Blake Butler: ‘I don’t want this story to end as “Molly killed herself”’

A recent controversy rocked the literary world when coverage of author Blake Butler’s memoir, Molly, about his late wife, notable poet Molly Brodak, hit tabloids and spun for the worst. The coverage sparked debate over the ethics of writing about relationships, as online attackers made accusations that the widower weaponized Brodak’s private life and exploited her death for fame or revenge.  

Claims gained ground that it was a “shameless cash grab,” “literary revenge porn,” or that it shouldn’t have been published due to privacy concerns, since the memoir reveals Butler’s discovery of his late wife’s affairs after her passing.  

Last year, author Isabelle Kaplan also explored similar ethics in a viral essay in the Guardian about her relationship with a controlling writer and concluded being disrespected means it’s fair game. Kaplan was applauded for speaking up — but witnessing the same cultural circles demand Butler’s silence raises questions about the moral integrity of these callouts and larger ones around the desire to bend art and literature toward what’s palatable. Criticism of art is, of course, a necessary practice. Calls for silence denote something larger; that perhaps society’s notion of art should be to entertain rather than challenge, inspire or give voice to experience. 

Molly is challenging but it is not a hit piece. The memoir is thoughtfully crafted, with Butler revealing his own infidelities and failures in the relationship, grappling not just with grief but also coming to terms with experiencing abuse. Still, he tenderly examines his marriage to Brodak with nuance. But the tabloids don’t want nuance. They want a simple story. Villain and hero. But love and death is rarely that simple. As people reacted more to the gossip than the book itself, even tackily mocking published excerpts, I reached out to Butler to discuss the debacle. 

Elle Nash: The backlash didn’t happen until the piece in the Daily Mail came out. 

Blake Butler: It was very obvious any information they had came from the LA Times review. As it spread it got more diluted and because there’s gaps in that story, they start making up their own stuff. I told my publicist to tell them they have no right to this. [My publicist] got a hold of a reporter from Daily Mail after that article blew up and they wanted to do another story, now with original content. We agreed, but they had to remove the first piece. By then it was too late. The further it got out, like to Perez Hilton, the more nasty it got. I am trying hard to control it and get any leverage, but you find out pretty fast that you just don’t have any control over the tabloids. They do not care. 

EN: Can you speak to what you’ve experienced from the public? 

BB: A lot of my contact has been strangers saying, “I’ve been through similar stuff.” Other people jumped to conclusions. Some were my friends. People cherry-picked things to pin on me. But you think I wanted her to be dragged this way? I wrote the book for the exact opposite reason — to bring her honor and justice. And you can’t understand why she did what she did unless you understand everything that was going on. My whole goal was to provide what I knew. You need these pieces to understand her. 

Each person has this thing you can’t touch and the beauty of a relationship is opening that. While Molly’s greatest desire was to feel loved and to be known, she was also terrified of opening up because every time she had, she’d gotten hurt more. I don’t even know that I thought she was mentally ill. I just thought she had been through a lot of hell. 

EN: You said the demands of silence is what makes American culture a “battleground between Disney and Infowars.” 

BB: It’s right to want to protect Molly if I had done what they thought. Yet none of the people that criticized took the time to explore beyond the article. The thing they took as a weapon shows they’re using it for their own end. They’re like, “how do I get myself into this story?” I think we’re used to responding and making things about ourselves. That’s what the culture asks us to do online. 

The point of those actions should be to reduce pain and suffering overall. But what their action does is create more pain and suffering. You conflate a notion of justice with something that’s vain and petty and attack someone who experienced what you are rallying against. A sensible person who’s neither right nor left can see what they’re doing with that. 

EN: Some of the criticism against you asked if we should allow a man to tell the narrative of a dead woman’s life. 

BB: We live in a world where men are abusers more frequently than women by a vast majority. When we hear a man saying, “Someone did something to me that made me want to die,” it’s like, well, aren’t you supposed to be a man? Especially online, people are going to be Machiavellian. You got to find people in your corner who care about hearing you and are not just saying, “You’re a man, deal with it.” Or “You’re an abuser so you don’t get to have feelings.” When I get accused of something like that, I understand they’re speaking from their own pain they haven’t fully accessed yet. But there are guys who have less resources to understand what’s happening to them. When you get into this duality of black and white, you only trust voices that are either Disney or Infowars. The maniac on the side screaming or the one that refuses to look at anything real. 

EN: It seems the reason these criticisms crop up is because of the question of power dynamics. What are the ethics of telling the stories of others? You had said, “The story I tell in Molly is mine.”  

BB: John D’Agata told me this book is an essay, not a memoir, because it’s me trying to figure out Molly, but it concedes that’s impossible. Then it says, why should I live? It becomes the real question. Surviving your spouse’s suicide exposes you to suicide in a unique way because you’re still alive and you have to reckon with what it does. That’s why I describe in the book that suicide passes pain on, it doesn’t resolve it. What makes the rejection and the mishandling of it so hard is this book simulates as close as possible my [experience] and the path of how to get back out and why. [The book] is not trying to define Molly. It’s trying to be a work of art.  

It’s silencing to say I shouldn’t write from Molly’s journals and her work, because they don’t want to know the truth about her. And honestly, that’s the state Molly lived in her entire life. She never felt known. They think they’re doing liberation by bringing me to justice. The goal of this book is to repudiate the life she spent in shadows feeling unheard. That comes along with some bumps and bruises. I think Molly was an important American figure, I’m not going to write off her work as a suicide’s work. Moreover, she told me to write about her. When she taught writing to others, she’d say “Your story is yours. No one can take it from you. And in fact, it’s your duty to tell it.” 

I know we live in a world where it’s easy to point fingers, but not everyone deserves to have the finger pointed at them. And I can take it. But other people suicide because of stuff like this. We know this online bullying makes people die. This is literally the meat of suicide. 

EN: She had several unpublished manuscripts — will you be able to publish those? 

BB: Alone in Poland is her memoir about going to where her father was conceived in a forced labor camp by the Nazis during the liberation of the Jews. There are two book-length poems that are brilliant. A lot of this I have been saving for when I’ve been in the right mind. I’ve already placed her archive at Emory University where she taught. 

We’re also going to start [nonprofit arts organization] Glass Orchid. There’s so much that I want to come. I don’t want this story to end as “Molly killed herself.” Molly’s life is an important life. There’s a lot to learn from her because she is a complicated and brilliant person. 

Why Nigel Farage failed on ‘I’m a Celebrity…’

The coronation of Sam Thompson, Scrappy Doo in human form, as King of the Jungle in this year’s I’m A Celebrity… was an inevitability. It was unthinkable that Tony Bellew – his still, stoic Scouse sparring partner – would not come second. And that Nigel Farage wouldn’t trail in third.

When Farage made it through the public votes, all the way up to the final, there was much amused speculation about him coming out on top. The ‘banter’ outcome would’ve seen Farage take the crown, just for the sheer devilment of it.

Yes, that would’ve been delicious, the ultimate wind-up of Farage’s many detractors. It was a pleasant daydream to imagine the horrified tweets declaring that the former Brexit party leader’s win was confirmation that the public are all swivel-eyed fascists and that ITV had blood on their hands for normalising a dangerous extremist. There would have been some corkers of the genre, no doubt. ‘The level of tantrums on here today persuaded me to vote even though I haven’t watched any of it,’ I saw someone say on X on Sunday. 

But Sam had this wrapped up. His friendship with Tony was delightful to watch; the hyperactive, naughty ‘child’ type and solid, centred ‘dad’ type that’s been the base template of comedy double acts for centuries. Sam’s irrepressible bounce is a delight because it reminds us of the far-off days when we too – yes, even us – bounced.

And there’s the key point, and the reason why Farage could never have won: we watch shows like I’m A Celebrity… to escape, to put the shouting and wrangling and angst of the rest of television with its lectures and chiding and goading, behind us. It is a bubble of fun that takes place as far away as it is possible to get.

This is the second year in a row that a contentious politician has taken part, which may partly explain the ratings drop of this series. The presence of Matt Hancock last year and Farage in 2023 were constant unwelcome reminders of real life, with all its angst and aggravation. The intrusion of politics into such a bagatelle is like putting Marmite in a trifle.

Ant and Dec themselves have let slip that they’d like a break from politicians in the jungle. I have an alternative: a one-off, all-politician version. The forthcoming mass annihilation of Tory MPs should provide a bumper crop of contestants. Imagine Lee Anderson and Caroline Nokes forced to share a toilet.

What of Farage? From his point of view, was it worth it? It was certainly fascinating to watch him in this very unfamiliar social setting. People with his very ordinary, widely held and pretty innocuous opinions are never seen on TV, except as villains or fools. It was disorientating to see a tiny bit of what boring people call ‘representation’ in the blanded-out, deracinated world of TV, where even the deepest outback is London and everyone has the same bank of stock reactions and phrases: ‘you’ve got this babes’, ‘at the end of the day’ ‘it is what it is’ ‘I’ve got your back’. 

It’s a horrendous cliché, but Farage has the confidence of the public school boy. He has the fortitude, reserve and physical stillness of the generation two before ours, forged in harder times. He has that lost British quality – that I can just about remember, and which was blasted away forever by the death of Diana – of assuming goodwill without ever having to demonstrate it, let alone display it constantly with tactile contact and calling everyone ‘babes’ and ‘hun’.

Farage can keep things in, which nowadays is extremely rare. It was interesting to compare his unflinching demeanour in the trials with that of Bellew, who is similarly weighted, but who let his emotions burst out.

But as for turning round doubters? Farage was affable, certainly, but also rather dull. He is neither loveable nor funny in social situations. Even Matt Hancock knew he had to try and seem schmaltzy. Making people go ‘aaah’ is totally beyond Farage. Which is fine. He was, however, sunk from the moment he whispered to Grace Dent, very early on, that he wanted to do the trials because it meant getting 25 per cent of the air time. Now, this is the kind of thought that many a contestant will be thinking – but saying it out loud in front of cameras was a disastrous blunder. It put me in mind of the time a few series back when a popular boy band member said something along the lines of ‘Oh I had a really bad year last year, I only made half a million pounds so thats why I’m doing this’ and was voted out in short order. We like our contestants ingenuous, or at least making a good fist of pretending to be.

So, in his stated aim of winning over doubters and haters, and appealing to a ‘young audience’, will Farage’s stint in the jungle have made the slightest difference? No.

It’s time to crack down on Yousaf’s foreign affairs freelancing

For those who still believe in that old-fashioned thing called the British constitution, there has come a glimmer of hope from an unlikely source. Lord Cameron has threatened to withdraw Foreign Office support for overseas visits by Scottish government ministers if the SNP continues to disregard protocol on international jaunts.

Humza Yousaf raised eyebrows during COP28 when he shook hands and chatted with Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The SNP leader, who was at the event in his capacity as first minister of the Scottish government, tweeted out a photograph of the meeting and said they had discussed the situation in Gaza. In the same tweet, Yousaf called for an ‘immediate and permanent ceasefire’, which is at odds with the UK government’s position. Foreign affairs is supposed to be reserved to Westminster but the SNP government in Edinburgh isn’t terribly attentive to such constitutional niceties.

In a letter to Angus Robertson, the Nationalists’ grandly-titled ‘cabinet secretary for constitution, external affairs and culture’, the Foreign Secretary says the Scottish government failed to provide ‘sufficient advance notice’ to allow a Foreign Office official to be present at the Erdoğan tete-a-tete. In April, Cameron’s predecessor James Cleverly announced a crackdown on Scottish ministers holding meetings with foreign leaders and officials with no representative from the UK government in the room. The Nationalist administration at Holyrood would have to flag up any future bilaterals to facilitate the assignment of a Foreign Office official. In this instance, Cameron writes, ‘A UK official was available, whose contact details were known to your officials on the ground, but the location of the meeting was not shared with them.’

Citing previous breaches of the protocol, Cameron states that, should another occur, the Foreign Office will not facilitate any further overseas meetings and will ‘consider the presence of Scottish government offices in UK government posts,’ referring to the quasi-embassies that Holyrood is allowed to maintain in capital cities across the globe.

Yousaf’s meeting showed terrible political judgement. For one, his new friend Erdoğan says Israel is a ‘terror state’ while branding Hamas a ‘liberation group’. For another, given Erdoğan‘s unenviable human rights record, the friendly handshake drew criticism even inside the SNP. Roza Salih, a Kurdish-born Glasgow councillor who came to the UK as an asylum seeker, said she was ‘disappointed and disgusted’ by Yousaf meeting with a man who ‘kills Kurds in Turkey and does not respect human rights’.

But neither of those things will bother the SNP. The chance of having its burgeoning foreign affairs apparatus reined in will. As I’ve documented in the past, the Scottish government has been gradually developing and articulating an independent foreign policy for years now. It has its own nascent Foreign Office, the External Affairs Directorate, tasked with ‘protecting our place and interests in Europe’. It has its own international affairs blueprint, the ‘Global Affairs Framework’, which sets forth ‘the values, principles and priorities underpinning the Scottish government’s work to become more active internationally’. It is openly pursuing ‘diplomatic relations’ and ‘political links’ with China, Ireland, Germany and Canada.

Former first minister Nicola Sturgeon lobbied the German government in 2016 on ‘Scotland’s perspective’ on the EU; gave a speech in Dublin in 2017 pledging that ‘on virtually every issue of substance relating to Brexit, the Irish government… has an ally in Scotland’; and told the French National Assembly in 2019 that ‘the Scottish government is committed to the European Union’. As of 2021, the Scottish government was spending almost £6 million annually on its aforementioned overseas offices. In 2014, in his capacity as external affairs minister, Humza Yousaf called for an arms embargo on Israel, which then as now was engaged in a military operation against Hamas in Gaza.

Set against years of Scottish government provocation and empire-building, Lord Cameron’s mild rebuke does not go anywhere near far enough. Threatening to withdraw Foreign Office support and require the Scottish government’s embryonic consulates to find new office space is not an adequate response. UK government civil servants assigned to the Scottish government must be prohibited from engaging in activities related to foreign affairs without permission from Whitehall. If that doesn’t put a stop to Holyrood’s usurpation of Westminster’s foreign policy powers, parliament will have to consider legislative remedies. As prime minister, Cameron twice revisited the Scotland Act to expand Holyrood’s powers. If the government has to go back a third time, it should be to restrict them.

Stop sending Christmas cards! 

Christmas cards are the pits, aren’t they? A positive engine of seasonal ill-will. They take hours to do, if you do them properly, and wing across the country (and have you checked the price of a stamp lately?) to be received by people you like but don’t see, or people you see but don’t like – and to find themselves consigned to the recycling bin, in many cases, within thirty seconds of being opened. You feel guilty when you get a card from people you failed to send one to; and resentful when you don’t get a card from people you remembered to send one to.

It strikes me, though, that we civilians have it positively easy on the Christmas card front. Imagine what it must be like being a member of the royal family. It’s enough to cause pity to well in the heart of even the most fervent of republicans. If you’re the King or the Prince of Wales, you have to send hundreds and hundreds of the wretched things. Thousands, probably: many to people you actively loathe and institutions you’ve barely any memory of being involved with. More than that, you’re expected to lose what I imagine will be a full day of your life to a professional photoshoot: not for you, unfortunately, the bumper pack of Oxfam cards decorated with a generic robin redbreast.

Then, which is even worse, the moment the first one lands on the first doorstep, they are all over the papers. Your choice of clothes, your expression, the setting, the arrangement of your family in the frame: these things are parsed for meaning with the sort of hermeneutic energy otherwise only reserved for the discovery of some long-lost gnostic gospel turned up in a dig in Alexandria.

So, this year, we were informed at some length that the Prince and Princess of Wales were projecting ‘undone glamour’ in this year’s seasonal snap. Undone glamour? No, me neither. Implies a magic spell that’s been disenchanted, or a 1940s actress after a casting couch incident, if you ask me. Or maybe it means that they’re looking glamorous but have the top buttons of their shirts loose, which is sort of the case here. I mean, it’s a perfectly normal family photograph, or as perfectly normal as a professionally styled black-and-white family photograph of a Prince and Princess of Wales is likely to look. The couple are smiling. Their three kids are smiling. Everyone’s in a matchy-matchy pale shirt and jeans. The kids are in plimsolls. HRH has his sleeves rolled halfway up his forearm.

Yes, yes, but what does it mean? Could it be that in channeling ordinary folk – who are presumed to appear in photographs without ties – it’s a sign that the future of the monarchy is in reforming hands? Or is it, as one critic earnestly contended, ‘a visual powerplay that attempts to bring some of the gloss that has been lacking from the monarchy in recent years back to public view’? Or is it a brazen challenge to the Montecito cool of the estranged brother and sister-in-law? Another such critic: ‘there is one California couple, all too eager to show their warts of late, that this can’t help but seem like a reference to. What new front this Christmas vibe-snatching opens up in the war between the brothers and their wives is anyone’s guess.’

Comparisons are, of course, made to the parental Christmas card, which came out on the same day. His Majesty wasn’t having any of that unbuttoned glamour stuff. He appeared with the Queen, photographed in full colour, positively festooned with Royal bling: coronation tunic and robe of estate, topped for monsieur with the Imperial State Crown and for madame with Queen Mary’s Crown. There’s all manner of gold-trimmed, red velvet swag in the background and it looks as if they‘re standing in great pools of fabric as their robes spill past them and down two or three steps in front. Very much not your classic ordinary folk family snap.

So, is Prince William’s unbuttoned look a shocking challenge to his father’s traditionalism? Or is this a carefully co-ordinated one-two punch drawn up by the Way Ahead Group – showing the younger generation that Princes of Wales can be groovy while reassuring older monarchists that there are still plenty of crowns and diamonds in the Buck House dressing-up box?

Me, I think that we can and should apply Occam’s razor to the problem. They’re just sodding Christmas cards. The King is a stuffy old thing, and he’s also the King, so you can expect him to have a slightly stuffy Christmas photo, and that’s cool. The Prince of Wales is a Sloane Ranger married to another Sloane Ranger, and he’s in his early forties, so he’s likely to look a bit more Boden catalogue than his seventy-something dad. If either of them wanted to send an important message to the public, or to their estranged relatives on the other side of the Atlantic, there are easier ways to do it than through the medium of highly ambiguous fashion statements that need to be picked apart like entrails by the haruspices of the popular press.

My advice to them, not that I flatter myself they will take the slightest interest in it, is to stop sending Christmas cards altogether. Getting Christmas cards only encourages people. It takes five or ten years for your friends to get the message, become former friends and stop bothering to send you cards at all. Plus, if you’re the Prince of Wales, you will be spared opening your morning paper to discover that you’ve apparently been sending coded messages through your family snap like someone blinking in a hostage video. Time, money and face saved, you can concentrate on the important things in life: eating mince pies and snoozing in front of a Bond movie like everyone else.

How the English invented champagne

Is champagne a wine region or a state of mind? The small bubbles have a way of getting into the bloodstream and the imagination, creating a slightly euphoric sensation which encourages pleasant chatter. But who put the sparkling genie in the bottle? Who pioneered the intricate process of secondary fermentation in a bottle strong enough to withstand six atmospheres of pressure and contains all those wonderful bubbles of CO2, about 20 million per bottle? 

In France, it is claimed that it was Dom Perignon (1638-1715), ‘Come quickly. I am tasting the stars,’ he is supposed to have said. Very romantic, a convenient sales pitch. The only problem is that the story is cobblers. Even eminent French wine historians now agree that there is no written evidence for it. 

Events in Hereford, Oxford, Somerset and London suggest a very different origin story. In the 1620s, strong dark green bottle glass, known as Verre Anglais, was invented by Huguenot glassmakers who had fled France. The onion shaped bottles had necks with a string lip for tying down the cork and a punt or kick in the bottom to make them stronger. In a legal judgment of 1662 given by the attorney general, four Huguenot glass makers made a sworn affidavit that Sir Kenelm Digby had invented this type of bottle while they were in his employ ‘neere thirty years earlier’.  

One cidermaker well-known to Sir Kenelm was a Hereford man, Lord Scudamore. In his 1631 to 1632 household accounts, he bought six dozen bottles from glass merchants in London and Gloucester and six dozen corks. He even has a ‘new lock for ye Sydar house door’ where he carried out his experiments in fermentation. After four years as Charles I’s ambassador in Paris, Scudamore returned and in 1639 he took six bottles of cider up to London. He also had a 14-inch-high cristallo glass flute made for drinking sparkling cider, engraved with the royal coat of arms on one side and his own on the other. This glass is now in the Museum of London.   

The glass looks very much like a champagne flute and yet, in 1639, Dom Perignon was only a one-year-old. So all the pioneering work – learning how to control the effervescence and the naughty little dregs was done in England by these cider makers with new-fangled tough dark bottles. Scudamore also had ‘rare contrived cellars’ with running water and he is credited with turning cider from ‘an unreguarded windy drinke fit only for Clownes and day labourers into a drink fit for Kings, Princes and Lords’. Sadly the civil war intervened and Scudamore’s lands in Herefordshire were sequestered.  

Another cider maker, Ralph Austen, an ardent parliamentarian from Leek, had a large walled garden on Queen Street in Oxford which contained the world’s first cider bottling factory. In 1653 he wrote:  

Cider maybe kept perfect a good many years, if being settled it be drawn into bottles and well stopt with corkes and hard wax melted thereon, and bound down with pack thread, and then sunke down into a well or poole, or buried in the ground, or sand laid in a cellar.

Crucially, a note was printed in the margin of a book he published in 1657: ‘Put into each bottle a lump or two of hard sugar or sugar bruised’ – a crucial part of the champagne-making process. He was also on the right track. 

Next John Beale, fellow of the Royal Society and Vicar of Yeovil wrote many aphorisms on cider published in Pomona in John Evelyn’s Sylva. In a paper of 10 December 1662, John Beale mentions ‘A walnut of Sugar’ being added to every bottle of cider, something around 18g sugar per bottle which is spot on. The astronomer Sir Paul Neile uses a ‘nutmeg of Sugar’ playing on the safe side. Here you will find ‘Potgun Cider’ which flies around the house from the addition of too much sugar. Sir Paul also advises that bottling in the manner of cider ‘may doe good to French Wines also’. A crucial step forward. The first time that bottling with the addition of sugar has been articulated for French wine. This is 1663. Wine buffs take note: it is all about technique and méthode. Dom Perignon only enters Hautvillers Abbey in 1668.    

But did this cider fully sparkle? The key is in the word mantle, forming a vigorous head or froth. To mantle or not to mantle, that was the real question. In 1657, a letter from John Beale to Samuel Hartlib illustrates the point: ‘We will rather drinke pure water, than the water of rotteness, as we call all drinke that does not mantle vigorously.’

So mantling cider was de rigueur by 1657 or as the French would say, mousse. Royalist youth wanted to put a bit of sparkle back into life under Puritan rule. John Beale’s letter continues: ‘Our Cider, if it bee brisky, will dance in the cup some good while after it is powred out. They will not drinke cider, if it be no soe busy, as thoroughly to wash their eyes whilst they drinke it.’  

Now enter Silas Taylor, a parliamentarian captain of horse, with a family estate near Hereford and one of Pepys’s spies in Harwich and a composer to boot. It is Silas Taylor’s 1663 descriptions of cider in a letter to the Royal Society which gives real colour to the sparkling debate.  

I have tasted of it, three years old, very pleasant, though dangerously strong. The colour of it, when fine, is of sparkling yellow, like Canary, of a good full body and oyly: the taste of it like the flavour or perfume of excellent peaches, very grateful to the palate and stomach.

Excellent. But does it really sparkle? Silas Taylor then gives advice on how to bottle cider and the great care needed to get the timing right.  

This makes it drink, quick and lively; it comes into the glass not pale or troubled, but bright yellow, with a speedy vanishing nittiness (as the vinters call it) which evaporates with a Sparkling and whizzing noise.

The Oz Clarke of his day… So sparkling cider was not only on par with wine at this time, it was streaks ahead. They even had wooden racks for storing bottles with the necks pointing downwards. My hypothesis is that the cidermakers passed their knowledge onto the London wine merchants who perked up their flat champagne wine. That knowledge slowly filtered back to France. Viva Lord Scudamore. Ruinart, the first French champagne house was not founded till 1729. Voila! 

Letting go of my mother’s house

My mother passed away last year and it fell to me to sort out her house. Returning from four years in Russia and the Caucasus, I moved into her Suffolk home to get it ready for selling. There was a huge amount to do. Alongside organising my mother’s headstone – no small or hasty business – there was an entire house and a life to sort through. This involved going through endless knick-knacks, glasses, crockery, clothes – and 15 or more rubble sacks of papers and old letters. The last was both cathartic and disconcerting. These are written relics of a life that existed before I came along, one that may well have been richer and more hopeful. I found mountains of love letters to my mother from luckless suitors, good luck telegrams from her family as – in her early twenties – she’d set out on her big trip to America, and notes from university theatre directors begging her, as a young woman, to audition for their latest play. A life I’d dimly known about but had never seen evidence of before.   

But there was too much to do to brood on it. We’d released equity, the interest was rising day by day, and a local-handyman-who-knows advised us to sell the house immediately in its shopsoiled state before the downturn came. But it was my mother’s home – she would, I knew, have wanted it passed on in decent condition. Thus began a learning curve I’m sure is second nature to most homeowners – finding gardeners, plants, carpets and carpet layers, learning to sand and paint woodwork, buying one of those special roller extensions to reach ceilings (I tell you now, redecorators, stick to white walls, or trying not to botch the joins between wall and woodwork is a nightmare). We finally found a buyer last month and ended up getting the exact amount we were quoted last January before the great sprucing up began. There’s a lesson in that, though too late for us.   

Yet I can’t regret the time or money invested. If my mother’s Alzheimer’s was a five-year goodbye, this period in her home has been the final letting go of a parental hand. I wake up in the same house she did, walk the same streets, make a cup of tea with the same kettle – and though I don’t feel her presence here (that went with much of the furniture) and wouldn’t want it to go on forever, it’s all been very comforting. It has also allowed me, after 30 years of coming here, to finally get to know Newmarket, the racing town she settled on as her home.  

Newmarket wasn’t a place I would ever have chosen. Horses leave me cold – I’ve had an aversion to them ever since, as a child, I got kicked hard by a chestnut one called Modger.Horses are the business of this town – if they’re not crossing the road in front of you, you can hear them whinnying and stamping in nearby buildings. World-class racecourses are a mile or so away, and in the morning dozens of trainers and stable hands go cantering over the local heath. This presumably would be manna to some people. But if you’re not into racing, then Newmarket – as my sister is fond of saying – is a bit of a one-horse town. There’s no theatre, cinema or dedicated bookshop, no pub with roaring fireplace or crackling logs. To get any of these things you have to take a train to Cambridge or Bury St. Edmunds. Apart from the horse people – for whom this is the centre of a spinning world – Newmarket is a dormitory town for bigger, starrier places nearby.  

Yet I have, over the last year, grown cautiously fond of the town and got used to it. It’s not much more than a long high street – the usual hardware and betting shops, a faintly retro W.H. Smiths, a Starbucks and a Caffe Nero and, in the Rutland Arms, a once fine, now defunct old hotel. Amid the statues of horses and equestrians, there’s every kind of restaurant: the residents of Newmarket could eat their way around the world seven nights a week. But rising above those low buildings you can see the land beyond and a furze of far-off trees and at the end of the road, just beyond the clocktower, open country begins. This, along with those uncluttered East Anglian skies, gives a feeling of space and freedom. Sometimes, when the sky’s overcast, the air is damp and the wind is gently blowing, you get an atmosphere and a smell that you could bottle and sell as ‘Englishness’ – what I’ve occasionally longed for in the time I’ve lived abroad.  

I know few people round here, but it doesn’t matter. I have a friendly neighbour called Roger, a biochemist in his 70s, a man who has lived abroad, travelled extensively and is brimming with good will towards his fellow man. Next door is Helen, a wonderfully organised woman (her lawn puts me to shame) who’s willing to stop and chat and feeds my cats when I’m away. And that – barring the nice couple at number 3 – is about it. There’s a freedom, too, in popping out to Waitrose without the threat of being seen unshaven or sloppily dressed by anyone you know. I’ve found I’m quite easy to keep happy too – a pub breakfast, a visit to a garden centre, the occasional afternoon walk to the local Spa Hotel a mile away for coffee and biscuits. There’s a nearby museum of horse-paintings and though the subject matter is of little interest to me, I like the feel of a gallery with its gift-shop and café. If you’re not out to build a roaring social life, what more do you need?  

Besides, I have memories here. Revising for a Shakespeare exam 30 years ago, going swimming in the (now closed) high street pool, thinking about the History Plays while doing lengths, following it with a doorstep cheese and bacon sandwich at the Clock Tower Café (also gone). Talking to my mother over one of her roasts, visiting farm shops in her Nissan Micra, walking her dog. I have taken the train from Cambridge countless times, emerging onto the platform of its sweet, one-track station, to make my way home through the evening backstreets. I like the solid, pebble-clad old buildings, and can finally see why she loved the nearby heath so much – a wonderful, vast, rolling sweep of pure green, mown into clean stripes beneath a cloudless blue sky, with a kind of 1930s austerity to it. All these things I might well miss.  

Come February and completion dates, it will all be over. There will be nothing to drag me back here except my mother’s burial plot, with the huge East Anglian fields swelling gently beyond. I have no clear idea yet where I’m going when I leave this house for the last time and life’s perhaps the more bracing for it. As they probably shout at those racehorses from time to time: ‘Come on, y’old bugger! Jump!’ 

Teenage teachers won’t fix Britain’s classroom troubles

Teaching in the UK is in trouble. Less than half the number of secondary school teachers required this year, a record low, have been recruited, according to government figures released last week. STEM (science, engineering, technology and maths) subjects are particularly struggling: we only have 17 per cent of our target number of physics teachers and 63 per cent of maths teachers (down from 88 per cent last year). Yet this is a problem across the curriculum: the only subjects where the government met its targets were classics, PE and history.

Teach First, the largest teacher training programme in the UK, announced this weekend that in order to tackle this recruitment crisis it will consider being part of a new apprenticeship scheme for trainees as young as 18. The idea is that these trainee teachers would pay no tuition fees and earn a salary as they worked, thereby hopefully attracting school-leavers who are put off by the cost of a degree. Teach First itself has been struggling in recent years: last year it recruited the lowest number of trainees in four years, missing its target by one-fifth.

There are obvious safeguarding issues with this proposal: having teachers and students who are potentially only a few months apart in age is a very strange relationship dynamic. I remember when I first started teaching, aged 21, that I thought my relative youth would make it easier for me to build relationships with the students. To some extent this was true, yet it also made it harder for me to exert authority. My relative lack of life experience did not help matters either.

Teaching apprenticeships could also erode the status of the profession even further. Teachers should be, fundamentally, subject specialists, not teenagers who have had no further education than the one they are instructing. Having a degree, for all of its financial downsides, gives you a lot of weight in the classroom, and students are much more likely to look to you for expertise – and to see you as an aspirational figure – if you have been to a good university yourself. The ever-widening roles teachers take on, particularly in terms of pastoral responsibilities, means that the importance of subject knowledge has been sidelined for other skills, but surely we need to re-establish teaching as a more academic profession, not less? We already have lower entry requirements than many other OECD countries: for example, in Finland, France, Portugal and Spain, graduates need a masters degree in the relevant subject to become a secondary school teacher, whereas in the UK 22 per cent of maths teachers and 43 per cent of physics teachers have no relevant post A-level qualification.

The other fundamental problem is that this will do nothing to help retention. The largest workforce survey by the Department for Education found that 40,000 teachers resigned from state schools last year, while the number of teaching vacancies have doubled in the last two years. Shockingly, 40 per cent of teachers leave within five years of qualifying. Teach First also has a particularly high turnover: only 69 per cent of Teach First teachers continue for more than one year after qualifying (compared to 88 per cent who train through other routes). The government is therefore literally paying hundreds of millions to train up staff who will simply not stay. Why should we assume the same thing won’t happen with apprenticeship teachers?

There are many reasons for this mass exodus: poor behaviour in schools, the pressures of Ofsted, other careers being able to offer more flexible, family-friendly arrangements like working from home. Ultimately though, the two main factors are pay and workload. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, salaries for more experienced teachers have fallen by 13 per cent in real terms since 2010. Graduates in STEM subjects can command much higher salaries in the private sector, and so are particularly hard to recruit and retain: in the early 2010s, maths teachers accounted for nearly 30 per cent of its secondary cohort, but this declined to 18 per cent by 2018. Unless we can address this, then we will continue to experience a brain drain of the best and brightest into other professions.

If we can’t give teachers more money, then we could potentially give them more time. Due to increasing pupil numbers and decreasing staff levels, teacher timetables in most schools are made up of 90 per cent teaching time and 10 per cent PPA (planning, preparation and assessment time). We need to ease some of these pressures and allow for more good old-fashioned thinking space. This might, ironically, mean recruiting more teachers: at an extreme end, allowing for 50 per cent PPA would require about a third more teachers coming into the system. Yet if this increased quality, standards and job satisfaction, then it would also increase recruitment and retention. This would be a long-term investment; apprentice teachers, on the other hand, are a short-term band-aid.

Nigel Farage has left the jungle. What now?

Nigel Farage has left the jungle. For a brief moment it looked as if the original Brexiteer might pull off yet another electoral upset. Instead, he finished a creditable third on I’m a Celebrity… one of the biggest popularity contests on TV.

Throughout the series, left-leaning commentators have accused ITV of deliberately ‘fun-washing’ (a depressingly 2023 phrase) Farage’s reputation. The comedian Stewart Lee wrote an especially humourless piece for the Guardian, which included a passage implying that because of Farage’s appearance in the jungle, Ant and Dec were somehow sympathisers of the Norwegian white supremacist Anders Breivik (yes, really). I have little doubt that alongside an army of GB News viewers and hardcore Brexit supporters, there will also have been those who voted for Farage simply to enjoy the crescendo of hysteria from left-wing social media every time he survived a vote-off.

And yet, it would be a mistake to assume Farage’s podium finish is a sign that viewers have fallen in love with either his personality or politics. For those of us who have followed the series closely, he has made for surprisingly lacklustre television. As Gareth Roberts correctly observed on these pages a few weeks ago, Farage has revealed himself to be a really rather boring man. He has largely (and perhaps deliberately) avoided any blazing political rows with his campmates, and shown little of the roguish bonhomie one associates with him. Aside from a brief glimmer of jocularity, when he performed Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy’ during a karaoke session in the Jungle Arms, he has been a peripheral figure, reduced to wandering around camp muttering about the litter. 

This time last year, on the same programme, the former Health Secretary Matt Hancock surprised the nation by also finishing third. Twelve months on, has it led to a fundamental reappraisal of Hancock the man, or the politician? Absolutely not. If anything, it has only added to the existing narrative that he’s a somewhat pitiful figure desperately craving validation and attention. Farage’s motivations are just as transparent. Early in the series, he complained to fellow campmate Grace Dent, naively believing he was off camera, that he was disappointed not to be doing that day’s bushtucker trial, because it accounts for ‘25 per cent of the airtime’. It’s a comment Ant and Dec have enjoyed poking fun at ever since. On another occasion he was asked if he wanted to be Tory leader or prime minister one day. He gleefully responded ‘never say never’. This is not a man who is disguising his true intentions. 

What happens next for Farage? Given the current state of the Conservative party, it is entirely conceivable that Farage may end up as its leader within a few years, whatever the consequences will be. Or perhaps he will re-engage with Reform UK, previously known as the Brexit party, whose polling numbers have risen in recent months. Either way, this won’t be the last we hear of Nigel Farage. Throughout his time in the jungle, he has given the impression of an opinionated man choosing to hold back, desperate to avoid causing too many rows with his campmates or alienating ITV viewers. Now he’s left the confines of the Australian rainforest, he won’t have any such qualms. Nigel Farage is out of the jungle. His third act starts now.

Why Joe Biden’s Latin America policy is failing

At the opening ceremony of the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles last year, President Joe Biden announced the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, which the White House described as “a historic new agreement to drive our hemisphere’s economy recovery and growth and deliver for our working people.”

The plan has become the administration’s signature Latin America policy. As noted by the White House, the region matters not solely because it’s where the US is situated, but because it also accounts for 32 percent of global GDP. Even more so, the region is rich in resources that are crucial in the development of emerging technologies. The Americas account for about a quarter of global exports in agricultural and fisheries products, and although their manufacturing has stagnated with the rise of Asia, with the right policies, it could offer some alternatives in various industries. 

But even if the administration refuses to say it out loud, the region matters because it matters to our most formidable geopolitical competitor. “China is capable of providing loans with far fewer strings attached than the US, which is why their economic influence in the region has become pervasive,” House Foreign Affairs chairman Michael McCaul told The Spectator. So pervasive, in fact, that through economic means they have been able to advance their geopolitical goals. 

This year alone, China has condemned the United States in a summit for developing countries in Cuba, where, according to McCaul, “the CCP is colluding with the corrupt Cuban regime to enhance the spy station it operates just ninety miles off the US coast.” China has also improved its relationship with natural resources-behemoths such as Venezuela and Brazil.

The US continues to be Latin America’s top trading partner. But unlike the optimists, Chairman McCaul stressed that the fact alone does not mean the US is winning. China has surpassed the US in developing trade relations with individual countries. A closer look reveals that US trade with Mexico alone accounts for 71 percent of its trade with the region. Meanwhile China dominates in trade with most countries, including Brazil, Argentina and Peru. 

China’s increased presence in Latin America has other effects. “Five Latin American countries have severed ties with Taiwan in recent years,” McCaul pointed out, illustrating how China looks at the region to advance causes that go beyond profit maximization.

You might expect Biden’s Latin America strategy to take these realities into account, but that hasn’t happened. “It’s far past time for the Biden administration to better prioritize expanding our economic footprint in Latin America,” McCaul said.

The main problem with APEP is that it is nothing more than a forum, with little focus on trade policy. It sells itself as a way forward, but it lacks the mechanisms to do so. Allies of the administration have expressed their frustrations about this in Congress. In March, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Virginia senator Tim Kaine criticized the White House: “I struggle to see what this administration is doing in Latin America that has any heft to it.” Similarly, grilling State and Treasury Departments representatives, Chairman Robert Menendez said, “I am so embarrassed because when I meet these heads of state, I can’t tell them that they’re wrong” when they lambaste the US’s lack of a hemispheric agenda.

Another problem with the partnership is its members. APEP includes Barbados, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Uruguay. South America’s most powerful economies, Argentina and Brazil, are absent. For context, these two countries’ economies are equivalent to that of more than sixty-five Colombias. 

Even the current APEP members are unsold on the idea of participating in a simple, no-strings-attached forum. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador refused to attend the summit where the partnership was announced, citing the US’s refusal to invite leaders from Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela. For context, Mexico’s economy is equivalent to that of close to twenty Panamas. 

Other members of the partnership, such as the Dominican Republic and Colombia, aren’t that set on being the US’s partners either, with the former recently severing ties with Taiwan and the latter embracing Chavismo.

As the US grew more absent, paralyzed by fears of being called ugly names by Castro wannabes, Latin America has had the biggest democratic recession of any region over the past twenty years. In the name of democracy, America’s absence has made the continent far less democratic, even as spending fixates on democracy-building. China, instead, has focused on using all available means to advance their concrete interests — mainly, extracting a ton of resources and growing a presence in the US’s neighborhood. There are uncomfortable lessons for the United States to learn from China, starting with this one: material interests, not ideology, govern world affairs.

Nigel Farage comes third on I’m A Celeb

It’s been a highly anticipated finale of I’m A Celebrity, not least because of the staying power of Brexit mastermind Nigel Farage — who tonight made third place in the series. For weeks, viewers have been glued to their screens, delighting in seeing the controversial GB news presenter squirm. From eating pig’s anus on pizza to being filmed in the nude, it’s certainly tested Farage’s humility. 

But while no one could accuse Farage of being camera shy, ITV insiders have complained that the ex-MEP is ‘one of the least interesting campmates ever’. Others have criticised the former Brexit party leader of tactically stripping and wearing his shirt backwards to better display his voting information. Footage played back tonight by Ant and Dec showed him whispering to a fellow campmate that ‘if you do the challenges, it’s 25 per cent of the airtime.’ Once a politician, always a politician… 

Though not quite King of the Jungle, a beaming Farage told the presenting duo that ‘if the public have put me in number three, I couldn’t be more thrilled’. His mission in image rehabilitation well underway, Farage will now return to much less exotic surroundings. It’s back to the real world, where he’ll be pressed to address rumours about whether this has all been part of a grand scheme to return to frontline politics.

And maybe he will. After social media hashtags evolved over the course of the series from #BoycottImACeleb to #NigelFarageToWinImACeleb, the former Ukip leader has shown that when it comes to his infamous campaigning charm, he’s still got it…

Tory tribes gear up for Rwanda clash

The next 48 hours could be among the most important of Rishi Sunak’s premiership. His flagship Rwanda Safety Bill will get its second reading in the House of Commons on Tuesday, with MPs expected to vote on it in the evening. But before that there will be a day of tense meetings in rooms across the parliamentary estate as various Tory tribes gather to discuss the Bill and whether they can support it.

Much of the attention is focused currently on the right of the party. A quintet of factions will meet at noon on Monday under the auspices of the European Research Group to hear the conclusions of its ‘Star Chamber’ of lawyers. They have already given the legislation a ‘thumbs down’ with chairman Sir Bill Cash writing in today’s Sunday Telegraph that the legislation is insufficiently ‘watertight’ to avoid protracted legal challenges by illegal migrants.

Such a conclusion is hardly surprising, given the trenchant criticisms of the Bill by Robert Jenrick – the man who, until Wednesday, was charged with piloting it through the Commons. More worrying for party managers is the turnout expected, with representatives from the Common Sense Group, New Conservatives, Northern Research Group and Conservative Growth Group all expected there. The aforementioned encompass cultural conservatives, social conservatives, Red Wallers and Trussites too.

In the evening, attention will likely switch to the centrist wing of the party. The One Nation Group will meet Monday night and release a statement at around 7 p.m. Chaired by Damian Green, this caucus claims more than 100 members and are mindful of what the legislation would mean for Britain’s international obligations. Downing Street will be relieved that thus far, key members of the group appear to be remaining onside and could begrudgingly back the Bill despite reservations. 

What is telling is how few Tory MPs outside the government have said that they will either support or vote against the government – most are keeping their powder dry. Both David Davis and Dominic Raab, two solidly centre-right figures, have today signalled their support for the Bill, with the latter penning an op-ed for the Telegraph that urges MPs to not ‘let the best be the enemy of the good.’ It follows a joint article on Friday by James Daly and Philip Davies which notes that ‘we don’t have long left.’

The magic figure this week is 29 – the number of Tory MPs needed to vote against the Rwanda Bill to remove Sunak’s majority. But the last time a government Bill was defeated at a similar stage was in 1986 on Sunday trading. That fact is indicative of the government’s likely approach: convince MPs to abstain or vote for the Bill reluctantly, knowing that they can amend it further down the line.

Robert Jenrick, for instance, told Laura Kuenssberg this morning ‘I won’t be supporting this Bill, but I do think we can fix this.’ Sir Bill Cash meanwhile argues the government can ‘work respectfully’ with colleagues to amend the Bill. With Christmas looming, entreaties for a compromise could allow a tired party to make it through to recess and resume battle after a much-needed break.

But away from parliament, the most consequential event of all could happen tonight when Nigel Farage is released from the jungle. After a brief recuperation from his Australian ordeal, expect him to be vocal in his criticism of the government’s failure to deliver on its pledge to ‘stop the boats.’ His choices in the coming months could have more impact than any manoeuvrings from the various Tory tribes. 

Wes Streeting’s ‘tough love’ approach to saving the NHS

The NHS faces an institutional and structural problem in the way it works, Wes Streeting believes. ‘Unless it changes, it’s not going to survive.’ The shadow health secretary’s ‘tough love’ philosophy suggests NHS bosses are very much mistaken if they expect much more generous health spending under a Labour government. Instead, Streeting has slammed the health service for using winter crises as an ‘excuse’ for funds. 

Streeting’s interview in today’s Sunday Times comes as the health service is facing record high waiting lists of over 7.5 million and record waiting times (with 3.2 million waiting over 18 weeks for care). More junior doctor strikes have been announced as medics remain unhappy with their pay and working conditions – which inevitably means many more appointments and procedures will have to be rescheduled. The hospital system is congested: patients arriving in A&E are having to wait too long before they’re seen, while those fit for discharge from wards are left languishing as the country’s social care services have less and less capacity to cope with demand. But Labour doesn’t see the answer as simply funnelling more money into the system. 

Part of the reason for this is it can’t. Keir Starmer has said Labour won’t turn on the spending taps while the tax burden is on course to hit its highest level since the Second World War. In accepting the financial predicament it looks likely to inherit, Labour has had to reconsider its approach to the crisis in the NHS. Streeting’s ideas are radical, but not in the way you might expect. Instead of planning to completely reorganise the NHS, he’s more interested in specific areas of inefficiency. 

One example is GP time. Taking inspiration from Singapore, Streeting wants to move back to a ‘family doctor’ system where every patient is anchored to a GP, removing the ‘red tape’ that slows community doctors down and improving on the current system of funding allocation for practices. He also plans to cut unnecessary referrals so that patients aren’t bounced between GPs and hospitals, and back again. And the shadow health secretary is keen to make community healthcare a seven-day operation, with neighbourhood health centres open in the evenings and on weekends. 

In terms of the bigger picture, Streeting wants to ‘get rid of the stupid stuff that is holding the system back’. He pointed to the lack of communication between different hospital services, meaning patient records aren’t immediately available when a patient moves. There are less obvious inefficiencies too: different hospital trusts are all run in slightly different ways, which can cause issues for staff moving between them as well as affecting the transfer of patient information. Technology will play a crucial role here. Streeting wants to replicate Singaporean health apps to improve links between GP and hospital services and encourage patients to make better lifestyle choices. One points-based app awards users who improve their fitness with supermarket discounts – which could be one way of dealing with the UK's £100 billion-a-year obesity crisis. 

Many of Streeting’s proposals will be welcomed by clinicians, who – as Streeting tells the Sunday Times – ‘can see the examples of waste and inefficiency’ in the service. His plans to both regulate and improve the quality of NHS managers (essential particularly after the revelations of the Lucy Letby case) would mark an important development in the role of non-clinical NHS staff. The shadow health secretary points to the ‘dead weight of management bureaucracy’ that medics feel prevents them from being able to adapt to a changing patient population – with ageing patients the 1948 national health service was never built to manage. 

But while Streeting talks about the need to ‘adopt a culture of innovation’, his support of the NHS workforce plan concerns some medics. They worry an already crippled system will become flooded with physician associates (healthcare workers with advanced responsibilities without a medical degree) in place of qualified doctors. Promising innovation is one thing, but NHS staff are growing increasingly disillusioned with their workplace. Streeting has hinted a Labour government would offer striking doctors a more generous deal than what is currently on the table (a 6 per cent rise plus a payment of £1,250) – but this is still likely to be much lower than the full pay restoration to the 2008 levels the BMA are looking for, and may not stop the strikes.  

The shadow health secretary has become bolder in expressing his feelings about NHS reform. In October he talked of ‘rewiring’ the health service – now he’s clear that it’s ‘a service not a shrine’. His pragmatism will help him, he appears to think, mould a system that is more patient-centric and doctor-led. Will Streeting be the health secretary that saves the NHS on a budget? He’ll certainly have his work in government cut out, if he does indeed get that far. 

Sunday shows round-up: Robert Jenrick says the Rwanda bill won’t work

Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg after resigning on Wednesday, former immigration minister Robert Jenrick was disparaging in his assessment of the government’s new Rwanda legislation. Explaining his resignation, he said he couldn’t be the minister guiding the bill through parliament. Jenrick implied he had a better understanding of the issue than the Prime Minister, and that a ‘political choice’ had been made to bring forward a bill which wouldn’t do the job. Jenrick claimed that under the proposed legislation, the Rwanda scheme would be bogged down by migrants’ potential legal claims and would not act as an effective deterrent.

Michael Gove: ‘this bill is the robust measure required’

In defence of the government’s plans, Levelling up Secretary Michael Gove argued that the scheme would not be mired by legal claims. He told Laura Kuenssberg that there were only ‘narrow exemptions’ to the policy, and individuals could only challenge their deportation if there was ‘an immediate risk of serious… harm’ to themselves personally. Gove claimed Rwanda was ‘clearly a safe country’, but also suggested that the fact the bill was being criticised on one side of the debate for striking out human rights legislation was evidence that it was sufficiently ‘robust’.

Liz Kendall: Home Secretary’s immigration plan has a fundamental flaw

On Sky News, Trevor Phillips asked Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall about James Cleverly’s recently announced five-point plan to cut legal migration. Kendall claimed Labour had been calling for some of the Home Secretary’s proposals for some time, but said the government was not dealing with the crucial issue of skill shortages. Kendall told Phillips that Labour would have ‘fundamental reforms’ of apprenticeships and training to cut immigration in a way that works for the economy.

Olena Zelenska: ‘If the world gets tired, they will simply let us die’

Finally, Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska spoke to Laura Kuenssberg about the worsening plight of her country, in the face of an ammunition shortage for the Ukrainian army. Zelenska made an impassioned plea for the continued support of western countries, saying a lack of support would be a ‘mortal danger’ to her people.

SNP probe investigates £95,000 Jaguar

It’s safe to say that it’s not been a great year for the SNP. For 2023 ends as it began – with questions being asked about the long-running investigation into the party’s finances. And while a luxury campervan sparked headlines earlier this year, attention has now alighted on the purchase of a luxury £95,000 Jaguar car. Can’t beat buying British, eh?

As part of Police Scotland’s ongoing probe, the cops are investigating the purchase of a top range electric vehicle. It is alleged to have been bought by Nicola Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell – the SNP’s former chief executive – from a dealership in Edinburgh in October 2019. A car of the same description as the Jaguar, registered in 2019, was photographed on the couple’s driveway in March 2021. Now, it has been sold, with questions being asked as to its sale history.

A source told the Sunday Mail:

Police have interviewed at least one worker at the dealership about the sale. This is an extremely high-end vehicle, one of the most expensive electric SUVs on the market. The basic price start at around £80,000 and optional extras can get you up to £95,000 if you are going for all out luxury. It goes without saying that it is completely out of the price range of most people, especially in a cost-of-living crisis.

It’s the second notable vehicle to be investigated as part of Operation Branchform, following the discovery of the £110,000 motorhome languishing in Murrell’s mother’s drive. The police investigation into the party’s funds — to find where the ‘missing’ £600,000 of indyref2 donations went — remains ongoing. All this at a time when donations to Humza Yousaf’s party are drying up, with a paltry £7,400 received in six months, according to public accounts.

Talk about a car crash…

The French elite have realised that Marine Le Pen might win

You can tell that French elections are in the air because legal proceedings are being taken against a leading figure of the French right. So it was with François Fillon of the Républicain party, a key contender in the 2017 presidential elections, whose hopes of winning were dashed during the campaign by legal investigation into alleged misuse of parliamentary funds, subsequently ending his political career. So it is now with Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National, as France gears up for the 9 June 2024 European parliament elections, for which her party is the clear front-runner. This week, French investigating magistrates scheduled a hearing for 27 March 2024 to determine whether Marine Le Pen, the Rassemblement National and 27 members misused EU funds in the payment of parliamentary assistants between 2004 and 2016. If found guilty they risk ten years imprisonment, a fine of one million euros and, most significantly, ten years of ineligibility for public office.

A charitable mind might venture that this is merely the work of an overzealous self-confessed left-wing judiciary. In 2013 photographic evidence was published of a notice-board in the premises of the Syndicat de la magistrature – the leading trade union for French judges – entitled the ‘mur des cons’ (literally ‘wall of c****). It displayed pictures of leading right-wing politicians such as Nicolas Sarkozy. This summer the same trade-union was present at the French Communist party newspaper’s annual political jamboree, where it participated in a debate on institutional police violence following the June riots. Any pretence of the judiciary’s political neutrality was discarded years ago. 

Yet if one adds public service broadcasting, France’s leading newspapers like Le Monde and the metropolitan elite, there is a growing panic-stricken realisation that in the near future Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblement National may be heading for power. Until now France’s elite has been in denial about this prospect, in the deluded belief that this could not happen in the country of the Rights of Man. But the writing has been on the wall for years. With the victory of nationalist right movements across the EU, from Sweden to Italy and the Netherlands, it only seems a question of time.

The EU itself is petrified at the prospect. In preparation for the 2024 elections in which the Rassemblement National is expected to wipe the board, Paris has been peppered with EU posters displaying carefree young individuals with the words: ‘Democracy, diversity and climate protection. Europe is you.’ Or ‘Unity, security and renewable energy. Europe is you’. All feature the slogan (in English): ‘You are EU’. The fear is poor youth turnout, especially the youth demographic that doesn’t yet vote for the RN (as many over the age of 25 do).

This week Le Monde featured a longitudinal study on how French attitudes to the Front National/RN have evolved over the last 40 years. The yearly barometer of French opinion shows for the first time a majority believing that the ‘extreme right’ party will soon participate in government. Le Monde with customary self-delusion puts this down to the political configuration from the 2022 legislative elections: the RN being the second largest party in an Assemblée Nationale in which President Macron is devoid of an overall majority. The paper then insists on an ‘acceleration’ since the summer: what it calls ‘the urban riots’ (when studies show the riots to have been far more widespread encompassing small market towns), the terrorist attacks in France, the reinforcement of the RN party’s president (the 28 year old, articulate, telegenic, Jordan Bardella, from an immigrant, banlieue, single-parent, background), and the national impact of the Middle East conflict. All, according to Le Monde, have given the ‘extreme right’ pride of place in public debate making its victory in the 2027 presidential election so much more likely. In short, adherence to the RN’s ideas, notably on public safety, immigration and Islam, has climbed, as has its ‘normalisation’ and credibility. What is more, the study reveals the porosity between the electorate of the traditional centre-right Républicain party and that of the RN, now viewed as the only opposition to Emmanuel Macron, even by left-wing sympathisers. The number of French who disagree with the RN’s ideas is the lowest ever at 54 per cent, while most people believe the party is no threat and 65 per cent believe it will come to power.

Now that the denial is lifting amongst France’s elite, be prepared for more dirty tricks to block Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella from power.

Does Macron want to make France more multicultural?

Emmanuel Macron will address France in the coming weeks in what is being billed as a ‘Message of Unity’ speech. According to Le Monde, the president is aware that the country is in turmoil but he believes he can make France great again. ‘The role I have assigned myself is to hold the country together,’ Macron is quoted as saying. ‘Between denial and over-dramatisation, there is room for lucidity that involves examining the country’s problems but also not letting it fall apart.’

Those problems are many, from a cost of living crisis to violent crime and much in between. The French have a reputation for not looking on the bright side of life, but there is little to be cheerful about these days in the Republic. Even the Olympic Games, which are coming to Paris next summer, have turned into a source of anger and embarrassment for millions. 

Much of the discontent is directed towards Macron. His enemies sense that he is floundering. The swagger has gone, and with it much of his authority. So, too, the respect of his adversaries, domestically and internationally. Macron talks but no one listens. 

Last week encapsulated his diminishing stature. The president became embroiled in a row after he hosted a Jewish ceremony at the Elysée Palace. Didn’t he or any of his advisors anticipate the furore that would erupt? Admittedly, much of the outrage was faux, manufactured by politicians – mainly on the left – who accused him of betraying France’s cherished laicite, or secularism. But that’s not the point. In inviting France’s Chief Rabbi, Haïm Korsia, to light the first of eight candles and mark the start of the Jewish festival of lights, Macron was also inviting criticism.  

A president of the Republic should not be seen to favour one religion over another. ‘Will Macron now do the same for other religions?’ wondered Alexis Corbière of La France Insoumise. ‘It’s a dangerous spiral.’ 

Jewish groups also expressed their unease about Macron’s gesture. ‘This is something that shouldn’t be allowed to happen again,’ said Yonathan Arfi, head of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (Crif). ‘French Jews have always considered secularism as a law of protection and of freedom. Anything that weakens secularism weakens Jews.’

What made Macron’s invitation to the chief Rabbi all the more inexplicable was the fact that last month he excused himself from joining a march against anti-Semitism precisely because he said that the president of the Republic should not be seen to take sides. France is about universalism, as Macron explained to the New York Times in 2020.  

He contacted the newspaper to rebut criticism of French secularism in the wake of the murder of the schoolteacher Samuel Paty. ‘There is a sort of misunderstanding about what the European model is, and the French model in particular,’ Macron said. Describing the model as ‘universalist, not multiculturalist’, he added: ‘In our society, I don’t care whether someone is black, yellow or white, whether they are Catholic or Muslim. A person is first and foremost a citizen.’ 

Does Macron still adhere to that view? The French left doesn’t think so, and nor do some on the right, particularly after his government launched an initiative last week called ‘The New Generation’.  

The objective, outlined by Rima Abdul Malak, the Minister of Culture, is ‘to better represent social and geographical diversity in the cultural professions’. This will be achieved by identifying, training and appointing 101 young professionals, between the age of 25 and 40, to positions of power in cultural institutions. These people will ‘reflect the diversity of society in all its dimensions (social origin, geography, disability, etc.).’ 

Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest party was quick to express its outrage, and according to a Sunday newspaper, they will take legal action against the Minister for Culture, who they accuse of embracing a ‘woke ideology’ that promotes ‘anti-white racism’. More to the point, they claim, the initiative is ‘illegal as it constitutes racial discrimination on the grounds of skin colour, which is prohibited by our laws and our Constitution.’

Macron wants to use his upcoming address to the nation to ‘restore hope’ and remind France ‘what makes us who we are’. But what is that? It is universalism or is it multiculturalism? Macron seems unsure, a leader who has lost contact with the people he leads. 

Six English sparklers to enjoy this Christmas

Before I started researching my book Vines in a Cold Climate, I had a particular image of English sparkling wine as consistent but rarely that exciting. It was all a bit formulaic, like big brand champagne but leaner. I am pleased to say that I could not have been more wrong as the wines now made all over southern England are incredibly diverse, offering a wide array of styles for every palate. If you’re spending between £25 and £50 then England actually offers, on the whole, much more interesting wines than Champagne. Here are six wines that show how different English sparkling wines can be.

Westwell Wicken Foy NV (Westwell £27.50)

I’m a big fan of Westwell not least because it’s one of the nearest vineyards to me. It produces a range of still and sparkling wines but this might be my favourite. It’s made from a blend of roughly equal parts pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay, and aged for 18 months so it’s still quite youthful. For me, the smell is of cider apples and then it’s saline and lemony on the palate with richer notes of yeast and toffee. Huge fun.

Coates & Seely NV ( The Champagne Company £29.50) 

The Coates & Seely in question are Christian Seely who works for French wine giant Axa Millésimes overseeing its prestigious wineries in Portugal, Bordeaux and Hungary, and former banker Nicholas Coates. This Hampshire sparkler is definitely the one to give to Champagne lovers to see if they can tell the difference. There’s green apple fruit with delicate floral, biscuit and hazelnut notes; subtle wine with a beautiful balance that gets better with each sip.

Everflyht Rosé de Saignée 2020 (Grape Brittania £40)

Rosé de Saignée is made using the technique of letting a little of the colour from the red grapes leach into the wine and then drawing some of the now pink liquid off. It’s then fermented in a mixture of wood and stainless steel and the results are wild: crunchy raspberries on the palate with woody oaky flavours and a little tannin. It’s so vivid and alive. You’ve never had fizz like this before.

Domaine Hugo 2020 (Hawkins Brothers £50)

This comes from a tiny biodynamic vineyard in Wiltshire run by Hugo Stewart who had made wine in the Languedoc before returning to his family farm to plant grapes. This is a blend of chardonnay, pinot noir, pinot meunier and pinot gris and, unusually, it’s fermented with wild yeasts and has no sugar added once secondary fermentation is complete. Risky in England’s marginal climate but in this vintage, it’s an absolute triumph, making a wine that tastes intensely rich and vital. Bravo!

Gusbourne Blancs de Blancs 2018 (Grape Britannia £65)

This is probably the English sparkling wine I know the best, mainly because it’s so often available by the glass in Kent. It’s always a great wine but I think this vintage might be the finest yet. It’s made entirely from chardonnay from Kent and Sussex and has that electric English freshness combined with a richness of fruit and irresistible baked croissant notes. 

Ridgeview Chardonnay Oak Reserve NV (Ridgeview £85)

Ridgeview is one of the biggest producers in the country. Everything in the range is consistently good but this shows what winemaker Simon Roberts can do when he lets his hair down a bit. It’s made entirely from chardonnay grown on the estate in Sussex and then fermented and aged in a mixture of old and new oak barrels, before undergoing secondary fermentation in bottle and aged for around six years. The result is something decadent and heady like a sparkling Meursault.

An election campaign is still dangerous for Putin

It was elaborately staged precisely to try and look unstaged. After a medals ceremony at the Kremlin for Heroes of the Fatherland day, Vladimir Putin joined an oh-so-unchoreographed gaggle of participants. One, Lt Colonel Artem Zhoga, appealed for him to stand for re-election. Although Putin admitted he had had second thoughts, he accepted ‘that there is no other way,’ and would indeed be running. This is, it is fair to say, not much of a surprise. Nor will it be a surprise if Putin wins in March. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be upsets along the way.

There was some sense that Putin may have been toying with stepping down in 2021, even though in a system like Russia’s, where law takes second place to politics, that is always a leap of faith, as it means putting your future and maybe even freedom in the hands of your successor. Ask Kazakhstan’s long-time autocrat, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who thought he had this sorted by hand-picking his successor and giving himself the key job of chair of the powerful Security Council for life – until his crony turned on him and he was forced ‘voluntarily’ to give up his position and be sidelined.

Ever since the invasion of Ukraine, though, there was no way Putin could risk stepping down, so the only question was when and how he was going to announce his run. Instead of staging a glitzy event for the announcement – he didn’t have to, when the full panoply of state-controlled media would blast the news to every corner – he took this approach with two goals in mind.

First of all, Putin is trying to present himself not simply as the people’s choice, but their servant. He has, in the past, complained of how hard he works for the Russian people, as a virtual ‘galley slave’ – it is clearly tough shuttling from palace to palace and sending men to die in an imperial war – and this is a similar gambit. Aware that there are signs of ‘Putin fatigue,’ his political technologists are trying to portray him as acting from duty, not ambition.

Secondly, the war is not actively popular with most of the electorate, and so Putin is faced with the challenge of being a wartime leader without being able to talk too much about the war. By surrounding himself with soldiers – Heroes of the Russian Federation, at that – he is seeking to invoke the needs of the war by osmosis.

Why does any of this matter? Surely Russian elections are stage-managed frauds, not real democratic processes? Of course – but that doesn’t make them wholly meaningless. They are essentially legitimating rituals, meant to try and persuade the masses that their vote counts and the regime deserves their loyalty and obedience, and make dissenters feel they are in a small minority and better keep quiet. To this end, they matter not for the outcome, but how much effort the political machine needs to put into manufacturing the planned result.

Rig it too much and too obviously and this defeats the object and risks – as happened in 2011/12 – triggering popular protests. The Russian presidential administration apparently plans an overwhelming win with 75-80 per cent of the vote on a 70 per cent turnout, to give a sense that the nation is united behind both Putin and his war. Avoiding protests will be a huge challenge.

To this end, there will be considerable efforts to ‘pre-rig’ the vote as far as possible. Favourable constituencies such as pensioners and factory workers can expect to be bought off. The minimum wage is already going up in January, and we can expect other sectors to get promises and maybe even real payoffs, all at the cost of an overstretched federal budget already supporting 30 per cent defence spending.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, will try to neutralise hostile constituencies. While the liberal opposition leadership is exiled or imprisoned, there is still life in the opposition, with Alexei Navalny’s team pushing an ‘anyone but Putin’ campaign. This may acquire greater significance as a nationalist ‘turbo-patriot’ opposition also emerges, with outspoken Kremlin critic (and likely war criminal) Igor Girkin, also in prison, campaigning to get on the ballot – already with unexpected support from the leftist Red Front.

Of course, it is unlikely any genuine opposition candidates will get on the ballot – another way of managing the result is to make the others standing even more unattractive than Putin. Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov will be standing, even though his brand of paleo-Marxism doesn’t appeal to many in his own party. Caricature nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky used to be a fixture to make Putin look statesmanlike, but he died last year and while his successor at the head of the LDPR, Leonid Slutsky, has suitably unpleasant views, he’s no showman. The real question will be who they can dredge up to be the token liberal, and whether anyone with any even limited credibility will be willing to play this compromised role.

Above all, elections are inherently destabilising, even sham ones. There has to be some kind of disagreement and debate, even if scripted, and this can create space for more discussion. The war, growing authoritarianism, the scope for civil society, environmental worries, economic dislocation: all of these will creep into the discussion, even if cautiously and often coded. So while the outcome is a given, the process is worth watching.

‘Rizz’, ‘vibes’, and what we lose with Very Online language

Welcome to our language: ‘rizz’. Here’s the OED definition: colloquial noun, ‘defined as ‘style, charm or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner’. It was announced on Monday as the Dictionary’s word of the year, and it’s here to stay sadly, because that’s how language works. That’s why we don’t speak like George Eliot characters.

Rizz became popular the way all words do nowadays: they start somewhere opaque online, then filter effortlessly into real life. As a 23-year-old, I hear it semi-frequently, although I kind of wish I didn’t.

What does it mean for a word to go ‘viral’? It means that everyone starts using them, and then we get a stale monoculture. These words, by definition, become clichés immediately. The worst example of this zombie language is the decline of adjectives, and the replacement of descriptive terms by saying something has ‘X’ vibes. ‘Vibes’ is a linguistic cop-out. You don’t have to explain anything, because saying ‘vibes’ will do the trick. Some other horrendous examples include: ‘it’s giving cringe’ – which is similarly vague – or saying that something ‘hits different’ if you can’t place why Coca Cola tastes better in the cinema. Listen to the mood-based names of the playlists that the Spotify bots are recommending me: #lightacademia, #duvetday, #serotonin, #bottomlessbrunch. Then scream.

It would be fine if this language was plain, intelligible or funny. Instead, it is neither creative nor accessible. In its airy talk of ‘energy’ and vibes’, it’s occultist: hard proof we’re dealing with pseudo-profundity here. 

The internet is hollowing out our language. The language we use matters, because it is the basis of all thought. If we speak worse, we think worse. And ‘rizz’ is speaking terribly. Martin Amis’s famous argument was that clichés of language are clichés of the mind. He wrote that ‘style is morality’, since elegant style reveals elegant thinking. Amis’s floweriness is sometimes juxtaposed to the plainness of Orwell, but the two men had the same belief in the essentialness of good language. In Politics and the English Language, Orwell wrote that:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved.

We’re all those ‘kind of dummies’ now, evoking buzzwords with little thought behind them. A right-wing politician that merely says the word ‘community’ will have post-liberals jumping up and down. Stock phrases such as ‘decolonisation’ and cynical theories like postmodernism become applied to almost anything regardless of the context, because they are a faux-clever substitute for original thought. It’s how you end up queering boats, as Portsmouth museum workers did to the Mary Rose earlier this year. It’s how you end up with Phoebe Bridgers calling Queen Elizabeth II a war criminal. It’s how you end up with Israel being called a ‘Nazi’ state in infographics. ‘Nazi’ = worst thing, ‘Israel’ = worst thing, so Israel = Nazi! It’s not thinking, it’s memeing.

The internet should have exposed all of us to a much more diverse culture, but it’s done the opposite. As we spend more time online, we’re catching the same patterns of speech and the same patterns of thought. Bad vibes.

The Tories aren’t being honest about foreign marriages

Western liberalism was built on the principle of marrying out. Our beliefs about the freedom of the individual ultimately stem from the Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage, which helped create a worldview that was open, trusting and opposed to both clannishness and xenophobia.

The medieval Church’s insistence that marriage be consensual was revolutionary and strange; back in the 13^th century a romantic poem, The History of William Marshal, has the protagonist coming across an eloping couple who have defied their parents to seek true love. Our hero then robs them, and since the story was commissioned by Marshal’s sons to glorify him, we can assume that public opinion might have thought this the right thing to do.

Yet three centuries later a popular playwright was able to write a story in which the audience sympathises with star-crossed lovers defying their parents’ wishes. Czech social scientist Karl Deutsch called this change of attitude ‘the Romeo and Juliet revolution’, and romantic freedom was intimately tied up with individualism – the idea that a person must be free to make their own life choices, rather than doing what is best for their clan.

Because the right to marry for love is central to our idea of individual liberty and personal happiness, many people strongly object to anyone who might stand in the way, whether it’s the Montague and Capulet patriarchs or the Conservative party.

So the government’s new marriage restrictions for foreign spouses have been harshly criticised, with many couples now denied a chance of happiness. The reason for this change of policy is that the Tories are at disastrous polling levels, almost bad enough to send them into Canadian-style extinction at the next election. They are even losing votes to the tiny protest party Reform – and were Nigel Farage to return from the jungle to lead that movement, the Conservatives might well come third.

The biggest headache is the huge rise in immigration post-Brexit, carried out both for economic and ideological reasons, but extremely unwise politically. After 2016 Tory and Labour voters realigned considerably on the issue of immigration and multiculturalism, and yet despite this the governing party ramped it up.

Immigration salience tends to rise and fall with immigration numbers, and while Brexit briefly took the wind out of the issue, public concern has once again followed the underlying figure.

It is not just that the numbers are large, but unselective. In the Telegraph, Sam Ashworth-Hayes writes that:

Just 335,000 of those coming in the year to September arrived on work visas. The numbers were made up by their 250,000 dependants, some 486,000 students, 153,000 dependants of students, and a surge in humanitarian and family visas (a little under 200,000)

This is not immigration as economic rocket fuel, but as a short-term patch. The dependants of people brought in to avoid paying British care-home workers more are unlikely to add significant economic value, and we can see this in the data; only 25 per cent or so are in work.

People arriving on social care visas are exempt from paying the NHS surcharge, and tend to work in low-paid roles. There is a good chance that they are a net fiscal drain even though they cannot claim benefits; the rest of the country pays for the schools their children attend and their healthcare, too. Other indicators bear this pessimistic perspective out. Despite many theoretically being selected for their ability to work, foreign-born residents are more likely to live in social housing than those born in the UK. In a country with a chronic housing shortage worsened by immigration, this is adding insult to injury.

So like panicking pilots heading towards the ground, the Tories are desperately pushing at any button, hoping one will magically save them from oblivion, and have hit on marriage. Yet while this new rule would have prevented low tens of thousands out of last year’s 1,180,000 migrants from arriving, at the same time potential migrants can still apply for a skilled worker visa if their salary is less than £26,000 but their job is in a ‘shortage occupation’ – and also bring dependents. (Although the government has also outlined plans to restrict other routes, which one must treat with a certain scepticism.)

This means that, perversely, the new rules may give foreigners more rights than British citizens in bringing a partner. According to the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, ‘in some circumstances, British workers would face more restrictive rules on family than migrant workers in the same job’ and ‘health professionals in the NHS who come to the UK on skilled work visas would be able to bring their non-UK citizen partners with them.’ So foreign nurses can bring over a spouse but British nurses can’t.

The new rules also mean that British professionals working in places like Singapore, Australia or the US are going to find it very difficult to move back with foreign-born husbands or wives, and these are just the people we want to return. The cost of compliance is already quite a burden, with various fees involved in trying to win over the Home Office.

The rule is particularly onerous becauseit only measures UK earnings. If you have a job in the US and marry an American, for example, you can’t get a British visa for them based on your American salary, but first have to move home, get a job, pass the earnings threshold and then apply for them to join you.

This seems both personally cruel, and unhelpful for the British state – so why has the government pushed this particular button? Firstly, when it comes to immigration, numbers attract headlines, and the numbers are astonishingly high. Yet while crude measurements are better than none, numbers are not the only problem – it’s just easier for the government to reduce this particular inflow, even if it means punishing high-productivity white-collar professionals based abroad.

On top of this, it’s also a good example of immigration concern being driven by taboo, and an unwillingness to say who we don’t want arriving. Instead the system tries to be ‘fair’.

British citizens marrying foreigners is not a problem, sham marriages within particular communities are. It is chain migration, through family reunion, which has the most negative social and economic effects.

When Labour came to power in 1997 one of the biggest mistakes they made was to abolish the ‘primary purpose’ rule, which required that newlyweds show that immigration was not the primary purpose of their marriage. This, activists complained, was racist. Indeed, it was designed to specifically stop members of minority groups using marriage to obtain British citizenship. And it was a good policy.

Abolishing the primary purpose rule led to a situation where, according to Christopher Caldwell, ‘Fully 60 per cent of Pakistani and Bangladeshi marriages [were] to spouses born abroad, a major factor in the roughly 50 per cent growth of the Pakistani population of Manchester, Birmingham, and Bradford over the 1990s.’ This not only sharply increased the size of these communities but also reinforced the culture of the old country and reversed integration. Often not only were spouses from the same ethnic group, they were from the same family, with UK citizens married off to cousins from the old country.

The most segregated Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Britain have not fully undergone the Romeo and Juliet Revolution, coming from cultures which are still clannish, making integration very difficult. Marriages were often forced, and resulted in a number of honour killings, which were annually in double figures by the time Labour left power.

This form of chain migration is extremely damaging to social cohesion, and becomes harder to control once a minority population becomes large enough. The only way you stop it is by clamping down on marriages. But because of taboos about openly saying who we wish to let in, we instead employ very crude measurements, and apply these rules far more widely.

Immigration taboos also lead to proxy arguments, the classic example being the EU and Brexit. The rising salience of immigration in Britain, and the rise of anti-immigration parties, first the BNP and then Ukip, came about with the rapid growth of segregated, largely south Asian communities from 1999 – before EU immigration ramped up in 2004. Indeed, both Leave and Remain voters preferred EU to non-EU migration, but because of taboos about discussing the issue, the EU became a proxy for immigration concerns. Immigration drove the Brexit vote, but even the argument about ‘control’ enabled senior Tories to convince themselves that it was wise to increase global migration afterwards.

Avoiding the real issue results in bad policy decisions, and the marriage rule is another example. It is in part designed to stop sham marriages and chain migration – unions that increase the separation of a minority group – but because it is so crudely applied the net drags in people who wouldn’t be a problem, and ends up needlessly making our lives worse.

Immigration policy should be directed towards serving the interests of British citizens and making their lives as convenient and happy as possible. Any restrictions will lead to hard cases having their hearts broken, but more selective rules can still minimise this human cost.

It should be a formality to bring in a spouse from another rich country, while having rules to make it difficult to do so from states which enable chain migration. A British professional overseas who wants to return with a Singaporean, Italian or Canadian spouse shouldn’t have to jump through hoops or spend a fortune in legal fees – they’re paying a high premium on an insurance policy which doesn’t usefully discriminate.

Numbers matter, but they are not the only story. The most beneficial sort of immigration comes from countries of relatively equal wealth, and the social cost of free movement between rich countries is minimal.

But because immigration concerns are so wrapped in taboo, the authorities are only able to use extremely crude and arbitrary rules. And so Romeo and Juliet must live apart.