No. 752

White to play. Shirov-Wedberg, Lundin Memorial, Stockholm 1990. Black has just played Rh6-h5, attacking the e5 pawn, but Shirov found a powerful response. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 22 May. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 Qh3! Qxh3+ 2 Kg5. When the d6 pawn falls, the d5 pawn will decide.

Last week’s winner Mark Richardson, Taddyforde, Exeter

Four Nations Chess League

The Four Nations Chess League (4NCL) season concluded last month in a resounding victory for Chess.com Manx Liberty. The team from the Isle of Man won all eleven matches, thanks to narrow 4.5-3.5 victories against both of their closest rivals, Chessable White Rose 1 and Cheddleton. On the final weekend, the Manx squad was boosted by the inclusion of veteran elite grandmaster Alexei Shirov, who won the only decisive game in the match against White Rose. Shirov conjured a firestorm of tactics against Jose Camacho Collados, the 2022 Welsh champion who is a lecturer in computer science at Cardiff University.

Alexei Shirov (Chess.com Manx Liberty) – Jose Camacho Collados (Chessable White Rose 1) Four Nations Chess League, April 2023

1 e4 c5 2 Nc3 e6 3 Nge2 Nc6 4 g3 d5 5 exd5 exd5 6 d4 Nf6 7 Bg2 h6 7…cxd4 8 Nxd4 Bg4 9 Qd3 Bc5 looks stronger, developing with tempo. 8 O-O Be6 9 Re1 g5 The straightforward alternative 9…Be7 runs into 10 dxc5 Bxc5 11 Nf4, winning a pawn on e6 or d5. But Black’s centre is not stable enough to support this kingside extravagance. Shirov finds an effective way to open up the game. 10 Na4 c4 10…b6 runs into 11 c4! 11 b3 cxb3 12 axb3 b6 (see left diagram)

Another prophylactic pawn move is too slow. The damage limitation option was 12…Bg7, when 13 Nc5 O-O loses only the pawn on b7. But a player with Shirov’s imagination might well have investigated 13 Ba3 b5 14 Nc5 b4 and here the magnificent 15 Nc3! gives Black no respite: 15…bxa3 16 Nxe6 fxe6 17 Rxe6+ Ne7 18 Qe2 Kf7 19 Nb5 with a tremendous attack. 13 h4! gxh4 14 Nf4 hxg3 15 fxg3 Rc8 16 c4 At the cost of a pawn, Black’s centre is facing demolition. Bb4 17 Nxe6 fxe6 18 Rxe6+ Kf7 19 cxd5 Nxd5 20 Rxc6 Rxc6 21 Qh5+ Kg7 22 Bxd5 Rg6 23 Qe5+ Qf6 24 Nc5 A lovely flourish, since 24…bxc5 25 Rxa7+ wins. a5 25 Qc7+ Black resigns

A spectacular finish from earlier in the season:

Tim Wall (Chessable White Rose 2) – Jon Speelman (Wood Green) Four Nations Chess League, January 2023 (see right diagram)

Black has just played 32…f7-f5. White’s next, a capture ‘en passant’, is fully playable, despite opening a diagonal for Bc7xf4. 33 exf6 33 Rxf5 leads to a draw by perpetual check: exf5 34 Qxf5+ Qe6 35 Qh7+ with the next check on h8 or e4. Rxb3 34 Qh7+ Tempting, but 34 Qxb3 was essential. Then Bxf4 35 Bxf4 e5! 36 Bxe5 Ke6 37 Bf4 Kxf6 and Black’s draughty king makes it hard to exploit the material advantage. Kc8 35 f7 Raxa3! 36 f8=Q+ Kb7 The extra queen turns out to be ineffective. 37 Qhg8 Ra1+ 38 Kh2 Rh3+ 39 gxh3 Rh1+ 40 Kg3 Rxh3# 37 f3 g3 38 Kf1 Ra1+ 39 Ke2 Rb2+ White resigns  

Suella Braverman is making Rishi Sunak look weak

The National Conservatism conference is entering its third day in London, and has managed to grab more headlines than the official Conservative conference usually does. Tory party conferences have become so stage-managed that attendees often don’t bother going into the main hall – except for a quiet breather – because they know they won’t learn anything from the speakers. Last autumn, one of the Tory events included a minister and a guest speaker holding an ‘in conversation’ session that appeared to have been pre-written on a script. No wonder the NatCon event is making waves – and has been so attractive to Tory MPs and ministers, including the Home Secretary Suella Braverman, because it appears to be a genuine conference rather than a stage performance.

The problem for Rishi Sunak is that stage performance is the sort of thing a party trying to stay in government for an historic fifth term after the next general election should be aiming for, not a debate about what Conservatism should be. That kind of debate works well in opposition when a party is recovering from more than a decade of what Michael Gove yesterday described as the ‘boring and even more dispiriting task of government’, but the Tory party hasn’t actually reached opposition yet. It still has time to talk about government, about what the party has achieved in its 13 years, such as education reforms, which most Conservative MPs seem to have forgotten is an achievement of their own party, even as pupils’ reading scores rocket up. It can also talk about what the government is doing now: What is it doing? Does anyone in the Conservative party know? And when are they going to tell us about it?

It’s easy to blame backbenchers who sound off about the importance of the ‘normative family’ or the dangers of childcare for stealing the airtime that the Conservatives should be using to talk about delivering (Sunak was joking at his garden party for Tory MPs this week that he was delivering both in government and also with food). But the Prime Minister appears to lack authority and presence.

Sunak’s authority was undermined from the very start by his appointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary in order to get his second leadership campaign sufficient support from the right of the Conservative party. Braverman showed this week what the power balance between the two of them was when she pitched up at the NatCon conference to give her own vision of immigration under a Conservative government, implying that she didn’t think this one was doing it right yet.

Braverman has also been having a row with cabinet colleagues who pay lip service to driving immigration numbers down, but take a NIMBYish approach to any attempts to cut numbers in their own sectors; yesterday Sunak was praising the extension of the Seasonal Worker scheme just a day after Braverman had talked about the need for Brits to be the ones picking the fruit. Sunak’s habit of detaching himself from problems in government and offering a commentary rather than a great clunking stamp of authority on, say, the resignation of a minister, means he just seems less powerful. No wonder figures like Braverman are already preparing for what they expect to be a spell in opposition and a new leadership contest: the party seems quite content to be detached from power at the moment. Though it will find that opposition is even more boring and dispiriting than governing.

There’s ‘the rub’ – but where did it come from?

‘So, are the Tories going to win the election?’ asked my husband after listening to the engaging psephologist Sir John Curtice. I’d been paying attention, but was distracted by Sir John’s phrase ‘the rub in the ointment’. Typical of extempore speech, this a metaphorical mixture of the fly in the ointment and the rub.

Ointment might suggest a rub like Vicks VapoRub, which originated in America in 1905. The Oxford English Dictionary says such a rub is likely to be a liniment, though I can’t quite see the difference. I do remember Sloan’s Liniment, its label bearing an engraved portrait of the thick-moustached inventor, Dr Earl Sloan (another American, a doctor by courtesy).

How much a fly spoils your metaphorical ointment is not clear. Is it like a fly in the soup, a slug in the salad, a snail in the ginger beer? It relates to Ecclesiastes (10:1): ‘Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honour.’

As for the non-ointment rub, it comes from the game of bowls, as an unevenness of the ground which impedes a bowl. Shakespeare often uses the metaphor, most famously in the soliloquy ‘To be or not to be’ in Hamlet.

The rubbing champion was surely Dr J.G. Martindale of the Wool Industries Research Association, who in 1942 invented a machine to perform a rub test for textiles. One that endured more than 30,000 rubs would suit commercial use; more than 40,000, the demands of public-transport seating. My husband asked if there wasn’t some 19th-century aristocrat who said that a man might rub along comfortably enough on £40,000 a year. That was jogging not rubbing, which is why John Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham (1792-1840), was known as Jogalong Jack. He was brought into the government by his father-in-law Earl Grey, the Whig who became prime minister in 1830 only because the Duke of Wellington failed to retain parliamentary support for the Tories.

The sex appeal of lobsters

The night before I moved a pet lobster into my flat, I ate agnolotti all’ aragosta for dinner. It was possible that my soon-to-be companion, Snips McGee – who I inherited from a friend – would outlive me (the oldest lobster on record was estimated to be 140 years old) and I wanted one last plate of lobster ravioli, hold the moral hang-ups.

The French author Gérard de Nerval also owned a pet lobster, which he took for walks on a blue silk leash. ‘They are peaceful, serious creatures,’ he said. ‘They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw upon one’s monadic privacy like dogs do.’ How I wish that were true. My Snips didn’t bark, but it was hard to find monadic or any other kind of privacy with an infant-sized cockroach by my bed.

Salvador Dali associated lobsters with the bedroom. His lobster-shaped ‘Aphrodisiac Telephone’ was designed to look erotic. In ‘The Dream of Venus’, naked female models are covered with lobsters. He collaborated with Elsa Schiaparelli on the ‘lobster dress’, which was included in Wallis Simpson’s wedding trousseau and worn shortly before her marriage to Edward VIII. Why did he consider lobsters erotic? I shared a bedroom with a lobster and just don’t get it. But such sensuality captivated the Dutch still life painters long before Dali. You’ll find many a ripe red lobster banqueting with skulls and pocket watches in a de Heem or de Ring in the Wallace Collection.

Despite what the TV show Friends might tell you, lobsters don’t mate for life. Female lobsters wield their pheromones feverishly and with little subtlety. She wafts her urine into the alpha male lobster’s domain, seducing him and mating with him for about two weeks before letting the next lady in the line-up repeat the process. What’s more, lobsters excrete from their faces into the faces of their opponents and mates, sending chemically encoded hate mail or love letters.

It’s difficult to see past lobsters’ hard exteriors, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings. ‘We need to look for ways to move beyond our own emotional responses to these animals and instead look at the evidence about what is actually going on in them,’ says Dr Jonathan Birch, a professor at LSE and principal investigator on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project. The project has discovered that several decapod crustaceans, including lobsters, might be sentient based on specific behavioural and neurological criteria. I wonder if this means they could be capable of love, or something like it.

Like star-crossed lovers, Snips and I were of separate worlds. His blue blood belonged in open waters, not a 60-litre tank in my student flat. Out of boredom, misery or perhaps indifference, he crushed his oxygen filter and eventually suffocated. I was grief-stricken – not only because it was more than a century too soon, but because I had loved him. I buried him at sea.

Months later, I indulged in a lobster roll on a trip to the coast. The sun was out, children were playing and I was happy. I considered the conclusion that Dali and de Heem had drawn before: all that’s left to do with the facts of mortality is to savour them.

Dear Mary: How do I find out the truth about the family tapestry?

Q. I was lucky enough to marry into a family where everyone gets on well. One of my brothers-in-law was the only one with a big enough wall in his house to hang a family treasure of a fragile antique tapestry, but last year he too moved into a smaller house and the tapestry now lies in his attic. When one of us asks how the tapestry is doing he moans ‘ruined, no doubt – ruined by moths’ but refuses to discuss it further or let anyone else have a look. The tapestry may or may not be beyond repair, but this much-loved man has always preferred to keep his head in the sand rather than confront something potentially painful. Mary, what should we do?

– Name and address withheld

A. If you get on well with your brother-in-law then you must know how to get into his house without breaking in. Next time he goes away, set up a site meeting with an expert in tapestry conservation. Following the inspection, you can have an informed family conference about whether the tapestry is in good enough order to be welcomed by a museum to which it could be donated or sold and which would be happy to pay for the repairs.

Q. It is entirely possible that the friend of R.J.’s daughter (Dear Mary, 15 April) referred to the good wine as ‘plonk’ simply because he thought it was slang for wine. I believed this to be the case myself, having only read it in novels, until I was at least 25.

– P.W., London NW1

A. And, it is well known in literary circles, you are now a highly sophisticated and sought-after dinner-party guest. Hosts should be sympathetic to the gaffes of the young. There is no need to take offence – as did one overreacting host, who soaked off the label of a bottle of 2009 Pétrus and had it framed it with the caption ‘Plonk’ so that he could grumble each time someone asked about it.

Q. I am a decorator with many long-standing clients. One of these runs several members’ clubs in London and allows me free rein about colours and paint finishes etc. He is a busy man and trusts my judgment. A problem has arisen since he employed a shareholder’s daughter as an intern and she has started nitpicking about my work, for example getting me to redo work quite unnecessarily. I know she’s trying to make herself look invaluable to her employer. Any advice, Mary?

– Name and address withheld

A. The intern will soon move on. Meanwhile, find a moment alone with your employer. Confide in compassionate tones that you are happy to go along with the intern’s diktats as you realise how important it is for her to build her self-esteem and feel she is making an impact… as long as, in the short-term, he does not mind the higher bills?

The Battle for Britain | 20 May 2023

My search for a Matt Hancock impersonator

I’m trying to organise an event in Westminster with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott and it’s proving a bit of a nightmare. So many obstacles have been thrown in our way that we’re beginning to think it might be jinxed. But we aren’t about to give up.

The original idea was for the two of us to have a conversation on stage in front of a live audience about Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages. These are the messages – more than 100,000 in total, between the then health secretary and various politicians, civil servants and advisers – that he shared with Isabel when she was employed to ghost-write The Pandemic Diaries, Hancock’s memoir about the crisis. Convinced these messages contained important information about the government’s handling of the pandemic that was in the public interest, Isabel passed them to the Telegraph and they became the basis for some hair-raising news stories about Hancock and his colleagues.

In an effort to make the event a bit more fun, we arranged for a couple of actors to read out some of the more embarrassing WhatsApp exchanges. Tim Hudson, who appeared in Who’s The Daddy?, mine and Lloyd Evans’s play set at The Spectator in 2003-04, agreed to reprise his role as Boris, and Laurence Fox, the leader of the Reclaim party, said he’d be happy to play Hancock. So far, so good. We had a promising evening of entertainment on our hands.

Then the trouble started. When Isabel and I started promoting the event on social media, we got a lot of unpleasant responses. People accused us of being ‘grifters’ – in their eyes, we were trying to profit from the misery the government had inflicted on the population during the pandemic. I hadn’t anticipated that, mainly because I thought the chances of us making any money were slim. We had booked the 250-seater auditorium at the Emmanuel Centre, a beautiful building in Westminster, at a cost of £4,200, which meant we’d have to sell 168 £25 tickets just to cover the venue hire – and then we’d have to pay the actors, the booker, a camera crew, a designer. All in all, we’d have to sell 246 tickets just to break even – some grift! Admittedly, we were also selling tickets to a drinks reception beforehand and a dinner afterwards, but those would be held at a nearby restaurant so any profits would be minimal.

The first person to drop out was Tim Hudson, whose agent got in touch to say he’d been offered another job by the BBC on the same evening. Was that the real reason, or had he had second thoughts after seeing the tsunami of hate on Twitter? Understandable if so, given how woke the acting world is, but still. Not great. Then the Emmanuel Centre said it wouldn’t be able to host the event after all. Turned out someone from Hancock’s office had been in touch and said that if it staged this scandalous jamboree it would be ‘profiting from stolen goods’. According to Isabel, he’d used the same argument in an effort to get the Telegraph not to run any stories based on the WhatsApp messages, but it didn’t wash because he’d shared them with her, as well as other people. Nevertheless, it worked on the Emmanuel Centre, which didn’t want the aggravation.

Then another setback – Laurence Fox dropped out. I called him to find out why and he said it was partly because I’d run a piece on my news publishing site (not by me) that was critical of his friend Calvin Robinson. The writer of that piece, Ian Rons, took issue with a monologue of Calvin’s on GB News about the war in Ukraine in which Ian felt he had been insufficiently supportive of the Ukrainian side. Ian is very passionate about that issue, so he really let fly. Calvin wasn’t happy and, out of loyalty to him, Laurence decided to withdraw from the event. Again, understandable, but it left Isabel and me in the lurch.

Thankfully, with a bit of scrabbling around we’ve managed to patch things up. The owner of the Hippodrome, Simon Thomas, has generously stepped in and said he’ll host the event, albeit three days after it was originally planned. That meant we had to offer a refund to people who’d bought tickets, but so far only about a dozen have taken us up on that. Meanwhile, we’re going to squeeze in an interview between Isabel and me in an events space at the restaurant where we’re holding the drinks and the dinner. We’re confident we’ll be able to hire two new actors by then – but if anyone reading this fancies themselves as a Hancock or Boris impersonator, contact me at realtobyyoung@gmail.com. The show must go on!

Why mass shootings won’t change Serbia’s gun culture

Two mass shootings in Serbia have left 17 people dead, many of them children, and there are protests on the streets of Belgrade. Demonstrators blame Serbia’s populist president, Aleksandar Vucic, and so Vucic has his own series of anti-gun rallies planned and has ordered a swift crackdown on gun ownership, a ‘practical disarmament’.

But Vucic has his work cut out for him. Weapons are embedded in Serbia’s culture and it’s hard to imagine a significant number of Serbians simply handing them over. In Serbia, the gun is a way of life.

When I worked in the Balkans as a journalist, a man felt underdressed without a Kalashnikov. Provincial streets thronged with men with AK-47s loosely draped over them. In the more sophisticated Belgrade, apart from the Kalashnikov-ed heavies hanging around the Hyatt Hotel (home of the press centre and gangster central), the weapon of choice was a pistol, generally worn with jeans, T-shirt and leather blouson.

That was, to be fair, during the wars of the 1990s, but the gun culture predated those wars, and it has survived them too. In 2018, the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey found that Serbia had the third highest rate of guns in civilian hands in the world – at 39 per 100 residents, topped only by the US and Yemen.

‘The gun is a status symbol,’ said Predrag Petrovic, research director of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy. ‘If you have a gun, you are mighty and powerful and protected in your neighbourhood.’

Ivana Jeremic, editor of the Balkans Insight website, says: ‘Every family in Serbia and all over the Balkans owns a gun –or used to. It’s not used to kill or threaten people; it’s part of our tradition. In villages they fire in the air to celebrate a wedding or a baby.’

During the war, it was often hard to differentiate between a firefight and a post-football match party. Marcus Tanner, former Balkans correspondent for the Independent, remembers crowds shooting in the air to celebrate the election of the Metropolitan of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church.

Serbs love guns because Balkans culture celebrates brigands and a spirit of heroic defiance. Their fertile plains and rugged mountains were once densely forested, teeming with hajduks (resistance fighters), and hillmen: all battling enemy occupation – Ottoman, Austrian, German. Hajduk Split (founded in 1911, when Croatia was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) is one of Croatia’s top football teams.

‘The Serbs had a lot of guns in the 19th century – they got rid of the Turks in the 1820s on their own,’ says Tanner. ‘They didn’thave to wait for Lord Byron or the British Navy like the Greeks.’

In the 1930s Tintin Balkan adventure King Ottokar’s Sceptre, almost every cartoon features a man wielding a moustache and a gun. Even communist Yugoslavia did not clamp down on gun ownership – unlike, say, neighbouring and culturally similar Soviet-influenced Bulgaria. Gun ownership there stands at only 8 per cent, and was a tenth of that at the end of communism. But in Non-Aligned Yugoslavia little effort was made to disarm the people, and in the 1990s President Milosevic of Serbia was heavily dependent on his gangsters and warlords – Arkan with his Tigers, Vojislav Seselj and his White Eagles.

In Sarajevo, the gangsters who defended the city at the start of the siege in 1992 were heroes, although the Bosnian government did crack down a year later: most of the gang leaders were ‘shot while trying to escape’. Arkan survived in Serbia as a folk hero until his murder in 2000. Seselj, despite being convicted of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, is back at liberty and is now a Serbian politician.

What’s alarming about the latest shootings, though, is that Serbs have begun to turn their guns on each other. Some people suspect that the widespread coverage of US school shootings is influencing young Serbians; others blame violent video games and television.

Gun ownership in Serbia, although widespread, is already strictly controlled, and despite the potential for disaster, even members of Belgrade’s liberal intelligentsia show no real enthusiasm for controls to be tightened. Petrovic thinks any attempt from the government will fizzle out: ‘They always do. No one wants to give the guns up.’

The AK-47 – by far the most common celebratory weapon – is already illegal, yet openly used. ‘Everybody knows each other and the local police in the communities,’ says Petrovic. ‘They know if they can celebrate with an AK. People do get wounded sometimes, but the authorities don’t mind because they know it’s not intentional.’

Probably the closest I came to death in my four years in Bosnia was miles from the front lines, on a summer’s evening in a pizza parlour. The owner had a row with her boyfriend, who stormed off, returning ten minutes later with his Kalashnikov. He started spraying bullets all over the terrace. Along with the rest of the guests, I hit the deck.

There was a blizzard of broken glass, bullets pinging off the walls. The police chief soon came and calmed the broken-hearted suitor, who was led away weeping – probably for an understanding glass of slivovica in the local nick. We returned to our pizzas. No one had been hit. But there was a bullet hole in the windscreen of our car, and the bullet had gone through the passenger seat where I’d been sitting minutes before.

Petrovic recently found a bullet on his roof terrace in a smart area of Belgrade. ‘It must have been a celebration,’ he says. ‘But if I’d been out there, I’d have been shot.’

How far would you go to get your sick child a kidney transplant?

Here is your dilemma. Imagine you have a university-age daughter who has developed kidney failure. She needs a transplant. You know that the best results are obtained when the operation is performed at a transplant unit with access to the best immunosuppressive drugs, when the kidney is taken from a living donor, and especially when that donor is young and from a similar ethnic background to the recipient. Like most parents, you will go to almost any lengths to help your child – but would you break the law?

Ike Ekweremadu thought that the risks of breaking the law in the UK were worth taking to gain the best outcome for his daughter. His plan failed, and on 23 March he, his wife Beatrice and their middleman, Dr Obinna Obeta, a Nigerian doctor living in Southwark, were found guilty of transporting a young man from Nigeria for purposes of organ donation in violation of the Modern Slavery Act. As a recently retired surgeon, I was fascinated by the case and spent weeks in the public gallery of Court 5 at the Old Bailey. 

Ike is a powerful and influential politician in the Nigerian parliament. He was first elected a senator in 2003 and was deputy president of the Senate for three consecutive sessions from 2007 to 2019. As a title of respect, he is known as ‘Chief’. He is extremely wealthy and has about 40 homes in Nigeria, Dubai, America and the UK. His four children were educated in British private schools.

Ike has a doctor brother called Diwe, who was a classmate of Obeta in medical school. Obeta had a contact in Nigeria who has access to a panel of potential donors. A suitable kidney donor was found, referred to in the trial as ‘C’. His name cannot be disclosed. C was an impoverished 21-year-old street trader from Lagos who sold mobile phone accessories from a barrow. The £7,000 reward offered for the kidney was equal to four years of earnings from the barrow, although that’s pocket money for the Ekweremadus, who would also pay £80,000 for the private transplant operation at Royal Free Hospital.

A passport and visa were arranged for C. The visa stated that he was Beatrice’s sister’s son, which was not true. C was brought to London in February last year and stayed at Obeta’s home. He was coached to provide false answers at the Royal Free interview. It was important for him to understand that altruistic kidney donation is legal in UK but not if money or material advantage is exchanged.

C was rejected as a donor by the Royal Free nephrologist, who was not convinced that he and Ike’s daughter were first cousins. C, who spoke poor English, also appeared to have only a limited understanding of what was happening. After 11 weeks in London, C was told that he would be returned to Nigeria but without any of the payment promised. He absconded. Three days later, he turned up at Staines police station, and told his story – that he had been trafficked from Nigeria for kidney donation. 

The Ekweremadus were arrested at Heathrow airport as they returned from Turkey where they had possibly been trying to arrange another transplant. Their phones and devices were seized, which revealed every last detail of the conspiracy. 

During the trial, it was obvious that the conspirators regarded C as a disposable asset. They had thought it better to buy a kidney rather than ask a family member to donate. In a press release after the conviction, the Chief Crown Prosecutor said: ‘This was a horrific plot to exploit a vulnerable victim. The convicted defendants showed utter disregard for the victim’s welfare, health and wellbeing.’

Obeta was jailed for ten years and Ike for nine years and eight months, both to serve two thirds of their sentence in custody before being released on licence. Despite a desperate plea from her barrister that Beatrice should receive a deferred sentence to care for her daughter, she was jailed for four years and six months, only half in custody.

C has declared that he would be scared to return to Nigeria, fearing retribution. At the sentencing hearing he refused to claim compensation from the accused, who he described as bad people. He was said to be living alone in London reconstructing his life. Hopefully, he will be granted asylum given his bravery in appearing as a prosecution witness in this trial. 

So back to you, reader. Where do you stand on the moral and ethical arguments for and against the sale and purchase of kidneys for transplantation? It is illegal in all countries except for Iran, although tolerated in some others.

In Iran, kidneys can be sold legally, and consequently there is no waiting list for a transplant. A government agency runs a register for buyers and sellers and also oversees the matching process. Kidneys are then sold for a fixed price of about 5,000 US dollars. Tens of thousands of transplants have been facilitated in this way. 

Illegal organ trafficking happens all over the world. It was described in court as an industry. The World Health Organisation has estimated that more than 10,000 kidneys are traded every year, more than one every hour. Trafficking happens mainly in low-income countries where cadaveric donorship is not established, or where kidney dialysis is not available, too expensive or unsafe. In that case, the choice may be between either buying a kidney or death. 

In high-income countries, buying a kidney for transplantation isn’t just illegal, it is usually considered immoral and unethical by the medical profession, ethicists and armchair ethicists alike. The reasons given include the potential coercion and exploitation of vulnerable people and the possible harm done to the donor by having an unnecessary operation. While these are valid and reasonable concerns, they are held from the cosy comfort of a society where kidney dialysis is readily available and a transplant usually possible after a short wait.

The factors which limit survival of the transplanted kidney is the availability of medical expertise and the cost of the best drugs for immunosuppression, which may amount to £2,000 per month or more. This is one of the reasons why the recipient of a transplanted live-donor kidney may only survive for two to five years in a low-income country, compared with 20 to 25 years in a high-income country. 

Finally, back to Chief Ike Ekweremadu. If he wishes to atone for his horrific treatment of C while he is in prison, and while his daughter still waits for a transplant, then establishing a world-class nephrology and transplant unit in Lagos would be a fitting act of repentance. 

How to fake it till you make it

Not to sound too much like Kamala Harris during one of her peregrinations on the nature of time, but the thing about the future is that it catches up with you awfully fast.

For a while we have been warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence and the special hazards of ‘deepfakes’. It seemed so futuristic when we saw a deepfake of Barack Obama some years ago, which demonstrated how easy it was to put words into someone’s mouth that they did not say. Well, now we have had an example in real time. Or at least the electorate in Turkey have.

Personally I am not persuaded that Turkey’s election was ever likely to be entirely fair and free. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan once said that democracy is like a tram: you take it until it gets you to your destination – the destination, presumably, being such a time as elections become unnecessary. Never-theless the country did go through the election process this week. And despite a surprisingly knife-edge result, the most interesting thing was actually what happened a few days before the election, when a sex tape was released featuring one of the candidates – Muharrem Ince. The candidate immediately denounced the tape as a ‘deepfake’.

I should stress at this point that I have not gone online to search out the tape in question and assess its provenance. All I do know is the candidate was swift to cite ‘deepfake’ in his defence. And not just deepfake, but dastardly, Israeli-originated deepfake. Ince was not content with simply denying the tape was real: it had to be the work of the Israelis.

This is a popular and common enough move in Turkey, as it is across much of the Islamic world. Get into a spot of bother and you can always claim that the Israelis are to blame. Some readers might remember that moment some years ago when Lord Ahmed of Rotherham killed a man on the M1 by accidentally hitting the victim’s crashed car just after he had been texting. Lord Ahmed received a short prison sentence for dangerous driving and subsequently cropped up on television in his native Pakistan explaining to an interviewer that his conviction had been overturned. (It hadn’t.) And that his harsh sentencing had, in fact, been down to the Jews. Lord Ahmed declined to elaborate on this point. In any case, this was explanation enough for Pakistani television. Though sadly for Lord Ahmed he could not blame the Jews when he was convicted some years later of child sexual abuse.

But I digress. Turkey’s presidential candidate seems to have imagined that hinting that the purported sex tape was not just a deepfake, but an Israeli deepfake, would go down well with the Turkish public. The tape was released just before the final polls. And in the candidate’s opinion this was a shame, because Ince – who also ran in the 2018 election in Turkey – said that he was offering Turkey ‘a third option, a third way’.

Instead of being able to offer the Turkish people this third way of doing things, though, poor Ince had to pull out – of the race that is. And it is probably all for the good. Because at present a couple of days is not enough for the world to determine whether a sex tape is the real article or a piece of mischief-making. I pity the candidate who would want to try to prove this point. After all, there are only two ways in which you can really get absolved in such a matter and have it swing in your favour.

The first is to invite the entire voting public to view the sex tape and decide for themselves whether it is the genuine article or not. The other is to have some sort of press conference, with an overhead projector and perhaps one of those laser pointer jobbies, the better to point to those portions of the tape which should be viewed with particular suspicion by the voting public.

My point is that this could be seen as almost the epitome of a lose-lose situation. Whichever way you go, you are merely solidifying the question of ‘sex’ and ‘tape’ in the minds of the voting public. Not something which is likely to be a vote-winner, unless you happen to look an awful lot like a swimwear model (which Ince does not). And quite possibly not even then.

But somewhere within this sorry modern tale is a deeper lesson. In recent years I have commented with some regularity that the treadmill of technological progress on which we are running is going at too high a speed for our legs to keep carrying us. Even before the era of deepfakes we were at risk of being thrown off the treadmill. Now perhaps we are indeed at the throwing-off stage.

For how is a voting public to know what is true and what is not? If something in any way scandalous dropped before an election in a more developed democracy, how would we be able to know whether the material was true or not? Would we trust our intelligence services to tell us? Would Americans?

How would a candidate be able to undo any damage that had been done in time to keep themselves in the running? And how to discern the difference between an unscrupulous candidate who is willing to say any old thing to get himself out of a tricky situation and actual deepfake interference? The public at large have enough difficulty agreeing on the first of these two, never mind with the additional challenge of the second.

I do not know how this will go. All I do know is that while Muharrem Ince no longer has to prepare for government, the lesson of his abortive political career is that we should try to prepare for the future that has already arrived.

How the ancients handled old age

Research in the USA has shown that it is possible to do something about grey hair. But ‘grey hair’ stands for ‘old age’, and there is nothing we can do about that, except make it easier to live with. Modern medicine certainly helps. There was no such luck in the ancient world, where the playwright Sophocles described old age as ‘unregarded, powerless, unsociable, unfriended, where misery couples with misery’.

Take Fronto, a close friend of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. He died at the age of 60, and many of his more than 200 letters mention his physical ailments. Almost every limb was in pain at some stage or other, while he also suffered from gout, neuritis, rheumatism, sore throats, coughs, insomnia, stomach pains and perhaps cholera. Doctors of course could do little about any of this, and even less about old age. Indeed, Pliny the Elder commented that nature gave us no greater blessing than a short life, since people so wracked with illness and decline could scarcely be called ‘living’.

All the ancients could do was to offer advice about how to face up to it. The satirist Juvenal pointed out how foolish it was to pray for a long life, because the only certainty was that one would complain about how awful it was; if one was to pray for anything, he went on, it should be for a mens sana in corpore sano. Pliny the Elder offered the hope of a sudden and entirely natural death, which he regarded as a suprema felicitas. He gave some examples: dying while putting on one’s shoes, or asking the time, or making love to a woman.

Cicero’s dialogue on old age recommended remaining active both physically and mentally and regarding death as something to be welcomed, ‘like a ship coming into harbour’. And then there were the funerary inscriptions. One celebrated the sweet repose of the dead, no fear of starving, no arthritis, no debt ‘and my lodgings are permanent – and free!’. Another put it like this: ‘I was not, I was, I am not, I care not.’  And another pronounced: ‘I died of a surfeit of doctors.’ We should be so lucky…

Europe is turning against net zero

The contrast couldn’t be greater. In Britain a wealthy cabinet minister goes on television to boast of how he is installing a heat pump in his home – something his government is proposing to force on millions of British homeowners over the next few years in spite of them costing many thousands of pounds more than a gas or oil boiler. Meanwhile, in France, the President makes a speech calling for a ‘regulatory pause’ on green issues in order to push for the ‘re-industrialisation’ of his country.

So far, Britain and the EU have moved more or less in tandem on climate change – which is not all that surprising given that until three years ago Britain was a member of the EU and therefore within its regulatory orbit. Both are committed – at least in theory – to a legally binding target of achieving net zero by 2050; Germany and Sweden have taken it further and have a 2045 target. Yet over the past few months Britain and the EU have started to diverge – and in the opposite direction to that which had been feared by many Remainers. While the UK government has declined to weaken its net-zero commitment in the face of a cost-of-living crisis, in the EU the green tide is showing signs of receding.

In Britain the government has refused to budge with its ban on fracking, and only gave permission for a coking coal mine reluctantly after years of failing to support the project; Germany is tackling the energy crisis by re-opening coal mines for thermal coal. Indeed, the energy giant RWE is removing a wind farm to dig for lignite, the filthiest form of coal. The fortunes of Germany’s Green party are in reverse, with its share of the vote plunging to its lowest level in 20 years in a regional election in Bremen last week.

In Britain, the main parties seem determined to go into the next general election falling over each other on green promises, with only the minuscule Reform UK daring to question net-zero targets. In the Netherlands, by contrast, the Farmer-Citizen Movement – BoerBurgerBeweging, or BBB – rose from nothing in 2019 to take the largest share of the vote in March’s regional elections and could well find itself in government after the next general election in two years’ time. Its rise is down to Mark Rutte’s government trying to halve nitrogen emissions by the somewhat negative policy of bribing the country’s livestock farmers to close down their farms.

While in Britain the government remains committed to its proposed ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 (and hybrids by 2035), whatever the cost to the UK car industry and motorists, the EU recently backtracked on its proposed ban. Following lobbying by the German car industry, the EU has opened the door to internal combustion engines remaining on the market after 2035 – provided they can use synthetic fuels manufactured from hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Most remarkable is the tone of Emmanuel Macron’s speech last week. Five years ago, while Britain was experiencing its first Extinction Rebellion demonstrations, France was in the grip of the ‘yellow vests’ protests sparked by the rise of taxes on diesel. Macron at first refused to budge, although increases in fuel duty were later shelved. Now, however, the French President has changed tack, asserting that Europe has gone far enough in passing laws to abate carbon emissions – it is the turn of other countries to catch up. ‘We are ahead in regulatory terms of the Americans, the Chinese and of any other power in the world,’ he said. To plough on ahead of the rest of the world, he added, would threaten investment in Europe.

Macron’s shift did not come out of thin air. It is a response to Joe Biden’s euphemistically named Inflation Reduction Act (which the US President may not have noted has the unfortunate acronym IRA). The IRA bungs nearly $400 billion towards investment in green energy and other environmental measures. Americans will qualify for handouts towards the purchase of electric cars and heat pumps, for example, on condition that these are made mostly in the US.

This has changed the debate over net zero in the EU. The UK is slower to cotton on. While our own ministers continue to blather on about net zero creating many thousands of ‘green jobs’ for Britain, even as companies have begun to relocate operations to the US to take advantage of the handouts, the EU has been agonising for months about how to respond. As Macron has evidently noticed, Biden has declined to set any kind of target, still less a legally binding one, to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 or any other date. He has continued to approve new oil and gas drilling in Alaska. But what he has been very happy to do is to dress up a blatantly protectionist programme in green clothes.

Macron, for one, has had enough. In 2019, when France and the UK set their respective net zero targets within a week of each other, the theory was that it would inspire other countries to follow suit. Yet four years on, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit counts a maximum of 23 countries as having some kind of legal net-zero commitment. Many of them are places with inconsequential emissions, such as the Maldives and Fiji. The list includes neither the US nor China, which between them account for more than 40 per cent of global emissions. There couldn’t be a more dishonest phrase than the oft-repeated ‘race to net zero’ – the biggest polluters have stayed behind the starting line as those that rushed off early have hampered their industries with high taxes and green tape.

Net-zero laws are beginning to look like a form of economic self-sacrifice – something our own government ministers seem slow to realise. I hope Grant Shapps’s heat pump keeps him warm. Many other early adopters have complained of having a lukewarm home in return for their hefty outlay. From 2026, when the government will ban installations of new oil-fired boilers, the rest of the country will gradually have to follow suit. Without the £5,000 grant which will be available for a maximum of 90,000 homes, a heat pump installation will cost between £7,000 and £13,000 and maybe thousands more for extra insulation. Just don’t expect UK industry to be seeing the benefits.  

Keir Starmer’s housing pledge has trapped the Tories

Sir Keir Starmer has broken cover on planning. In perhaps his most daring policy announcement so far, he has declared his intention to overhaul the planning system to free up more housing. When pressed on the morning media round he was clear – he would take the fight to NIMBYs and wouldn’t yield to backbenchers about developments in their patch. Labour, he said, would be on the side of the ‘builders not the blockers’.

It is a bold move, but one which shows the shifting sands of the politics of housing. Until recently, rising house prices were something governments boasted about, a sign of prosperity for middle England. Anything that threatened that, including development in local fields, was something to be campaigned against and blocked. Now, the narrative has flipped.

The cost of housing has become a mainstream concern, at least for anyone under the age of 40. Prices in London have become prohibitive for even the highest earners, and the problem is spreading. Across the southeast, and in cities across the country, wages have flatlined while property prices have soared, leaving many in adequate accommodation. For those stuck in the rental market the situation is often worse, with landlords who are ambivalent about their responsibilities raking it in and tenants pushed into frequent and costly moves.

The Tories, once the party of home ownership, have failed to fix this. Any attempt to liberalise planning has been met with backbench rebellion. Even Liz Truss’s free-market, supply-side insurgency saw housing targets as the enemy, pledging to scrap national targets which forced local authorities to permit development. It was a policy that Sunak was forced to keep, even though Tory-leaning thinktanks warned him that it would make the housing situation worse.

Starmer’s announcement shows he wants to fight the Tories on this. The discussion around planning has gradually broken away from interest groups and into the mainstream – and the Labour leader wants to make it a focus of the next election. Played well, it could be a real boon for his campaign. It is an area where the Tories have failed to deliver on their rhetoric and which vast swathes of the country feels in their pocket. Equally, he has more room to alienate the NIMBYs.

The Conservatives struggle to achieve anything on housing because their biggest supporters are older homeowners in the suburban fringe. These people wince at the thought of the bulldozers rolling out and as homeowners have no real interest in stemming rising house prices. The also tend to vote Tory. Labour, Starmer reckons, can probably do without them, instead relying on the votes of the young who want to own a home.

He will still have to negotiate some internal opposition. Many in Labour’s ranks are suspicious of property developers and dispute the link between supply of houses and costs. Others see the rollout of private housing as second-best to building more social housing. Labour MPs are often as likely to be swayed by local self-interest as other parties – but Starmer seems determined to bulldoze through all of this.

Now the Tories are stuck in an invidious trap. Any steps to liberalise planning going into the next election could start to cost them in the seats that mean the difference between defeat and oblivion, yet it will be hard to be credible to any younger voters without a serious offering on it. In the long term, it’s hard to see how the Tories remain a potent political force if homeownership becomes impossible for people born in the 90s or later.

The party has had a dozen years in government to find an answer on this and has failed. Housing targets have been missed, developments blocked, and prices have soared. Anything they say about building now will be met with scepticism, giving Starmer a huge advantage if this becomes a key battleground.

The Labour leader’s announcement makes that more likely. It also shows a braver side of Starmer as we move towards the election. He is choosing to spear the Conservatives on an issue he knows they have little room to manoeuvre on and challenging for their mantle as the party of homeownership. More than that, however, he seems to do it in a way that acknowledges and accepts the political risk. All of this suggests he’s confident that his own next home will be on Downing Street.

Who else has come after Percy Pig’s crown?

Pig out

Marks & Spencer wrote to an ice cream parlour in Hertfordshire demanding that it stop calling one of its products ‘Perky Pig’ on the grounds that it infringed the chain’s copyright of Percy Pigs, which it has been selling since 1992. Some more onomatopoeic porcines:

– Pierre Pig: collectible plastic figurines introduced by Fabuland in 1984. The characters in the series also included Pat Pig, Peter Pig and Patricia Piglet.

– Peppa Pig: children’s TV series first broadcast on Channel 5 in 2004, and favourite of former PM Boris Johnson.

– Percival Pig Finds His Manners: children’s book published in the US in 2014.

– Percival, the Performing Pig: children’s play by Dilys Owen.

– Perry Pig Jump: Nintendo game brought out in 2019.

– Pamela Pig Has Lost Her Oink: literacy aid for three- to five-year-olds available for download on the Tes website.

United state

Who belongs to a trade union?

Highest sectors (% of employees belonging to a union): Education (49%), health and social work (39%) and public administration and defence (39%).

Salary level

Less than £250 a week                        12%

£250-£499                                             22%

£500-£999                                             30%

More than £1,000                                 18%

Age

16-24                                                      4.3%

25-34                                                      20%

35-49                                                      35%

50+                                                          41%

Regions: membership is highest in Wales (36%), Northern Ireland (31%) and north-east (29%). It is lowest in the south-east (17%), London (18%) and the east (20%).

Source: Beis

Qualified success

Which country sends the best-qualified migrants to England and Wales? Percentage educated to higher education level by country of birth (31% of native residents have such qualifications):

Nigeria                                                   68%

South Africa                                          54%

India                                                       51%

Italy                                                        48%

Germany                                                47%

Ireland                                                    36%

Poland                                                    35%

Romania                                                33%

Pakistan                                                 29%

Bangladesh                                            24%

Source: ONS

Could Derbyshire survive on its own?

Since at least the beginning of this century there has been a mood abroad – cultural as well as political – to trash the place that contributes most to British culture and the British economy. Without London and its population, we in the rest of the United Kingdom would be unable to continue living in the manner to which we have become accustomed and which we seem to consider our birthright. But suggest as much in the English provinces, the West Country, East Anglia, the Home Counties, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, and people look at you as though you were mad – or, worse, secretly in the pay of the spivs and swindlers of Canary Wharf and the City of London.

When did you last hear a politician – Labour, Tory, Lib Dem or Scot Nat – singing the praises of our metropolis, celebrating the earnings the City pours into the Exchequer or testifying to the outstanding work ethic of Londoners rich and poor? When did you hear a culture secretary single London out for mention for its massive contribution to the arts, theatre, opera, classical music and the rock and pop scene? When has any health secretary ever pointed out that Londoners’ obesity rates are the lowest in the country because private car use in the metropolis is almost impossible? When, outside London, did you ever see anybody walking up a moving escalator?

I love Derbyshire, one of whose rural constituencies I represented in parliament for almost seven years. I consider rural England my home now, and my London flat the place to go when work requires it. I gnash my teeth, however, when I hear those whose home is in my adopted county casually denigrate their capital city as though it were commonly agreed that this is the Babylon of England. It would only be slightly a caricature to say that the general view across much of the rest of Britain is that London is a place of lah-di-dah people who spend most of their time at posh dinner parties; sickos and perverts; beggars and good-for-nothings; greedy financial moguls who sit round creaming their wealth off fat balance sheets and who wouldn’t recognise a spade, let alone call it one, if they saw it; welfare scroungers; and – aargh – foreigners. ‘Went there once,’ said someone I know in the Midlands, ‘on a coach. I think it were called Reading. Didn’t think much to it so I came home.’

Of course I overstate, so let’s instead talk relativities. Millions outside the capital (I’ll wager) would subscribe to the following statement: ‘In provincial towns, cities and the countryside, people are more likely to do an honest day’s work, live cleaner, healthier lives, be more “down to earth” than Londoners and contribute more to national prosperity and what makes this country great.’ Pick that statement up and examine it.

Take my own county, and imagine Derbyshire were an independent country with its own domestic economy. Let’s call this nation Derbytania. We in Derbytania have only two big industries: Toyota, employing around 2,500, and Rolls-Royce plc (the aero-engines people). Or, rather, we don’t because when Rolls-Royce went bust in 1971 the government of Derbytania would not have been able to afford to bail it out. Westminster rescued Rolls-Royce. We have quarrying, too, so yes we export limestone. And we have farming.

Now, farming is many British people’s idea of a real, productive job. I admire farmers. They give us British the look and feel we associate with country living. But those working in agriculture are about 1 per cent of the British population and contribute about half a per cent of our GDP. Farmers do work hard. The life of a small livestock farmer in hill country (much of Derbytania’s agricultural sector) is tough and financially unrewarding. But it’s not just unrewarding for the farmer: it’s unrewarding for the national kitty. Most of Derbytania’s hills are covered in sheep. The farmers who own them have been reliant on the EU providing more than 40 per cent of their income in subsidy. Derbytania voted to leave the EU. If its farmers think all that money will now come from the ministry of finance in Derby, they’re under a misapprehension.

So what else do we do here in Derbytania? We’re teachers, we’re NHS workers and managers, and huge numbers of us work for the baffling range of layers of local government with which we’re blessed. And if we suppose these salaries are largely paid for out of our council tax, we’re wrong: as wrong as if we suppose that the £13.3 million that our charming and relatively well-to-do town of Ashbourne has just been awarded from Westminster’s ‘levelling-up’ fund (for a stone paving scheme) would ever have come from Derby. Some chance.

We’re not, generally, workshy. But it’s nine-to-five for most Derbytanians, and we mostly commute by car. Content to keep to our contracted hours, and looking forward to retirement, we don’t obsess about career like many Londoners. We recoil from stories of the homeless on London’s streets, forgetting that every town and village in Derbytania has its misfits, addicts and alcoholics, and most drift away – as often as not to London.

I like life here in Derbytania. I like my Derbytanian neighbours: nice people for the most part, sensible, honest and not shirkers. I like Dicky and Daffy Tottering in CountryLife’s ‘Tottering-by-Gently’ cartoon strip. But have we Derbytanians the least idea of the level of wealth transferral from the metropolis upon which we depend? And though Dicky and Daffy would tell you their roots are in their county, those roots are ultimately nourished from Canary Wharf and the City of London.

Provincial Britain thinks of itself as a solid citadel of industry and common sense, and of London and its fancy ways as the barbarians at the gates. Friends, we are subsidy junkies and the barbarians are paying the bill. God forbid that London should ever take back control.

Rampant unions will embed high inflation

So farewell, Transpennine Express, the northern rail operator whose hapless management were no match for the Aslef union that was determined to see this underperforming franchise renationalised. TPE’s drivers, beneficiaries of the super-luxury conditions I recited last month, have effectively invented a new form of moral hazard: have no fear of crippling your employer with outrageous demands and relentless non-cooperation, because if it goes down, the government will step in and re-employ you on the same terms or better.

Aslef has more strikes planned nationally for 31 May and 3 June, and the other rail union RMT – having done its best to disrupt travel to Eurovision in Liverpool – says it may join in on the second date, which happens to be FA Cup final day. Royal College of Nursing members have voted to hold out for a double-digit pay rise, despite their own leader recommending a lower offer, and junior doctors are still chuntering too.

Teachers and civil servants, even driving examiners, are poised for more action, while airport workers await their best chance in peak holiday season. One way or another, the union movement is more rampant today than it has been for the past 40 years – bottom-up, because workers are distressed about inflation, and top-down wherever hard-left union leaders see opportunities to subvert privatised industries and make Tory ministers squirm.

Oddly, all this seems to be happening with barely a peep from the unions’ coordinating body, the TUC, which is almost as quiescent as the CBI and whose general secretary Paul Nowak, in post since December, is invisible. But the litany of pay demands and forthcoming stoppages has even knocked racism and trans stories off the top of BBC news agendas – and let’s be fair, it’s the legitimate role of workers’ reps to ask for more at a time of steeply rising prices.

The cacophony will last at least until the general election. The disruptions will erode productivity, cause already poor public services to get worse – and generally contribute to a sense of a nation that’s going to the dogs under a government that has passed its sell-by date. As the negative mood deepens, so the pay spiral will gather momentum even as raw materials prices subside, embedding an inflation that’s higher and longer than those of our competitors. The Bank of England is now predicting 0.25 per cent UK growth this year, rather than the 0.5 per cent contraction it previously foresaw: far from a soft landing, however, we’re heading into an extended patch of national turbulence.

Mail failings

Farewell also to Simon Thompson, the chief executive of Royal Mail who is stepping down after little more than two years in post, following a vicious dispute with the Communications Workers Union that was settled last month by a 10 per cent pay award over three years plus £500 bonuses. The deal finally struck with Royal Mail’s board is below what the CWU asked for and includes concessions on working practices – but their consolation prize is the departure of Thompson, a cardboard caricature of corporate insensitivity whose days already looked numbered following a disastrous select committee grilling earlier this year.

Royal Mail (now a brand name within the FTSE 250-listed International Distributions Services plc) limps on demoralised – incapable of maintaining its door-to-door ‘universal service obligation’ to a standard that holds public affection, or of maximising the potential of the international parcels operation that the Thompson regime tried to prioritise, or of boosting its own enfeebled share price.

The concern for whoever is brave enough to succeed Thompson is that the CWU – no doubt inspired by their Aslef brethren – will return to the fray next time determined (as they were accused of being by Royal Mail during the recent dispute) to bankrupt the company. If that happens, the daily letter-post service, renationalised, might be reunited with the state-owned but also troubled Post Office Ltd – to recreate a public-service entity that would burden the taxpayer and slowly wither, while the viable parcels business would inevitably be sold to the highest foreign bidder.

It would be a cruel irony if that turned out to be Germany’s Deutsche Post, an example of success in privatised national mail services that Royal Mail has tragically failed to emulate.

Dancing in the rain

But we’re not saying farewell quite yet to Dame Sharon White, chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, who has just lost a vote of confidence – by the employee–owned retailer’s ruling staff council – in her performance for the past year, but won a second vote endorsing her future strategy. Unrest among the 80,000 partners in John Lewis and Waitrose outlets reflects a loss of £234 million for 2022, the cancellation of their bonuses for only the second time since 1953, and concern that White was preparing to sell an equity stake in the group that would have compromised its preciously guarded mutual structure.

But she has now made clear that demutualisation is out of the question – though painful cost-cutting to bring the group back to break-even is not. Given the constraints of partnership on such a scale, Dame Sharon has a uniquely difficult job in the multiple-store retail sector – and as a former Treasury official and regulator, regularly faces the jibe that she’s ‘not a retailer’ herself. We can only wonder what Archie Norman or Stuart Rose or Justin King would have done if parachuted into John Lewis in her place.

Speaking to partners last week, White quoted the poet Vivien Greene about not ‘waiting for the storm to pass [but] learning to dance in the rain’: most business leaders have the opportunity to do that on the way up through their industries rather than, as in her case, in full media glare at the top. Fair-minded shoppers will wish her good fortune in her challenge.

Lithuania’s PM: ‘If Russia is not defeated it will come for somebody else’

In July, Lithuania’s Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte will welcome Nato leaders to Vilnius for one of the most important summits in the alliance’s history. Top of the agenda will be how to help Ukraine push back Vladimir Putin’s forces. But a more thorny problem will be whether to formally offer membership to Kyiv – a move that would make Ukraine’s front lines Nato’s own.

Simonyte believes that the war could have been avoided if Nato had accepted Ukraine and Georgia’s membership bids back in 2008. Before Putin invaded Ukraine last year, she says, ‘western leaders and western organisations were ready to abandon their positions every time Russia was pressing’. Indeed it was only at the Madrid Nato summit last year that Russia was formally declared ‘a threat rather than just a rival’. The Baltic countries were under no such illusions about Russia’s hostile intent. The Ukraine invasion was being ‘prepared for many, many years’, says Simonyte. For Putin, ‘building prosperity, trying to increase people’s welfare is a little bit tiresome… it’s easier to give people a substitute for progress, for instance the greatness of your nation’. And for Russia, now as historically, greatness is defined not in terms of ‘scientific achievements or economic achievements but by controlling people around you. That was the concept of Russian empire and is still the concept of Russian elite, unfortunately’.

Simonyte strongly rejects suggestions that there was anything the West or Volodymyr Zelensky could have done differently in order to avert war. ‘The usual Putin story is that it was Nato that was moving eastward, pressing Russia from the west. But this is nonsense because there was no real presence whatsoever of Nato [forces in the Baltic] until he grabbed Crimea,’ she says. ‘We were members of Nato, yes. But the debate about any deployment in the region was very complicated… only after [2014] was there any enhanced forward presence established in the Baltic states.’ On the contrary, she argues, it was Putin who ‘did everything for his neighbours to feel insecure and of course look for security guarantees. And that’s Nato’.

Lithuania was sending military aid to Ukraine long before most of its Nato allies were. But as Ukraine prepares for a major counter-offensive that is likely to define the endgame of the war, what will victory look like? Simonyte’s vision tallies exactly with Zelensky’s: ‘Russia is expelled from all [Ukraine’s] territory, justice for the guilty is implemented, and the rebuilding of the country is financed by those who are guilty of that devastation.’ And if none of those things happen? ‘Then there will be no peace in Europe.’

But some Nato leaders – and increasing numbers of European voters – are wary of open-ended support for a war that Zelensky last week warned could last for ‘decades’. Recent polls in Italy, for instance, suggest that just a third of voters agree with continuing arms supplies to Ukraine. So far, Simonyte insists, Nato support for Ukraine is ‘as strong as it was a year ago, I have no doubt’. Nonetheless, she acknowledges that there are ‘debates’ in many countries between advocates of peace – which would come at the expense of territorial losses for Ukraine – vs full justice. ‘Some of the people are saying we are tired of this war – well, yeah, nobody said that would be pleasant. But if [Russia] is not defeated then it will just be a matter of time before it regroups, re-arms, and that it will come for somebody next.’ Is there any scenario short of fully expelling Russia from all Ukraine – including Crimea – that could also count as victory? That’s up to Ukraine to decide, says Simonyte – but she sees ‘very little probability that Ukraine would cede lands for any kind of peace deal’. As for future relations with a post-war Russia, Simonyte sees some hope that in the Russian government there are ‘practical people who do understand that this [war] makes no sense’ – but they’re not ‘within the circle of decision making’.

Simonyte sees no problem with Ukraine’s apparent attacks against oil storage bases and freight trains inside Russia – and even a drone strike on the Kremlin’s Senate Palace. ‘Russia is at war, though I know that they pretend they are not at war,’ she says. ‘I think it’s a big mistake to think that if you’re at war with another country, then the war is only in that other country for some reason. And you have parades, festivals, people in cafés, and everything continues as normal. Life is not normal.’

Does she believe that September’s destruction of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines that run past Lithuania’s coast was done by Ukrainian freelancers, as recent reports have suggested? ‘If you ask me who would benefit [from the destruction of Nord Stream] I would say it’s the Russians,’ she says. ‘They can claim force majeure in arbitration cases for not delivering gas to European countries because there are still contracts that are binding… But I’m not in intelligence. So I will wait until there is some formal investigation and formal conclusions.’

A former economics professor, veteran minister and parliamentarian, 48-year-old Simonyte has led her 2.8 million-strong country since 2020. There’s no real difference in the way that men and women lead, she says – ‘I think it’s always about the personality rather than the sex’. But some voters see female leaders as ‘a mom in the family… which is maybe why during a crisis, you quite often see a woman being elected’.

The three years of Simonyte’s premiership have seen a fair share of crises – Covid, unrest in neighbouring Belarus that followed a presidential election that was widely regarded as stolen, and the invasion of Ukraine. Simonyte offered the exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya not only political asylum in Vilnius but official recognition as the government of Belarus in exile. When up to a million Russians fled from political repression and mobilisation, several thousand found a home in Lithuania – alongside a much larger number of Ukrainians.

In neighbouring Latvia and Estonia, Russians represent a quarter of the population – some of whom complain that strict language aptitude laws have relegated them to the status of second-class citizens. Latvian authorities last year controversially shut down the Dozhd TV Russian-language television station and withdrew residence permits for his émigré staff on the dubious grounds that the staunchly opposition-minded channel supported the Russian army.

Lithuania has so far been relatively free of these culture wars, in part because just 7 per cent of Lithuanian citizens are ethnic Russians. ‘About 10 per cent of our population would say that [Lithuania] was better under the Soviets than it is in an independent state,’ she says. ‘But I lived under that regime for 15 years and I know that this is a completely fake idea.’ Russians in Lithuania are in no way second-class citizens, she insists: like Poles, Belarusians and Jews they have their own native-language schools. And she says that her country will continue to issue humanitarian visas to Belarusian and Russian activists. ‘Can I say that all of them are like leaders and beacons of democratic transition? Not necessarily… but we are ready to take this risk.’

One overseas culture war that has had a direct impact on Lithuania has been Brexit. Before Britain left the EU, hundreds of thousands of educated young Lithuanians left the country for jobs in more prosperous parts of Europe – with many ending up in London. Brexit and Covid brought many back home – which is good news for the Lithuanian economy. ‘I feel pity for Britain for leaving the European Union,’ she says. ‘But on a bilateral level, I think we still have perfect relations and a good understanding of the global situation.’ Europe has become stronger after Britain’s exit, she argues, thanks to the collective challenge of Covid and the Ukraine war. ‘Before, it was more an economic than a geopolitical player,’ she says. But now, ‘the EU has a stronger geo-political stance than it ever had’.

Simonyte hasn’t met Putin personally – ‘not something that I miss very much’ – and, since the International Criminal Court issued its war crimes warrant against him, is now unlikely to. But in a few weeks she will be hosting allies from across the western world who have come to realise that the Baltics, with their repeatedly ignored warnings of the dangers posed by Russia, are perhaps worth listening to.

Letters: What Millennial Millie needs

Lion of London Bridge

Sir: Douglas Murray’s well-presented essay (‘Don’t be a hero’, 13 May) brings to mind the bravery of the Millwall fan Roy Larner, who fought off three knife-wielding religious fanatics in a terror attack, saving the lives of many others in the process. Stabbed eight times and in a critical condition, the ‘Lion of London Bridge’ managed to drive his attackers off. This was five years ago and yet, despite meeting all criteria for courage of the highest order, Mr Larner has yet to receive any public citation, let alone the George Cross he so obviously deserves. One wonders what is delaying this long overdue recognition.

John B. Cowper

Taplow, Buckinghamshire

Heroic admonishment

Sir: Douglas Murray reminds us of those noble citizens who ‘have a go’ when someone does something wrong. Before the Troubles ended, my father challenged a thief trying to steal a neighbour’s car on the north/south border in Fermanagh. He chased him into the post office and, despite being aged 75, he felled the thief and sat on him until police arrived. An officer said to the thief: ‘You could have been killed.’ The reply was: ‘I know, with that old boy sitting on me!’ It ended with an arrest, but also a caution for my father for injuries to the thief. He never tested his hero nerve again.

Ian Elliott

Belfast 

Salisbury’s rat

Sir: Jon Day’s ‘Notes on… Rats’ (13 May) reminded me of a rat recovered from the skull of William Longespée, the first person buried in Salisbury Cathedral, which was found when his tomb was opened in 1791.

Long exhibited in Salisbury Museum, the rat’s fame is now assured: its desiccated remains are displayed in the cathedral alongside the tomb itself. That the rat contained traces of arsenic poison supports suspicion at the time of Longespée’s sudden death that he may have been murdered, though it is not exactly proof. Few rats can command more attention or inspire children’s interest in history through such a gruesome past than this one.

Peter Saunders

Curator Emeritus, Salisbury Museum

Three coronations

Sir: I was able to draw the attention of your distinguished former editor, Lord Moore of Etchingham, in the House of Lords Tea Room to a slight error in his recent column (Notes, 6 May). He suggested that no one alive today has an adult memory of what was expected in the coronation of George VI in 1937. My mother-in-law was 21 at the time and is now 107, so she has witnessed three coronations. She has also received three birthday cards from the late Queen (for her 100th, 105th and 106th birthdays) and a card from the new King (for her 107th). ‘A hand of three queens and a king is pretty good’, as she says.

Lord Rennard

House of Lords, London SW1A

More on Millennial Millie

Sir: Lara Prendergast introduces us to Millennial Millie as the modern Mondeo Man (‘Meet Millennial Millie’, 13 May). While the characterisation may seem quite niche to the Home Counties, Millie’s inability to access the housing market is one of the big challenges the Conservative party needs to address if it is to gain the trust of a new generation. The solution to date, by all parties, has been to build their way out of the problem. While there remains a need to increase supply, the real solution must lie in finance. Greater supply only helps if it lowers prices, which it has patently failed to do so far and which would undermine the stability of many more households if it did. Ensuring affordable access to long-term secured finance is vital, to ensure Millie and her friends – who are already earning well and spending vast sums on rent – can secure the future that many of us took for granted. 

Matthew Barber

West Hanney, Oxfordshire

Home Office antics

Sir: Charles Moore (Notes, 29 April) is aggrieved by the ‘arrogance of ministers and officials’ he detects in the government’s continued lack of response to contacts from Sir James Dyson. Their contempt for less prominent citizens is even more pronounced. In December 2021 I wrote to the Home Office asking about the legitimacy of their policy of bringing illegal immigrants ashore from the Channel, in the context of their stated duty (on the Home Office website) of securing our borders and keeping Britons safe. Despite my repeated follow-ups, I have yet to receive a focused response. And still, despite the public outrage at the injustice of the policy, the people in the boats are ferried ashore and accommodated in comparative luxury, while many thousands of Britons sleep rough. How does the Home Office get away with doing the opposite of its duty?

Chris Male 

Weston-super-Mare

My spoon

Sir: I was fascinated to read Robert Tombs’s account of the gold coronation spoon (‘Notes on…’, 6 May). I possess an exact replica of it, known as my ‘christening spoon’, and had always wondered why the bowl was divided. Now the secret is revealed! Presumably these replicas were sold as souvenirs when Queen Elizabeth was crowned.

Prudence Jones

Cambridge

For the birds

Sir: Matthew Parris says in his review of the concert he attended in Guadix (‘Looking without seeing’, 6 May) that the music would only be a ‘strange noise’ to the birds and be ‘not saying anything’ to them. We enjoy birdsong even though we cannot know its meaning. Why should the little birds not likewise get some pleasure from Brahms? I suspect it is more than merely noise to them.

Gordon Ingle

Hampstead

The myths around immigration

After the media bigged up the expiration of America’s Covid-era Title 42, which enabled the US to block entries into the country, the anticipated stampede across the southern border doesn’t seem to have occurred. No worries, then? Behold the miracle of social adaptation. Before the handy illegal immigrant ejection seat was retired last week, illegal entries from Mexico had risen to 11,000 per day – if sustained, more than four million per year, and that’s after 2.3 million southern border apprehensions last year. The record-breaking influx had already become a stampede, and apparently people can get used to anything.

As for why the ever-escalating surge of visitors for life, obviously loads of rational people would rather live in the US – or the UK – than in less agreeable locations. A better question is why they are allowed to.

The myth of inexorability. Americans and Britons alike have been told that the rapid transformation of their society is inevitable, the reduced clout of what we’re now meant to call the ‘settled’ inhabitants akin to a natural process, which mere governments can no more arrest than the tides or the rising sun. We’ve been conditioned to regard minority majorities later this century as our destiny. Yet Japan, Poland and Hungary constrain immigration through muscular public policy.

The myth of the ageing society. Oh, the ageing society is no myth, but the notion that only unrelentingly high rates of immigration can solve the subsequent support-ratio quandary is a fairy tale. Because immigrants also get old, we’d have to keep bringing in more to take care of the new old people. In 2010, Migration Watch calculated that to maintain the UK’s 2008 support ratio, we’d need to absorb foreigners ‘peaking at 1.2 million per year before 2051 and up to five million per year later in the century. That would increase the UK population to 119 million by 2051 and 300 million by the end of the century’. Picture it, nearly the current population of the US crammed on to our small island. Propping up a top-heavy age structure by constantly importing a younger population is a mug’s game. Try raising the retirement age.

The snowball factor. The more who come, the more who will come. Home Office research on why the UK is such a draw is un-reliably dependent on self-reporting. People know better than to tell civil servants: ‘I came to Britain because I want a free house.’ But one oft-cited attraction is surely sincere: friends and family in country already. (Ludicrously generous family reunification policies accelerate this inducement.) Heading for the unknown is more appealing when you know people who can show you the ropes. In smartphone world, every arrival is an independent publicity agency for the US or UK. Immigrants tend to underplay the downsides of their new lives, portraying their circumstances to kith and kin in rosy terms.

For the host country? Punishment for success. The nations that immigrants flee are often a mess; in comparison, destination countries are orderly and functional. Order and functionality are the result of generations of innovation and hard work. Taxpayers’ thanks for sustaining democratic norms, rule of law and economic dynamism? Providing millions of guests with food, housing, healthcare and education. The profusion of people who prefer our countries is flattering, but we can’t finance hospitals with compliments.

For migrants? Reward for success. Nearly everyone who wants to stay does so.

Prosperity guilt and political arrogance. Rather than taking pride in having organised a nice place to live, we feel sheepish that others don’t have it so good. According to the left, too, everything bad that happens anywhere else in the world is all our fault. This arrogates to us westerners an exaggerated impression of our powers.

Short-sighted parsimony. Border enforcement and deportation are expensive. Talk is cheap. In both Britain and the US, tough rhetoric fronts for operational passivity, learned helplessness and incompetence. But the costs of capitulation are high, and they’re not all monetary.

Legal obligation, which ought to revert to discretion. We’re hogtied by our own rules, whose fine points immigrants know better than their publicly financed lawyers. I heard the UK’s Indian high commissioner explain last week that India is not a signatory to any international treaties on asylum, yet still legally admits surprisingly large numbers of immigrants – by choice. Thus we needn’t either foolishly fling open the gates or callously slam them. A viable middle course would speed applications from the highly qualified and proper political refugees (Ukrainians, Hong Kongers), while drastically reconceiving ‘asylum’, which is now a farce. We’re being played, and gullibility isn’t admirable; it’s a weakness.

Sentimentality. Sympathy for the immiserated seems to reflect well on the open borders brigade, but these people are consumed with their own moral vanity, with no interest in the practicalities of the generosity they impose on others. The left harps on the finitude of water, wilderness and energy, except when it comes to immigration, in regard to which all these quantities are suddenly inexhaustible. The flip side of progressives’ soft-heartedness is utter contempt for the rights of their compatriots.

Fiddled figures, which disguise the scale of the situation. British politicians cite only ‘net’ immigration, subtracting those who’ve left. Official estimates exclude illegal immigrants who evade detection and visa overstayers. Rishi Sunak’s focus on last year’s 45,000 arrivals in small boats distracts from last year’s astronomical legal immigration: 1.1 million – about the number of permanent visas the US granted, with five times the population.

In a recent podcast, the commonly astute Andrew Sullivan pushed back hard against Nigel Biggar’s controversial analysis of British colonialism as not altogether bad. Passionately denouncing Britain’s grabby past, Sullivan stressed what a terrible thing it was for foreigners to pour into another people’s territory and usurp its resources. As Sullivan is himself sceptical about the benefits of mass immigration, I was astonished he failed to make the connection.