China and the strange history of balloon warfare

China’s ‘spy’ balloon, (or is it an errant weather balloon?), is currently being tracked across America. Picked up above the Aleutian Islands, it was buzzed by US planes above Montana and is now headed eastwards as it is pushed by the prevailing Jet Stream. The Pentagon has decided not to shoot it down; it does not want debris landing on middle America. China insists the balloon is used for meteorological research and strayed because of bad weather. But the incident has prompted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his trip to China that was scheduled for next week.

Was the balloon inspired by Japan’s Emperor Hirohito? Starting in November 1944 the Japanese army sent Fu-Go (Operation Fu) balloon bombs across the Pacific from various sites along the east coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu. The idea was to start forest fires in the northern states of America. During the five-month campaign some 9,300 Fu-go bombs were launched of which about 385 are thought to have made to the US. They carried several 11-lb incendiaries and a 33-lb bomb.

The balloons were made of washi, the beautiful paper from mulberry bushes that Japan still produces today albeit for more artistic purposes. The washi strips were then glued together by Japanese high school girls and the balloons were brought for final assembly at Ryogoku Kokugikan, the sumo wrestling arena in Tokyo.

They were a pathetically inaccurate weapon. The bomb balloons were found as far apart as North Dakota and Hawaii. One reached as far east as Michigan. There were no reports of forest fires despite Japanese propaganda claims. But there were casualties. Elsie Mitchell, the wife of a preacher, was killed along with five young children when they stumbled upon one of the balloon bombs during a picnic in Fremont National Park in Oregon. It is thought that one of the kids kicked it. They died instantly.

However, one of the bombs did significant damage of some strategic importance. By extraordinary luck rather than judgment one of Hirohito’s bombs landed on the power lines that fed the Hanford Engineer Works located in Washington State. This top-secret facility, part of the Manhattan Project, was producing the plutonium later used in Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945. Fortunately for the US – though perhaps not Japan – the reactors were only shut for three days.

Overall however, Hirohito’s balloons were one of those useless fantasy weapons that Japan used in desperation to turn around its fortunes in the Pacific War. Why, then, might Beijing be turning to balloons in its ongoing tussle with the US? Chinese state media is following the balloon’s flight closely; ‘If balloons from other countries could really enter continental US smoothly, or even enter the sky over certain states, it only proves that the US’s air defence system is completely a decoration and cannot be trusted,’ the paper said.

Whatever is going on, the balloon isn’t a one off: ‘this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years,’ the Pentagon said. The current Chinese projectile is the latest episode then in the long history of balloon warfare. They were first used as military signalling devices by chancellor Zhuge Liang, a famous Han dynasty leader in the 3^rd Century. He is still celebrated in China’s annual Lantern Festival. In Europe, silk balloons were used in the wars of the French Revolution, though Napoleon did not think much of them and disbanded the specialist balloon brigade in 1799.

Fifty years after that Austrian Hapsburg forces dropped bombs from balloons onto Venice during the First Italian War of Independence. Twelve years later, the Union Army of General Irving McDowell used a balloon for artillery observation at the First Battle of Bull Run; they were frequently used thereafter by both Union and Confederate Forces including engagements at Sharpsburg and Fredericksburg.

Britain used balloons to support Imperial adventures in current day Botswana and the Sudan; 15 year later the British Army used them in the Second Boer War, notably at the Siege of Ladysmith in Natal Province.

Such was the fear of balloons that they were banned in the 1899 Hague Convention’s article IV, ‘Declaration of Projectiles from Balloons’ which stated that ‘the contracting powers agree to prohibit, for a term of five years, the launching of projectiles and explosives from balloons or by other new methods of a similar nature.’ The Convention made a timely bid to future proof bombing from the air. Studies on manned flight were already being circulated, though it was four later, in 1903, that the Wright brother made their first powered flight.

Despite the Hague’s best efforts, the proliferation of balloons, and more importantly military aircraft, doomed the banning of bombing. Only desultory attempts were made thereafter. Bizarrely it was Hitler who tried to ban bombing in a proposal to Britain and France in 1936.

Two years later at a meeting in Hitler’s apartment, it was suggested to Neville Chamberlain the idea of bombing women and children was abhorrent – even though it was Hitler’s Condor Legion, commanded by Wolfram von Richthofen, that bombed the ancient Basque town of Guernica on General Franco’s behalf on 26 April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Later, of course, Great Britain had to use blimps to defend London from Hitler’s V2 rockets.

In this bizarre balloon episode, Xi Jinping’s name will now be added to the role call of dastardly leaders who have used their intimidatory power. But don’t expect balloon limitation talks anytime soon.

Women prisoners are being let down

The safety of women in prisons cannot be allowed to plummet back down the news agenda after the latest Sturgeon saga is over. Not least because today has seen the publication of a report into one women’s prison in Gloucestershire that makes for troubling reading. HMP Eastwood Park, which holds 348 women, was the subject of an unannounced inspection in October last year. Staff from HM Inspectorate of Prisons made several findings that you’d expect: high levels of mental ill health; backgrounds of criminality, homelessness and substance abuse; and prison understaffing. 

However, they found plenty more. There was ‘no central record or oversight of the number of women who had been segregated, the reasons why or for how long’. The unit appeared to be used to house women ‘who could not be placed elsewhere in the jail, due to their mental health needs or associated behaviour’. One veteran inspector described the treatment and conditions of women in the segregation unit as ‘the worst that he had seen’.

The write-up notes that ‘rates of self-harm were very high and increasing’ – up 128 per cent since 2019 – and that women who are ‘acutely mentally unwell’ were being kept in ‘an appalling environment that failed to provide therapeutic support’. Of the 28 recommendations made during the last inspection (2019), seven had only been partially achieved and 12 had not been achieved at all. Worryingly, inspectors found that the use of force against the women ‘had increased significantly and we were not confident it was always used as a last resort’. By significantly, they mean up 75 per cent in the space of three years. In a prisoner survey, 27 per cent reported feeling ‘threatened or intimidated’ by staff. 

The report characterises the state of the cells as ‘appalling, dilapidated and covered in graffiti’. One was ‘blood-spattered’ while others had ‘extensive scratches’ on the walls indicating, in the inspectors’ analysis, trauma suffered by previous inmates. One cellblock was due to be closed over ‘fire safety risks’. The prison was also failing to provide basic supplies: one prisoner was forced to borrow underwear from her cellmate. Staff were ‘not adequately trained or qualified to support the women on the unit’ and, despite extensive mental health and ‘extreme’ self-harm problems, staff ‘received no clinical supervision’. No one in a leadership or oversight role had ‘noticed the severity of this situation’. ‘No prisoner should be held in such conditions, let alone women who were acutely unwell and in great distress,’ the report concludes. 

While there was commendation for some aspects of its regime, what inspectors saw was enough for them to assign Eastwood Park the lowest possible grade for safety. Conceding this is an unusual finding for a women’s prison, the report points to ‘gaps in care’ and ‘lack of support’ for the most vulnerable women. Inspectors found this ‘concerning’. 

Prisoners are among the most vulnerable members of the population, deprived of their liberty, choices, self-direction and placed at the mercy of the state. The vulnerability is all the greater for women prisoners. Six in ten have suffered domestic abuse, while self-harm is seven times more prevalent in women’s prisons than in their male counterparts. Women are also more likely to be primary caregivers and 17,000 children see their mothers imprisoned every year. 

There is a larger conversation to be had about our over-reliance on prison but an even more urgent one is needed on the conditions inside. While Eastwood Park does not represent all jails, it does represent our tolerance for custodial conditions that are – or ought to be – incompatible with the minimum human dignity guaranteed by an advanced liberal society. If prisons are necessary, and there are offender profiles for which they are, they must be places of safety, humane treatment, compassion, education and rehabilitation. 

Custody is the punishment, the conditions of custody are not. Prisons are there for public safety, not as dumping grounds for the abused, the mentally unwell, the addicted and the desperate, and not to inflict government neglect or public sadism on offenders. It is all the more important to recognise this in the case of female prisoners. Women who have been failed, abandoned and mistreated throughout their lives do not deserve to end up in a place like Eastwood Park. 

How will Mason Greenwood fare in the court of public opinion?

Mason Greenwood’s future at Manchester United remains uncertain, but one thing is clear: the footballer will not be available for selection for HMP Strangeways next season.

Greenwood – by all accounts an absurdly talented young footballer – had faced charges of attempted rape, ABH and controlling and coercive behaviour. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced yesterday that they were discontinuing the prosecution:

‘… a combination of the withdrawal of key witnesses and new material that came to light meant there was no longer a realistic prospect of conviction. In these circumstances, we are under a duty to stop the case.’

It is no criticism of the CPS to say that this hardly begins to explain its decision. They are constrained in what they are able to reveal by both the law and good sense. Any complainant in a sexual allegation is entitled in law to lifelong anonymity. In this case her identity is an open secret, but the law prevents the CPS – or anyone else – mentioning it. 

Pictures of a woman with numerous bruises and blood coming from her mouth, together with a disturbing recording of someone – said to have been Greenwood – demanding sex with an apparently unwilling woman have been widely available on social media for over a year. We have no way of knowing whether they are genuine, misleading or downright malicious.

Of course it is very unusual for people to fabricate evidence in this way, but it does happen. Only last month, Eleanor Williams, a 22-year-old from Barrow-in-Furness, was convicted of making a series of false rape allegations against a number of innocent men – allegations she backed up by posting online images of her injuries she had inflicted on herself. Her claim to have been the victim of an ‘Asian grooming gang’ was revealed to have been an elaborate hoax.

Far more common than malicious allegations are those where complainants change their mind about supporting a prosecution. This seems to have been the case in Greenwood’s case.

The CPS statement refers to ‘the withdrawal of key witnesses’. There are any number of reasons why complainants no longer wish to give evidence, especially in cases with a domestic element. They may be threatened. Even if not actually threatened, they may be afraid of the consequences if they stand by their account. They may fear giving evidence because they have not told the truth, in whole or in part. They may simply wish to put the whole thing behind them and get on with their lives.  They may have forgiven their attackers and not want them punished. 

It is very rare to see a witness statement admitting that a previous statement was false (and making such an admission would immediately invite prosecution for perverting the course of justice), but all criminal lawyers will be familiar with the ‘withdrawal statement’ which includes the words ‘everything I have said previously is true but I no longer wish to support the prosecution of Mr X because ….’ Abused women, or men, may believe that their partner’s violence was a one-off and decide, often unwisely, to give them another chance.

For good reasons, the CPS does not always see such changes of heart as fatal to a prosecution.  Witnesses who change their mind once can can do so again. Ultimately they can be compelled to come to court: it is one thing to tell a police officer that they do not wish to support a prosecution, another to stand mute in a witness box or (far more likely these days) at the other end of a video link. Those deemed to be unwilling to tell the truth can be treated as ‘hostile’ and forced to admit that they made the original allegations. But an unwilling witness is often an unpersuasive witness; there is, in any case, a tension between the CPS exercising its public duty to prosecute a potential criminal without further traumatising someone who may have been that very criminal’s victim.

The courts are more ready than they once were to admit out of court statements – typically the original accounts given to the police – that would previously have been inadmissible as ‘hearsay’ unless the witness was willing to face cross-examination. So it is sometimes, though not very often, possible for the statement of a frightened witness to be read to a jury without the witness herself facing questions from the defence. Especially in cases with plenty of supporting evidence that can sometimes enable the CPS to continue a prosecution even with an unwilling witness. But the persuasive value of a witness unwilling to give sworn evidence in court is much reduced.

The CPS have not revealed whether the withdrawal of the ‘key witnesses’ in this case is something that happened recently or some time ago. There are some reasons to suspect that they continued to prosecute even after ‘key witnesses’ withdrew their support. However, their statement does say that the witness problem was only one of a combination of reasons for dropping the case. The other was that ‘new material came to light which (together) meant that there was no longer a realistic prospect of conviction.’ 

The statement gives no inkling of what that ‘new material’ might be. Was it something supplied by Mr Greenwood’s defence team or something uncovered by the police? Did this new material fundamentally undermine the whole case, or was it merely a straw on the back of an already creaking camel?

In the language of the CPS the lack of a ‘realistic prospect of conviction’ means prosecutors believe that a ‘reasonable jury properly directed and acting in accordance with the law’ would now be unlikely to convict Mr Greenwood. The court of public opinion is not similarly constrained. It will reach its own conclusion unencumbered by evidence, law or due process.

What is the point of another Trump presidential campaign?

It was always assumed that the moment Donald Trump walked out of the White House on the morning of Joe Biden’s inauguration, he would begin angling for a second non-consecutive term in 2024. A year ago, he launched his own Twitter imitation platform, Truth Social, and then in November he officially launched his presidential campaign. His speech was met with tepid enthusiasm, even by some of his most ardent supporters.

In the weeks since, Trump has spent his time on Truth Social attacking Republicans and prospective rival candidates and once again defending himself from the many lawsuits and scandals he finds himself in. That includes his imbroglio with Stormy Daniels and an unexpected dinner with Kanye West, Milo Yiannopoulos and Nick Fuentes.

But despite all the obvious signs that Trump was going to run again, it’s not clear that he, those close to him, or anyone in the punditocracy stopped to ask why.

Why does he want to do this? If you ask this question on Twitter, his supporters will reply ‘to make the country great again’ or something along those lines. But that’s not really a sufficient answer. America is a much changed country in 2023 compared to where it was in 2015 — and Trump will be forced to be a different candidate. He cannot run as an insurgent billionaire outsider, setting out to smash the corrupt system and drain the Swamp. With every new proposition or policy, Trump will be pressed on why he didn’t do this in his first term. We already know how he’ll respond: ‘The Deep State… bad actors within my White House… stymying my agenda…’ But will that cut it with voters?

Trump now finds himself as a post-pandemic candidate after being a pre-pandemic president, trapped by his usual bluster of blaming officials he hired, or never fired, over the way the Covid response was handled. Faulting the governors of Georgia or Florida won’t cut it when Trump was in charge of the country. He cannot hide behind the podium on this. How he deals with this quandary going forward will define his coming candidacy.

But then that leads us back to our question – why? Why does Trump, now age seventy-six, want to go through this again? What is the case for subjecting the country to another Trump candidacy? Because, as of now, it does not appear that Trump’s heart is truly in it in the same way as when he descended that escalator amid a sea of cameras and cheers. Right now, the only apparent reason for another Trump candidacy is because he wants to avenge his 2020 loss like a boxer. (Also, as MSNBC talking heads will remind you, legal problems.)

Trump is not someone used to being rejected or told no. In 2020, voters rejected him and told him no. To set out now to assuage his ego is not going to be enough. Voters will see right through it.

If 2024 is about winning for winning’s sake, and reliving every grievance from 2020, his candidacy will be a fool’s errand and an exercise in personal vanity, something Trump knows a thing or two about. Yes it’s true: he might once again secure the GOP nomination, and he could certainly make a case against Joe Biden’s handling of the economy and foreign affairs. But Trump has shown no ability to focus on these things, especially when the national media would rather engage him on election denialism.

For a Trump candidacy to be successful, he has to give the country a reason to look forward. As of right now, it doesn’t appear he’s capable of that.

A version of this article was originally published in The Spectator’s world edition.

What striking workers don’t tell you about public sector pay

You’ve got to hand it to the trade unions: they’ve done a fine job rallying the public behind industrial action that has caused widespread disruption and inconvenience. Despite train cancellations, school closures and medical appointment delays, nearly two-thirds of the British back the nurses’ walkout and close to half back the teachers’ strike. Even sizeable minorities support the ongoing train strikes, according to recent polling. 

The argument from the unions – that their hardworking members deserve a hefty pay rise (in order to ‘improve service’) – has captured the public imagination. But how many of those who complete YouGov or Opinium surveys stop to consider the huge discrepancy between public and private sector pensions?

This is the glaring omission in the ongoing debate over pay. It is feebly referenced by Tory politicians and ignored by Labour. I’ve yet to hear a single union leader volunteer to mention the gold-plated, defined benefit pensions all-but-guaranteed to their members (at unsustainable cost to the taxpayer,) though I will gladly issue a clarification if I’m wrong.

This is not to say public sector remuneration is perfect as is; at a time when surging inflation and rising energy bills are hammering disposable incomes, some workers will have a point about their pay. Nurses have seen real pay fall significantly since 2010, yet over that period they have consistently pulled long, tiring shifts at unsociable hours. Teachers have watched real wages fall as class sizes have risen. 

ONS labour market data has recently shown private sector wage growth outstripping that in the public sector, leading to warnings over the recruitment and retention of staff in teaching, nursing and elsewhere. But this hides the fact that public service jobs and pay were mostly left untouched by Covid, often for no work in return.

The problem is not the total package offered to public sector workers. Rather, it is the inflexibility of the package, how it is divided up between wages and pensions, and how it has allowed public sector workers to feel short-changed. In turn they are drawn to demand pay increases without any commensurate improvements in productivity.

As the IFS has underscored, generous defined benefit occupational pensions, virtually extinct in the private sector, remain ubiquitous in the public sector. The average teacher earned over £42,000 in 2021, but they were also benefitting from employer pension contributions of nearly 24 per cent, worth an additional £10,000 on average. A nurse on a headline wage of £35,000 a year actually receives a total package equivalent to almost £62,000 once accrued pension rights are taken into account. In other words, we are paying our public sector workers well, it’s just that much of the benefit is locked away in the distant future.

If the unions wish us to move towards a world where public sector employees are paid on par with their private sector counterparts, what justification is there for public sector employer pension contributions to remain triple that of those offered to workers in the private sector?

The current situation strips teachers, nurses and paramedics of control over their own pay and pension arrangements. In essence, two thirds of young workers do not see their pension as an important issue. Being offered a higher salary in the short term at the expense of a gold-plated pension might be attractive for some public sector employees earning £35,000. They may wish to invest in themselves and their families today. But others, perhaps starting work later in life or in a settled dual-earner household, might prefer a larger pension and a lower monthly income. This flexibility ought to at least be on the table in negotiations.

The harder truth, however, is that without some sort of radical reconsideration of these vast pension rights, the long-term fiscal health of the nation is at risk – as well as the deferred payments many will rely on. One official estimate is that the cost of future pension liabilities increased by £70 billion in 2021/22 alone, and the total – for nothing more than pensions liabilities for public sector workers – has now hit £2.6 trillion, equivalent to the size of the entire British economy. Even if unions are inclined to reject lower pensions in exchange for higher salaries, there is a risk with this high financial burden that their pension expectations may not be met in the future – strengthening the case for taking cash today over jam tomorrow.

Just as politicians should be honest about the cost, the public should be presented with the full picture on public sector pay and entitlements. Trade unionists, just like professional footballers, tech entrepreneurs and indeed everyone else, are perfectly entitled to fight in their own narrow, financial interests. But those interests ought to include exploring whether members would be better off earning more today, as they struggle to pay rent or exorbitant childcare fees, and a little less in retirement.

Mick Whelan gives the game away over striking railway workers

We’re all familiar with the usual trade union cliches: it’s not about us, it’s about passenger safety; staff morale is low; and strikers are being ‘victimised’. Or, in the words of Aslef general secretary Mick Whelan on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, train drivers are being ‘demonised’. More so than government ministers, who are forever portrayed by union leaders as callous evil-doers?    

But it is what Whelan said next that really catches the ear. Asked whether he thought the public should be sympathetic towards train drivers on £60,000 a year turning down an offer which would take their pay to £65,000 a year, he said:

‘It isn’t about what we earn, it is about what other people don’t earn. I want every nurse in the country, everybody in the fire brigade, everybody in the public sector, every teacher to have what we have.’

Whelan seemed to be accepting that train drivers actually get rather a good deal – in which case why is he still not satisfied? But let’s leave that aside and try a little thought experiment: what would happen if every nurse, fire-fighter and teacher really were to be paid £60,000 – or even £65,000 – a year. 

At present, the median UK salary for a full time worker is £640 per week, or £33,280 per year. Let’s now increase that to £65,000 a year. Multiplied by the 24.6 full-time workers in Britain, that would increase the national wage bill by £780 billion a year. The size of the UK economy is around £1.8 trillion. Government revenue in 2021/22 was £819 billion. But let no-one say that the money couldn’t be found. As the BBC was ticked off by Andrew Dilnot this week, it is wrong to equate public debt with household debt because governments have a facility which private households do not: the ability to print their way out of debt. So let’s print the money, and give every employee a Wage Guarantee – rather like the Energy Price Guarantee – which bumps up their wages to £65,000 a year.  

What does Whelan think would happen then? Most people would have a very pleasant surprise when they opened their next pay slip – only around seven per cent of the working population currently earn more than £65,000. Their sense of satisfaction would rapidly fade, however, when they went shopping. With all that massive extra spending power you don’t need too much imagination to work out what would happen to prices. You can print money, but you can’t print wealth; the corrective mechanism is inflation.

I don’t think that Whelan has quite worked out the implications for train drivers. The Wage Guarantee wouldn’t give them much of an uplift in their nominal pay because they earn so much already. What the resulting rampant inflation would do, however, is to eat away at their real earnings. Suddenly, their £60,000 or £65,000 a year would feel more like £33,000 does today.   

If equality of income really is what Whelan seeks, I don’t imagine his members would be too pleased with the result. What suits them – and very much doesn’t suit taxpayers, given that they contributed £13.3 billion in subsidy to the operational costs of the railway in the year to last March – is the current situation. The reality is that train drivers are a highly privileged group of workers whose wages are far out of line with nurses and teachers.

Piers Morgan is no match for slick Rishi Sunak

Gold wallpaper? All gone. That was the first big revelation of Piers Morgan’s interview with Rishi Sunak to mark the PM’s 100^th day in No. 10. Every trace of Boris’s trailer-trash décor has been replaced with squeaky-clean white visuals.

Piers and Rishi went head-to-head in a characterless kitchen-diner that looked like the show-home of a new-build flat in Milton Keynes. Piers got straight down to business and raised the issue that obsesses the entire nation: himself. He boasted that he’d reached No. 10 long before Rishi when he interviewed Tony Blair many years ago; he recalled that the Blairs had a singing fish nailed to the wall that crooned, ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy,’ at the touch of a button. 

‘What’s your mantra?’ he asked. 

Rishi said that was a question for his wife and he added, ‘she doesn’t sing “Don’t Worry, Be happy”, although we do love Bob Marley.’ Piers let that pass – or perhaps he didn’t spot it. The song was written by Bobby McFerrin.

Rishi is slick but not slippery. He’s comfortable answering intrusive questions about his personal tastes. He can discuss Southampton and Arsenal like a real football fan. He admitted to playing with Star Wars light sabres and belting out karaoke versions of ‘Ice, Ice Baby’. None of it sounded bogus. He’s an immensely difficult man to dislike and he dealt easily with Piers’s strange queries about how he proposed to his wife. 

‘On bended knee?’ asked the great political commentator. 

‘Yes.’

‘You’re stinking rich aren’t you?’ 

‘I’m financially fortunate.’ 

‘Are you a billionaire?’

‘I’m not going to get into that.’ 

Piers quizzed him on immigration, women’s rights and nurses’ pay. And whenever Rishi found himself in a tight corner he resorted to sophistries. He brought up an abstract virtue like ‘compassion’ or ‘humanity’ and re-framed the question on that basis. It’s a ploy favoured by woke activists too. A debater who endorses ‘compassion’ can cast their opponents as ruthless and inhumane. Piers invited the PM to condemn Suella Braverman for describing the channel migrants as ‘an invasion’. Rishi flourished his moral free-pass.

‘We should remember we’re a compassionate country,’ he said. ‘We open our hearts and our homes to people fleeing persecution’. He mentioned Hong Kong, Syria and Ukraine. Then he got a bit matey, like Blair, using a Cockney street-trader’s manner, with his consonants dropping: 

‘Buh we are no’ a soft touch, righ’? We are no’ a soft touch.’ 

He promised ‘new laws’ guaranteeing that illegal migrants will be detained and removed to a safe country, ‘within days or weeks.’ He said genuine asylum-seekers had nothing to fear: 

‘We will couple (the policy) with humanity…so we can capture those genuine cases.’ 

Asked to define a woman, he gave a reply that Julie Bindel would have been proud of: 

‘Adult human female…I married one, I have two daughters.’

Then he raised the moral force-field again to ward off accusations of hate:

‘We must have enormous compassion and understanding for those who are questioning their gender identity.’ 

Piers complained that nurses have to pay fees to park outside the hospitals where they save lives. This is unjust. Rishi ducked and dived. He blamed the hospital trusts, he mentioned student bursaries for nurses: 

‘And here are some of the other things we’re doing.’

‘Don’t change the subject,’ snapped Piers. Some nurses, he said, fork out £1,000 a year in charges.

‘I’d love it if people paid less to get to work,’ said Rishi. 

‘Will you at least look at it?’ 

‘Of course I will.’

That sounded like a tactical blunder. A U-turn seems likely.

For his big finale, Piers couldn’t resist bringing up his pet-hate, Harry and Meghan. He suggested to Rishi that the globe-trotting eco-warriors should be excluded from the coronation and, effectively, from the royal family too. An easy one for Rishi to avoid as the guest-list is a matter for the monarch. Of course, if there were any justice in our constitution, their future would be decided by Piers.

How a Spectator Life reader put me on to a 20-1 shot for a Festival handicap

One of the nicest parts about writing this weekly column for Spectator Life is the informed comments that greet it each week from readers. I am thinking specifically about people such as ‘Simian Leer’, ‘Oswald Grimes’ and ‘Simon’. This week my thanks go to ‘Simian’, who in late December highlighted the chances of NASSALAM in the Paddy Power New Year’s Day Handicap Chase.

Nassalam finished a staying-on third that day and ‘Simian’ later posted a second comment asking whether the Ultima Handicap Chase might be a good Festival target for Gary Moore’s six-year-old gelding. The astute reader seemed convinced a step up in trip to more than three miles would suit the horse.

As Nassalam prefers cut in the ground, the horse will also benefit from any guaranteed watering – if necessary –  to ensure the ground is ‘good to soft’ on the opening day. If the heavens open before day one of the Festival, all the better.

Today, too, the form of that New Year’s Day contest, in which Nassalam was third, could hardly be working out better with the fourth horse, Il Ridoto, dotting up on Cheltenham Trials’ Day last weekend and the sixth horse, Jacamar, winning comfortably just two days ago at Leicester.

Of course, Nassalam is not guaranteed to run in the Ultima and, if he wins another big handicap before the Festival, he will blow his current handicap mark/official rating of 144. But, hopefully, with the Festival not much more than a month away, that will not happen and this race could well be his target.

All in all, it makes sense to back Nassalam Non Runner No Bet for the Ultima – four bookies (Sky Bet, William Hill, bet365 and BetVictor) now have this offer on all Festival races. Take the 20-1 each way NRNB paying five places with Sky Bet rather than the 25-1 with some other firms not offering the NRNB concession and only paying four places. If Nassalam does line up on 14 March, he is very unlikely to be 20-1. If he doesn’t contest the race, we will simply get our money back. Make no mistake, this is a very good bet.

In the meantime, this weekend offers plenty of good racing at Sandown, Musselburgh and Wetherby – and, even more so, across the Irish Sea at the Dublin Racing Festival. However, my only suggested bet for the two days is on EMPIRE STEEL in the Virgin Bet Masters Handicap Chase (Sandown, 3.30 p.m. tomorrow).

Sandy Thomson’s nine-year-old gelding ran as many poor races as good ones last season but when he was on song he looked a proper racehorse. He demolished a six-horse field at Kelso in February last year winning hard held by 16 lengths off a rating of 139. He had earlier looked likely to win the Rowland Meyrick Handicap Chase at Wetherby off a mark of 141, but he fell four fences out.

Tomorrow his rating is still a very fair 143 and connections are hoping for a big run from him so that he is all but guaranteed a place in the Randox Grand National field at Aintree on 15 April (that would probably need a rating of 145).

Take the 12-1 each way, paying five places, offered by Sky Bet even though he would probably prefer softer ground than he will encounter tomorrow. Rapper, who won comfortably at Cheltenham on New Year’s Day, could be a big danger but time may tell he will be even better suited by a marathon trip of up to four miles.

Finally, even though I have already put up two bets for the Randox Grand National, I am going to put up a third in ANY SECOND NOW. The more I look at his form in last year’s race, the better it seems.

We now know that he had an impossible task trying to concede 12lbs to Noble Yeats and was only beaten just over two lengths into second place. The first two pulled 20 lengths or more clear of the third horse, Delta Work.

Noble Yeats is now rated 167 – fully 20lbs more than in the National – while Any Second Now has gone up a mere 3lbs to a rating of 162. Once again, his season is sure to be aimed with just one Saturday in April in mind and, even at 11 years old, he might triumph in his third attempt at winning the marathon contest.

Take the 20-1 each way five places with William Hill because he is unlikely to be outside the first five home if he jumps around safely. Any Second Now runs in the Grade 1 Paddy Power Gold Cup at Leopardstown tomorrow but all I want to see here is him come back safe and sound.

Last weekend worked out well for followers of my tips which, I am pleased to say, show a profit of more than 27 points in just two months. Master Coffey, as I had feared, was a non-runner (money back) but Back on the Lash, put up at 7-1, won nicely. As one Spectator Life reader, ‘Squire Western’, commented after the race: ‘Back on the Lash definitely an improvement on Dry January!’ I will drink to that.

Pending bets:

1 point each way Empire Steel at 12-1 in the Sandown 3.30 p.m tomorrow, paying 1/5 odds, five places.

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

1 point each way Mister Coffey at 25-1 for the National Hunt Chase, paying 1/5 odds, three places.

1 point each way Hewick at 20-1 NRNB for the Cheltenham Gold Cup, paying 1/5 odds, three places.

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

1 point each way Corach Rambler at 20-1 in the Aintree Grand National, paying 1/4 odds, four places.

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

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

Settled:

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

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

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

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

1 point each way The Big Dog at 12-1 in the Welsh Grand National, paying 1/4 odds, four places. 3rd. + 2 points.

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

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

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

1 point each way Sir Ivan at 20-1 in the Sandown 3 p.m., paying 1/5 odds, five places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

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

1 point each way Dubrovnik Harry at 8-1 in the Kempton 2.40 p.m. race, paying 1/5 odds, seven places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

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

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

2022-3 jumps season, running total + 27.8 points.

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

Gender self-ID and the challenge for America’s children

America’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wisely advised this week that thirteen years of age is too young for kids to be on social media. Hear, hear. But we must ask: if thirteen is not old enough for Twitter or Facebook, how is it, according to the Biden administration, totally old enough to opt for life-changing hormone blockers if a child just knows deep down they are a different gender?

According to Murthy, thirteen-year-olds are still ‘developing their identity’. Therefore, he rightly reasons, the experience of social media with all of its mean-spiritedness and self-aggrandisement may harm a child who stares too long into its distorted funhouse mirror.

But if a thirteen-year-old is still ‘developing their identity’, then how on earth can we allow him or her – yes, him or her – to decide on a course of medical treatment that could have negative long-lasting effects solely on the basis that he or she is fully aware of what their ‘gender identity’ is? You see the problem here?

The proponents of treatment, be it in the form of hormone blockers or even surgeries, assure us that these horrors are ‘gender-affirming care’. Who could object to such a warm and fuzzy sounding thing? After all, don’t we want to care for children? But this is a diabolical and Orwellian lie. These are sex change operations conducted at the discretion of kids whom the Biden administration says are too young for a Tumblr account.

And let us also posit here that social media and the ‘transing’ of America’s youth may not be entirely separate phenomena. According to Komodo Health Inc, the number of American youths diagnosed with gender dysphoria – a fancy name for a child who thinks they are the wrong gender – leapt from 15,172 in 2017 to 42,197 in 2021. How does that number nearly triple in just four years?

The only explanation for such a surge is social contagion, which is to say a fad. And where’s the most likely place that your child or mine might discover or develop that fad? Of course it’s social media, where transgender advocates prey on kids, telling them that if their own family rejects their claims of transsexuality, there is a willing and waiting family of drag queens and activists ready to provide them a new home.

As Katherine Dee posits, ‘the internet has, historically, created a weird environment where these identities can be “tried out”, usually in the context of certain subcultures. None of this starts on Tumblr. I’d say Tumblr was the lab leak. It amplified problems, it created new ones, it refined others. It’s definitely the point of this cycle going mainstream with a lot of help from the press.’

Meanwhile in public schools all across America, these childhood fantasies of being born in the wrong body are nurtured by teachers and school systems who rely on faux-experts to defend their meddling in the minds of kids. You see, they know better than us ignorant parents.

They offer a menacing Sophie’s choice, arguing that if parents do not agree with the fantasy, embrace it and allow medical treatment for it, they put the child at risk of suicide. The evidence of this is slim to none – and yet these activists happily point a metaphorical gun at the heads of the kids of terrified parents. That is if they even bother to inform the parents at all.

This is madness. It’s not nuanced, it’s not complicated: it’s insane. Even worse is that this has nothing to do with helping kids. This is about affirming adults whose delusions about gender only make sense if they are born that way, and for that to be true, they need trans kids, even if, as the surgeon general made clear, those kids’ identities are still developing.

This needs to be a wake-up call for every adult in the United States. Americans like me can no longer pretend any of this makes the slightest bit of sense. Kids are being irrevocably harmed – and that is our fault. If this recommendation about social media and kids doesn’t open our eyes, then what will?

The curtain needs to come down on this damaging farce. Of course thirteen-year-olds should not be able to choose their own gender and suffer the myriad physical risks of medical intervention to cure an ailment that doesn’t exist. Make no mistake, this is a test and we are failing it. Too young for Twitter is too young to chop off body parts or suppress hormones. It’s clear, it’s obvious — and it’s time to stop the madness.

A version of this article was first published in The Spectator’s world edition.

Europe has lost control of the migrant crisis

Piers Morgan brought out the bulldog in Rishi Sunak during their interview on Thursday evening. ‘If you come here illegally – if you’re an illegal migrant here – then you will not be able to stay here,’ thundered the Prime Minister, in as much as he ever can thunder. 

People who arrive in Britain illegally, like the 46,000 who made the journey across the Channel last year, will be deported if they are judged to be ineligible for asylum. Sunak also promised that claims will be heard ‘in a matter of days or weeks, not months or years’. Failed applicants ‘will be sent to an alternative safe country, be that where you’ve come from if it’s safe, or indeed Rwanda’. 

It was just the sort of fiery rhetoric that should boost the morale of the Tory rank and file, were it not for the fact that they’ve heard it all before. On the eve of the 2019 General Election, Boris Johnson made a pledge to the British people: vote for me and I will put an end to uncontrolled immigration. ‘The problem…is there has been no control at all and I don’t think that is democratically accountable,’ Boris boomed to Sky News. 

Sunak should be given time to make good on his promise, even if the smart money is on his failing to stem the small boats arriving in southern England. As for sending people to Rwanda, that too may prove more difficult to achieve than he imagines, as the Danish government has recently discovered. 

Last week it was announced that Denmark has abandoned talks with Rwanda over its plan to send failed asylum seekers there. Instead Mette Frederiksen’s coalition government has proposed an EU initiative to establish migrant reception centres outside of the EU where asylum seekers and migrants can have their claims examined before a decision is made. Currently, only about one fifth of people arriving in Europe illegally are ejected. 

Denmark’s solution is not new; in an interview with The Spectator last August, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni proposed the EU setting up ‘hotspots in Libya to process asylum requests’. According to Denmark’s Migration and Integration Minister, Kaare Dybvad, his government has scrapped talks with Rwanda ‘because there has been movement on the issue among many European countries…[and] there are many now pushing for a stricter asylum policy in Europe’. 

Mette Frederiksen was recently described by one French broadcaster as ‘the face of the anti-immigration left’ in Denmark, a moniker bestowed on her after her government adopted its ‘Zero Refugee’ policy. The policy was criticised by Human Rights groups, the UN and the EU – particularly in 2020 when Denmark became the only EU country to withdraw residency permits for Syrians. Nevertheless, Frederiksen has been a hit at the polls. Last November she was returned to power with her Social Democrats achieving their best result in twenty years. 

One of those who has been critical of Denmark’s hardline approach to mass immigration is Ylva Johansson, the EU’s Commissioner for Home Affairs. Last year she described their Rwandan scheme as ‘a flagrant crime against basic human rights’. 

Last week, however, Johansson admitted that the current immigration numbers are unsustainable. There were 330,000 illegal entries into the EU in 2022, 90 per cent of whom were men, a great many from countries where there is neither war or oppression. ‘We have a huge increase of irregular arrivals of migrants,’ Johansson conceded. ‘We have a very low return rate and I can see we can make significant progress here.’

The difficulty for the EU is agreeing to a solution that suits all 27 member states. Some countries, notably Germany, see migrants as a way to boost its workforce. ‘We want to conclude migration agreements with countries, particularly with North African countries, that would allow a legal route to Germany but would also include functioning returns,’ said Germany’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser last week.  

Other smaller countries, such as Denmark, Sweden, Holland and Latvia, want the EU to reduce immigration and instead focus on providing developmental aid for third world countries who send the most migrants to Europe. The issue will be one of several discussed by EU leaders at a summit in Brussels next week. 

But these are discussions that have been kicked around the EU for years. One of Emmanuel Macron’s first keynote speeches after coming to office in 2017 was at the Sorbonne in September that year. In ‘A Sovereign Europe’, the new president of France outlined his vision for the EU, which included the creation of ‘a common area of borders, asylum and migrations, to effectively control our borders, welcome refugees with dignity, integrate them fully and swiftly send those who are not eligible for asylum back to their home countries’.

None of these laudable aims have been achieved. On the contrary, the number of migrants arriving in Europe in 2022 was the highest since 2016; France was one of the countries that received the most. 

Arguably no European leader has shied away from confronting the challenge of mass uncontrolled immigration quite like Macron, a pusillanimity that he inherited from his predecessors. There  have been 30 immigration bills in France since 1980 – the latest was unveiled on Wednesday. It is the second such bill in Macron’s presidency. The first, in 2018, was a failure and expectations for this one are low.  

The interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, has said the 27-article bill will streamline the asylum claims system, making it easier to deport failed applicants along with any migrant who commits a crime. Critics on the right claim the bill does not address the fundamental issue at the heart of the country’s migrant crisis: how to prevent people arriving in France in the first place. They fear the bill will actually attract more migrants because one of its articles allows for the regularisation of undocumented workers in employment sectors where there is a shortage of manpower. 

If the bill is to be passed, Macron will need the support of the centre-right Republicans. But the signs aren’t good. Bruno Retailleau, their Senate leader, condemned the bill because ‘it does not allow us to regain control’. 

‘Control’ is the key word in Europe’s migrant crisis. The EU lost control on 31 August 2015, the day Angela Merkel opened the continent’s borders with her cry of ‘We can do this’. Europe couldn’t – the number of arrivals has simply been too great. Now time is running out, and electorates are fast losing patience with politicians who make grand promises and then fail to deliver.  

Bruno Retailleau cautioned Macron on Wednesday that if he does not bring mass immigration under control there will be ‘insurrections at the ballot box’. That warning should sound throughout Europe. 

Why Putin is channelling his inner Stalin

Vladimir Putin has journeyed to the southern city of Volgograd – better known by its former name of Stalingrad – to take part in the 80th anniversary celebrations of the great Soviet victory in the city this weekend. The battle was the turning point of the second world war.

While there, the Russian president specifically linked his invasion of Ukraine with the Nazi attack on Russia – turning history inside out as he did so. ‘It’s unbelievable but true,’ Putin said. ‘We are again being threatened by German tanks. Again and again we are forced to repel the collective aggression of the West.’

By painting the West as the aggressor in the Ukraine conflict, although that is the exact opposite of the truth, Putin is deliberately invoking the spirit of the most sacred event in his country’s national consciousness: what Russians  call the Great Patriotic War.

The Russian president knows whereof he speaks. Memories of the titanic and triumphant struggle with Hitler’s Germany are kept alive and constantly refreshed in Russia by a continuous round of anniversaries,  rhetorical references and military parades. By linking these potent events with his own aggression Putin is also identifying with the tyrant who led the country through the second world war: one Joseph Stalin.

Piquantly, Putin has very personal links with the great dictator: his own paternal grandfather, Spiridon Putin, was a chef who cooked meals for both Stalin and Lenin. As a former officer in the KGB, Putin himself is a child schooled in the vicious system that Stalin created.

A new bronze bust of Stalin was unveiled in Volgograd as Putin arrived in the city – the latest stage in an ongoing rehabilitation of the formerly disgraced dictator. The 70th anniversary of his own death in 1953 falls next month.

These days, Russians are encouraged to think of Stalin as the leader who won the Great Patriotic War rather than the murderous monster who had allied with Hitler and killed millions of his own people. He was also responsible for creating an artificial famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor, in which up to 10 million Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death.

By channeling his own inner Stalin, Putin is intentionally preparing the Russian people psychologically, not only for his expected Spring offensive in Ukraine, but also for a long and merciless war there – one in which they will be expected to make the same sacrifices in blood and treasure that their grandparents’ generation made at Stalingrad.  For the West, as well as Ukraine, it is a very chilling message.

Do mask mandates work?

This week there was an update to a Cochrane review, which studies the way physical interventions can interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. The review, which Tom Jefferson is the lead author of, looks at evidence from 78 randomised trials with over 610,000 participants. In other words, this review is exactly the sort of higher-quality evidence you want when making healthcare decisions.  

The review’s fifth update looked at handwashing, antiseptic use, social distancing and barriers such as masks, gloves, gowns and visors.

Given past controversies, it’s worth looking at what the review says about the effects medical or surgical masks have on the way respiratory diseases spread.  

Interestingly, 12 trials in the review, ten in the community and two among healthcare workers, found that wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to influenza-like or Covid-19-like illness transmission. Equally, the review found that masks had no effect on laboratory-confirmed influenza or SARS-CoV-2 outcomes. Five other trials showed no difference between one type of mask over another.

This is the second update of the review since the start of the pandemic. The first update was delayed by seven months due to unexplained editorial decisions. It was too late when it came out in November 2020 to make a difference to national Covid policy; by then, activism, low-quality observational evidence and government policy had set the agenda for mask mandates, and the damage had been done.  

Often these government policies relied on observational studies on mask usage and the spread of Covid. But there are lots of flaws in observational evidence. For example, in the absence of a study protocol setting out methods before the study is done, it is possible to shift the dates of an observational analysis to suit the rise and fall in infections. So if you time your analysis near the peak of infections, the results will favour mask interventions as the infection rate quickly decreases.  

But when we pointed out in November 2020 the troubling lack of robust evidence on face masks and the problems with observational studies, we were shouted down, removed from Facebook and put on the government’s secret watchlist.   

What many also failed to notice at the time was that studies that look at individuals – as opposed to populations – can lead to erroneous policy decisions. Studies which involve individuals frequently track people who have specifically chosen to wear a mask. But policies on mandatory masks are very different – they involve lots of people who don’t like wearing masks every day, and many people who won’t wear one at all. A study which only looks at keen mask-wearers will not reflect how people comply on a population level. 

The Cochrane review findings report relatively low adherence to mask-wearing, which is similar to what happens in the real world. With better adherence and higher quality masks (and if you are careful when you step out the door), you might reduce your risk in specific settings by a small amount. However, when you scale up any potential small benefits to those who step out the door regularly, the effect doesn’t stack up as a population-based intervention.  

Mandates that affected the whole population never made sense. Moreover, even in high adherence populations such as Japan, they have not stemmed an inevitable rise in infections. Part of the problem may be that during the pandemic the government had to be seen to be doing something. Interventions like handwashing and vaccines are invisible, but masks acted as a visible sign of compliance.  

What we have witnessed in this pandemic are strong beliefs about what works and what doesn’t. At times, it’s been more like a football match, with cheerleaders on either side goading the opposition. Several policies such as mask mandates, restrictions, and unproven interventions now seem absurd in hindsight. And as the culture of fear has lifted, the population has become all too aware of their detrimental effects.  

We failed to follow an evidence-based approach during the pandemic. We are now left with the human, social and economic aftermath of evidence-free policies. 

The anti-Midas touch of Mad Money’s Jim Cramer

When Tesla, the electric-car company controlled by Elon Musk, went public in June 2010, pricing its IPO at $17 per share, Jim Cramer, the ubiquitous and highly confident American TV anchor, proclaimed on his show Mad Money that investors should avoid the stock at all costs. It was a ‘Sell! Sell! Sell!’ Cramer announced in his typical over-the-top, over-caffeinated style. But he wasn’t finished with his diatribe, not by a long shot.

‘You don’t want to own this stock,’ he continued. ‘You don’t want to lease it. Heck, you shouldn’t even rent the darn thing.’ The next day, another CNBC reporter found Musk on the streets of Manhattan and told him what Jim Cramer had said about the Tesla IPO the day before: ‘Our own Jim Cramer said yesterday, “I’m not sure Tesla has a business plan that’s going to work. It’s not a smart investment.” What do you say to the skeptics who look at where Tesla is and the money that you’re raising and say, “They’ve got a nice roadster, but they don’t have a good business plan?”‘

Tesla’s IPO had raised some $225 million (£184 million) and the stock had traded up around 40 per cent on its first day. Musk still had most of his dark hair back then and was obviously feeling good about things. ‘Well, I think, you know,’ Musk responded, ‘as Jim might say, “Ya, sure, Jim, we’re no Bear Stearns.”‘ Burn. Major burn. Sick burn, as CNBC’s sophisticated viewers would have known all too well.

Musk was referring to the infamous moment more than two years earlier, in March 2008, when a Mad Money viewer asked Cramer if he should be worried about owning the stock of Bear Stearns. The eighty-five-year-old investment bank was teetering on the edge of the abyss amid wild rumours about its ongoing viability. The market had been up more than 400 points on the day, so maybe things weren’t as bad as market chatter might suggest. Responding with another patented Cramer tirade, he said, ‘No! No! No! Bear Stearns is fine. Do not take your money out! If there is one takeaway other than the plus 400, Bear Stearns is not in trouble! If anything, it is more likely to be taken over. Don’t move your money from Bear. That’s just being silly! Don’t be silly!’

As most everyone knew by the time of Musk’s rhetorical flourish, Bear Stearns prepared to file for bankruptcy protection a day after Cramer’s rant. And then, because of a massive intervention by the Federal Reserve, JPMorgan Chase agreed to buy Bear Stearns for $2 a share, a price that looked like a typo. Bear Stearns had avoided bankruptcy only because of the Fed-engineered rescue plan; it was the first time in American history that the Fed saved a Wall Street investment bank. Cramer had been spectacularly wrong about Bear Stearns.

Had CNBC viewers listened to him and held on to their Bear Stearns stock, they would have lost nearly everything, even after JPMorgan Chase eventually increased its offer to $10 a share. And had Mad Money’s viewers bought Tesla’s stock, instead of sell sell selling it, they would have made a small fortune, or a massive one, as Musk has. Tesla stock is up more than 13,000 per cent since the IPO – and that’s after it was down around 70 per cent in 2022. When Cramer reversed course a bit, saying last August, ‘I am all in on Tesla and CEO Elon Musk,’ Musk burned him again – most likely inadvertently – by selling nearly $7 billion (£5.7 billion) worth of his Tesla stock. In fact, since Cramer went ‘all in’ on Tesla, the stock is down nearly 50 per cent. Anyone who bought Tesla on his recommendation would have been singed.

But with Cramer, there’s always more. Last June, he praised Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF, the now disgraced and incarcerated founder of FTX, as the ‘new J.P. Morgan’ after SBF and FTX appeared to bail out several struggling crypto companies. It was not the first time Cramer gushed about a founder billionaire: in April 2015, he compared Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who has since been sentenced to eleven years in federal prison for fraud, to Steve Jobs. ‘I regard you as a visionary, next-generation person,’ he told her in a Mad Money interview.

Three days before FTX filed for bankruptcy protection on November 11, 2022, Hedgeye, an independent Wall Street research firm with some 175,000 Twitter followers, tagged Cramer’s tweet about SBF and JP Morgan. ‘Never before in the history of humankind has one person been so reliably wrong,’ Hedgeye wrote. ‘@JimCramer is the anti-Midas — everything this shithead touches turns to shit.’

Or consider Cramer’s call on Meta Platforms, the company that used to be known as Facebook. On 23 June 2022, he said that shares of Meta were a buy because its CEO Mark Zuckerberg was ‘simply unstoppable’ and that the ‘metaverse’, the creation on which Zuckerberg had bet billions of dollars, was ‘a cool place to go’. Zuckerberg had been a Mad Money guest the day before – Cramer let him blither on about the wonders of the metaverse – and the segment featured avatars of the CNBC anchors, including one of Cramer. He seemed truly moved – Zuckerberg had even created a VR garden for gardening-enthusiast Cramer to enjoy. In a conversation with his co-anchor, David Faber, Cramer gushed, ‘This thing is for real’. He seemed nearly overcome with emotion.

Fast forward four months, to October 27, and Cramer was again overcome with emotion, this time humility, not joy. He appeared to be nearly crying on air. Meta had just reported disappointing third-quarter earnings, and the stock fell 25 per cent in one day, to the lowest level in six years. ‘Let me say this,’ Cramer said, choking up, ‘I made a mistake here. I was wrong.’

He said putting his faith in Zuckerberg and his management team was ‘ill-advised’. ‘I had thought there’d be an understanding that you just can’t spend and spend right through your free cash flow,’ he said, ‘that there had to be some level of discipline.’ When Faber asked him what he’d got wrong, Cramer replied: ‘What did I get wrong? I trusted them, not myself. For that I regret. I’ve been in this business for forty years, and I did a bad job. I’m not proud.’

A Cramer fan who has known him for decades questions just how valuable his advice is these days. ‘He presents himself as being the guru on every possible investment, stock, issue, and company, in a way that simply isn’t possible,’ he said. ‘Which is why the record then reflects fundamental macro and micro errors, and then it makes you ask the question, “Has this descended from wisdom into carnival barker?”‘

Many people seem to be wondering the same thing. In fact, there’s a new cottage industry devoted to doing the opposite of everything Jim Cramer suggests. On Twitter, the account @CramerTracker, with 170,000 followers, has been around since November 2021. Its sole purpose, it proclaims, is tracking ‘the stock recommendations of Jim Cramer so you can do the opposite’. I found the site’s 24-year-old proprietor in Michigan – he declined to share his name – who told me that he was ‘always fascinated’ with the idea that Cramer could go on national television ‘and basically say whatever he wants to say, every single day, with no accountability’.

The CramerTracker guy said he started the site to track the stocks Cramer recommended to viewers on CNBC. ‘But the more I spent time on it, the more I realised, like “Holy cow, this guy has thousands of calls each month.” And just kind of highlighting the ones he got right and the ones he got wrong, more often than not, he hit some rock.’

He decided to analyse the performance of the stocks Cramer recommended between 2017 and 2021 – his 12,564 individual calls – and compared them to the simultaneous performance of the S&P 500. The analysis showed that Cramer’s picks underperformed the S&P by around six percentage points. Not horrific, by any stretch, but far from stellar. ‘A little bit closer to the market than I would have anticipated,’ he said.

The analysis also showed that the volume in the stocks Cramer recommended increased some 25 per cent the day after: people were following his advice and promptly losing money. People think the man behind CramerTracker doesn’t like Cramer because he’s so consistently negative about him and his stock recommendations. But that’s not true. ‘I need him,’ he tells me. ‘Without him, I wouldn’t have my own thing.’

James Kardatzke is the CEO of Quiver Quantitative, a company that provides traders with ‘unique data sets’ he hopes will give them special insight into trading opportunities. He’s all of 22 and, like the fellow behind @CramerTracker, he’s hoping to make a living off Jim Cramer’s foibles. In August last year, he created the ‘Inverse Jim Cramer Strategy’ and posted it on Seeking Alpha, a well-known website for traders and their ideas.

‘While often the target of criticism for his slightly lackluster stock-picking performance, the Mad Money host is without a doubt one of the most influential TV personalities in the history of finance TV,’ Kardatzke wrote. ‘However, it remains a given that his stock picking abilities seem to have slowly deteriorated over the years.’ Kardatzke analysed Cramer’s ten ‘most recommended’ 2022 stocks into August – from Procter & Gamble (number 1, a loss of 10 per cent) to Marvell Technology (number 10, a loss of 32 per cent), with Meta Platforms at number 8 and a loss of 19 per cent through that point in the year. All ten of the stocks Cramer touted most vociferously between January and August had lost money, not all that surprising given that the S&P 500 lost more than 14 per cent since the beginning of the year.

What was surprising, though, was that Kardatzke’s inverse Cramer investing strategy – a combination of shorts and longs related to Cramer’s picks – paid off big time. For the one-year period between August 2021 and publication of the Seeking Alpha piece, Kardatzke’s trading strategy generated returns of 20.1 per cent, compared to a same-time loss on the S&P 500 of 6.3 per cent, a whopping 2,600-basis-point difference.

Kardatzke updated the analysis in October. ‘Our Inverse Jim Cramer Strategy excelled even during the latter half of this troublesome year,’ he wrote, again on Seeking Alpha. ‘The Mad Money host himself has once again proven to be a leading source of first-class investment advice, but only if we are to invert the recommendations.’ In the third quarter of 2022, the inverse Cramer strategy returned 2.2 per cent, while the market declined 2.4 per cent, a more modest 400-basis point swing but still noteworthy.

In an interview from his home in Wisconsin, Kardatzke told me that the popularity of the inverse-Cramer strategy derives from what he sees as growing skepticism with ‘experts’ more generally. ‘A lot of people are starting to become more cynical toward the idea that these are really experts who know exactly what’s going to happen and are clairvoyant when it comes to the recommendations and predictions they’re making,’ he said.

Matthew Tuttle, managing director of Tuttle Capital Management, a small investment adviser in bucolic Riverside, Connecticut, has taken the inverse Cramer investing strategy further than the youngsters behind CramerTracker and Quiver Quantitative. In October, Tuttle filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to start trading a new ETF (exchange- traded fund) that will allow investors to bet directly against Cramer’s recommendations simply by buying the Inverse Cramer ETF – SJIM (for short Jim).

The new ETF, Tuttle wrote in the prospectus, ‘seeks to provide investments results that are approximately the opposite of, before fees and expenses, the results of the investments recommended by television personality Jim Cramer.’ At least 80 per cent of the ETF’s investments will be invested ‘in the inverse of the securities mentioned by Cramer,’ he wrote, by either shorting the stocks he recommends or by entering into derivative contracts that ‘produce a negative correlation’ to his on-air recommendations.

While Tuttle appears to be an equal opportunity ETF advisor – he’s also pushing a ‘Long Cramer’ ETF (LJIM) – his heart seems to be on the inverse side. Tuttle has been a Wall Street trader since 1999 and says he’s a ‘huge believer’ that individual investors need to educate themselves about Wall Street and the financials of individual companies. ‘Just look at all the crap that goes on out there,’ he told me.

One place individual investors go to educate themselves are the financial news networks, such as CNBC, Fox Business and Bloomberg. But Tuttle worries about the quality of their content. ‘What financial media has turned into is entertainment and I get it, it’s ratings,’ he said. ‘Look who the advertisers are… I wouldn’t mind that as much… if they labeled it as such.’ He’s especially miffed that CNBC gives Cramer free rein to make his recommendations and then rarely holds him accountable when they prove disastrous. ‘When Jim Cramer comes on, they treat him with deference: “Hey, we’re going to bring Jim on and ask him what he thinks about this,”‘ Tuttle continued. ‘And there is never, “Hey, Jim, yesterday we asked you about what you thought about SNAP earnings and you said SNAP was going to be great. And right now, it’s down 30 per cent. Did you get that one wrong?” And there’s never any of that;’ – actually occasionally there is – ‘there’s amnesia on what he said the previous day and the previous day before that. And there’s never a disclaimer on the bottom, “Hey, this is just entertainment,” which there clearly should be on Mad Money.’

For its part, CNBC, where I’m an occasional contributor, declined to make Cramer available to be interviewed in a timeframe to meet The Spectator’s deadline, nor did it allow me to speak to any of his CNBC colleagues or make introductions for me to his friends. ‘Cramer isn’t inclined to be interviewed,’ Keith Cocozza, the CNBC spokesman, said in an email to me.

Jim Cramer, now sixty-seven, was a wunderkind. He grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia. His mother was an artist; his father owned a packaging company. As a teenager, he hawked Coca-Cola and ice cream at Veterans Stadium. At Harvard, he studied government and rose to become president and editor-in-chief of the Harvard Crimson. Along with his occasional beefs about the Harvard curriculum, most of Cramer’s Crimson pieces were about jazz.

After graduating in 1977, Cramer worked as a newspaper reporter in Tallahassee and Los Angeles, where he wrote obituaries for the Herald-Examiner. He lived out of his car for nine months after his LA apartment was robbed. In 1981, Cramer enrolled in Harvard Law School. He started trading stocks while there, leaving stock tips on his answering machine and making enough money to pay tuition. Then it was time for connections to kick in. Michael Kinsley, a fellow Harvard alum, introduced Cramer to Marty Peretz, the owner of the New Republic – Cramer’s sole article for the magazine, in November 1977, was about the importance of meritocracy in the National Football League, specifically at his beloved Philadelphia Eagles. Peretz also made money from some of Cramer’s answering-machine recommendations and gave Cramer $500,000 to invest; he made Peretz $150,000 over two years.

After graduating from Harvard Law, and a brief stint as a clerk for Alan Dershowitz, who was defending Claus von Bülow, Cramer joined Goldman Sachs in the sales and trading department. (He passed the bar but never practiced law). After three years, he left Goldman to set up his own hedge fund with some $450 million of investors’ money. In addition to Peretz, the early investors were Steven Brill, the owner of American Lawyer, for which Cramer had written, and his law school classmate Eliot Spitzer, later attorney general and governor of New York. He ran his firm until 2001, when he retired from the hedge fund business. He told BusinessWeek in 2005 that he had averaged returns of 24 per cent annually and taken home annual pay in excess of $10 million.

Cramer also had some side interests. In 1996, he and Peretz started TheStreet.com, a website dedicated to financial news and investing. Cramer took it public in May 1999, before the internet bubble burst, and made a small fortune. He was an editor-at-large for SmartMoney. He appeared frequently on CNBC. In 2002, he teamed up with Larry Kudlow, the former Bear Stearns economist and future national economic adviser under Donald Trump, to host Kudlow & Cramer on CNBC. In March 2005, Cramer started Mad Money, his own CNBC program, to better educate the growing class of lay investors. It quickly became CNBC’s most watched show, with some 380,000 viewers tuning in every weeknight as of November 2005. (In November 2022, only about 147,000 people watched Mad Money; it’s no longer among CNBC’s ten most popular shows.)

Cramer was getting famous. In November 2005, Dan Rather interviewed him on 60 Minutes. ‘He’s the Jerry Lewis of business show hosts and he will do anything to grab your attention,’ Rather said. He got Cramer to admit that he had been wrong about recommending that people buy the equity of Dick’s Sporting Goods.

‘I blew it,’ he told Rather. ‘I blew the call. And I think you have to own up to ’em, admit ’em.’ He also became infamous when he appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in March 2009, a year after Bear Stearns’s collapse and Cramer’s spectacularly wrong call. Stewart chewed him up and spat him out, to the delight of a studio audience more than a little angry at Wall Street. ‘I understand you want to make finance entertaining,’ Stewart told Cramer. ‘But it’s not a fucking game.’ In the midst of his ongoing beating, Cramer finally conceded he should have done more to foresee the financial crisis and to warn people about it. ‘I can’t reconcile the brilliance and knowledge that you have of the intricacies of the market with the crazy shit I see you do every night,’ Stewart concluded.

In fairness, Cramer has made a few smart calls. He was an early booster of the chip makers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. He recommended both around May 2020 and both stocks have performed well. Nvidia has more than doubled (and at one point was a five-bagger for Cramer) and AMD is up roughly 25 per cent. ‘My dog is named Nvidia and he’s about to hit an all-time high!!’ Cramer tweeted in June 2018.

He also saw trouble coming in the Disney C-suite early and called for the removal of CEO Bob Chapek the day after Chapek announced Disney’s fourth-quarter earnings and Disney stock fell 13.2 per cent. Cramer texted the Disney CFO, Christine McCarthy, with his view that the results were ‘devastating’ and then said on CNBC the next morning that Chapek should ‘absolutely’ be fired, that he was ‘delusional’ after presenting Disney poor earnings as pretty wonderful. Eleven days later, Cramer was proven right when the Disney board kicked Chapek to the curb and replaced him with former CEO Bob Iger. It was McCarthy who got the ball rolling, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In January 2022, Cramer started the CNBC Investing Club. For $400 a year, the general public can attend virtual monthly club meetings, with access to Jim Cramer and the portfolio of his charitable trust, as well as live daily Cramer videos, daily news and analysis and a newsletter. ‘The exclusive investor-focused product will equip members with Cramer’s unparalleled knowledge and analysis of portfolio management and investing and give behind-the-scenes access to Cramer and the investing club team,’ CNBC boasted at the time of the launch. Members of the club also get access to the trades he makes in his charitable trust portfolio forty-five minutes before he makes the trade or seventy-two hours before he makes the trade if he mentioned the stock on CNBC. (Cramer’s trust has made the equivalent of £3 million in charitable donations since he formed it in 2005.) Observers assume that Cramer himself takes a piece of the subscription fees that come into CNBC for the investing club. ‘He tweets about it every other day,’ the @CramerTracker guy tells me. ‘That’s one thing I always thought was unethical.’ (Cocozza, the CNBC spokesman, declined to comment about the investing club.)

Right or wrong, ratings high, ratings low, Cramer endures after two decades on CNBC. It must be because people still watch and he must still make money for the network and its parent company, Comcast. (Cocozza declined to comment about whether Cramer is a CNBC money maker.) ‘He’s brilliant,’ Spitzer tells me. ‘He was a friend. His brilliance was unambiguous.’ Spitzer also said he was a happy investor in Cramer’s hedge fund. ‘He was an all-star year after year,’ he continued. But, Spitzer continued, maybe the original formula has hit some headwinds. ‘Later in his career, maybe he’s batting .250,’ the former New York governor said, ‘and you wonder whether the world has changed, the markets have changed, information flows have changed and the forum has changed. And, so, he’s now on TV rendering advice instantaneously in response to questions… But it’s a tough market and whether that is a way for people to make investment decisions is a serious question in my mind.’

One thing is certain, though: Cramer remains hard to take your eyes off, if wild-ass, carnival-barking stock picks are your thing. ‘He comes on, and he’s forceful and confident,’ Tuttle told me. ‘If I were running a news network, and we were looking for someone on there to be entertaining, he is perfect for that. [But] if they ever did have accountability, they’d have to get rid of him.’

A version of this article was originally published on The Spectator’s world edition.

Why won’t the Palestinian ambassador condemn the Jerusalem massacre?

Husam Zomlot is head of the Palestinian mission to London and an adviser to the country’s president Mahmoud Abbas, currently in the 18th year of his four-year term. Zomlot was interviewed by Sky News’s Kay Burley this week in response to Burley’s interview with Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to Britain. Both interviewees were asked about the synagogue murders in Jerusalem last Friday, in which seven Israelis were killed. They were also asked about a prior Israeli raid on an Islamic Jihad terrorist cell in Jenin, which killed ten Palestinians, including a civilian woman.

At the outset of the interview, Zomlot complained about Hotovely’s characterisation of the synagogue murders. He accused his counterpart of having ‘failed to mention that the incident in Jerusalem happened in an illegal settlement and that it is squarely the responsibility of the Israeli government to send their citizens to practise illegality’. 

Just as she had confronted Hotovely on the Jenin operation, Burley asked Zomlot if he condemned the synagogue murders. Since he has claimed ‘misrepresentation’, I quote this part of the interview in full. For the sake of accuracy, Burley misstates the age of the perpetrator as 15. He was 21. 

Kay Burley: Fifteen-year-old boy kills seven Israelis, including a newly-married couple helping the injured, shot outside a synagogue on Holocaust Memorial Day. Do you condemn that?

Husam Zomlot: Every life lost is absolutely a tragedy, and no one works for a non-violent solution to this more than us.

KB: Do you condemn it?

HZ: No… I condemn the origin of all this. That’s what needs to be condemned. 

KB: So you don’t condemn that action?

HZ: (stutters) We can sit here until the morning to talk about condemnation. We must stop the cycle of violence. That’s what we need to do. And we must visit the root cause of this violence. For many, many years we have been…and media is guilty of that, is trying to draw some parallels, is…is…failing to focus on the actual cause of all this. And then we start to trying to just… like yesterday, you asked her is violence on both sides. What both sides? What are the both sides?

KB: I’ve just given you an illustration.

HZ: Where are, Kay, the both sides?

KB: I’ve just given you an illustration. 

HZ: You know, when you go and kill all these people—

KB: If you won’t condemn it, will you at least send condolences to the families of those that died?

HZ: We have been…the Palestinian people and leadership have been doing that all along and have been expected… expected…not only to do that but to provide protection to our own jailers, our own occupiers, colonisers, besiegers, and we have been doing that all along. 

Zomlot is a seasoned diplomat and therefore skilled in the precise and deliberately imprecise use of language. His refusal to condemn the murders was no mistake. The pivot to familiar-sounding cliches about ‘the cycle of violence’, something I objected to in my Coffee House piece earlier this week, reflects the Palestinian Authority’s strategy of speaking the language of incitement at home while its diplomats, such as Zomlot, speak the language of peace and human rights abroad. The dichotomy is underscored by Zomlot’s claims of providing ‘protection to our own jailers’. 

What the Palestinian Authority actually does is send money to the families of terrorists who murder Israelis. Known as the Martyr’s Fund, this annual fixture of Ramallah’s budget saw £139 million in 2020 alone handed to the relatives of Palestinians captured or killed in terrorist attacks on Israelis. 

There was an event in Israel this morning that could be thought of as a coda to Zomlot’s comments. In Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, Mahamat Déby, president of the Republic of Chad, opened his country’s new embassy to Israel. Chad is the latest Muslim-majority country to form or strengthen relations with the Jewish state, which in Chad’s case resumed in 2019 after being terminated in 1972. It’s perfectly possible to have relations with Israel while championing the rights and self-determination of the Palestinians. Pretty much all countries that have relations with Israel do so. 

But Ramallah should see this trend as ominous, because it is. As I observed in 2020, when the United Arab Emirates reached its normalisation agreement with Israel, ‘the Palestinian cause is being shunted to make way for a new Middle East, in which Israel is one of the main power brokers and looked to by its Arab and Muslim allies for protection and prosperity’. Chad is the latest country in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region to decide that relations with Israel are necessary, whatever sympathies it feels for the Palestinians. It will not be the last. 

The Palestinian Authority continues to choose rejectionism, incitement and extremism. We saw the consequences of that choice in the deaths of seven Jews on Friday evening. We see them elsewhere, too: in the slow death of pan-Arab and pan-Muslim solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

Bring back the railway restaurant car

It’s six o’clock and you’ve fought your way on to a train at a major London terminus. The carriage is rammed – heavily pregnant women, the stricken and the young stand in the corridors like it’s A&E – and everywhere people are diving into takeaways. The pungent egg and cress sandwich from Pret is bursting at the seams next to you; on the other side of the table there’s a lout blasting music from his phone speaker and eating the smelliest katsu curry money can buy. A pasty is crumbling down the front of a businessman going to fat on the far side of the aisle; another tubby businessman belches peanuts and is moving on to his third gin and slimline tonic; and a Big Mac and fries is disappearing into the space between a pair of headphones opposite and will repeat all the way to Chester.

Amid the coughing, the incessant phone-ringing and the bovine moaning of the standing you realise that were Dante alive today he would add another concentric circle of hell labelled ‘West Coast Main Line’. But frankly it’s the same story on whatever intercity service you choose at this time of night. And the worst part? Chances are that – if your stomach has survived the assault on the senses – you’re hungry too. But who wants to eat in such an intimate fashion, being gawped at like a zoo animal and surrounded by slurping sound of sloppy mastication?

Yet it wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, when gloves came in proper sizes rather than simply small, medium and gorilla, there were these things called restaurant cars on trains. You’ll have seen them in the old films; there were tables, tablecloths, waiters and cutlery. There was also, I imagine, civility.

And then there wasn’t. It has been reported that the last restaurant car was withdrawn from service in May 2011 – on the King’s Cross to Leeds line. In fact there is one that still survives – when strikes allow, Great Western Rail offers a Pullman dining car on certain services (£37.50 for three courses), and it looks lovely. But the overwhelming majority of us are left at the mercy of on-board takeaway torture.

So here’s a thought. Why not bring back the railway restaurant car? We are told that more people are using railways than ever. We also know that despite great efforts, trains are really no faster than they were 50 years ago – meaning there is still plenty of time to fit in a meal on a journey between most major cities. The number of people travelling during mealtimes has not reduced, and we live in a society far, far more obsessed with food (and if you look at the obesity figures, by overeating, too). So surely you don’t need an MBA to recognise the business case?

If you have to spend several hours on a train, what could be better than doing so while being served the finest food the world? It’s simply Michelin stars on the move. And when you’re dining aboard the gastronomic express you don’t care if the train is slightly late – you simply order another course from a tasting menu, one that takes you from Euston to culinary heaven via Liverpool Lime Street. 

Imagine it: truly fine dining at speed. What would you go for? Kedgeree at 140 miles per hour, perhaps washed down with a chilled chablis or glass of Ridgeview sparkling? Kick off with steak tartar or lobster bisque at Watford Junction, moving on to beef wellington from a sustainable, individually named herd of vegan Dexters, followed by the artisanal cheeseboard after Crewe Junction? Then port – and all that before you step off the train at Manchester Piccadilly, feeling like a god. 

We have the routes in abundance, thanks to the Victorians; we have the passengers; and we have some of the greatest chefs in the world. With already dozens of restaurants to their name why wouldn’t someone like Heston Blumenthal, Jamie Oliver or Angela Hartnett add what could be the finest restaurant car civilisation has ever known to their portfolios? Who wouldn’t want to try out Gordon Ramsay’s dining car on the London to Edinburgh line?

We simply need the rolling stock and the will to do something impressive and not irretrievably cheap. Is it feasible? Yes. Would it bring joy and pride to our locomotive life? Yes, it would. With our chefs and gastronomic passion we could have a dining experience that would be the envy of the world. It would make Emmanuel Macron sick – not from the erratic motion of the carriage, but with jealousy. Yes Mr Macron, your TGVs might be faster, more 1980s-looking and probably more efficient, but our food rocks. Literally, perhaps, if you’re rattling on the through Cambridgeshire at 120mph on the East Coast Main Line.

The Eurostar, where dining currently takes place on airline-style trays, could get involved too. You could do the best of British going one way, and the elite French gastronomy on the return leg. Ooh la la! From the entente cordiale to salmon en croute in the blink of an eye.

The return of restaurant cars would also allow for the exploitation of another exciting untapped opportunity – a train version of MasterChef, with Gregg Wallace, Marcus Wareing and others stuffing their faces en route to a variety of provincial railway stations. ‘Tonight Gregg, I’m pairing sous vide duck a l’orange with truffle jus and parmesan coulis with the stopping service to Littlehampton. Pudding will be served after the train divides at Burgess Hill…’

So here’s my advice for railway workers: don’t go on strike, go on MasterChef. Once we have dining cars back, you can be a star too, and passengers will fall in love with rail all over again. It’s time to let the belt – not the train – take the strain, and put food at the heart of the great British railway experience.

The Whale is a work of art

If the 20th century was the age of the common man, the 21st is the age of the common man’s confounding. Between shambolic politics, culture wars and actual war, nothing is turning out quite as well as anyone expected. What was meant to be an era of freedom and enlightenment seems to have become the opposite.  

Nowhere is this more evident than in the way we interact with one another. In what feels like the blink of an eye, discourse, and by extension society, has taken up residence on the internet. The pace of the outrage cycle has gathered such speed that we must always be finding something new to be incensed by. Social media has made us myopic, scrutinising everyone and everything until we find or invent reasons to clutch at our collective pearls. The result is utterly wretched and it’s sucking the joy out of just about everything faster than we can create new things to hate.

The latest victim of this treatment is The Whale, a claustrophobic body horror film from Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky which arrives in UK cinemas today. Before this week, I knew two things about The Whale: one, that it was The Mummy star Brendan Fraser’s big return to Hollywood more than a decade after he fell off the A list; and two, that there was a fat suit and people weren’t very happy about it.

Ahead of the film’s release, the controversy centred around the decision to put Fraser, who famously gained weight during his time out of the spotlight, in a fat suit. Now that they’ve actually seen it, critics both professional and of the social media variety have turned their ire to the unflattering portrayal of fatness itself.

It is certainly a deeply unflattering portrayal. In The Whale, adapted from Samuel D. Hunter’s award-winning play, Fraser plays Charlie, a morbidly obese literature professor teaching classes online to hide his monstrous size from his students. His 300lb fat suit is an impressive feat of prosthetic design, and clearly intended to repulse. But The Whale isn’t really about how fat a fat man can be. Charlie’s struggle with traumatic events and the resulting loss of control over both his life and his eating habits are what make the story so raw and so utterly compelling. The fat suit is simply a vehicle to deliver this.

Charlie’s best friend Liz, played brilliantly by Hong Chau – now Oscar nominated for the role – berates him incessantly for the health risks that come with his size, yet she enables him all the while. The film forces us to challenge our ideas of what it means to care for another person, and ourselves. It’s depressing, grotesque and hopeful all at once.

I would go so far as to say The Whale is the greatest film I’ve ever seen (yes, even better than It’s a Wonderful Life and The Shawshank Redemption). Aronofsky has pulled off a visceral piece of filmmaking. His direction combines with an ingenious score and grippingly claustrophobic staging to build into something truly stellar. One scene in particular shows Charlie’s spiral into an episode of uncontrolled binge-eating that invokes genuine horror more gut-wrenching than anything the horror genre has spit out in years. It is a scene so well choreographed, acted and edited that it would be reductive to accuse this film of simply being mean to fat people.

I won’t give away how it ends, but it is in these raw and often brutal moments that Aronofsky provides a refreshing sense of honesty, a theme he riffs on throughout the film. Anything less – a kinder, more sensitive depiction; a slightly smaller fat suit – would utterly defeat this purpose.

Ultimately, The Whale feels less like a movie and more like the distillation of a baroque oil painting. It delivers the same drama, the same interplay between light and dark, and induces the same guttural response – and makes perhaps the most compelling argument yet that something as populist as cinema can be legitimately seen as serious art.

This is why the direction in which our culture is heading matters so deeply. There is an extraordinary power to this film, yet critics are performatively unimpressed because it doesn’t fit with the trend for ‘body positivity’. The idea that a work of art so raw and arresting can and should be lost beneath such puritanical noise is deeply disquieting.

There was a time when being honest, even if it made others uncomfortable, was a liberal position. Now discomfiting any section of an audience, we are told, must be avoided at all costs. So much great art is great exactly because it makes us uncomfortable; it forces us to take an earnest look at ourselves. Charlie’s grotesque size, the disgust he can read on the faces of those around him, the destructive concern of a friend – all of these can and should raise profound questions for the audience. But instead of responding with an open mind, more and more of us turn to art with suspicion, treating it as something that must be exorcised or sanitised.

I fear a society where we lose the ability to respect and appreciate great works of art, whether or not we like them. But it seems we’re heading in that direction – and that, to me, is the truly offensive thing.

You can also read Deborah Ross’s review of The Whale, published in this week’s Spectator.

How to make the most of the third trimester of pregnancy

The final trimester of pregnancy is a strange time. You’ll be told to rest, as if you can somehow bank sleep. The reality is likely to be a dash to buy everything you need, as well as don’t need (a hi-tech ‘nappy bag’ for instance). Once the baby arrives, even trying to get out of the house becomes a mission. With that in mind, here are some helpful ways to focus mind and body during the final few weeks, if you’d rather not spend too much time obsessing over the correct shade for the nursery. 

Complete your baby courses

The National Childbirth Trust runs the most well-known antenatal courses, but many others are available too. Bump and Baby Club is supposedly a little more relaxed in its attitude towards childbirth. Some hospitals offers their own courses, so it’s worth seeing if any are available at yours. As well as providing information about the birth, antenatal courses bring together women at the same stage in pregnancy. Once all the babies arrive, it’s helpful and reassuring to be able to share advice. Most antenatal classes start around eight to ten weeks before your baby is due, but some get booked up months in advance, so it’s worth putting your name down for the one you like the look of at an earlier stage.

Try acupuncture

Many hospitals recommend acupuncture in the third trimester, while some even provide it for free. Acupuncture is helpful for birth preparation, as well as any musculoskeletal pain. A technique called moxibustion can be used to help turn babies from breech, transverse or back-to-back, to head-down presentation. Registered acupuncturists can be found through the British Acupuncture Council. 

Take the right kind of exercise

It’s probably sensible to avoid anything that too closely resembles cold water swimming in late pregnancy and instead opt for an indoor pool. Swimming takes pressure off the bump and can also help reposition the baby if needed. Various swim groups offer ‘aquanatal yoga’, including AquaTots, Turtle Tots and SwimKidz. In the final weeks of pregnancy, exercise becomes harder – but Mamawell, run by Rosie Stockley, provides online courses suitable for right up until the end of pregnancy. They help to stretch and strengthen the body, and courses are also available for the postpartum period. 

Consider yoga and hypnobirthing

As well as being an enjoyable way to exercise at this stage, certain yoga positions are useful during childbirth. Janet Balaskas runs the Active Birth Centre, with courses available online. She was one of the early proponents of active birth and encourages women to use a variety of different resources, including yoga and hypnobirthing, for birth preparation. I found her advice invaluable. The Positive Birth Company also provides well-regarded hypnobirthing courses. Most yoga studios will also offer pregnancy yoga, which – be warned – is not exactly strenuous. Don’t come expecting too many downward dogs; the focus will most likely be on breathing techniques and easy stretches. Yoga classes are also a good place to meet other expectant mothers. 

Book some R&R

Pregnancy massage tends to be a much lighter style. If you’re in London, Sarah Jane Watson makes life easier by coming to you with her heated bed and frankincense oil. Having worked as a professional masseuse for 30 years, she is confident enough to provide a wonderful pregnancy massage. Urban Massage also allows you to book a massage at your home. It’s worth noting that most places won’t offer massage to women in their first trimester so it’s best to save it for those final weeks. 

Pregnancy-safe facials are also lovely at this stage. Pfeffer Sal’s Gently Does It facial is hi-tech but suitable for pregnancy. The Aman Spa at the Connaught offers a 90-minute ‘nurture experience’ that is designed with pregnancy in mind. I read about Danuta Mazur years ago and have been seeing her for a while now. Her facials are safe for pregnancy, and I can highly recommend them. For more of a retreat, Thyme in the Cotswolds offers treatments for pregnancy in the Meadow Spa. The hotel is a quiet, relaxing spot, and in many ways the ideal place for a late pregnancy break. Perhaps it’s because Caryn Hibbert, who founded Thyme, used to work as a doctor specialising in women’s health. 

Prep down there…

I have become something of an evangelist for a contraption called the AniBall. It’s a birth trainer that I was recommended by a friend for my first pregnancy, and I now recommend it to all my friends who are pregnant. It’s certainly not glamorous – but it helps prepare your body for birth and reduces the amount of tearing and damage done. It’s recommended to start using it from around 36 weeks. Best used in private…

Five things we learnt from Rishi versus Piers

Tonight marks 100 days since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister – so what better way to celebrate than an interview with Piers Morgan? The charge from some of Sunak’s critics like Nadine Dorries is that he’s an ‘invisible’ ‘submarine Prime Minister’ who isn’t ‘out at the front, making the case’ for his party. This evening’s encounter on TalkTV gave him the chance to do just that. Morgan mixed policy with the personal, in the style he’s used previously to good effect in interviews with the likes of Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer. Much of it focused on Sunak’s ‘five pledges’ – reducing debt, halving inflation, boosting growth, stopping the boats, cutting NHS waiting times – though there were questions too about his earnings, recreations and marital life too. Below are five things we learned from tonight’s interview.

The looming battle on small boats

Morgan asked Sunak about his pledge to stop migrant crossings in the Channel and the action he has taken in his first 100 days as PM. The latter responded by pointing to new deals with France and Albania, which will respectively increase patrol numbers and return migrants home faster. But the PM was keen to stress the importance of changing the existing legislative framework and emphasise how it will only be through new laws in the coming weeks and months that will really offer the solution to these problems. Sunak said he is keen to expedite the process whereby ‘the vast majority of cases’ are detained and removed from Britain to either a safe country for processing or their home country where appropriate. His language about how ‘we are not a soft touch’ nation is a taster of what is likely to come in the Commons during the upcoming parliamentary session.

Nurses stand the best chance of improved conditions

When asked about the ongoing strikes, Sunak was keen to talk up nurses as an exception from other public sector workers. He stressed both his own family’s employment within the health service and that when Chancellor, he exempted those within the NHS from a general pay freeze during Covid. Such praise though did make it difficult for Sunak when Morgan asked him why nurses aren’t being granted an above inflation pay rise or exempted from NHS car parking charges. During a prolonged back and forth, Morgan raised the case of nurses spending up to £1,000 of their earnings on such schemes, with Sunak eventually agreeing to ‘at least look at the issue’ of whether free parking ought to be introduced in England, as it is in Scotland and Wales.

Britain’s goal in Ukraine remains unchanged – but the strategy has shifted

One of Sunak’s firmer answers was when he told Morgan what Britain’s goals are with regards to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: ‘Our desire and goal is for Ukraine to win this conflict.’ Coming ahead of the first anniversary of the conflict, it’s a timely rejoinder to a minority of voices who question the UK’s ongoing role there. While Sunak was keen to make clear that Britain’s aim remains unchanged, he wanted to emphasise that, as Prime Minister, he has shifted ‘our strategy on Ukraine to a more proactive strategy.’

Morgan tried to bait Sunak by asking him what he felt about Boris Johnson’s calls for more tanks and jets to be delivered to Ukraine; the PM preferred to talk about capabilities and the importance of training. ‘The thing to bear in mind with jets, these are incredibly sophisticated pieces of equipment that require months, if not years, for people to be trained on’ he said, adding ‘It’s not about just giving them what they need, we need to make sure that they can use what they are giving.’

He will ‘shortly’ publish his tax returns

Morgan pressed Sunak on his commitment to publish his tax returns; he first made the promise during his first bid to be Tory leader last summer. Unlike in America, there is not a long tradition of Prime Ministers making these documents public, though Theresa May published four years of returns when standing for leader back in 2016. Sunak referred to ‘precedent’ when asked as to how far back his returns would go and told Morgan: ‘They will be published shortly. As you know the tax filing deadline was just a few days ago. So that’s why. So we do the tax-filing deadlines just passed, so they’re just being prepared and they will be released shortly.’

His proposal to his wife

Sunak has shown an unwillingness to discuss personal matters before, complaining about the ‘upsetting’ criticism of his wife Akshata Murthy over her family company’s failure to end ties with Russia. So in one of the lighter segments of the interview, it was to Morgan’s credit that he got Sunak to shed some light on the relationship between the pair. He agreed that he was ‘batting above average’ with her and said that he proposed to her in Half Moon Bay in California, where they met while studying. Sunak said that his wife gives him the ‘extra support to keep going when things are tough’ and that both of them ‘do love Bob Marley.’

Tories unite – for one night, at least

To the Hurlingham Club, that seat of sporting privilege. Where better to host the 1922 committee’s centenary dinner? Tory grandees, MPs and donors piled in last night to raise a glass to King and cause. ‘In the 100 years of the ‘22’s existence,’ remarked Rishi Sunak, ‘we have had Conservative prime ministers for two-thirds of the time.’ The accompanying hearty roars were testament to the good spirits (and wines) in evidence last night.

It’s been a difficult few months for the Tories, with three prime ministers and a whole host of cabinet changes. So it was no surprise then that Sir Graham Brady – the long-standing chairman of the 1922 – sounded a note of caution in his welcome speech, reminding his guests that, for all the media attention on party-infighting, the committee spends ‘most of our time trying to support and advise our leaders’. He added: ‘We all have a common interest in their success. We can, as they say, hang together – or we can hang separately.’ And while there were plenty of old warriors from previous parliamentary parties out in attendance, it was notable that Theresa May was the only former Tory premier to turn up to the long-standing engagement – unlike Major, Cameron, Johnson and Truss.

Still, while the polls may predict grim things for the Tories come the next election, there was little sign of it within the hall, with much talk of the ‘next 100 years’. Eddie Hughes was the compère for a charity fundraiser, channelling the great tradition of the northern music hall act – and was ably assisted by May. And Sir Graham even found room for a little self-deprecatory levity in his speech, joking that the PM ‘might be forgiven for thinking that the 1922 committee is the only enterprise in the country that he would like to see reducing its productivity’. He added: ‘I personally am looking forward to a considerably quieter year. As my local rabbi said during his sermon, “Sir Graham, we are all looking forward to seeing less of you on the television this year”.’

Not for nothing did Sunak open with the words: ‘It’s wonderful to be here tonight with so many colleagues – and not a grey suit in sight.’ Downing Street will be hoping that remains the case…

Why is Australia’s bank snubbing King Charles?

Traditionally, the reigning monarch has appeared on the lowest denomination of Australia’s banknotes. It is a practice that harks back to the pound notes of pre-decimal days. It was even maintained by the Reserve Bank when the one-dollar note was replaced by a gold coin in the 1980s, and the Queen took the colonial philanthropist Caroline Chisholm’s place on the $5 note.

This was controversial at the time, but only briefly. Before long, the Queen’s place on the $5 note was fully accepted. This remained so until her death in September.

Today, however, our central bank showed its tin political ear with its announcement that the image of the late Queen, Elizabeth II, will not be replaced on Australia’s $5 note by our new King, Charles III.

Instead, it announced ‘The Reserve Bank has decided to update the $5 banknote to feature a new design that honours the culture and history of the First Australians… The bank will consult with First Australians in designing the $5 banknote.’

Presumably, the bank’s board believes it is following the fashionable trend in Australia to show ostentatious respect for our original inhabitants. The bank nevertheless stressed that the ‘update’ will take years and will involve extensive consultation before the replacement note is designed and printed. If experience is any guide, anything that involves consulting with Aboriginal communities may not reach a consensus at all, and so the late Queen may end up on Australia’s currency in perpetuity.

That hasn’t stopped Australia’s republicans and Aboriginal activists from celebrating the bank’s announcement as a big win for their agendas. If the bank’s governor and board members felt they were being apolitical, they are extremely naïve.

Craig Foster, the head of the Australian Republican Movement, hailed the change as an ‘important symbolic step’, adding, ‘To think that an unelected king should be on our currency in place of First Nations leaders and elders and eminent Australians is no longer justifiable.’

An outspoken Australian senator and Aboriginal woman, Lidia Thorpe – who last week screamed ‘this is war!’ at a protest against Australia day – claimed victory for her cause, calling it ‘a massive win for the grassroots, First Nations people who have been fighting to decolonise this country.’ As for Australia’s Labor government, which after the election last May established a minister to promote an Australian republic, it insisted this was the Reserve Bank’s decision, despite the government making its preferences clear soon after the Queen’s death.

Australia’s Treasurer and a prominent republican, Jim Chalmers, expressed quiet satisfaction in welcoming the change. ‘This is the right decision for the right reasons… to ensure that the new $5 note recognises and celebrates the culture and history and heritage of Indigenous Australians,’ he said today.

‘This is a simpler, nearer-term change which says we’ve got an opportunity here to recognise the monarch on our coins [and] recognise First Australians on the $5 note and I think that strikes a good balance.’

But Chalmers well knows, just like Foster and Thorpe, that a prelude to ditching the monarchy is to diminish its quotidian presence in Australians’ lives. The King may still jangle in Australians’ pockets, but now he will not be found in our wallets.

Indeed,with Australia, like Britain and the United States, increasingly becoming a cashless society, even coins are becoming relics of the past.

Yet the Reserve Bank’s political blundering could have been avoided with a simple, elegant, solution. It could have decided to revive Australia’s long-defunct $1 note.

The 1966 note that was retired in 1984 had a stylish, elegant, Aboriginal design, featuring artwork inspired by a then well-known but now forgotten Aboriginal artist, David Malangi. On one side, it featured a head-and-shoulders portrait of the Queen, alongside a stylised Australian coat-of-arms with its supporting kangaroo and emu drawn in a traditional Aboriginal manner. On the other side was a similarly stylised Aboriginal scene derived from a Malangi bark painting.

The design of that banknote was bold, simple, and stylish. It spoke of Australia’s past, present, and future.

By removing the King from the $5 note, the Reserve Bank board just couldn’t see this win-win opportunity and, tin-eared, decided to create needless division instead.