germany’s gradual deindustrialisation, and the creation of new economic dependencies on China in the automotive sector, for example. 

The region has also failed to act as an effective counterweight to the EU’s protectionist instincts, in particular those of France, directed at America’s tech giants. What are, for example, Eastern Europe’s common positions on deepening the single market, digital services, or AI? Estonians, or Latvians, surely have their own views on such subjects. Why don’t we hear more from politicians from these countries?

The question of Europe’s economic future increasingly hinges on whether Eastern Europe as a bloc, together with the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, can lead a broad pro-market coalition to counter some of the worst ideas originating in Paris and Berlin, not unlike the United Kingdom did before Brexit. On that point, alas, Eastern European leaders leave a lot to be desired – to their own detriment and to the detriment of Europe and the wider Western alliance as a whole. 

Sunday shows round-up: Cleverly says questions to answer over Russell Brand allegations

Foreign Secretary James Cleverly: We must be careful when listening to the voices of the ‘powerless’

Comedian Russell Brand has been accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse. Brand denies the allegations against him and said his relationships have all been consensual. The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg asked Cleverly if he thought there were ‘wider questions the industry must answer’. Cleverly agreed, and suggested that abuse was particularly challenging in places where there are ‘acute differentials in power’.

On Libya:

After devastating floods hit Libyan city Derna, Cleverly said that the UK was doing what it could to help, but pointed out that the lack of an effective government in the area meant providing aid was extremely difficult.

Laura Kuenssberg asked him if the UK had a particular responsibility to help, given its role in Libya’s political past. She also asked him if cuts to the UK’s foreign aid budget has had negative consequences for those in need of aid.

Cleverly admitted that budget cuts always have an impact, but claimed the foreign aid budget must always reflect the state of the UK’s economy, and that the country is still one of the world’s biggest aid donors. 

On the Westminster ‘spy’ story:

Relations between the UK and China are a topic of debate after a parliamentary researcher was arrested on suspicion of spying for Beijing. Cleverly recently made a visit to Beijing, but he repeatedly refused to answer Kuenssberg when she asked him if he raised the recent case of the arrest with Chinese officials.

Cleverly also would not tell Sky’s Trevor Phillips whether he knew about the arrest before travelling. He did say however that direct relations were essential, and that suggestions we should disengage from China were ‘not credible’.

Keir Starmer: People smugglers should be ‘in the same category as terrorists’

Trevor Phillips challenged the Labour leader on his migrant crackdown, asking him if he would use powers the government has when it comes to terrorists, and detain smugglers without charge. Starmer avoided answering this question directly, but said operations to deal with people smuggling gangs would be more effective if they used the kind of international intelligence sharing found in counter-terrorism operations.

Labour’s Pat McFadden: ‘We’re not going to take part in an EU wide scheme’

Laura Kuenssberg asked Labour’s shadow cabinet office minister Pat McFadden if the UK might have to accept a certain number of asylum seekers as part of any proposed migrant deal, and if Labour would set a limit on that number. McFadden claimed that the deal would not involve specific numbers, and would be focussed on issues like family reunions among asylum seekers. 

The decline of the West: America’s Pacific cities face a bleak future

As recently as the early Nineties, when the great cities of the Midwest and East Coast were careening toward what seemed like an inevitable downturn, the urban agglomerations along the Pacific coast offered a demonstrably brighter urban future. From San Diego to the Puget Sound, urban centres along America’s western edge continued to thrive and expand as migrants from other parts of the country, and the world, crowded in.

In the process, the Pacific cities seized the economic initiative. The West Coast became home to the country’s premier trade entrepôt and its dominant entertainment and technology centres, and home to five of the world’s six most valuable companies.

Yet now these same cities — despite differing histories and industrial mixes — face a precipitous decline. Never before have all the burgeoning cities of the future, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, started to shrink. This is, at least in part, a reaction to high prices, relentless property crime, homelessness — San Francisco’s rate of homelessness, for example, is twelve times the national average — and diminished economic opportunity, particularly for the middle and working classes.

At the same time, big companies like Tesla, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Jacobs Engineering, Fluor, Bechtel and McKesson have moved headquarters; others are shifting their operations elsewhere, largely to more business-friendly and less costly regions in Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Tennessee. Hundreds of other less notable companies, most paying above average wages, have also gone east and south.

The largest US economies are increasingly located in the sunbelt states, which are fast becoming the prime locations for Fortune 500 companies, with Houston and Atlanta in the top three after New York. But Southern states, including Georgia, Louisiana, Florida and Texas, also dominate the list of most small businesses per capita. This is not simply a shift of low-wage jobs; according to the forecaster Lightcast, it includes manufacturing as well as business and professional services, the largest high-wage sector.

America’s urban woes aren’t limited to the West Coast, of course. But the decline there has generally been steeper than elsewhere. Why? How did such golden cities get so tarnished, so quickly? Unlike in the tragic case of the Midwest, the answer is not reliance on declining industries: tech, space, entertainment continue to show promise and could propel growth for decades. Instead, the damage has been remarkably self-inflicted, reflecting the reckless growth of a set of progressive dogmas, tough on police and permissive toward criminals and vagrants while imposing ever more burdens on what is left of the middle class.

The results of these policies are particularly evident in tech-rich San Francisco, where decades of tolerance for even extreme deviant behaviour has helped create a city with more drug addicts than high school students; little wonder it ranked last in the US for efficiency in a recent WalletHub survey. In Southern California’s far more proletarian city of Los Angeles, a UN official last year compared conditions on downtown’s Skid Row to those in Syrian refugee camps. Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Oakland, Portland and Seattle show some of the highest per capita rates of homelessness in the country.

San Francisco may grab the headlines, but perhaps nowhere is the political change more notable than in Los Angeles, a city I moved to in 1975 and my home until seven years ago. Back then LA, in contrast to places like New York, was what the late Fred Siegel described as ‘the capitalist dynamo,’ brimming with new companies not just in entertainment or aerospace, but in fashion, where it was the production leader, as well as in trade and scores of smaller niche businesses, many of them run by on-rushing immigrants and escapees from east of the Sierra.

This ebullient economy existed not only under conservatives like Sam Yorty but under Tom Bradley, his African-American successor and a former cop. Like previous mayors, Bradley, particularly in his first two terms, embraced traditional growth strategies, expanding the city’s port, investing in roads and bridges, bolstering its large industrial base. LA saw itself as the city of the future — and with good reason.

Such assertions seem absurd today. Los Angeles not only lags in job growth, it is losing its grip on the industries which drove its ascent. Industrial employment, a traditional source of blue-collar upward mobility, dropped from a million in 1990 to barely 300,000 now. LA County, which includes the city and its environs, has lost virtually all its largest companies including Northrop Grumman, Unocal, Occidental Petroleum, Hilton Hotels, Computer Sciences and Sun America.

The ‘capitalist dynamo’ is still evident on the streets, particularly in Asian and Latino neighbourhoods. But the jobs created there are primarily smaller scale, poorly paid and service-oriented, admits LA booster Michael Kelly, executive director of the Los Angeles Coalition for the Economy and Jobs. Industrial decline has been particularly devastating to the African American and Latino communities, where these firms were a source of gainful, steady employment. After the riots of 1992 order and some degree of racial harmony were restored under Bradley’s successor, the late Richard Riordan, a pro-police businessman who restored the flagging confidence of the business community. But after Riordan, the city’s politics changed, as progressives began to take over all the organs of governance, cheered on by Hollywood and the increasingly leftist LA Times. This year, rising crime prompted rapper 50 Cent to warn that ‘LA is finished’ after the city lifted bail requirements for people arrested for nonviolent, non-serious felonies and misdemeanours.

Behind many wrong turns in LA’s recent history lies the apparent desire of city leaders to transform, even overturn, its basic character, always defined by scores of smaller, largely lower-density communities, what one early booster called ‘the better city.’ Instead, starting in the 1980s, city leaders began to fantasise about aping New York. Los Angeles County spent billions on building an urban rail system, promoted denser development and dreamed about turning its lacklustre downtown into a gleaming corporate, arts and entertainment centre.

Even now, LA seems stuck in its density delusion. Even though it ranks near the bottom nationally in new housing construction, the city wants to authorize massive building programs for hundreds of thousands of units in two of its least attractive areas, Hollywood and downtown. Both parts of the city are plagued by large homeless populations, while fleeing businesses have emptied increasingly unused office towers. Even before the pandemic the $20 billion-plus (£16 billion) transit system, more and more burdened by crime and homelessness, carried fewer riders than the old bus-only system did in 1985. The system’s salvation, such as it is, is that massive numbers of poor people are unable to afford cars and must rely on public transport.

Demographic trends tell a shocking tale, particularly for a city that attracted huge waves of aspiring middle- and working-class families for nearly a century. Over the last two decades, Los Angeles County, by far America’s largest urban county, has lost 750,000 residents aged under twenty-five. In the last decade even the foreign-born have been leaving: the county lost foreign-born population between 2010 and 2020, as immigrants and their families headed instead to booming cities in Texas and Florida. According to the state, Los Angeles now has fewer residents than in 2010 and is expected to shrink by an additional 1.7 million by 2060, according to the most recent state Department of Finance estimates.

Even when Los Angeles emerged in the 1920s as the West Coast’s premier city, San Francisco remained confident, even arrogantly so, about its superiority. The late California newspaperman Neil Morgan once dubbed it ‘the narcissus of the West’. San Francisco, its boosters argued, was a ‘real city’ in a way that auto-dominated, sprawling Los Angeles was not. It saw itself, with reason, as the Pacific equivalent of Manhattan, a big-time city with better weather, a more spectacular location and a legacy economy defined by big banks, insurance companies and engineering firms.

But the real game-changer took place not in San Francisco but in the once bucolic regions to its south. Silicon Valley’s filled-out pattern resembled LA sprawl, a vast suburban network filled with defense and space firms. It was, and remains, the epicenter of the global tech industry, home to more of the ultra-rich than any region on earth. As the tech industry has migrated from production to software and social media, more of this business headed back to the city, while employees of Valley companies increasingly commuted from trendy urban locations.

Yet even as the city and region expanded with the tech boom, the lack of good working-class jobs and soaring property prices undermined social stability. Homelessness has become an overwhelming issue. Former mayor Gavin Newsom’s 2004 pledge to end homelessness in a decade turned out to be one of his more egregious empty promises.

In fact, Newsom and his successors adopted standard left-wing positions, particularly on vagrancy, drug use and ‘petty’ theft, that have come close to destroying a city arguably better positioned for success than any other in the country. San Francisco suffers among the worst levels of property crime in the country and residents frequently find themselves dealing with theft, public defecation, open public drug use and occasional assaults.

This sad scene is unfolding even as tech’s golden goose is also flying south. The ease with which tech work can be done remotely is definitely hurting — nearly half of Silicon Valley’s jobs, notes a University of Chicago study, can be done from home.

Meanwhile, dirt, homelessness and hypodermic needles (roughly two million are left on streets annually), are depressing the tourism and hospitality industry, the city’s other big employer.

This once unstoppable economy retains some of its crown jewels, but the region overall is losing its allure. Even Silicon Valley itself, with a 17 per cent vacancy rate, is singing the blues as construction projects, like Google’s in downtown San Jose, have failed to materialise. Once proud promoters of urban density, a group of oligarchs may see the tech future not in San Francisco or even San Jose, but in a proposed project in exurban Solano County sixty miles from the city. It’s a good idea, but it will face strong opposition from NIMBYs and the state’s powerful green lobby. This suburban shift may be the best way to rescue the Bay Area from eventual obsolescence. But it could also accelerate the movement away from places like San Francisco and San Jose.

Today, San Francisco and the Bay Area in general are less a beacon of progressive success than a devastating example of its excesses. The city’s once strong condo market is facing enormous challenges and many hotels, supermarkets and other retailers, including some with deep local roots, have announced plans to leave. The once-great magnet is losing its draw, showing that even great assets can, if poorly served, be squandered.

Even as California’s cities began their descent, Seattle and Portland seemed to be thriving. After disastrous layoffs in the early Seventies from its leading employer, Boeing, Seattle regrouped with a new group of growth companies led by Microsoft, Costco and Amazon. For much of the last decade, these cities have attracted migrants from California, lured by somewhat lower housing prices and, until recently, less severe social problems.

Now the region is being pummelled by tens of thousands of layoffs. Seattle’s finances are increasingly precarious and its left-leaning council’s response has been to raise taxes on businesses while exempting public employees. At the same time it has become a major centre of homelessness and civic disorder. During the George Floyd riots, a whole section near the city’s downtown became essentially self-governing, under the control of hardcore radicals, with lethal effects. More and more city residents feel crime, rising rapidly in recent years, is bad enough to drive them out.

Migration patterns have changed as well. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Seattle participated in the region’s boom, which saw the addition of 187,000 domestic migrants. But now the Seattle metropolitan area is losing net migrants while many residents are moving to the state’s smaller metropolitan areas such as Bremerton, Spokane and Olympia.

Portland never achieved Seattle’s economic dynamism but was widely hailed as a model for dense, progressive planning and social liberalism — it positioned itself as a leisure-oriented San Francisco where ‘young people go to retire’. Despite being the whitest of America’s big cities, it was wracked with almost constant violent protests for much of 2020, extending even to the gentrified Pearl District. Spurred by crime and disorder, the Portland area is now losing domestic migrants. The region added 252,000 net domestic migrants between 2000 and 2020, but since then the Census Bureau has found that Portland’s urban core county, Multnomah, lost 13,000 net domestic migrants while the surrounding suburbs grew modestly.

Some still praise Portland as ‘an anarchic wonderland’. But now its streets are best known not for quirky food trucks and street musicians but growing fentanyl use. Over the past three years, the LA Times reports, the number of unhoused people in the Portland metro area has jumped from about 4,000 to at least 6,600. Shootings in the city have tripled. Homicides climbed from thirty-six in 2019 to ninety-seven last year. Lower-level crimes have spiked too: more than 11,000 vehicles were stolen in 2022, up from 6,500 in 2019. According to Portland’s KGW-TV, ‘every forty-two minutes there is a report of vandalism,’ often involving broken windows. There were more reports of broken windows last year than during the 2020 riot year.

It is certainly too early to write off the once mighty Pacific cities. They retain many critical natural assets: they’re near mountains and spectacular water views; they have relatively mild climates (likely a big plus in a period of global warming), and a concentration of promising industries. The education base from the University of Washington, Berkeley, UCLA, Caltech and other top schools still gives the region a headstart in many promising industries.

In each of these Western cities, the key challenge is political. No one should expect a GOP resurgence, but there has been some modest pushback to the progressive agenda. San Francisco, for example, removed some particularly radical school board members and replaced its ultra-lenient DA, as did Seattle. There are stirrings in minority communities, as evidenced by a growing shift of Asian and Latino voters to the right, and in Oakland, the local NAACP recently denounced lax policing as a cause of growing violence, particularly in the black community.

Certainly, public opinion is not satisfied with the status quo. A 2022 poll from the San Francisco Chronicle found that roughly a third of the respondents were likely to leave within the next three years. Two-thirds said that life in the city is worse than when they’d arrived, and only one-quarter of respondents expected life in San Francisco to improve in two years. More than one-third said it would worsen.

Nevertheless, last year, Los Angeles decisively elected Karen Bass, a product of the city’s Democratic machine, as mayor over a pragmatic businessman, Rick Caruso. As middle-class voters leave, radicals continue to win more seats on the city council. Oakland also recently elected an unreconstructed radical and defunding enthusiast, Sheng Thao, as mayor, even as developers begin to turn away from the troubled city amid soaring crime and a depleted police force that only responds to violent lawbreaking. A stolen car, or a looted store, simply has no priority.

For these reasons, MSNBC’s recent claim that ‘the progressive takeover of America’s big cities is nearly complete’ has a terrifying ring of truth. Hardcore radicals are now ascending not only in Los Angeles but San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. Some pledge to create ‘socialism in one city,’ by passing such things as the Los Angeles proposal to establish a $30 (£24) hourly minimum wage for hospitality and airport workers. Seattle, facing a fiscal squeeze, now wants to impose its own city-wide capital gains tax.

As Seattle Council member Kshama Sawant said in a widely-shared video, she and her supporters are ‘coming to dismantle the deeply racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism’ and replace it with ‘a socialist world.’ Sawant also promised to ‘take into public ownership the top 500 corporations and banks that dominate the US economy.’

The west coast’s competitive edge is being further eroded by mounting pressure from urban planners and radical environmentalists. In Portland there are moves to ban gas-powered trucks from the emptying downtown. The LA Department of Water and Power’s plans to go ‘net zero’ promise in reality to triple energy bills by 2035; not exactly a boon to low-income residents or industries. Many who are concerned about climate change demand the end of suburban expansion, despite evidence from a recent Breakthrough Institute report that suggests suburbs are potentially more ‘green’ than dense cities.

And as the foregoing implies, all these cities face severe fiscal challenges. A December report from the San Francisco Standard reported the city’s budget projections for the next six years included over $1 billion (£800 million) in lost commercial property tax revenue. As noted by city economist Ted Egan, office space industries contribute about 72 per cent of San Francisco’s GDP, meaning that ‘if anything happens to the office sector, it ripples throughout virtually every aspect of the city’s economy.’

At some point fiscal reality and progressive fantasy are bound to collide. It’s hard to see where the money will come from, for example, for San Francisco’s reparations program, which proposes to pay $5 million (£4 million) to all qualified black residents. Plans to build more public housing, pushed in all these cities, face similar obstacles.

Given their remarkable assets, physical and intellectual, the Pacific cities should be thriving, not losing people and jobs to far less attractive hotspots like Dallas, Houston, Phoenix or Nashville. Yet until the progressive stranglehold is somehow loosened, this decline will continue, to the immense sorrow of those of us who headed West in search of a better urban experience.

This article was originally published in The Spectator World’s October 2023 edition

Does tennis have a doping problem?

Is it more remarkable that Romanian two-time Grand Slam tennis champion Simona Halep took performance enhancing drugs, or that she was caught? I ask only because the sport’s authorities seem to catch vanishingly few dopers, which surely means either they’re very bad at it, or elite players rarely cheat to win enormous sums of money.  

Certainly, it’s easy to be cynical about tennis. When in 2017 I interviewed legendary doping chemist Angel ‘Memo’ Hernandez – who during the nineties and 2000s was the world’s leading illicit sports chemist, providing undetectable super-stimulants to a wide range of household name athletes – he burst out laughing when I asked about doping in tennis.  

‘Tennis was paradise for a long time. No testing involved. No testing. They were in paradise, enjoying their stuff, loving their stuff. No testing at all. Now I believe they have started testing, but it is still a joke,’ he said.  

Halep on Monday was banned for four years after a urine sample she gave at last year’s US Open was found to contain Roxadustat, an anti-anaemia drug that just happens to stimulate production of the red blood cells so vital for physical endurance. Halep denies knowingly taking the drug.

Her case carried echoes of that of five-time Grand Slam winner Maria Sharapova, who in 2016 was the last high profile tennis player to be sanctioned for doping when she was popped at the Australian Open for taking Meldonium, a drug newly added to the WADA anti-doping list, used to treat ischaemia by enabling increased blood flow – and with it improving aerobic capability.  

It is surprisingly difficult to find an exact figure for how many top-level tennis players have been caught taking performance enhancing drugs – as opposed to recreational drugs ultimately harmful to performance, such as cocaine – since the Open era began in 1968. According to Wikipedia, it’s less than 80, which is a tiny fraction of the thousands of players who have competed in Grand Slam events during that time.   

Halep, Sharapova and Marin Cilic (who received a four month ban in 2013 for ingesting the stimulant Nikethamide) aside – those who have been caught have hardly been a roll-call of the sport’s greatest luminaries. They include Wayne Odesnik, Mariano Puerta and Barbora Strýcová. No, me neither.  

But the feeling persists that tennis, and the media that covers it, doesn’t help itself when it comes to the wider perception that all might not be as it seems at the sport’s highest levels.   

When the greatest ever player Novak Djokovic was caught on camera appearing to inhale a gas from an opaque water bottle during his Wimbledon victory over Tim van Rijthoven in 2022, he simply told reporters at a subsequent press conference that the bottle had contained a ‘magic potion’ and added that it enhanced his performance. ‘It helps’, he said. No one asked him to elaborate any further. 

A few days later, after winning tennis’ most prestigious tournament, he once again refused in front of journalists to explain what the so-called magic potion contained and instead talked vaguely about one day marketing it. He even told a reporter that if he tried the potion he too ‘might win Wimbledon’. Everyone laughed and no one asked him to elaborate any further. He still hasn’t said what was in the bottle, and no reporter has asked him about it in public since. 

While there is no suggestion, or indeed evidence, Djokovic has ever taken any form of illegal performance enhancing drug, his secrecy on the topic of what he ingested during the match with Rijthoven raises important questions. Most obviously: why the need for secrecy? And isn’t it ultimately bad for tennis?  

In 2016, former world number one Sir Andy Murray said:  

‘I have played against players and thought: “they won’t go away, or they don’t seem to be getting tired.” Have I ever been suspicious of someone? Yeah. You hear things.  

It’s harder to tell in our sport as people can make big improvements to a stroke or start serving better because they have made technical changes. If it’s purely physical and you’re watching someone playing six-hour matches over and over and showing no signs of being tired, you’d look at that.’  

Boris Becker, then Djokovic’s coach, was quick publicly to rebuke Murray for his comments. ‘We have random drug testing and unless it’s proven, they are 100 per cent innocent… I believe 100 per cent Andy is clean. Roger [Federer] is clean. Rafa [Nadal] is clean. Novak gets tested a lot. That can mean twice in a Grand Slam’, he said.  

A remarkable aspect of the evolution of modern men’s tennis is the increasing durability of the sport’s best players since the 1980s. To pluck a few great champions at random, Andre Agassi was 32 when he won his last Grand Slam, Pete Sampras 31, Jimmy Connors 31 and Becker 28. Nadal, Federer and Djokovic have all won Grand Slams aged 36.   

Perhaps one aspect of tennis that causes journalists covering it to be hesitant about asking questions that are anything other than fawning is the astonishing tribalism and aggression of many of the fans of the sport’s biggest stars.   

In November last year, I experienced this first-hand when I reposted on what was then Twitter, now X, video footage I had seen showing Djokovic’s team seemingly trying to hide a concoction they were making for him in the stands at the Paris Masters, commenting that it looked dodgy and asking if anyone could explain what was going on. What followed was a tsunami of online abuse, including not just threats of physical violence toward me, but also toward my family. Tennis, it turns out, isn’t as genteel as it looks.     

For what it’s worth, Djokovic is far from alone in receiving mysterious drinks from team members in the stands, transported via ball boys or girls, during matches, or even disappearing for strangely long toilet breaks during difficult moments in competition only to emerge sufficiently reinvigorated to seize victory. Many of his rivals do exactly the same sorts of thing.  

Earlier this month, there was online outrage over footage of Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz, the game’s newest hot-shot, receiving an actual test-tube containing pills from his team mid-match against Britain’s Dan Evans at the US Open. This sort of thing didn’t used to happen.  

Halep, naturally, is appealing the decision against her. Good luck to her. I grow increasingly convinced no one any longer really cares who is doping and who is not in all top-level sport, much less tennis – how else to explain journalists’ apathy toward it – on the basis that so much of the evidence we see with our own eyes suggests virtually everyone must be at it.   

If that’s the case, then why hang poor Halep out to dry? It’s easier, surely, just to enjoy the spectacle and believe in the magic. 

Kamikaze drones are the future of warfare

The West is struggling to confront the modern military technologies of Russia, Iran and China. A year and a half of the war in Ukraine has proved it. Iran has exported cheap Shahed-136 kamikaze drones to Russia, and they have been used to terrorise Ukrainians. Putin appears ready to invest further in procuring thousands more. Sir Tony Radakin, chief of the defence staff, said this week that, in response, the British Army wants to create regiments of kamikaze drone pilots. He’s right to do so.

Iran’s drones are cheap to make, estimates say around £15,000 each, but the air defences needed to shoot them down are far more expensive. This difference between how western countries wage war, investing in expensive weapon systems that take many years to develop and procure, compared to how Russia and Iran are fighting, presents a challenge for the future of combat. Israel, similarly, learned over the years that it needed to reduce the cost of intercepting missiles fired from Gaza, and has invested in laser air defences for its Iron Dome system. When it comes to drone warfare, cheaper drones are likely the future.  

When drones first appeared on battlefields in the 1980s, they were designed to be used in place of piloted aircraft, usually for missions that were considered dirty and dangerous. This meant developing drones, such as the US-made Predator and Global Hawk, that could fly for hours and were packed with expensive surveillance equipment. During the 1990s, as these weapons were developed, the West was relaxing in the wake of the Cold War, confident that a new world order would mean defence industries could tinker and take its time with expensive projects (like stealth, fifth-generation aircraft) drones became flying Bentleys. The US Global Hawk, for instance, costs up to £160 million. 

Over the last two decades, Iran and China have pioneered new types of drones. China’s commercial DJI drones have taken over most global markets for small, recreational quadcopters. They can be packed with small explosives or used on the battlefield to help infantry and artillery spot enemies. Over time, western militaries have also adopted a plethora of smaller drones, such as the Wasp, Raven and Puma; but they are more expensive than Iran’s kamikaze attack planes. Recently, western militaries recently begun to acquire kamikaze drones, which are usually called ‘loitering munitions.’ These weapons loiter over a battlefield and then slam into a target, destroying themselves on impact. AeroVironment’s Switchblades are seeing increasing use, but again they’re expensive, and they’re not used frequently enough.  

The wars of the future will require different weapon systems, both to shoot down cheap threats, and also to fight enemies on the battlefield. Every military revolution has a point like this, like the first time a plane sank a giant battleship. New weapons make older platforms irrelevant. The Maginot line, for instance, was easily breached by Germany despite France’s massive investment. Western countries should learn from the experience in Ukraine. The West doesn’t need drones like the Shahed, which is slow and easy to shoot down, but it needs to field large numbers of expendable drones in any future conflict, and it should look to increase the number and types of systems it acquires.

Weaponising commercial drones is not an answer, because modern jamming can easily neutralise most of them. Instead, investing in expendable quadcopters and other systems that are similar to commercial drones is the right path for western militaries.

Nimbys and Greens are teaming up to block German wind farms

Germany’s Robert Habeck might well be an excellent children’s book author but he is proving to be a dismal economy and climate minister. Habeck, who also serves as the Greens vice-chancellor in the country’s coalition government, rode to power in 2021 promising to speed up the transition to renewables. At the heart of his pledge: more windmills, bigger windmills and, above all, built much, much faster. But these promises are proving to be little more than hot air, as my own fruitless struggle to build windmills attests.

Wind energy is crucial if Germany is to meet its goal of renewables producing 80 per cent of electricity by 2030, up from 46 per cent last year. Chancellor Olaf Scholz says that ‘four or five windmills’ must enter service daily between now and 2030. The University of Cologne’s Energy Economy Institute says six windmills must be built each day to meet the target. But in the first half of 2023, an average of just 1.8 new windmills were built each day. Failure to speed up the excruciating approvals and permitting process for renewables is the main reason for the hold up. ‘Nothing here is going any faster yet in Germany,’ said a wind energy developer in Berlin, who asked not to be named.

To make matters worse for European builders of wind turbines, rising interest rates, supply bottlenecks for manufacturers and financial woes are also biting. As wind turbine construction slumps in Germany, the amount of electricity produced by windmills has flatlined since 2019. From 2014 to 2017, as many as 1,792 new onshore windmills were built each year. Since 2019, the figure has been less than 500 wind turbines for all but one year, according to the German Wind Energy Association.

The truth is that the number of windmills being built will be nowhere near the numbers needed to meet Habeck’s targets. Slow manufacturing isn’t the only reason: there is also rising anger among Germans who say wind turbines defile the countryside and fight them tooth and nail.

Amid this and other missteps on migration and the economy, support for the Schlolz-Habeck government fell to a record low. Just a fifth of voters said they were satisfied with the coalition’s work, according to a poll for ARD TV.

Habeck isn’t the only politician to land himself in hot water for making promises which he can’t deliver. Too many politicians in Berlin are guilty of making grand statements of ambition while ignoring pesky questions about how practical these schemes are. The dismal failure to meet Nato defence spending targets is a prime example. Politicians in Berlin also like virtue-signalling on being morally clean and speaking of how Germany must be an example for the world. Whether anybody abroad is even watching is a question never asked.

Perhaps most worryingly, for a country that prides itself on efficiency, an obsession with bureaucratic process over almost everything has taken hold in Germany. Slashing the red tape, while much discussed, is rarely done in practice.

Jan Techau, director of Europe at the Eurasia Group, a political consultancy, warns that Germany is losing the ability to carry out big, bold projects. ‘This is sophisticated state failure,’ says Techau. A cancer where everything still seems to work ‘yet nothing gets done.’ Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper says Germans now have ‘Angst’ about any big project. ‘First of all, the blanket answer is often: no.’

The failure to speed up renewables comes despite a growing list of reasons for supercharging their expansion. Environmental concerns are part of this necessity; so, too, is the simple matter of geopolitics: Russia’s war on Ukraine ended cheap natural gas imports from Moscow.

After the last three of Germany’s fleet of nuclear power plants were closed this year, there have also been issues related to generating electricity. Germany’s 17 shuttered nuclear stations used to supply a quarter of the nation’s electricity. Nevertheless, closing them was a sacred cow for Greens. So, surprise, surprise: Germany went from being a net exporter of electricity in the first quarter of 2023, to net electricity importer in the second quarter, after the three nuclear plants were shut in April, according to the Federal Statistics Office. Most imported electricity now comes from, you guessed it, nuclear power plants in France.

The hasty departure from nuclear has also forced the reopening of closed blocks at the filthy brown coal power plant in Jänschwalde, in eastern Brandenburg state, to make up for possible power shortfalls. Jänschwalde is a few miles from where I live and has been going gangbusters all summer with huge clouds belching from its cooling towers.

Which brings us back to Greens minister Habeck. Despite his failure to speed up renewables; despite German industry and consumers suffering from some of the highest electricity costs in the world to subsidise wind and solar; despite the economy sliding into recession; and despite German companies moving new investments abroad, nothing slows Habeck’s come hell-or-high water ambition to win Germany’s race to the Holy Grail of renewables: net zero. It’s as if Habeck has forgotten half of his job title – ‘Federal Minister for Economy’ – to focus solely on the second half: ‘and Climate Protection.’

Habeck’s mantra remains: ‘Onshore wind energy is the key for our energy supply’ and he still claims he can expand the number of wind turbines to cover two per cent of German territory with windmills to enable Europe’s biggest economy to be carbon neutral by 2045. Good luck with that.

The least of Habeck’s problems is his own party. But this is bad enough. Windmills bitterly divide the Greens between those demanding radical expansion of windmills to cut CO2; Nimbys who love renewables but not in hip, weekend house regions like the Uckermark near Berlin; and those demanding total nature protection and de-growth.

The Greens, a big-city party with few members in rural areas, are brutal in dealing with those viewed as enemies, such as farmers, hunters and almost any land-user. This ‘take no prisoners approach’ won’t work for wind energy, however, because it could tear the green movement apart.

Yet the trouble is that Habeck’s renewables plan will fail unless he uses the most robust, legal force of the federal government to slash regulation, water-down nature protection regulations and axe laws designed to prevent wind turbines and hundreds of miles of power lines needed for a renewables-based grid. Or, if he has to leave the regulatory jungle in place, triple the number of bureaucrats to speed things up.

If he is too succeed, Habeck needs to legally castrate regional and municipal governments to strip them of the power to decide the fate of wind parks. So far, he has tinkered at the edges of this but not gone for the kill. This won’t work: Germany needs to further reduce the ability of legal proceedings to block or slow renewables and power-line projects.

In thinly-populated eastern Germany, four out of five states banned building windmills in forests. My state, Brandenburg, was the only exception that allows them. This removed a huge area of potential wind energy sites. The ban on forest windmills may have been declared null and void in Thuringia state by the Federal Constitutional Court in 2022, but the four states are in no hurry to amend their laws. Saxony-Anhalt says it plans to eliminate the old law by 2024, yet there’s speculation it’ll be only slightly altered. This could limit windmills to a small number of forests damaged by fire, bark beetles or wind.

At our family forestry business, I’ve seen for myself the obstacles in trying to build wind turbines on six different sites in eastern Germany. As I’ve discovered, even where it seems possible to build a wind park, nothing is decided until everything is decided. And sometimes, nobody can even tell you if everything has been decided.

At Kleinsee Forest, about two hours southeast of Berlin, I signed a contract to be part of a wind park in January 2021. The first step was a year-long environmental impact report. Before this, nothing can be done. The study costs hundreds of thousands of euros and involves people running around in the woods day and night counting birds, bats and everything else that creeps, crawls or flies. On the hottest summer days, a guy who looked like a San Diego surf bro, perched on a lifting platform 20 metres above a meadow from dawn to dusk, noting down whatever he saw in the sky.

The most important finding was a nest used by a peregrine falcon. The peregrine falcon is no longer endangered and the population in Germany and Europe has risen since the 1970s. There are 600 breeding pairs in Germany and up to 15,000 pairs in Europe. Nevertheless, windmills generally can’t be built closer than 500 to 1,000 metres from raptor nests. For this wind park, the nest means that at least one of the potential windmills has been axed. But last year, the falcon moved 750 metres east and laid its eggs on the roof of a hunting high seat. Did this mean we could build the wind mill near the old nest? Of course not. The site is ‘reserved’ for at least three years in case the falcon decides to return.

Transpose this across Germany and it means many windmills blocked due to birds that aren’t threatened or not even present. Smart technology may be a better answer than bans: early warning systems can shut down windmills when larger birds approach. It’s already standard practice that windmills in areas with bats don’t operate at dawn and dusk when bats are most active.

The municipal government has now voted three times in favour of my project. Is it now green-lighted? Certainly not. Approval is not just required from numerous other higher-up state bodies. It may still need to go back to the municipal government for yet another vote. When I asked the developer when the final go ahead can be expected, he shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘Maybe in 2025.’

So, if all goes well, the first wind turbines may start producing electricity in 2027. That’s almost seven years after I signed the contract. And this is for a small wind park with just 15 windmills.

Our second wind park suffered a fate illustrating the small-town German municipal power to torpedo renewables. It was planned west of the city of Eisenhüttenstadt and our part of the park was to have had four wind turbines. The developer was optimistic environmental issues could be sorted. But a query to the local government met with a flat ‘nein!’ The developer dropped the project.

A third windmill was supposed to be built near Kyritz in western Brandenburg. The project seemed set to go but there was a problem: there are already a dozen wind turbines in the area. The developer bailed out after discovering the local government wouldn’t approve more.

So even on the tiny portion of Germany where windmills are, in theory, allowed, there are umpteen reasons not to build them – or build less of them.

German polls show big majorities love renewables. Just not in my backyard, please. Not in our sacred forests. Not near our weekend cottages. And don’t you dare water down our local rights to say ‘no’ to anything we don’t like.

The next time you hear leaders from Berlin virtue-signalling on how swiftly they will be expanding wind energy, ask minister Habeck: where’s the beef (or, in his case, the veggie-burger)? This government, despite the best of intentions, is not going to deliver on its renewable energy targets.

Putin is resurrecting Russia’s ‘iron rogues’

A year before Russia launched its brutal campaign to subjugate Ukraine, I visited a wintry Moscow. It was striking to see how far the capital had moved away from celebrating the cult of the old communist leadership that had dominated the then Soviet Union with an iron fist. The tomb of Lenin by the Kremlin was, of course, still doing good business with tourists. But the bust of Joseph Stalin, standing on guard outside his old boss’s gaudy vault, resembled a forgotten relic.

The sorry state of these statues was no accident. After the failed coup by Kremlin hardliners in August 1991, First Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s power drained away. As a result, the USSR quickly disintegrated and Yeltsin’s rule as leader of the Russian Federation was established. One consequence of the defeat of the old order, mirrored across Eastern Europe, was the spontaneous act of demolishing cultural aspects of communist rule. Flags replaced, official insignia forcibly knocked off buildings, the names of well-known boulevards and streets changed, and the statues of major figures from the previous eighty years of one-party government defaced or removed. But now, under Vladimir Putin, the rogues are being resurrected.

This week, amid the daily news cycle of atrocities and high-stakes political intrigue, the unveiling of a statue in Putin’s capital caught the world’s attention. A statue of Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, whose Bolshevik nickname had been ‘Iron Felix’ was once again immortalised, but in bronze. With some fanfare from Russian state media, the statue was unveiled in front of the headquarters of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Formerly the KGB, this was, of course, the state organ used by Lenin, then Stalin, Khrushchev and all others in the communist era to maintain control at home and strike fear abroad. It’s current director Sergei Naryshkin, surrounded by senior officers, proclaimed at the ceremony for the statue’s unveiling that Dzerzhinsky’s face on the original and new statues is turned toward Poland and Baltic states ‘because the threat to Russia from the northwest remains.’ 

The original 15-tonne iron statue had been removed by crane on the order of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov following civil disturbances in July 1991. By November that year, the communist party was banned; the following January, Luzhkov then signed a decree establishing the Muzeon Park of the Arts, situated along the Moskva River, a twenty-minute walk from the Kremlin. In Lenin and Stalin’s time it had served as the All-Russia Agriculture and Industrial Craft Exhibition. This would now be the home for hundreds of communist icons, including many of Stalin, Lenin and the old head of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky. I knew it as the Park of Fallen Heroes, and it is where I last looked upon Dzerzhinsky as an ice-cold wind blew into my face. I believed I was looking at a figure lost to history and no longer significant. How wrong I was.

Fast-forward to February 2023. Vladimir Putin’s entourage speeds through Volgograd amid a heavy security presence and monitored by state media. The war in Ukraine is about to have its first anniversary, Putin’s plans have unravelled, the west is supporting Ukraine and his army is taking a beating. Pragmatic, and with an eye to history, he is visiting the city all Russians venerate. This is where, against the odds, Stalin’s Red Army achieved what had been the unthinkable: destroying Hitler’s armies in the east.

Putin, like all Russians, has a deep-rooted connection to the battle and the Great Patriotic War. His elder brother died of starvation in Leningrad (St Petersburg) and his father was severely wounded there. Of all the Soviet cities commemorated after the war by Stalin as a ‘Hero City’ it was this one which Putin has regularly visited since he came to power, wrapping himself in a wave of national pride as he lays wreaths and meets veterans. For the eightieth anniversary in 2023 of the victory, the city renamed by Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, changed its name back to Stalingrad. Banners of the fallen were draped across arterial roads and the press took photographs of a new unit raised in the city that would be shortly sent to the Ukrainian front, the ‘Stalingrad Brigade’.

While all of this was in play, city officials undertook a very different, but important ceremony just prior to the presidential visit. In front of the city’s famous Panorama Museum, overlooking the mighty Volga River, a bronze bust of Stalin was again back on show in the city originally named after him. When I was researching in the city archives in 2020, I was surprised at how little evidence there was of the great tyrant. No statues, no place names or buildings. It had been de-Stalinised. Well, as they say in a famous magical movie franchise, ‘he’s back!’. But it had been coming and this return mirrored Putin’s increased grip on power over two decades as his foes were jailed, exiled or eliminated. In 2019, two busts of Stalin were unveiled, one in Volgograd (but not in a prominent position), and the other in the country’s third-largest city Novosibirsk outside of the local communist party’s headquarters. 

Putin has encouraged a movement for change in rehabilitating Russia’s greatest dictator, at both national and local level, stretching across the vastness of his empire. This resurrection is supported with positive polling, celebrating Stalin’s heroic leadership in WWII, and his steeliness when steering the country through the first years of the Cold War when the Soviet Union was in its zenith. Amid the bloodshed and terror of the current war Putin’s regime is conducting in Ukraine, don’t be surprised if yet more mass murderers and rogues are brought back to life in iron and bronze on the streets of Moscow. 

Iain MacGregor is a publisher, historian and author. His latest book is The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Centre of WWII’s Greatest Battle (Constable)

Confessions of a dog hater

Rishi Sunak’s plan to ban American Bully XLs is welcome news for us dog haters. It’s long been said that pooches are man’s best friend. But this is a problem if, like me, you love men, but are less than enamoured with his mate. If what the Spice Girls said about needing to get along with the friends of your paramour is true, then us cynophobes face solitude amidst the wilderness of dog-loving Englishmen on the dating scene. 

Over the years, I have mastered the art of gracefully skipping over the topic of dogs. But the prevalence of these animals is such that, sooner or later, the topic must be faced. Admitting you can’t stand man’s best friend is seen by many as a red flag, something you are forced to justify. But pretending you like them is also problematic: if you are not up front early on, you face the prospect of inadvertently becoming stepmother to a slobbering four-legged creature called ‘Baxter’ who shares the bed and even has its own toothbrush by the sink. Frankly, I’d rather a man ask me what house I’d be in at Hogwarts, or engage me in deep lore about Warhammer, than talk to him about his dog.

This aversion to dogs didn’t come from nowhere. I’ve met plenty of dogs, in grotty pubs, in the park – I even lived with one for a while. I can accept that many people think they’re cute. But they’re just not for me. Why do I need to love dribbling, stunted animals that ruin your furniture, bark, stink, never fully mature, and watch on smugly as you’re forced to stoop, pick up and dispose of their waste every day? Are men not enough?

Time and again I’m met with the same arguments. One is that dogs are therapeutic. I suppose this is true if meant in the sense that you waste an eye-watering amount of time and money for someone to watch you talk to yourself. Another classic excuse is that they’re ‘nicer than people’. It’s a uniquely British opinion of canids, and also applies to pigs. The English have no qualms eating pigs, but when I reveal my Vietnamese heritage, people look at me like I’m a monster when I joke about sautéing their beloved ‘Fido’. 

My least favourite argument is that dogs make people better. It’s said that some folks need a dog to develop empathy, show emotion, and form a routine of getting out of the house. Even that it makes them more balanced. Honestly? I’ve never met a person who became better-adjusted because of a dog. If anything, I’ve witnessed a western-wide infantilisation of people and their pedigree chums.

Since when was it normal to refer to a dog as your ‘baby’? Yes, they eat faeces, can’t speak English and crawl on all fours, but that’s their upper limit, not the base setting. Yet dogs are rewarded for this failure to develop – despite generations of exposure to human culture and selective breeding for intelligence – with coos and kisses. 

‘Looky-wooky at his little face,’ my friend says at the stony indifference of a miniature Schnauzer. ‘Couldn’t you just eat him up?’

‘Yes,’ I’ll reply, with equal stony-faced seriousness, before the subject is awkwardly changed.

Millennials like to complain they’re hard done by as a generation, and there’s some truth to this. But at a time of falling birthrates, which tend to foretell civilisational crisis, people are spending what money and time they have not on their own genetic continuation but on substitutes for it. 

This is the behaviour of a species that deserves its fate. And unlike the panda, there is no higher species looking out for us to try and snap us out of our idiocy. Instead of procreating, millennial dog owners mimic some of the worst traits of parents – oversensitivity, overbearingness – to the point where not liking dogs is, somehow, less socially acceptable than not wanting kids. Dating apps will let you discriminate by all sorts of things: height, race, politics, drug history, and, of course, children. And yet, there is still no filter for dogs. 

Perhaps now, thanks to the ongoing war on Bully XLs, we can start to shift the dial on the tacit consensus that dogs are fundamentally angelic. But, of course, that won’t happen. In England, it’s always the owners’ fault that a dog named ‘Killer Kong III’ ripped apart a poodle while walking down the high street. Not Killer Kong’s.

They say the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So perhaps I will have to look into getting a Bully XL of my own – that is unless Rishi Sunak gets there first and bans them. At least until then I’d have a friend to share my disdain for both dog and mankind. If you can’t beat them, join them. 

Why has Scottish politics forgotten about religion?

During the SNP leadership contest, something unusual happened: religion became a talking point in Scotland. Comments made by leadership hopeful Kate Forbes, a member of the Free Church of Scotland, on issues like gay marriage, abortion and having children out of wedlock, dominated the newspapers. But it became clear, after the dust settled – and Humza Yousaf defeated Forbes – just how unusual this discussion was.

Even people of faith find it hard to talk about religion. This summer, when reflecting back on the leadership contest, Forbes said ‘there is a fear which characterises right now any discussions about faith’. But a Scotland which does not reflect upon the role religion has played in its cultural and political history is doing itself a disservice.

At the age of nine I decided to stop going to church in Dundee. Chalmer’s Ardler Church was based in the community in which I lived, but said nothing to a young boy full of energy, questions and curiosity. The minister and other church figures did not speak to or connect with me or my parents and took many things for granted about how they saw the world.

The minister regularly used his services to rail against ‘militant communists holding the country to ransom.’ This was a spectacular misreading of his congregation, for Dundee in the 1970s was a hot bed of left-wing politics including a very active communist party. All his political comments underlined that the minister had little connection or interest in the people he was meant to serve. This was further underlined by the dynamic Catholic priest from the neighbouring church who was always campaigning for, and with, his parishioners. 

That was then. Fast forward nearly 50 years and I now find myself living in the town of Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and Galloway after 30 years in Glasgow. In the past two years, most Sunday mornings I have taken the short walk from my front door to our local Presbyterian church, Kirkcudbright Parish. I’m also a regular fixture at open days, coffee mornings and art fairs held at the church. 

This is something that has been a long-time percolating. First, I thought of myself as an atheist; then an agnostic; then became a person respectful of faith and people of faith; and subsequently I have become a member of a faith community myself; a Christian.

Kirkcudbright Parish Church sits in the centre of the town, not only as a striking building, but one inside filled with space, light and beauty which cascade through its windows and which visitors regularly comment upon.

It is a place of hope, calmness and activity. The congregation is welcoming, outward-facing and active in the town. They are an embodiment of the best of the practices of faith. It helps that my local minister, Rev. James Gatherer, is thoughtful, curious and has a humanity which informs his sermons and how he addresses his ministry.

He discusses the stories and parables of the Bible, grounding them to known recorded history and observations of the wider world. This is all done in a generous, non-dogmatic, non-didactic way miles removed from how I experienced Ardler all those years ago. It’s a method of lecturing that many politicians could learn from.

In the aftermath of the leadership contest, and following Forbes’ comments, I hosted a discussion on faith, religion and public life with Reverend Doug Gay, a Church of Scotland minister. It became clear, we reflected, that there has been a tendency, since around the late 1950s and early 1960s, for many of us to encourage a Scotland which talked about moral, civic and political issues without the dominance and overbearing influence of the Church.

This has occurred to such a degree that we now talk about Scotland in an almost exclusively secular setting. It brings us to a major crossroads: we need to put the Church (by which I mean organised religion and the faith tradition in its many strands) back into Scotland to explain who we are as a country, to better understand our history.

Too many modern references in Scottish public life lean on historical events through a contemporary lens, removing religion from the picture. Take the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, something which has become a foundation story of modern Scotland and often invoked to further the legitimacy of ‘popular sovereignty’. Or the 1689 and 1843 Claims of Rights which have a lineage and direct link to the 1989 Claim of Right – which made the case for Scottish self-determination and a Scottish parliament (and which itself invoked 1320). 

All these examples – 1320, 1689, 1843 – are imbued with religious power, influence and terminology and can only be understood by having religious sensitivity, knowledge and literacy. It is something we have chosen to forget – even to turn our backs on – in Scotland in the rush to overthrow old and oppressive traditions (which the worst of the Church embodied) to be modern and progressive. 

Yet in this process we have fallen for the fallacy of a single-story Scotland: a land where these ancient agreements are interpreted through the prism of modern, small ‘n’ nationalist, self-governing Scotland. There is a danger of one oppressive, intolerant version of a rich tradition being replaced by another in wilful denial of the other ‘Scotlands’ out there. 

A Scotland that concerns itself only with politics or individualism is a barren place. There is a richer, nobler country both in our past and present that we need to champion and nurture to tell better, truer stories about ourselves. And that is one in which the Church, religion and faith have a place.