Three times Emily Thornberry attacked Starmer’s CPS

Following the row over those Labour attack adverts about child sex offenders, it seems it’s open season now on Sir Keir Starmer’s record as Director of Public Prosecutions. Over the weekend the Sunday papers have been filled with stories from when he led the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) including his poor record in, er, prosecuting sex offenders. And in that spirit of reminding people who said what and when, Mr S thought it worth revisiting the past comments of Emily Thornberry, one of the most vocal supporters of Labour’s new adverts.

Thornberry has served as Starmer’s Shadow Attorney General since November 2021 but previously served in that same capacity under Ed Miliband between October 2011 and December 2014. And it was in that role that she frequently attacked Sir Keir, who served as the head of the CPS from November 2008 until November 2013. Below are three examples picked out by Mr S…

July 2010

Thornberry furiously attacks the CPS’s decision to not prosecute the police officer who struck and killed Ian Tomlinson at the G20 summit protests. She tells the House of Commons that it is proof that ‘there is no equality before the law’ – quite the claim given Starmer’s boasts about his work there. She says:

We have all seen the film. The man was clearly assaulted. We have also, have we not, read Nat Cary’s evidence in which he says that there is an area of bruising consistent with being hit with a baton? As Nat Cary says, if that is not ABH, what is? How can the CPS have taken 15 months to come to no conclusion? It is not going to take any action. I suggest that that would not have happened if the tables had been turned and this shows that there is no equality before the law. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman agrees, what is he going to do about it?

September 2012

Thornberry – in a post on her website titled ‘CPS backslides on rape prosecutions’ – writes to Starmer, demanding ‘an urgent rethink of the CPS’s decision to weaken guidelines that specialist barristers must deal with every stage of a rape prosecution.’ In a letter to Sir Keir and then Attorney General Dominic Grieve, she said: ‘Rape campaigners have denounced this as backsliding. The trial process can be notoriously traumatic for rape victims.’ It is written up in the Guardian in an article titled ‘Row over rape prosecutors: Emily Thornberry v Keir Starmer QC.’

October 2012

In an episode of Question Time, Thornberry attacks the CPS for failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, saying:

I’m really disappointed in the Crown Prosecution Service for letting down these victims. When evidence comes forward I’m really shocked that they did not go ahead with the prosecution… It’s being investigated by the Crown Prosecution Service, it’s a bit like the BBC doing an investigation of itself, or the health service doing an investigation of itself, or Broadmoor doing an investigation of itself.

That same month, Thornberry describes the CPS’s decision not to act on the Savile evidence as ‘deeply disappointing.’ She demands that any review of the decision ‘should be independent of the CPS in order to command public confidence.’

Doesn’t say much for Starmer’s record, does it?

Take the Rishi Sunak maths challenge

Rishi Sunak is back in the headlines today, saying it’s time for greater maths literacy. But when it comes to his own political pledges, how many of those stand up to mathematical scrutiny? A Spectator mug for the first person to complete all challenges.  

1. The first of Sunak’s five pledges is to ‘reduce debt’. Using published OBR data and basic maths rules, explain whether he is doing so. Show working. 
2. What devices can politicians use to dress up rising debt as falling debt? Would such methods pass muster in a GCSE exam?
3. Sunak says that he will ‘grow the economy’. How many prime ministers in modern history have failed to preside over economic growth? Show sources.
4. Sunak claims that he will ‘halve inflation’. What evidence is there that his policies are having any impact over and above what was forecast to happen when Boris Johnson was prime minister? In which other countries is inflation also expected to halve? Show sources.
5. In January, Sunak wrote: ‘We must get people back to work. It is to me as a Conservative unconscionable that at a time when businesses are crying out for workers, a quarter of our labour force is inactive.’ Since then, we have had his government’s first Budget – one where he could do what he wanted, not work under Johnson’s constraints. What was the labour force activity rate when his words were published? What is it now expected to be at the end of next year? Show sources.

How Liz Truss is wooing Washington

Many Brits who’ve outstayed their welcome in the Old Country head across the Pond for pastures new and the chance of a fresh start. The Pilgrims, Thomas Paine, John Oliver. Could former prime minister Liz Truss be the next to follow that well-trodden path? 

Since her astonishing fall from grace last September, when she managed just forty-four days as prime minister, Truss has found a couple of excuses to come to Washington. The latest DC think tank to welcome to the most impactful economic mind of the last decade is the Heritage Foundation, who had Truss give their 2023 Margaret Thatcher Freedom lecture last week. 

The auditorium was three-quarters full when Truss took to the stage, in a Tory-blue dress, skin-tone heels and that much-speculated-about necklace. Her speech was perfectly tailored to an audience of American conservatives: she hit on hot-button culture war issues, was hawkish on China, and offered potshots at the Democrats and the left.

‘What sex you are, what race you are… those things are not so important,’ she said. She decried the ‘imbuing of woke culture into our businesses’ and slammed how advocates of ESG culture deployed a ‘diversity target or social target’ to cut competitors out of the market. Truss singled out ‘defense industries’ which suffered as they are ‘not deemed socially acceptable’. Won’t somebody please think of Northrop Grumman?

The rapt audience at Heritage didn’t seem to be too concerned by what should have been the elephant in the room: the economic disarray triggered by Truss’s ‘mini-Budget’ that led to her being the shortest serving British prime minister ever. Her first attempt to tell her side of the story came in a 4,000-word essay in the Sunday Telegraph in February. In it, she said she was ‘not claiming to be blameless,’ but that ‘fundamentally I was not given a realistic chance to enact my policies by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support.’ She felt she shared the blame with ‘global economic uncertainty and changes to US rules.’

Truss restated this case in her speech. ‘We faced coordinated resistance,’ she said, from the IMF, president Biden and the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility. Her appearance at Heritage suggested that, despite the nightmarish outcomes of her government’s actions, she is resolutely sticking by the principles: ‘Last autumn I had a major setback — but I care too much to give up on this agenda,’ she said. 

Her comments addressing the resistance her government faced came curiously close to her section on free speech and cancel culture. This made my ears prick up. Later that afternoon, when I caught up with Truss in a podcast studio between media hits, I asked her about it. Did she consider herself a victim of economic cancel culture? 

‘These things are related,’ she said. ‘The limiting economic freedom, which is what we’re talking about here — because when the government is spending half of all the money in a country, that means people’s economic freedom is limited because they’re not spending their own money — I think that’s linked to people’s personal freedom being limited. You know what you can say, what you can challenge in a free society. I think those things are being limited.  

‘What I think we’ve seen is over a period of time, the left have successfully dominated institutions in our two countries. They’ve successfully dominated universities and the intellectual debate. So there are fewer free market economists in Britain than there were twenty years ago, I would argue. And the centre of gravity has shifted to the left. And the same thing is true in many parts of the United States as well, particularly within the Beltway.’

The main policy objective Truss pushed was for America to reconsider their pullout from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Were the US to join the deal that followed — the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CP-TPP — that would prove to be a ‘fast-track route to a UK-US trade deal,’ she said. The question of such a trade deal has followed Truss in the years since Brexit: she was secretary of state for international trade in 2019 under Boris Johnson. Later in the speech she criticised the Biden administration effort to implement a global tax rate: ‘We need a UK-US trade deal, not a UK-US tax deal.’

Truss thinks joining CPTPP is of vital importance to US interests, ‘as an anti-China bulwark.’ ‘What the US has done so far is a lot of security arrangements around the Pacific, but not enough economic engagement with the Pacific,’ she said. ‘That was the whole purpose of TPP, is to actually say to countries, ‘we’re going to trade with you, we’re going to invest in you, so you don’t have to look to China as the alternative.’ It’s so important geostrategically that the US engages economically with the Pacific region.  

‘A very good byproduct, because the UK has signed up to the terms of TPP and because the US designed the terms of TPP, we should be able to do a trade deal as part of that, or off the back of that, very easily. It’s a no brainer.’

I pointed out that the former president Donald Trump, who is currently leading in the 2024 polls, is the leader who pulled America out of TPP. Should primary candidates be asked about recommitting to CP-TPP as we head into an election year? ‘Yes.’

‘I want to see a dynamic US. I want to see a lower tax US. I want to see a US with less government intervention and subsidies. What I want to see is…things like the Inflation Reduction Act, which is actually a £400 billion subsidy program. I want to see that type of policy abandoned. I want to see the OECD minimum tax policy abandoned because that’s just about making the whole Western world high tax, high spend and low growth. And if we don’t do that, I think there’s just going to be further stagnation, further low growth, and it’s going to embolden China. 

‘What I want to see in the US presidential election next year is a candidate, stroke candidates putting forward a vision for how they’re going to make the West dynamic again. We need a strong, economically dynamic US that is going to engage with the rest of the world and pull them away from the Chinese sphere of influence. That’s what we need. So I’ll back any president who’ll do that.’ 

The last twelve months have seen a changing of the guard  for female leaders. Sanna Marin has just been beaten in an election in Finland. Jacinda Ardern has resigned in New Zealand and of course, the end of the Truss prime ministership.  Did she see a trend pattern there? Was there a different treatment of female leaders, as far as scrutiny of their appearance, their sex lives, their social lives, in contrast with male leaders? 

‘I don’t think Nicola Sturgeon and I have got much in common in terms of our politics,’ Truss replied. ‘You’re falling into the identity politics trap of thinking what group somebody in is more important than their opinions, ideas or capabilities.  

‘I do think there’s a reality that women politicians face a different type of scrutiny. There’s definite evidence that female politicians have faced worse abuse online for example, et cetera, et cetera. So there is a different way in which people are treated. But I don’t think the answer to that is to single out women politicians and say ‘this is part of a trend.’ I don’t think it is. I am very opposed to affirmative action and quotas because that to me is identity politics.’

One trend in politics Truss is comfortable discussing, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the rise of progressivism. Intriguingly, the former prime minister thinks the pandemic, and policies in response to it, played a role in boosting it.  

‘I think lockdown had a huge impact,’ she said. ‘I think in Britain we’d already seen a leftward shift of views, but I think it was exacerbated by Covid and lockdown.’

Why, I asked, because everyone’s spending more time on the internet? 

‘No, because it’s limiting people’s freedom. We can argue whether that was the right or wrong thing to do. But by limiting people’s freedom, you created a world in which the government had more power over people. And we’re living with the aftermath of that.’

So in Covid-23 or whatever the next pandemic is, does Truss think lockdowns are a likelihood in the UK? 

‘I don’t think we should do it again, no.’

With that, Truss headed in for her next TV hit. I mentioned to her and her press secretary that Reason, the libertarian magazine, were having a party that evening, and texted them the details. That night, ninety or so gathered at Reason’s Dupont Circle offices, drinking their free beer and listening to two of their editors debate whether cats or dogs were more libertarian. Sure enough, at a little past 8:30, the former prime minister arrived, with her husband Hugh and two teenage daughters in tow.  

In an instant, she was swarmed by well-lubricated political fanboys, eager for a moment with a world leader, no matter how fleeting. ‘Prime Minister, can we take a picture?’ asked a mustachioed young gent in a cowboy hat. ‘In that hat? Really?’ Truss replied, smiling and posing. The clamour, you would think, strikes a stark contrast from how a crowd would receive her back home. You got the sense that she could get used to this. 

This article originally appeared on Spectator World

The trouble with censoring Jeeves and Wooster

It would take longer than I’ve got to comb through copies of Thank you, Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves, to find out the ways in which they’ve been edited, ‘minimally’, to remove offensive language, but I think we can work out which bits may have fallen foul of the thought police. Penguin Random House have informed readers of the latest edition:

‘Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated. In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.’ 

I can only say that, reading Young Men in Spats and a few other PGW stories lately, I found myself hoping that it wouldn’t occur to anyone to submit it to sensitivity readers. 

We wouldn’t have known that Wodehouse was being expurgated if it weren’t for the Sunday Telegraph. Good for them, and to the Daily Telegraph for spotting that Roald Dahl had been bowdlerised. Because it simply didn’t cross my mind, as a normal book buyer, that publishers might in fact regard their authors’ texts as so much raw material, to amend at will. In my desperate sunny optimism, I had assumed that what I was reading was what the authors had written. I suppose we’ll have to abandon that premise now.  

But it turns out that the expurgation is more pervasive than we thought: Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie have been amended to take account of current sensitivities too. As for John Buchan, the only chance he has of being left well alone is that Penguin simply hasn’t got round to reading his stuff. There’s a reference to, I think, ‘a dirty Jew’ in one of the Richard Hannay novels; as for Prester John, let’s just hope that Penguin doesn’t realise it’s one of theirs and still in print. In fact, by the time you’d removed all the offensive stuff in it, there wouldn’t be much left. 

It’s come to something that, whenever you read older authors, you worry in case they fall into the wrong hands. GK Chesterton’s novels are littered with throwaway references to minstrels and blackface, which were – written as they were 100 years ago or so – intended without malice, but which would get short shrift in a modern edition. Yet that’s the thing about novels; they are of their time. And it’s precisely because they’re of their time that they’re interesting. 

It was always one of the problems with Kindle that its texts were potentially amendable. But printed books had seemed a safer bet. Not now. Tucked away in minuscule print on an inside page there may be a notification as above, to the effect that the author’s words have been tampered with, that readers are not getting the actual text they wrote. And if you’re buying the thing online, you’re not going to get the chance to spot the problem at all. 

The solution that Penguin arrived at with Roald Dahl was to issue the original stories – with all their fat, gendered, ugly people – in a new classic format, leaving the standard edition bowdlerised for the kiddies. I don’t think we can hope for the equivalent of a Wodehouse edition complete and unabridged and unexpurgated. But what we can ask for – indeed insist on – is that the reader should be given notice prominently that the books have been changed. There simply must be a formula ‘Expurgated Edition’ or ‘Amended Text’ or something on the front cover to let us know that we’re getting a twenty first century version of the original. I would have no objection at all to the priggish trigger warning above letting us know we may be shocked by the contents. Fine. We can handle that, though it’s undeniably irritating.  

Indeed, when I bought Tintin in the Congo a few years ago – and yes, it is very much not of our time – it came in a sealed wrapper with a big red wraparound warning that the contents were offensive. I’d have had far less trouble purchasing pornography. But at least back then it was actually available. 

It’s a safe bet though that children will have zero chance of ever seeing the originals of any story that has fallen foul of the thought police. School libraries are not going to stock the ‘unabridged’ versions of classic texts; they are more likely to be stuffed with propagandistic books about families with two mummies and grandads going on Pride marches. I could go on about this, but the least problematic route is to get books that are ready-pasteurised. 

But to return to the Wodehouse problem, now that we know that authors may be amended at will by publishers, especially those whose estates do not put up enough of a fight, there’s only one way to go: second hand. If you want to know that you’re actually reading what an author wrote, eschew modern editions, and seek out used copies of the work – I’d go back a decade or so. The books themselves will probably look nicer and be much cheaper. But the great thing is that you’ll be reading what the author intended, not what the publisher thinks you should be reading. There’s a difference. And if it means that the publishers concerned are that tiny bit less profitable, well, we can live with that too. 

Does Shakespeare tell us how Succession will end?

The award-winning Succession is many things. Now in its fourth series, it has been compared with a Renaissance painting, a Greek tragedy, a Jane Austen novel, and a psychoanalytical allegory of trauma responses (Kendall – fight; Connor – flight; Shiv – fawn; Roman – freeze).

Ultimately, however, it is a Shakespearean series. The writers may have swapped the battlefield for the boardroom and armies for anxious shareholders, but the show’s character studies and themes – power, family, politics, betrayal, revenge – are Shakespearean in their complexity and circularity. Only instead of soliloquies, we have a lot more raised eyebrows, death-stares and ‘uh-huhs’. There’s even a playwright called Willa.

Like Shakespeare himself, the writers have taken from a variety of sources. There are numerous allusions to Hamlet: Logan describes hearing bad news over the phone as ‘dripping poison in [his] ear’. His existential pondering in season four, episode one (‘I mean what are people? What are people?’) riffs off Hamlet’s ‘What a piece of work is man!’ speech. Greg the Egg is both a fool and a type of Horatio, never explicitly choosing sides or solidifying his position in this corporate, Oedipal quagmire, at least until his Faustian pact: ‘What am I going to do with a soul anyways?’

There are parallels with Macbeth: Shiv and Tom marry in Scotland, and are both driven by ‘vaulting ambition’ and ‘black and deep desires’. If Tom is a tool, then Shiv is the ‘dagger’. She tempts her indecisive, self-pitying husband, who would otherwise be ‘too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way’. Like Lady Macbeth, Shiv is similarly unmaternal; she may not go as far as threatening to kill a newborn child, but she’s also not willing to be a ‘f***ing incubator’.

Succession is not as bloody and gruesome as Titus Andronicus; Logan may make grown men ‘oink for their sausages, piggies!’ in ‘Boar on the floor’, but at least no one is being fed human meat in a pie. However, Logan’s ‘sacrifice’ of Kendall in the season two finale precipitates the cycle of revenge in much the same way as Titus’s killing of Alarbus does. Kendall’s arc in season on also follows Coriolanus’s: attempting and failing to gain counsel, leading a coalition against the ruling state, eventually being sacrificed for his betrayal. 

Then, of course, there is King Lear. Logan’s very first words in the series are ‘Where am I?’: the ageing patriarch, with a loosening grip on his faculties (think the UTI and dead cat scene), plays off his children as he dices up their inheritance on a whim. Logan, like Lear, was given no great fanfare around his death; in the play, Shakespeare simply writes, ‘he dies’.

Roman, previously a caustically witty clown, is developing into more of a Cordelia character. One could argue that in the first series Kendall was more Cordelia (or Kordelia with a Kardashian K). Yet Roman, like Cordelia, is the youngest child who the patriarch abuses and despises, and who is unable to say ‘I love you’ at the moment it’s needed most. In the last episode, Roman is the only child who doesn’t tell his father he loves him down the phone as he lies dying, unable to articulate the depth of his feelings more than ‘You’re going to be OK because you’re a monster and you always win’. Yet Roman increasingly seems to be the sibling with the most genuine love for his father, which he offers in the crushing blow of the season three finale. After the children realise their super-majority has disappeared, Logan bellows: ‘What have you got in your f***ing hand?” and Roman sheepishly replies: ‘I don’t know, f***ing love?’

Frank could be a stand-in for Kent, a loyal servant who is banished for questioning Logan/Lear’s leadership. Shiv’s poisonous litany of Kendall’s flaws in her open letter in series three, episode four is reminiscent of Goneril’s poisoning of Regan. Thankfully I can see no parallels with Gloucester’s eye-gouging, unless someone wants to do an analysis of Greg being sick through his costume’s eyeholes in the opening episode.

If Succession really is King Lear for the modern, media generation, then here’s my prediction: Tom will win. Why? Because Tom is Albany: an outsider who gains power by marrying the king’s daughter. Both characters are cowardly cuckolds who are constantly berated by more domineering wives who they later betray; both are sycophants who try to become the legitimate heir by their own merit. Tom, like Albany, will become king by virtue of everything and everyone else falling apart. He may even rule alongside Greg, who is like Edgar, appropriately nicknamed ‘Poor Tom’.

The moment has possibly been foreshadowed already. In the first episode of the series, as Tom is talking to Shiv about the bidding, the camera slowly turns away from Logan to Tom, who replaces him front and centre. Gerri, Karl and Frank flank Tom by his sides: let battle commence.

Yet with Logan gone, who would want to rule over these bleak and godless worlds? The tragedy therefore is not that Logan dies, but that the other characters have to live, unable to ever get the paternal love and validation that they so desperately crave. The question of inheritance and succession is only a metonym; everything else is ‘mere trash’. Tom may come out on top, but was it all worth it? Oh, what fools these mortals be.

Mean streets: the psychology of neighbour disputes

Eunice Day’s breaking point came when her neighbours asked if she would move her car from a communal grass verge in their cul-de-sac so that it could be mowed. After several weeks of polite hostilities, Day stormed a neighbour’s home in the Dorset town of Ferndown, a row ensued, and the resulting scuffle left the 81-year-old in court charged with assault.

In Bedminster, Bristol, fed-up locals have taken a more passive-aggressive approach to ‘outsiders’ parking on their streets. Suburban vigilantes have been creeping out and sellotaping notes to windscreens urging their owners to park outside their own homes instead. Over in the village of Polstead, Suffolk, meanwhile, one couple are contemplating a £160,000 legal bill, run up attempting to force their neighbours to take down a fence as part of a long-running row over access.

The Bible urges us to love our neighbours, but a recent survey by mobile phone brand OnePlus suggests that a third of us don’t even know their names. And long hours sequestered at home during the pandemic have ramped up our collective levels of frustration with their behaviour. Noise complaints in England increased 54 per cent between 2019/20 and 2020/21, according to the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has seen a corresponding increase in the number of people seeking its advice in disputes over territory.

Making a call to a council helpline or surveyor is one thing. But what is really fascinating is why some relatively minor problems escalate so dramatically. Mike Talbot, a psychotherapist and founder of UK Mediation, recalls, with a dry laugh, the case of a neighbour who became so enraged by the light from the adjacent property’s conservatory windows in the evenings that, rather than draw their own curtains, they demanded the neighbour’s window be blacked out or their light removed. ‘The judge told them not to be stupid,’ he says.

Martin Burns, head of ‘alternative dispute resolution’ research and development at RICS, has spent three decades mediating neighbour disputes. ‘You hear horror stories about people losing their life savings arguing about 13cm of land,’ he says. ‘It is a “king of the castle” attitude, that sense of propriety, and rage that someone has the cheek to encroach on my property.’

Typical combatants, says Burns, have ‘a lot of time on their hands’ and spend a lot of that time at home. They may also have health problems. A recent study published in the journal BMC Public Health found a clear correlation between people losing their cool over noisy neighbours and those suffering from chronic pain, insomnia, depression and anxiety.

Talbot adds that those who escalate disputes often have what could politely be called a fragile ego. ‘They are somebody who finds battles with people just so they can win and get some aggrandisement,’ he says. ‘They want to triumph over people, as an antidote to feeling disliked, belittled or humiliated. It doesn’t make sense, but it goes quite deep, sometimes back to their childhoods. Donald Trump is a nice example. He doesn’t have people he disagrees with; he has mortal enemies.’

Often quarrels begin when a newcomer challenges the status quo. Take the long-running and highly entertaining feud between Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who has owned his home in Holland Park, west London, since the early 1970s, and the singer Robbie Williams, who bought the house next door in 2013. The pair have been engaged in a lengthy dispute over Williams’s plans to dig a basement beneath the 46-room mansion ever since. Page protested that vibrations from the work would damage his home; it took five years of wrangling (and some very large legal bills) before Williams was granted planning consent in 2019 – on the condition that the basement would have to be dug using hand tools only.

Eunice Day was another incomer, who ignored requests to move her Audi from the grass verge beside her rented house and also, neighbours claim, escalated matters by deliberately blocking a private footpath with her wheelie bin and ‘intimidating’ them by sitting outside their homes on her mobility scooter. She was prosecuted after a showdown with one of these neighbours, Suzanne Webb, during which Ms Webb’s mobile phone was knocked from her hand. Last month, Day appeared at Poole Magistrates’ Court where she was convicted of assault and given a conditional discharge and a £646 bill for costs.

Parking rows and arguments over building works are classic neighbour-rage territory. But few things rile neighbours up more than border disputes. In 2015, Gary and Kerry Hambling bought a chocolate-box cottage near Polstead, Suffolk. It came with stables and a paddock, situated across the driveway owned by their neighbours Garry and Jenny Wakerly. 

Things went wrong when the Hamblings started parking vehicles in their field. The Wakerlys retaliated by fencing off their drive, effectively penning the Hamblings into their home. The Hamblings went first to Norwich County Court and – when that case failed – on to the High Court to force the Wakerlys to remove the fence. But the judge, Sir Anthony Mann, ruled that the Wakerlys could do what they liked with their drive, and the fence stayed put. The Hamblings now have a legal bill estimated at £160,000.

To try to prevent cases like these, the government has suggested that civil cases, including neighbourly altercations, be automatically referred to free mediation. Burns welcomes the idea. ‘At the heart of many disputes is a lack of information,’ he says. ‘You take up a position based on what you think you know, but mediation gives both sides a better understanding. If a chartered surveyor tells you the real location of a boundary, and gives a clear explanation and evidence, it can take the heat out of a situation and give people a reality check. Then we try to come up with a compromise solution. Mediation is aimed at win-win, where everyone feels they have got something.’

The other solution to a neighbour dispute could be an exit strategy. If the people living next door are really that awful you could always sell up and try your luck elsewhere. 

But cutting your losses could be tricky.  Vendors must declare any problems with the neighbours, and open warfare with number nine isn’t exactly a selling point. If you try to cover it up you could find yourself in court anyway – not over car parking or fences, but for misselling.

Wiltshire Police chief’s hunting Troubles

Oh dear. It seems that another police chief is making headlines, for all the wrong reasons. Perusing his copy of this week’s Spectator, Steerpike was bemused to read in Charles Moore’s notes about Wiltshire Police’s latest edict. No officer may join the force’s rural crime team if he or she has any link with hunting, even a pre-ban one or one with legal trail-hunting. Wiltshire Police say they are also barring anyone linked with anti-hunt protests. But as Lord Moore argues: ‘There is no symmetry here. Hunting is part of a rural way of life. Anti-hunt protests are political/ideological.’

Intrigued to find out more, Mr S took a look at the Facebook page of the local Police and Crime Commissioner, Philip Wilkinson, who appears to be fighting a thankless one-man battle to justify the policy. Underneath a Facebook post about the aforementioned Spectator article, Wilkinson has been deploying his best Socratic reasoning to explain newly-introduced ban. He writes that ‘it is not the job of the police to make value judgements regarding our cultural symmetry but to enforce the law of the land as democratically land down by parliament.’ How exactly does banning law-abiding recruits do that exactly?

Wilkinson then goes on to use a rather extraordinary analogy, likening the new policing framework to the British Army’s rules during the Troubles:

This discussion takes me back to my days as a soldier in Northern Ireland when we knew we were being impartial when both sides threw bricks at us… no Irish Regiments in the British Army were ever posted to NI during the Troubles. Yes they would have known the country and culture better than the English, Scottish and Welsh regiments but their presence would have inflamed the situation and made its policing so much more difficult.

He ends by claiming that:

I shoot, fish and have a knowledge of the countryside where I live, as do many others in the force and my office, I have even been to a hunt ball and watched the occasional Boxing Day hunt, as most country folk have, but i have not been engaged in hunting or anti hunting activities to a degree that would compromise my impartial position.

Mr S would only point to the official Wiltshire Police explanatory note about the changes to the rural crime team which says:

The new framework will provide more scrutiny around the suitability of our officers, staff and volunteers to work within the unit. It sets out key principles to ensure staff do not have personal links to hunts past or present, do not have links to any anti-hunt groups past or present and requires staff disclose links to any rural based hobby or initiative that could potentially call into question their policing impartiality.

Such official guidance sounds like Wilkinson would be banned from joining his own local force, given his ‘personal links to hunts past or present.’ Over to you, Wiltshire Police…

Sunday shows round-up: strikes show no sign of stopping

Pat Cullen – respect nursing, or strikes could continue ‘until Christmas’

This morning’s shows heavily focussed on the crisis in the NHS, after the Royal College of Nursing voted against the government’s pay deal, meaning further strike action. The RCN’s General Secretary Pat Cullen stood by her union’s members, telling Laura Kuenssberg that patients were at risk at all times due to the working conditions of nurses and doctors, not just on strike days. She said only ministers could stop strikes, and that they needed to return with an improved offer:

Greg Hands – ‘it’s a very fair and reasonable offer’

Defending the government, Conservative Party Chair Greg Hands was vague on what further steps would be taken while they waited for the results from all the unions, but he was keen to stress that the RCN leadership, including Pat Cullen herself, had initially recommended the deal to its members, and that the vote had only narrowly gone against it:

Wes Streeting – ‘deeply worried’ about patient safety

One of the concerning aspects of the dispute is the possibility that nurses will expand their action to remove protections for emergency and cancer care, potentially creating further risk for patients. The Shadow Secretary of State for Health Wes Streeting attacked the government on its general record with the NHS, and spoke about Labour’s plan to greatly expand the healthcare workforce. He did however urge the unions to think twice before expanding their strike action in ways that could be harmful:

Nurses striking with junior doctors would ‘remove safety net’

Another danger would be the possibility of nurses and junior doctors going on strike at the same time. Pat Cullen told Kuenssberg that there were no plans in place for such an action, but she neglected to rule it out. On Kuenssberg’s panel, NHS Providers deputy chief Saffron Cordery described the possibility as ‘incredibly worrying’, and said that protections that had been in place in previous strikes would disappear. 

‘This is pretty awful for you, isn’t it’

Finally, Greg Hands spoke to Trevor Phillips about bad polling results for the Conservatives. There are independent predictions that they could lose more than 1000 seats in the upcoming local elections, but Hands claimed they were fighting really hard to improve their chances. Phillips asked if he was simply trying to ‘massage expectations’:

Watch: Sturgeon denies SNP financial woes in leaked footage

Three cheers for the Sunday Mail, which has today got its hands on footage of Nicola Sturgeon which is, er, sub-optimal, to say the least. The newspaper has been sent a video of the then First Minister furiously insisting that the SNP’s finances had ‘never been stronger’ in a meeting of the party’s ruling body in March 2021.

Sturgeon is shown warning SNP apparatchiks on the National Executive Committee (NEC) to be ‘very careful’ about suggesting there was ‘any problems’ with the accounts’ in an angry statement that came after three members resigned from the party’s finance and audit committee. One of them, Allison Graham, had just read out a statement listing a catalogue of concerns over governance and transparency. Sturgeon responded by telling the NEC that:

The party has never been in a stronger financial position than it is right now and that’s a reflection of our strength and our membership… I’m not going to get into the details… But, you know, just be very careful, all of us, about suggestions that there are problems with the party’s finances, because we depend on donors to donate. There are no reasons for people to be concerned about the party’s finances, and all of us need to be careful about not suggesting that there is. And lastly, we’ve got to be careful as an NEC that we don’t reap what we sow, if we have leaks from this body it limits the ability for open free and frank discussion… If there are leaks, as with everything else, that gets more difficult to do so everybody has to be very clear about that.

How ironic that it has now leaked. It comes as the paper reports that jewellery purchases are now being probed by the police as part of a fraud investigation sparked by claims of misappropriated donations. Both Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell have declined to comment on the video…

How Russia became obsessed with fake news

On 1 July, Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev, known as the ‘Butcher of Mariupol’, delivered a statement about recent attacks on apartment blocks in Odesa. In a familiar tone of Soviet bureaucratese, he read aloud: ‘To implement the provocation across 26–28 June, twenty foreign mass-media representatives, as well as employees of the international organisation UNICEF, were brought to Odessa [to watch] a mock attack, planned by the military administration of the
Odessa region, on a social facility where a crowd of up to 30 anti-Russian activists had been prepared in advance to act as victims and casualties. Each participant in the staged scenes was paid $100 in advance and they also received a cash reward of $500 after the videos were filmed.’37 This is just one small example. It did not make headlines in Western media and it certainly is not the most bizarre or exciting claim of false flags but these everyday types of distortion set a scene where everything is a bit mad, so you stop noticing the general insanity all around you.

Russian political discourse is obsessed with fake news, or feiki, a term they use to denote any news that doesn’t correspond to the official ministries’ versions. Pro-Kremlin Russian think tanks, such as the unevocatively titled Social Research Expert Institute, release reports like ‘How They’re Killing the Free Press: Fact Checkers as an Instrument of Western Counter-Propaganda & Censorship’, to undermine Western efforts to pierce Russians’ information bubble. The television programme Anti-feik is a treasure trove of accusations and revelations about Western fake news, plots, conspiracies and ‘Buchas’. To Ukrainians, the word Bucha will bring to mind Russian soldiers’ occupation and massacre of civilians in a small town of that name to the north of Kyiv. In Russian, the word Bucha is a neologism and it means a staged atrocity. From my interviews and Telegram analysis, it is clear that this term is a popular, if colloquial, shorthand for fake news. For example, Vladimir Orlov, head of the pro-Kremlin PIR Center think tank, used it in the following context: ‘foreigners shouldn’t get involved with the pains and history of Slavic peoples. The French will not play or will play their own game, not intervening, but the Brits will be playing the game of causing more trouble, making more Buchas, creating more fakes. And I am sorry to say that, having many British friends [. . .] It is a new Great Game, we have to play and Russia will win. That’s it.’ His accusation was not that Britain was responsible for the crime scene at Bucha, but that Britain was responsible for staging a fake crime scene at Bucha.

Given its entry into the Russian lexicon, it is important to revisit the coverage of Bucha, which is illustrative of the way in which Russia discredits evidence of its crimes in the audience’s mind before then folding its version of events back into one of the broader and more consistent master narratives it uses to explain Ukraine, the conflict and Russia’s role in the world. As soon as – but not before, even though they must have known it was coming – images of civilian corpses from Bucha began to spread on social media in the West, the Russian state and social media launched an intense campaign of deceit to sow confusion around what really happened. While journalists, intelligence specialists, and disinformation experts confirmed that the victims were killed by the Russian forces that had occupied the town for a month before being driven out by the Ukrainian army, Russia had its own version, in which the whole thing was, predictably, a conspiracy against Moscow.

Russian media largely ignore stories of crimes against their own people, or people who can’t fight back, but spin any revelations of Russian crimes that make headlines in the West into outrageous stories. Bucha was no exception to this rule. At first, Russian TV stayed silent, waiting to see how much attention the story caught at home and abroad. By the morning of 3 April – two days after the news broke – it was clear that the massacres had outraged the world and unsettled even supporters of the Kremlin. More firestarters than firefighters, Russian media and propagandists launched an information offensive; Russian state TV personality Vladimir Solovev, for example, posted about it 39 times in 24 hours on his popular Telegram account.

News agencies, newspapers, and other media channels barraged their audiences with spiralling and ever more dissembling stories to discredit the Ukrainian version of events. There were claims that a small group of Ukrainian forces had killed the civilians as punishment for helping the Russians, or that the civilians had been killed accidentally by Ukrainian shelling, or that the bodies had only appeared two days after Russia left, or that the whole affair had been staged, just like the ostensibly faked chemical gas attacks in Syria. This dizzying range of narratives all appeared within twelve hours of each other on one Telegram channel, like a microcosm of mendacity.

Over the next day or so, the narrative began to stabilise around two axes: the Bucha affair was a staged massacre to cause the breakdown of peace talks and the dead civilians were the result of Ukrainian armed forces killing the local residents who had naturally supported the kind and helpful Russian troops, who were emphatically not the same Russian troops seen on camera shooting them at random, locking them in basements, and looting all their food. These two versions allowed the narrative to circle back towards the phantom spectre of Ukrainian fascism and a Western conspiracy to use Ukraine to destroy Russia.

The initial contradictions were not the result of panic, however, but deliberate moves in a time-worn ritual whereby Russian media and politicians slowly dismantle the truth and then replace it with a forgery. The process starts with the idea of ‘wanting to ask questions’ about the event being discussed (recalling RT’s tagline: ‘Question More?’), sowing doubt before offering alternative explanations expressed as mere suggestions or hypotheses, since the truth is ostensibly unknowable. One of the most egregious examples of this approach occurred when Russian and Russian-backed fighters in east Ukraine shot down passenger jet MH17, killing 298 passengers. The media’s immediate response was to interrogate random slivers of the actual story and slash away at them. To do so, they introduced fake characters such as ‘Carlos’, an imaginary Spanish Air Traffic Controller working in Kyiv, who could ‘prove’ Ukraine had downed the plane. This fabulism lay nestled between preposterous theories that the plane had been pre-loaded with corpses or that the Ukrainians shot it down in an attempt to assassinate Putin. Over time, a more stable Russian narrative – the Ukrainians did it and the West used it as a chance to malign Russia – emerged, fuelling the argument that historical and external forces are always aligned against an innocent Russia, which is forced to pick through fragments of reality in order to discover the ‘truth’ of the ‘provocations’ committed against it. Those provocations in turn justify whatever action Russia takes and reinforces the broader mindset used to explain and excuse Russia’s aggression around the world.

The consequences of normalising such a distorted view of events are devastating. They are designed to, and can only give rise to, further hysteria among the Russian elites and public. Russia uses its own crimes as further evidence that it is the victim and as a justification for committing ever more atrocities. This cycle, and its two stages of dispersing truth and reaffirming core narratives, is central to the Kremlin’s spectrum of allies approach. While some doubt may linger, preventing full, and undesired mobilisation of support, many Russian viewers will be convinced of the injustice of the West pinning others’ crimes on their country, leading them to become ritual, if not especially enthusiastic, supporters, or at least loyal neutrals. The less credulous will at least feel unable to discern the truth and sink into apathy. This is an essential feature of Kremlin propaganda and population management: it uses techniques that simultaneously demobilise active opposition among those who are overwhelmed by trying to argue back against different interpretations and solidifies ritual support and loyalty among those who believe that Russia is the victim of external attacks, especially since the confusion is eventually deftly folded back into a more coherent alternative worldview. This is what gives the impression that Russians live in an alternate reality and explains the connection between the idea that nobody and nothing can be believed and the firm foundations of a broader Putinist worldview.

^{This is an extract from Jade McGlynn’s latest book Russia’s War – out now.}

Belief in God doesn’t come from a fear of death

When I was a teenager someone asked me if I was scared of dying. No, I said, but I’m a bit scared of living.

I want to say the same thing to David Baddiel. In his new book The God Desire he seems to be trying to present himself as a more nuanced sort of atheist, whose Judaism allows him to understand the appeal of religion, even as he decides that he is too intellectually honest to believe.

But his central thesis strikes me as the very opposite of nuanced. He argues, in line with generations of middlebrow atheists, that the desire to believe in God comes from the fear of death. We believers just can’t cope with the unpalatable truth that oblivion awaits, so we perform all sorts of mental gymnastics in order to cling to the opposite possibility.

I just don’t think it’s true. It’s not true from my own experience, and it doesn’t seem a major factor in other believers whose minds I have tried to peer into.

The real ‘God desire’ is the desire for meaning. People start taking religion seriously when they realise that the various non-religious worldviews on offer are thin, flimsy, when a real visceral hunger for meaning has hit them. Ah, but it’s for us to construct meaning, says the humanist – surely one can draw on the greatness of art and science and politics, in order to create a bravely human worldview. Surely this is the nobler path, the path of undeluded self-actualisation.

Well, we believers have explored this path, and found it wanting. We have found that it involves a sort of imposture – for when it gets serious it echoes the energy of religion, whether pagan, Christian or other. When we see people finding sufficient meaning in art and literature and political campaigning and football and food and so on, we want to say, ‘really? How strong is your desire for meaning?’ We value these things too, but we don’t find it brave to construct a worldview from these bits and bobs. Rather, it seems to us that your need for meaning must be relatively weak, if this hodgepodge is adequate.

We have found that the secular orthodoxy is simply too weak to get us through the night. I mean the dark night of despair. Ah, so you need religion as a crutch, says the humanist – whether the fear is of death or despair. Well yes, he is right, more or less, and we should admit it – there is no shame in admitting one’s weakness, one’s need of God, and one’s consequent need of the grand mythological tradition that mediates him. But it’s important to identify despair as the key peril, not death. For death is unavoidable, and despair has an opposite, an antidote: faith. 

The humanist will reply that he just does not feel this sense of painful meaninglessness, of despair, that makes faith a necessity. The believer will reply that he is not looking hard enough for meaning, that he is too easily satisfied with flimsy comfy half-answers. It’s not much of a dialogue, is it? But it would be nice if humanists attended a little more carefully to the way that religion actually works before publishing their fashionable simplifications. 

Should Ukrainians stop speaking Russian?

A young woman called Lyudmila walks into a cafe in Odessa, the southern Ukrainian city. Her phone is switched on and the camera set to record mode. She approaches the owner and asks for service in Ukrainian.

He declines. He says his Ukrainian language skills are poor. When she insists he makes excuses, then tells her the cafe is closed, and finally asks her to leave. But unbeknownst to the owner, Lyudmila is a member of a small Ukrainian-language vigilante group.

The group, who call themselves ‘Getting on your Nerves’, has made it their business to turn this Russophone city, founded in 1796 by Catherine the Great, into a Ukrainian-speaking one, one small intervention at a time.

Backing them up is a law, passed in 2021, that stipulates that service personnel throughout the country address and serve their patrons in Ukrainian, and only switch to Russian if that is their client’s preference.

In this case the cafe owner was reported to the authorities and soon backed down, avoiding a €200 fine. Film taken of the incident, meanwhile, shared on Tiktok, went viral among locals, ensuring that many more got the message.

The incident may count as a minor one in a country where entire cities are being reduced to rubble in artillery duels in the east.

But it represents just one small salvo in a parallel war for the heart and soul of Ukraine that is being fought in cafes, shops and restaurants throughout the country.

In Kyiv, clerics are at each other’s throats over control of church property and congregations. A minority still cleave to Moscow for spiritual guidance but most now ally with the homegrown Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

In Lviv, for centuries a Polish town, Ukrainian culture is being promoted and celebrated in everything from music to the veneration of controversial nationalist leaders of the past.

But it is the use of language that is the main battlefront in this quiet war.

Until recently Russian was the most-used language in cities outside western Ukrainian. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, and Odessa, its third, locals spoke almost exclusively Russian.

I arrived in Odessa on the night train from Kyiv last week with a companion to investigate one of the most important frontlines in this new language-and-culture war.

At first blush little seemed to have changed in Odessa since my last visit in January 2022, on the eve of war. On a rainy early morning there were few people on the main pedestrian street, Derybasivska (Deribasovskaya in Russian), the cafes were closed and we were forced to take shelter in a McDonald’s.

By the following afternoon, however, the crowds had returned with the sun. Children gathered to ride small ponies, and teenagers threw darts at a photograph of Vladimir Putin. At a café called Lviv Croissants families were bringing children to sip hot chocolates and pick at large sticky cakes.

When we tried to wander down to the Potemkin Stairs, however, immortalized in Battlefield Potemkin, the iconic film by Sergei Eisenstein, we were stopped by sentries. The entire central section of the city’s seafront, it turned out, had been closed off.

We tried a different approach and were once again turned around.

In nearby Shevchenko park, a place where couples and families stroll in the evening, small triangular signs warned of minefields only yards away.

There was a huge memorial and plaques to the hero cities of the Soviet Union,

a status granted after World War II to cities that fought the Wehrmacht with grit and distinction. Kyiv was among them, as was as Odessa, Sevastopol, Moscow, Smolensk and a handful of others.

But the plaques of the Russian cities had been smashed out of their mounts with hammers and crowbars. Only Kyiv and Odessa had remained, and, perhaps optimistically, Sevastopol in Crimea.

Defenders of this policy of de-Russification say that after centuries of rule from Moscow – both Soviet and Russian – it is only right that Ukraine now promotes its own language, identity and culture.

But others point to the fact that Odessa was founded by Catherine the Great after her military campaigner and lover, Grigory Potemkin, seized the land from Turkish control and had never been part of an independent Ukraine.

To get a flavour of what was being celebrated locally we went to the opera. They were putting on a much-loved Ukrainian national classic from the 19^th century, a comic opera about a feud with the Turks.

Perhaps ironically the opera was originally written in Russian, and only later translated into Ukrainian.

We were taken to our seats by a matronly usher, who spoke to us in Russian, and then listened to a set of instructions, in Ukrainian and English, of what to do if there was an air raid during the performance.

In the square outside there was an empty plinth where until last December the likeness of Catherine had stood.

We went to market. Odessa has two notable markets: the old one is called the New Market, and a new one is called Privoz. There I talked to Galena, a 72-year-old lady with whisps of facial hair who was reading a battered Russian romantic novel and smoking long cigarettes.

She had the tiniest of stalls, selling just three jars of adzsika, a tomato-based condiment.

‘My grandmother was Ukrainian, but the rest of my family were Russian,’ she said. ‘But more than anything else we are Odessans. And we get on with each other.’

In the same row of stalls there was a Georgian bread-maker, using a deep circular clay oven to make large flat white bread, an Uzbek selling ginger, and an Azeri.

In 2014, shortly after the Maidan uprising in Kyiv overthrew the pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovich, a few hundred diehard Putin supporters had attempted to seize control of Odessa. There was a street fight with Ukrainian nationalists and the building they holed up in caught fire. Forty-eight people died.

But any hint of sympathy for Putin seems to have long since disappeared from Odessa.

On one of our days in the city we took a rickety old tram a half-hour north and visited a family for tea. They were of mixed Russian and Ukrainian descent. Russian was their mother tongue.

The matriarch of the house, a religious woman who led grace before we sat down, said: ‘I am half Russian and half Belarussian. But Moscow sent its paratroopers to try and seize our beach when the war started. I just wanted them all to be blown to bits!’

As for ‘Getting on your Nerves,’ its founder, Kateryna, was also once a Russian-speaker.

But that changed the day her grandfather was killed by a Russian shell fired into Odessa.

At a shop that sold military clothing and patches I talked to Sergei, a 26-year-old merchant seaman. Sergei once worked on cargo ships but has now been grounded by an edict that stipulates that men of fighting age must not leave Ukraine.

He was dismissive of the language law and the activists who sought to promote it.

 ‘I think everyone should be able to speak the language they want,’ he said.

But when I asked if his linguistic orientation might translate into any sympathy for Russia, his face hardened.

‘Absolutely not,’ he said. ‘There is only one road out of this war, and it passes through a Ukrainian victory.’

Scotland’s ferry network is sinking, and taking the SNP with it

There has been more ferry chaos this week for Scotland’s beleaguered island communities, so much so that it now looks like the Scottish government is bringing in the Ministry of Defence to help with the fallout. One senior SNP MP, Ian Blackford, has urged military bosses to provide a ‘short-term solution’ to the ferry network breakdown. Blackford’s pleas come after warnings that, with further disruption to services, Highland companies could be at risk of going bust.

On top of this, this last week has seen days of disruption after the MV Loch Seaforth, state owned ferry operator CalMac’s largest vessel, developed problems with its engine control system. The boat is the main vessel linking the Isle of Lewis to the mainland.

Commenting on the breakdown, Helen Sandison, who runs the Western Isles Cancer Care Initiative, highlighted the case of one patient and the impact it had on them. ‘We had one service user today who was due to start chemo in Inverness,’ Sandison explained to the BBC. ‘They were already disrupted because of the Loganair flights to Inverness have been disrupted for the past few weeks, so they were having to travel by ferry and book an overnight stay which they wouldn’t have had to have done if the flights were operational. That chemo tomorrow has been cancelled – it’s an added stress and worry for a patient who was ready to start their treatment.’

Scotland’s Clyde and Hebrides ferry services operate under public ownership and are run by a combination of Transport Scotland, ferry operator CalMac and procurement body Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd, which are both owned by the state. The ‘lifeline’ ferry services are thought too important to be touched by the private sector. The problem is the state, at least under SNP administration, has completely failed in its responsibilities, and Scotland’s islanders are paying the price.

A third of CalMac’s ferries are more than 30 years old, and about half of its largest ships are running beyond their expected service life. Breakdowns and disruptions to service are now a regular occurrence. Irate islanders have watched in disbelief as the scandal surrounding the Ferguson shipyard in Glasgow has unfolded. Two big new ferries should have been in service years ago. Instead, costs have spiralled into the hundreds of millions while the vessels have gone from crisis to crisis amid allegations of a contract rigged for political purposes. The boats are still nowhere near finished, and the future of the nationalised Ferguson shipyard appears at best precarious. 

Scotland’s islanders have had enough of the SNP’s incompetence. Speaking on Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland show last month, Isle of Mull resident Naomi Knight, whose family runs a marine services business, said: ‘We’re basically feeling that we’re being driven from the island and have a total loss of confidence in the ferry service. It is that bad. It’s been deteriorating for years, which most people are aware of, but it’s got steadily worse, and we’re basically in the midst of a ferry crisis across the west coast of Scotland.’

She added: ‘We’ve got to accept we’ve got challenges living on an island and we accept that, but we’ve got multiple challenges. CMAL are making strategic mistakes. CalMac are making operational mistakes. Meanwhile, the Scottish Government are pretending that there are no mistakes, resulting in the islands having a third-world ferry service.’

Unfortunately for islanders like Ms Knight, ferry services look to be far down the list of priorities for Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s new first minister. One of his first actions in office was to drop the transport portfolio from his cabinet. Scotland has had a transport minister since devolution. Yousaf himself was transport minister between 2016 and 2018. The downgrading of the role to junior ministership under the underwhelming MSP Kevin Stewart signals a head-in-the-sand approach to the ferries crisis.

Why bother making life better for Scotland’s minority of islanders when there are populist battles to be fought over the constitution? That attitude could, and should, come back to bite the SNP.

Opposition parties sense an opportunity. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar visited the Western Isles this week to talk up SNP ferries incompetence. They see an opportunity to take SNP MP Angus MacNeil’s Na h-Eileanan an Iar seat (the constituency area of the Outer Hebrides) at the next Westminster election. Ian Blackford’s constituency of Ross, Skye and Lochaber could also potentially change hands. Although Skye has a road bridge to the mainland, voters in the constituency are still keenly aware of the SNP’s failings when it comes to island communities. The seat was a Lib-Dem stronghold under Charles Kennedy and could return to its liberal roots.

If the SNP are booted out of western islands, it will be a well-deserved comeuppance for the party’s complete disregard for Scotland’s islanders. The ferries fiasco is the scandal that should have brought down the SNP long before we got to police raids and seizing a luxury campervan.

The French left is becoming anti-woke

Nearly one in two left-wing voters in France believes the country has too many immigrants. When the same polling company conducted a similar survey five years ago the figure was 27 per cent. The fact it is now 48 per cent demonstrates how the gap has widened between left wing politicians and their electorate when it comes to immigration.

The polling company that carried out the survey headlined their findings ‘The Great Taboo (on the left)’. The refusal of left-wing politicians in France to heed their voters’ anxieties about mass immigration is mirrored across western Europe, except in Denmark, where the left has listened and as a result is in power.  

The French left, or specifically Jean Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), has a curious set of values; they hold Marine Le Pen and her 13 million voters in contempt, describing her supporters as ‘fascists’ and refusing to shake the hands of Le Pen and her 88 National Rally MP2s. 

But LFI have fewer scruples when it comes to domestic violence. On Tuesday they reintegrated into the party Adrien Quatennens, who was given a four-month suspended prison sentence in December for what his wife called ‘physical and psychological violence’ over a number of years. ‘What shame!’ tweeted the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. ‘Here is the patriarchy. How can we still be here in 2023?’

The decision to rehabilitate Quatennens, once tipped to replace Mélenchon as the leader of the LFI, has created further divisions within the left-wing coalition of LFI, Socialists, Greens and Communists. When the coalition was assembled last year to contest the parliamentary elections Mélenchon was seen as its strongest asset, the only figure on the left capable of rallying the disparate factions. But he’s failed to hold the unity. In a recent interview, Fabien Roussel, the leader of the Communist party, described Mélenchon and his increasingly radical party as ‘out of touch’, and said that ‘we have to talk to the whole left’. 

Mélenchon once did. In the summer of 2020, for instance, as the Black Lives Matter movement swept through the West, Mélenchon rubbished one of its key tenets, declaring that: ‘Those who talk of “white privilege” have never seen a poor white.’

Mélenchon no longer talks like that. He has joined the ranks of the radical progressives and has become what the French call an ‘Ecolo-Bobo’ (an ecological bourgeois bohemian).  

Perhaps that is why his approval rating has dropped by 4.5 per cent in the last year. Marine Le Pen’s has risen, on the other hand, by 7.5 per cent, to make her the most popular politician in France in 2023. The only other leader to boast a meaningful increase in popularity is Fabien Roussel, up 2.7 per cent.

Half a century ago the French Communist party boasted five million voters and was a serious political force. But in 1972 they entered a left-wing coalition run by François Mitterrand, ‘a Union of the Left’ that ultimately won the Socialist the presidency in 1981 but reduced the Communists to a fringe party.  

Many Communists were unhappy with the alliance from the outset, and transferred their allegiance to a new party they considered better represented them than the bourgeois Socialists: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front. Between the 1974 and 1988 presidential elections, the National Front vote went from 200,000 votes to 4.3m. 

Fabien Roussel’s father remained loyal to the Communists, taking his young son along to factories in the north of France in the late 1970s to distribute tracts. Most of those factories are long gone and the deindustrialisation of that part of France explains why the Le Pens have found it such fertile territory for their cause.  

Coming from the region, Roussel understands the people’s despair and when he talks about his Euroscepticism, his support for nuclear energy and his love of a good steak with a glass of red, he is talking to these people, not the progressives in Paris who want nuclear energy and red meat outlawed.    

Last weekend Roussel was re-elected National Secretary of the Communists with a huge majority. In his acceptance speech he accused successive governments of having ‘transformed [France’s] borders into sieves.’ In a subsequent interview he doubled down on this remark, saying that there needed to be ‘firmer’ control of the borders. 

Progressives reached for the smelling salts. Typical of the many angry retorts was that of the Green MP Sandrine Rousseau, who raged: ‘The term “sieve borders” is a term coming from the nationalist extreme right. You don’t fight the far right by going to its terrain.’ Roussel provoked a similar reaction in 2020 when he said that ‘Islamism is fascism’.

The hysteria that Roussel provokes demonstrates how out of touch the progressive left is with millions of its traditional voters. ‘He sees himself as the heir of a French left, rooted in the political history and geography of the country,’ wrote Le Figaro of Roussel this week. ‘He rejects this new American left, which is more focused on societal struggles. Roussel is the anti-woke left.’ 

I have seen this division within the left on the pension reform demos in Paris. The workers marching in their overalls are protesting against the raising of the age of retirement; most of the students, with their blue and pink hair, and their LGBTQI flags, are protesting in the name of progressivism, encapsulated by their banner: ‘Burn Their Old World’. 

Roussel has been on TV this week warning about the dangers posed by the far right, by which he means Le Pen. But if she poses a danger than so do the Communists because economically and culturally they have a lot in common.

In particular, both have a visceral opposition to ‘wokeness’, described this week by Le Pen’s National Rally as a ‘danger to civilisation’. The National Rally have launched a cross-party parliamentary group to combat the spread of progressive dogma in French society. For them, as for the Communists, it’s a choice between nuclear energy or Net Zero; Red Meat or Vegan burgers and firmer borders or free movement.  

Politics in France is no longer a struggle between the left and the right, it’s a fight between the proles and the progressives, and it’s only just begun.

Remainers should be honest about the costs of Brexit

Those opposed to leaving the European Union repeatedly accuse Brexit of being based on ignorance fed by lies. The ‘lie’ they invariably refer to is the £350 million on the side of the Boris bus. In reality, it was the Remain campaign, and its interminable Rejoiner sequel, that was and is based on systematic distortions and gross misunderstandings.

One might shrug one’s shoulders if the distortions came only from business lobbies, EU-funded think tanks, the subsidised European media and the like. But some of the most damaging originate within the British state and its associated bodies. No one denies that the Civil Service has been and remains overwhelmingly opposed to Brexit. The ardent Remainer Lord Adonis said that the 2016 vote caused ‘a nervous breakdown’ in Whitehall. Subsequent comments, articles and books by senior officials amply confirm this impression. Michel Barnier noted in his diary that British officials were ‘unhappy’ and ‘embarrassed’ when a minister tried to take a strong line. The same mindset is patent in economic forecasts.  

Rejoiner propagandists like nothing better than to refer to ‘official figures’ and ‘the government’s own figures’ when trying to blame all our ills on Brexit. Supposedly pro-Brexit ministers have been deplorably reluctant to disavow misleading statistics. It was refreshing when Kemi Badenoch firmly rejected an economic forecast originating in her own Department of International Trade. More on that later. 

Let us briefly recall just a few ‘official figures’. The mainstay of ‘Project Fear’ in 2016 was the Treasury report on ‘the immediate economic impact’ of Brexit: ‘a vote to leave would represent an immediate and profound shock to our economy… a recession… an increase in unemployment of around 500,000, GDP would be 3.6 per cent smaller.’ Of course, there was no recession and the UK economy grew faster than the Eurozone. Recall too the astonishing claims made more recently by the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, that Brexit had made the British economy shrink by around 20 per cent compared with Germany. Given that the British economy had grown at almost the same pace as Germany’s since 2016, this was too much for all but the dimmest Remainers to swallow, though it still lurks in cyberspace. 

The latest dodgy figures – in origin probably misunderstandings of questionable estimates issued by the Office of Budget Responsibility and the Department for International Trade – have been adopted uncritically by much of the media, and are repeated as Holy Writ by thousands of people who evidently do not understand them. First, it is repeated that Brexit has caused a ‘hit’ to the British economy of 4 per cent of GDP, and second that accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) will bring negligible benefit – only 0.08 per cent of GDP in ten years’ time. Both of these figures are brandished triumphantly as ‘official figures’ and used to contrast the supposedly huge economic damage caused by Brexit with the meagre benefits of trading elsewhere.  

The ‘4 per cent hit’ comes from a 2021 OBR guesstimate that the UK might grow by 4 per cent less over the long term than if there had been no Brexit, not of course a ‘hit’ to the economy’s present level. This forecast is flawed by mistaken assumptions about immigration and an empirically weak claim about a link between trade and productivity. The real data that has since appeared shows that there may have been a fall (so small as to be hard to measure) in exports to the EU, but certainly not enough to have a major impact on GDP.

What about that 0.08 per cent? It originated from the DIT using the American GTAP general equilibrium model of trade to calculate the impact of changes in trade barriers. This model has a mixed record for the accuracy of its forecasts, and probably underestimates the long-term dynamic effects of broader trade liberalisation. Hence Kemi Badenoch’s disavowal of it as ‘stale, static, out of date’. Besides, the CPTPP is only one element of a range of post-Brexit trade policies: other new or upgraded trade deals (including with Australia, New Zealand, and Japan) and changes to UK regulations (including in financial services, gene editing, and data processing). It is the total effect of all these changes on exports and growth that has to be compared with the limited downside of leaving the EU.  

Rejoiners assume unquestioningly that membership of the EU brought us enormous benefits, and that losing them is a cause for general weeping and gnashing of teeth. But there is some evidence that the benefits to the UK of Single Market membership were negligible. The Bertelsmann Stiftung (a pro-EU German think tank) calculated them back in 2014. They worked out average income gains from EU integration between 1992 to 2012. Denmark was the winner, with every Dane making €500 per year – perhaps enough for a modest family holiday. But our gain was a princely €10 per year each – not quite enough for a month’s subscription to the New European.

Truly interesting would be an independent calculation of the cost of rejoining the EU. The most obvious would be our annual financial contribution. If Brexit has caused a fall of 3 per cent to 5 per cent in UK goods exports to the EU, that amounts to £5 billion to £8 billion (in 2019 prices); whereas membership dues (net) were £8 billion to £11 billion in 2018 and would be much higher now. In other words, any gain from rejoining the EU would be more than cancelled out by the membership fee. Compare the Bertelsmann Stiftung estimate with our membership payments. If their estimate is right, it was costing us roughly €200 each to get back €10 each from Single Market membership.  

There would also be the potentially crippling consequences of joining the Eurozone. Another German thinktank, the Centre for European Policy, estimated in 2019 that Euro membership since inception had cost every Frenchman €56,000 and every Italian €74,000.  

The CPTPP carries no such costs, and our annual exports (in surplus) to this dynamically growing region are running even now at £60 billion. A mere 10 per cent rise would more than offset losses in exports to the EU. 

A sensible discussion of future trade policy would demand dispassionate analysis, not the repeated use of dodgy economic dossiers by the spin-doctors of Rejoin.  

Shame on those who abandoned Peng Shuai

No one really expects much in the way of principles or morality from those charged with running international sport. The Qatar World Cup was merely the latest, most blatant example of the iron rule that money and greed conquers all in sport. But for a brief moment — 16 months to be precise — the Women’s Tennis Association appeared to offer hope of something better. The WTA announced to the world in December 2021 that it would indefinitely boycott all tournaments in China over the regime’s treatment of tennis star, Peng Shuai, who vanished after making allegations of sexual assault against a senior politician.

The WTA was widely praised at the time for its courage in standing up to China, but any credit, moral or otherwise, has vanished after a shameless U-turn by the WTA which now says it will return to competition in China, even though it has been given no real answers to its questions about Peng’s safety and freedom. The WTA even had the effrontery to try to justify what amounts to a craven reversal with some weasel words: ‘Peng cannot be forgotten through this process… The WTA will continue to advocate for Peng and the advancement of women around the world.’ Yeah, right. 

Peng is (or was, until the regime acted against her) one of China’s most popular and successful players, and a former world No. 1 in doubles.  She accused Zhang Gaoli, the former Chinese vice premier, of sexual assault in a detailed post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. The post quickly disappeared, and so did Peng. She last appeared in public in February 2022 at the Beijing Winter Games and gave what appeared to be a carefully orchestrated interview to the French sports news site L’Equipe, in which she claimed her original post was ‘an enormous misunderstanding’, and that she was retiring from tennis. Her claims of sexual assault gained worldwide attention because of the alleged involvement of a senior political figure. Such claims will have come as a grave embarrassment to the Chinese Communist Party which does everything it can to avoid scrutiny of what goes on in the highly secretive corridors of power. The leadership will have been determined to make an example of Peng. 

That’s why it took guts for a tennis organisation to challenge the all-powerful Chinese leadership. When it took the original decision to suspend tournaments in China, the WTA said it would put principle over profit, even if that meant losing hundreds of millions of dollars in broadcasting and sponsorship. Peng’s case was apparently ‘bigger than business’. ‘We will stay resolute’ insisted Steve Simon, the organisation’s chief executive. Simon has repeatedly made clear, as recently as March, that the WTA would return only when it was able to contact Peng and if the authorities conducted a ‘full, fair and transparent investigation’ of her claims.

Cynics are right to point out that the boycott took place while China was still closed to the outside world because of the pandemic, so it came at no real cost. This year would be the first that would have required an active boycott and instead the WTA has simply buckled. It is now back to business as usual. Can anyone really be that surprised? China constitutes a major part of the WTA’s income and women’s tennis increasingly revolves around major tournaments there, generating millions in prize money. 

Make no mistake. The WTA abandoning its principles is a gift to Beijing. It marks a significant setback to wider international efforts to hold China accountable for its appalling human rights record. It will only embolden China’s leaders in their calculation that it is safe to ignore any outside criticism because such concerns are inevitably short-lived and, sooner or later, China’s immense financial pull will prove too big a draw for morals or principles to get in the way. The WTA is just the latest international sporting body, alongside the International Olympics Committee, Fifa and the NBA, to turn a blind eye to China’s abuses. Money and greed has won, again.

Another grim reminder of Japan’s violent politics

Has Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida just survived an assassination attempt? Kishida was evacuated from the site of a stump speech in the fishing port of Sakizaki in Wakayama western Japan after what appeared to be a pipe bomb was thrown in his direction. No one was injured but people fled in terror after the attack, which occurred at around 11:25 AM shortly before the PM was due to speak. A man was wrestled to the ground clearly holding a cylindrical metal object identical to the one thrown at Kishida before being arrested and taken away. 

That’s as much as we know for now. It is not clear yet whether the ‘explosive’ was capable of killing anyone. From dramatic footage of the incident a loud bang can be heard, and a cloud of smoke seen and according to a witnesses there was a smell of burning. There isn’t much sign of damage, though. The suspect, who has apparently yet to respond to questioning and whose motive is so far unknown, is reportedly a 24 year-old male from Hyogo prefecture. He had a full-looking backpack with him. Its contents are unknown. 

Given the similarities in circumstances, speculation will inevitably focus on any possible link between today’s incident and the assassination of former PM Shinzo Abe just nine months ago. Abe was shot with a home made gunwhile campaigning in Nara. His alleged killer Tetsuya Yamaguchi declared a grievance against the Abe clan for its association with the Unification Church, which he said had all but extorted money from his widowed mother thus ruining his family. A subsequent probe revealed that 179 of 379 lawmakers from Abe’s and Kishida’s party the LDP had links with the ‘church’.

Kishida was not one of them though, and the current PM, a mild mannered former banker, has a fairly clean image. His worst personal scandal so far was a bit of nepotism – he employed his inexperienced son Shotaro as his executive secretary. But that’s small potatoes by the standards of Japanese politics and hardly explains why anyone would want to lob explosives at him.

However, Kishida did cause outrage in some quarters with his decision to grant the slain Abe a state funeral, which was not only hugely expensive but was claimed by some to be unconstitutional. The move alienated many, drew Kishida into the orbit of one of Abe’s numerous legacy scandals, and intensified the general antipathy to Japan’s eternal party of power.

Of course, today’s attack may be entirely unrelated to Abe’s murder, but it is another reminder that despite the carefully cultivated image of stability, Japan can be a violent and dangerous place at times. As I wrote in the aftermath of the Abe attack the country has a long history of political violence which has included numerous assassination attempts on the lives of Prime Ministers, with four, including Abe’s, being successful.

There are also regular spasmodic acts of violence from disturbed loners, usually nihilistic men in their twenties, with no apparent motive other than to gain notoriety, or escape from an oppressive, hopeless existence. In 2008, 25-year old Tomohiro Kato went on stabbing spree in Akihabara Tokyo, killing four and injuring eight. He was executed last year. In 2016, 26-year old Satoshi Uematsu, in a marihuana induced frenzy according to some reports, killed 19 residents of a residential home for people with disabilities. In October 2021, 24-year old Kyota Hattori, dressed as the Joker on Halloween night, carried out a knife and arson attack on a subway train in an apparent attempt to be given the death penalty and end his miserable life. 

The official response to today’s incident from Kishida, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno and LDP General Secretary Toshemitsu Motegi was to condemn the assault on democracy and declare that campaigning for the upcoming elections would carry on as normal. But it will surely be a new normal. Kishida will be embarrassed that the extra security measures brought in after Abe’s killing could not prevent today’s attack. Particularly galling is the fact that Kimura was initially apprehended by local fishermen, not the security detail.

Kishida will also be seriously worried about what all this presages for the G7 meeting in Hiroshima in May. He would surely have been hoping to welcome the other leaders to his hometown without having to impose too heavy handed a security presence, thus emphasising one of Japan’s greatest claims – the relative security and respect for the law. He might have been hoping that a few informal tours could have been arranged of his old haunts, with himself as guide. But that seems vanishingly unlikely now.

What I got wrong about junior doctors

I recently wrote a column elsewhere about the junior doctors strike. As if often the way with this topic, it resulted in some strong and sometimes vituperative reactions. 

It also led to many conversations with people in and around medicine.  Some of them thought I’d got things wrong. That’s a reasonable position to take, and it’s often useful to take criticism seriously. So I had a think about the column again, and concluded that there were indeed a few things I could have done better at.  

Retention

Of the various ‘you’ve got your facts wrong’ critiques of my column, the one I think that has most weight is that I overlook the importance of retention – rather than recruitment – in medicine. In sum, I argued that junior doctors are in a weak bargaining position because the supply of would-be doctors exceeds demand, something that should, in the long run, allow the state to buy more medical labour more cheaply. 

I also downplayed the scope for doctors to leave the medical labour market, arguing that they don’t have many alternative buyers for their labour: only a fraction of those who threaten to move to Australia ever do, and employment prospects for doctors outside medicine are not great. 

Was I too dismissive? Probably a bit. There is a retention problem. Some doctors do burn out and leave medicine, leaving the NHS short of doctors. That shortfall is around 6 per cent of the total needed. Quite big, but roughly half the shortfall in nurses, which strikes me as a much bigger problem for the NHS. Given that the two groups work in similar settings, I’d suggest that the difference in staffing gaps between doctors and nurses supports my overall point – doctors enjoy better conditions than others, and are in a relatively weak bargaining position – but I still didn’t pay enough attention to burnout/dropout. 

The reality of being a junior doctor

I noted in my column that being a doctor means being on a professional conveyor belt that carries you to ever-higher wages and a huge pension, the sort of progression that almost no other workers enjoy. I didn’t reflect on the fact that this leaves junior doctors with few choices and maybe a feeling that they lack agency. Many committed to being doctors in their mid-teens with their A-level choices and other decisions. That constrains their economic and social choices for all of their adult lives, and may help explain the passion they feel around their conditions. I don’t mean to suggest that junior doctors are angry because they’re trapped in gilded cages, but I think I should have thought – and said – more about the experience and outlook of those doctors.

Tuition fees

On that note, I should have mentioned tuition fees. Doctors study for longer and therefore amass more debt. Yes, they’ll pay it back over time (unlike many others who will never earn enough). And that debt is another reason to back my argument for shorter medical training: compressing a five-year medical degree into four years wouldn’t just allow medical schools to train more doctors, it would mean those doctors ran up smaller debts. 

But existing debt is still something important to the current cohort of juniors, and I should have raised it. 

Rent

Many junior doctors are members of Generation Rent, handing over a huge and painful proportion of their take-home pay on housing they don’t own. That’s not unique to them, and they’re better able than some of their peers to pay such rents. But that doesn’t change the fact that some junior doctors feel their standard of life is harmed by Britain’s miserable housing market. That’s a fair point, and one I should have noted. 

I also note that in earlier decades some juniors effectively lived in hospitals, which provided accommodation on site. That was partly because they worked much longer hours – 100-hour weeks were not uncommon – but also reflected a different approach to juniors by their employer.  It seems unlikely that the NHS will ever return to housing doctors, but it’s still a topic worth pondering.

My own biases

Before and after publishing that column, I spoke to doctors young and old involved in the strike debate. A caricature of those conversations would be something like this. 

Twenty and thirty-something juniors are, like many people of their cohort, angry at what they see as poor conditions, and not afraid to demand better. The people who don’t support them are often older and have enjoyed nice careers, debt-free tuition and a favourable housing market. Damned boomers.

Sixty-something consultants, working and retired, can’t see why today’s juniors are making such a fuss. They have much shorter hours than their predecessors and sometimes better pay. One eminent surgeon showed me evidence that he started his career in the 1970s on a wage worth less than £20k in today’s prices. And for that he was working sometimes twice as long today’s juniors. He, like many of that generation, decided to just grin and bear it. Work is hard, kids. Suck it up. 

I’m 47, so I sit between those two age brackets.  But I realise that I unconsciously incline towards the ‘suck it up’ side of the argument.  For me, unemployment and fear of unemployment are defining facts of my economic life. I grew up in a time and place where losing your job and joining ‘the 3 million’ was a real and terrible prospect.

I think we sometimes forget how significant that fear was. Pop bands used to sing about it. I was a fan of UB40 who were named for a Job Centre claim form and sang ‘I am the one in ten’ about 10 per cent unemployment in the West Midlands. 

That all forms my attitude to work and employers, which is quite deferential. Ultimately, they have the power, so at the end of the day, I’m reluctant to be too demanding of more money and better conditions. Don’t rock the boat, because you might go overboard. 

Someone who is in their late 20s has had a very different experience of British labour markets and culture. They’ve come of age in a time when the job market is much tighter and unemployment is a much more distant and less frightening concept. Yet at the same time, they haven’t enjoyed the increases in their living standards that people of my age and older did if we got and kept our jobs. 

So they feel they have strong reasons for demanding better, and less fear of the consequences of doing so than I or members of my cohort might. 

This isn’t just true of junior doctors, of course. It’s something I’ve heard countless times from employers of all sorts in recent years. Younger workers are just more demanding of more from their employers. And while I don’t easily understand that outlook, it exists and I should have tried to explain and analyse it in that column.

Conclusions

I’m not sure how much difference it would have made if I had reflected on the things I’ve listed here in my column. I suspect that junior doctors and others still wouldn’t have liked my central point – that we need to buy more medical labour more cheaply. Even after reflecting here, I still stand by that point. But I accept I should have done more to consider the perspectives and experiences of the people I was writing about. Sorry. 

How boredom begat James Bond

It is sobering to think that if Ann Rothermere had been a less enthusiastic painter, James Bond might never have existed.

In January 1952, Lady Rothermere and Bond’s creator Ian Fleming were on holiday at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica. Tension crackled in the air. He and Ann had been lovers since 1939. Her husband, Viscount Rothermere, chairman of Associated Newspapers, had recently divorced her. The news had reached the gossip pages of the Daily Express. The scandalous couple had discussed marriage — with some urgency because Ann was pregnant — but Fleming’s expectations of marital bliss were slim. ‘I can promise you nothing,’ he told her. ‘I have not an admirable character. I have no money. I have no title. Marriage will be entirely what you can make it.’ And now the day of the wedding — 24 March — approached like a tropical storm cloud.

Fleming worried about his age (43) and the chest pains that would lead to a heart attack in 1961. He weighed the prospect of abandoning his life of raffish promiscuity against the sober joys of fidelity. And he noted how restless he felt when Ann spent the mornings painting flowers.

For a man who’d been a key figure in wartime strategy — Commander Fleming, inventor of plans to outwit the Nazis; a restless traveller, a prodigious womaniser and bon vivant — he now cut a sorry figure: becalmed, spiritless, unwell. The man of action was stuck in a garden with a once-widowed, once-divorced socialite in her large straw hat, rather like a tropical avatar of Buzz Lightyear, the spaceman hero of Toy Story, when he’s no longer Andy’s favourite toy and finds himself at a doll’s tea party, wearing a flowery hat and re-named ‘Mrs Nesbit’.

‘My painting bored Ian,’ Ann later recalled. ‘He said he had no intention of sitting out in the sun watching me at my easel, and I suggested he should write something just to amuse himself.’

The Bond saga started on the morning of 17 February. After breakfast, Fleming closed the living-room door and wooden shutters, sat at his roll-top desk, uncovered his old Imperial typewriter, squared the ream of folio typing paper he’d bought on Madison Avenue, and started to write.

Every day for seven weeks, from 9 a.m. to noon, the tacketa-tacketa of the typewriter resounded through the beach house like gunfire. He made no outline of a plot or cast of characters (he took his hero’s name from the author of a book his eye fell on, A Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies) but typed on like a man under orders to create. At noon, he’d sunbathe, eat lunch, sleep and, at 5pm, read what he’d written before placing it in a blue folder. At 6:30, it would be time for cocktails.

When the routine ended on 18 March, he’d written 62,000 words and invented a new kind of thriller: coldly, humourlessly narrated, speedily efficient, machine-tooled in its treatment of action, violence and sex, and with a central role for someone he firmly believed himself to be.

Casino Royale introduced the world’s readers to exotic phenomena that would become as familiar as their families. To Bond himself, tall, dark-haired, laconic, habitually treating his body, and his brain, as machines to be kept in top condition; to Bond’s special brand of cigarettes, ‘a Balkan and Turkish mixture made for him by Morlands of Grosvenor Street,’ to his apartment in Chelsea and his car, a four-and-a-half-litre 1933 Bentley coupé ‘with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers.’ And to the first Bond girl, Vesper Lynd, described by the callow Frenchman Mathis as having ‘black hair, blue eyes and splendid… er… protuberances.’

Readers also had their first sighting of M’s secretary, charmlessly described thus: ‘Miss Moneypenny would have been desirable but for eyes which were cool and direct and quizzical’ (poor girl!). They could gaze in horror at the first Bond villain, Le Chiffre, a mystery man who wears his hair villainously en brosse, a sadist, flagellant and Russian agent, and embezzler of union funds that he seeks to recoup at the Royale casino. And they met Bond’s gruff, omniscient boss M, head of the British Secret Service, after he’d been told of the plan to “ridicule and destroy” Le Chiffre at the casino by making him lose 50 million francs.

M says the plan is ‘crazy but worth trying.’ And even as thriller plots go, it is preposterous — giving James Bond 25 million francs to play Le Chiffre at baccarat, a card game whose course and conclusion is decided by luck rather than strategy or skill. When (spoiler alert) Bond is dealt two queens, which amount to zero, the reader feels Bond’s pain. When he’s dealt a third card — the winning nine — the reader mentally punches the air with glee. But neither event involves human agency: the gamblers merely look on, while Fate determines which cards come their way.

The germ of Casino Royale had come in 1941, when Fleming was in Lisbon with the man on whom M was based, Admiral John Godfrey. They dined at the Estoril Hotel and checked out the casino. It wasn’t a glamorous spectacle — just a handful of Portuguese punters and bored croupiers — but in Fleming’s imagination the gamblers were powerful and dangerous adversaries. He whispered to Godfrey, ‘Just suppose those fellows were German agents — what a coup it would be if we cleaned them out entirely!’ He played at the tables that night until he lost all his money, but the scene grew in his imagination for 11 years, until the idea of striking a blow at the Nazis by winning stacks of their money gave him a plot.

He’d first talked about writing a thriller three years earlier when courting Mary Pakenham, an Evening Standard journalist. At his apartment, when not showing her his collection of French pornography, he talked her through his plot and his invention of the perfect villain — ‘a fat spider-like creature sitting in an armchair sniffing Benzedrine.’ Fleming himself indulged in the stuff, and when, in Casino Royale, we see the obese villain at the card table, he’s just ‘inserted the nozzle of the cylinder, with an obscene deliberation, twice into each black nostril in turn, and luxuriously inhaled the Benzedrine vapour.’

The most vivid inspiration for the Bond stories, however, was Fleming’s experience during the war. After failing at careers in banking and stockbroking, he was recruited by the Navy as personal assistant to Admiral Godfrey, where he shone. He became liaison officer between the Secret Intelligence Service and the Special Operations Executive, devising schemes for deceiving the enemy: the story behind the recent film Operation Mincemeat, in which a corpse was dropped on the French coast, with documents in its clothing that led the Germans to believe the Allies would not be invading Italy from North Africa, was originally his idea. While not a field agent, he was the brains behind the action. And Fleming’s love of ingenious plots emerged in his fiction alongside his love for the formal memoranda sent by intelligence bosses to their agents.

Casino Royale was published by Jonathan Cape seventy years ago on 13 April, 1953, to mostly glowing reviews. In the Times Cyril Ray wrote, ‘If Mr. Fleming’s next story has half the swiftness of this, as astringent an accent, and a shade more probability, we can be certain that he is the best new thriller-writer since [Eric] Ambler.’ Maurice Richardson in the Observer urged readers, ‘Don’t miss this. A sort of Peter Cheyney de luxe, with everything of the very best and most expensive.’ The Daily Telegraph signed up the bard of parochial Englishness, John Betjeman, to assess it; he concluded ‘Ian Fleming has discovered the secret of narrative art, which is to work up to a climax unrevealed at the end of each chapter.’ Not everyone was happy: the novelist Simon Raven, something of a connoisseur when it came to writing about physicality and corruption, complained in the Listener about the ‘clumsy ending and also the torture scene’ [in which Le Chiffre flays Bond’s naked testicles with a rattan carpet-beater] ‘which is really too monstrous to be excused even by its ingenuity.’

By the end of May 1953, the first edition of 4,750 copies had sold out. By midsummer, the publishers could boast that ‘since 13 April, a copy of Casino Royale by Ian Fleming has been sold every six and a half minutes that the bookshops were open.’ He was launched on the high seas of British culture. James Bond’s adventures would continue through thirteen more books, ending with Fleming’s untimely death in 1964 and the posthumous publications of The Man with the Golden Gun in 1965 and Octopussy in 1966.

The books have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide and have spawned a score of ‘continuation novels’ by diverse hands. We’ve come a long way from the day when Ian Fleming sat in his Caribbean garden — brooding, emasculated, Buzz Lightyear-as-Mrs Nesbit — and decided to fictionalise his life, and to take his alter ego, Commander Bond, to immortality and beyond.

This article originally appeared in Spectator World’s April edition

Rishi Sunak’s immigration delusion

Few observers of politics can by now be in much doubt about the defective nature of Keir Starmer’s antennae when it comes to picking up the concerns of the British public. The number of U-turns the Labour leader has made once it has been explained to him what most voters actually think – the latest being over trans issues – is quite striking.

But we should keep in mind that Rishi Sunak’s antennae are not especially reliable either. He is neither an early period Thatcher with an innate understanding of the instincts of ‘our people’, nor an early period Blair with a natural popular touch.

The Prime Minister has just reminded us of this weakness in an interview with the always astute Paul Goodman of the ConservativeHome website. Naturally, Goodman questioned him about his pledge to ‘stop the boats’, yielding an admission from the PM that it might still be a work in progress by the time of the next general election.

That acknowledgment led to a flurry of tricky tabloid headlines. But it was not the issue on which Sunak left himself wide open to a political right hook. Though it took him a while, he clearly gets the extent of public fury about illegal immigration via the English Channel and is right to claim that he is doing far more to address it than any past premier has done.

What should concern every Tory supporter is the position that Sunak set out when Goodman went on to grill him on the related issue of legal immigration. This is particularly pertinent with regard to the OBR’s new forecast that it is going to average 245,000 a year net for the foreseeable future.

While the Prime Minister did suggest that such a high level of immigration was not necessarily a pre-condition for future economic growth, citing the potential for further welfare reform, he did not shut down the OBR prediction. Instead, he suggested that public concerns over legal immigration centred largely on the issue of ‘control’ rather than volume and that this had been addressed by Brexit. ‘Fundamentally, the decisions about who is coming here and what they are doing here…we are now in control of,’ he said.

Sunak then added: ‘The most important question, the thing that everyone talks to me about, is not that. It’s the boats.’

No doubt that is a comforting delusion to be under for the leader of a party which failed to fulfil a promise to reduce net immigration below 100,000 for ten years in a row before Boris Johnson dropped the pledge. Or for a leader whose party presided over immigration to the UK of an unprecedented one million people last year (half a million net). But it is a delusion, nonetheless.

The UK population has grown by more than nine million in the past quarter of a century, the great majority of that being due to high net immigration. The vast influx has put public services, housing, infrastructure, wages for working class jobs and community cohesion under great pressure. And for millions of socially conservative voters the proposed volume of future immigration is therefore at least as important as the theoretical ‘control’ UK governments now possess over it. A lot of opinion research actually points towards this concern being even greater among the working class former Labour voters who switched to the Tories in 2019 than it is among traditional Conservatives, though it is high among them too.

Tory prime ministers since David Cameron have failed to make good on promises to reduce immigration volumes. With this in mind, the average voter will surely interpret Sunak’s relaxed position on the issue as a sign that more mass inward migration will follow if he is returned to power at next year’s election. And they’d be right to do so.

That leaves a significant gap in the market for a party willing to commit to ending mass immigration and to switch to something far more socially sustainable. This is where Richard Tice and his Reform party may be about to make a significant intervention.

In recent weeks the Reform leader has been investigating the potential of a policy of ‘Net Zero Immigration’. This would involve moving to what Frank Field and Nick Soames referred to as ‘balanced migration’ when they launched a campaign for it in the 1990s. That is to say, the number of incomers would be pegged to the number of outgoers over a fixed period such as a four- or five-year parliamentary term. It would still allow for approximately 400,000 immigrants a year as that equates to the level at which annual emigration has recently settled. But it would also address concerns about immigration pushing up the UK population to unsustainable levels with all the deleterious effects that has involved.

As one source close to Reform puts it: ‘Nobody can say it is a North Korean option whereby the UK would simply pull up the drawbridge against foreigners. But equally it deploys the concept of sustainability that the Left have exploited when it comes to environmentalism. And it’s got the word zero in it.’

Tice is making a set piece speech at a Reform party gathering in Derby this weekend. If he nails his colours to the mast of Net Zero Immigration then Sunak is going to find himself badly gazumped in the contest for the affections of migration-sceptic voters.