Could Russia try to assassinate British officials?

You only have to hear the words of Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian President and Vladimir Putin’s long term chief sidekick, to realise just how far Russia has propelled itself from the circle of civilised nations.

Dmitry Medvedev has recently made a habit of outdoing even his boss in blood curdling rhetoric. His latest outburst is typical: a direct threat to the lives of British officials. Britain, he declared, is waging an ‘undeclared war’ on Russia through its support for Ukraine, and because of that all British officials have now become ‘legitimate targets’.

Dmitry Medvedev’s chilling words may be no idle threat. Russia has a long history of assassinating – or attempting to assassinate – both its own dissidents living abroad in exile or foreign residents who have dared to displease the men in the Kremlin.

In fact, just as the former president issued his threat, the pro-Putin TV propagandist Olga Skabeyeva, nicknamed the ‘Iron Doll’ for her support for the war, made a direct reference to one such assassination attempt – Moscow’s botched bid to murder former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia using the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in March 2018.

Olga, who is married to pro-Putin politician and fellow TV host Yevgeny Popov, said that she wanted to see the spire of Salisbury cathedral fall on the head of Foreign Secretary James Cleverly and impale him. She was talking about the absurd excuse offered by the two would-be killers of the Skripals, military intelligence agents Alexander Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga to explain their presence in Salisbury on that day.

Connoisseurs of the history of official Russian lies will need no reminding that the two men claimed in a press conference that they had merely been in Salisbury as tourists to see the city’s famous cathedral spire rather than on a mission to murder the Skripals.

Putin’s Russia not only uses state assassinations as an instrument of policy, but jokes and boasts about it too. At the same time, the hypocritical supporters of Putin’s war whine and grizzle when a few drones hit Moscow – apparently oblivious to the lethal bombardment unleashed on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, killing civilians on a daily basis.

Russia’s war crimes since launching its invasion of Ukraine have already seen Putin personally indicted by the International Criminal Court for the abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia – an atrocity unprecedented in Europe since the mass kidnaps perpetrated by the Nazis in world war two under their Lebensborn programme.

By openly avowing and bragging about their similar crimes so shamelessly, Putin and his apologists are demonstrating their readiness to defy the norms and rules that have governed the behaviour of civilised nations since the 19th century – safe in the belief that they will never be held accountable.  These sick words and wild threats should be treated with the contempt that they deserve. 

Is Trump taking Hillary’s road to oblivion?

A few months back I asked a question of Donald Trump: does he know why he’s running to be president again? He made one major speech of which even some of his most ardent followers questioned the enthusiasm. Since then he has occupied the depths of Truth Social and not much more. 

After his announcement to seek the presidency for a third time last November (he ran as a Reform Party candidate in 2000, remember), he has held one campaign rally, one town hall on CNN, made one stop in Iowa and another where he canceled a much-hyped rally. He has spent much of his time taking shot after shot at Florida governor Ron DeSantis, telling him not to join the race, but as we learned last week, his efforts were to no avail. 

When DeSantis somewhat stumbled out of the gate with a malfunctioning Twitter Spaces event hosted by Elon Musk, Trump posted a couple of memes on his own social media platform, and then the very next day went golfing at a LIV International tournament in Virginia. 

DeSantis in the meantime appeared on Fox News, then with radio hosts Mark Levin, Dana Loesch, Erick Erickson, Glenn Beck and Steve Deace. The Florida governor also announced an $8.2 million fundraising haul in 24 hours. And once again, Trump went golfing. When he gave reporters some brief comments, he did not seem to speak with the same passion and voice that comes through with late night Truth Social posts directed at his competition. 

This does not look like the Donald Trump who barnstormed the country on his way to trampling all over the media’s coronation of Hillary Clinton in 2016, where he more than doubled her campaign stops in the final two weeks. Perhaps Trump is simply biding his time. He’s still polling as the GOP frontrunner for the nomination, but it is by far no sure thing and DeSantis has occupied second a healthy distance back from Trump, before he even declared. DeSantis is undertaking an all-out media blitz in early primary states, hitting 12 cities. 

DeSantis is also planning a strenuous fundraising schedule through his own state and others. It may or may not matter in the long run, but the plan already looks to simply out-work and out hustle Trump for the nomination. Trump himself should know how perilous it is to sit back thinking the race is wrapped up. Hillary Clinton thought the same in 2016, to the point of completely ignoring both her husband’s own campaign warnings and the state of Wisconsin through the duration of the 105-day general election calendar.

Trump’s other problem is that he believes the polls he wants (like those run on Twitter) and doesn’t appear to have anyone around him any longer willing to challenge him on having the nomination in the bag — which he believes, based on his statements, Truth Social posts and declaration that he may skip the primary debates altogether. Trump is surrounded by junior D-league back-benching online influencers, desperate to keep his company, who will say and do whatever he wants to stay that way. This is how political careers end. 

Earlier this month, while both Trump and DeSantis were in the state of Iowa, Trump and his people nixed a rally at the last minute, citing extreme weather concerns. But no such weather ever came, Trump packed his bags and left, and Ron DeSantis decided to make a last minute BBQ stop just up the road in Des Moines, where Trump’s rally location sat empty. 

Ron DeSantis, as a candidate, has now scheduled a rally of his own today back in Iowa. Trump has yet to reschedule his own rally. DeSantis’s media assault and his fundraising haul should be a wake up-call to Trump, or a punch in the mouth. The race is officially on, and he is stuck on the back nine. There was another candidate in 2016 who thought she had the presidency in the bag and didn’t feel the need to show up — and Donald Trump is starting to look like her.

This article first appeared in The Spectator’s World edition.

Immigration is the ultimate threat to Rishi Sunak’s political survival

Rishi Sunak’s pet theory that voters are relaxed about the level of legal immigration – so long as the government is in charge of it – and only really care about illegal immigration has just collapsed.

New polling from YouGov shows that among 2019 Conservative voters, concern about immigration and asylum is now running nip and tuck with the state of the economy as their number one political issue (61 per cent include the economy and 60 per cent immigration when asked to name the top three issues).

The NHS lags far behind in third place, mentioned by 43 per cent. Concern about immigration among Tory voters is on a sharply upward trend and threatens to reach highs last seen in late 2015 and 2016 in the run-up to the EU referendum.

This compares to a low water mark for migration anxiety in late 2019 and early 2020 when much of the Tory electorate presumably chose to believe (mistakenly) that Boris Johnson could be trusted to bring down volumes.

All this should not really come as a surprise to anyone who read the papers or watched the TV news as the unprecedented 606,000 figure for net immigration during 2022 was announced on Thursday and received saturation coverage.

The Tory record of promise-breaking on this issue, stretching all the way back to 2010, was well excavated too. And in the Commons, even Keir Starmer felt able to attack the Tories from a relatively migration-sceptic stance.

On the one hand there is some comfort in the latest YouGov figures for Sunak given that of his five key priorities, three mention the economy, one is about improving the NHS and one about getting a tighter grip on immigration by ‘stopping the boats’. So he is still in the right territory in general.

But on the other hand he has, in effect, had to pretty hastily add a sixth priority, which is to bring down the level of net legal immigration after admitting that it is ‘too high’. And the impression has spread among many Tories that Sunak simply doesn’t comprehend their anxieties about the issue, which run far beyond the impact on wages and jobs and into housing, transport congestion, public services capacity, social and cultural cohesion and local community spirit.

A vague undertaking from the Prime Minister about reducing immigration from the astronomical levels he has inherited isn’t going to cut the mustard given that it comes as an offer of recompense to voters who have been let down so often and for so long. It also came across as hugely under-powered, with the PM just not transmitting the persona of someone who is determined to significantly reduce the numbers of incomers.

He’ll simply have to do better and be more specific or a big chunk of the 2019 Conservative vote is going to sit on its hands come the 2024 general election.

In PMQs last week, Starmer rolled into vacant territory about the need to do more to train British workers for the one million plus employment vacancies that exist. Labour’s greatest potential weakness among the Red Wall voters it needs to win back has therefore been neutralised by a combination of Starmer’s opportunism and astonishing levels of Tory carelessness about honouring promises on a key issue for their voter tribe.

It is, to use the technical jargon, a big mess for Sunak’s Conservatives. No wonder he thought better of hanging Home Secretary Suella Braverman out to dry over that speed awareness course nonsense. She is the only front-rank minister who gives off eye-catching vibes about being prepared to go hard and upset the political establishment to bring down immigration.

Had he allowed her to fall, Sunak would have been even more exposed on this front. As it is, he needs her onside to extend his career at the top of politics very much more than she needs him in order to extend hers.

Given her keen nose for a kill as a Brexit Spartan who helped finished off Theresa May, and as a cabinet resigner who was in the thick of the downfall of Liz Truss, this is not a position with which Sunak should feel remotely comfortable.

A prime minister who finds himself having to say – or even think – ‘save me, Suella’ is in big trouble. But having zero comprehension of the ‘gut’ Conservative position on mass immigration has led him to this juncture. He was too posh to push immigration control and must now farm it out to someone who isn’t. Good luck with that, Prime Minister.

Can we know an artist by their house?

Show me your downstairs loo and I will tell you who you are. Better yet, show me your kitchen, bedroom, billiard room and man cave. Can we know a man – or woman – by their house? The ‘footsteps’ approach to biography argues that to really understand a subject, a biographer must visit his childhood home, his prep-school boarding house, his student digs, his down-and-out bedsit and so on through barracks, shacks, flats, garrets, terraces, townhouses and final Georgian-rectory resting-place. Walk a mile in their shoes – then put on their carpet slippers.

So, to know Horace Walpole, we board the 33 bus to Strawberry Hill. For Henry Moore, it’s Hoglands and its cactus house. For Barbara Hepworth, St Ives and sculptor’s dust. For Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and the Sussex Bloomsbury bunch, it’s a train and a pub lunch in Lewes, then on to Charleston to coo over curtains and cushions. Make a weekend of it. Start at Charleston, then on to Monk’s House where Virginia Woolf played boules and wrote her books, then to Farleys where the photographer Lee Miller and the painter Roland Penrose played host to the surrealists. Don’t miss the Picasso tile above the Aga. (I want one!)

In ‘Great Men’s Houses’, an essay for Good Housekeeping, Virginia Woolf describes a visit to the Chelsea house of Thomas and Jane Carlyle. ‘One hour spent in 5 Cheyne Row,’ she writes, ‘will tell us more about them and their lives than we can learn from all the biographies.’ Yes, no, maybe so.

Take Kettle’s Yard. When I started writing a life of Jim Ede, collector, curator and self-declared ‘friend to artists’, who filled his home in Cambridge with pictures, sculptures, stones, shells, seedheads, feathers, flints, Delft tiles, Tibetan yak bells, Javanese puppets, and, famously, pebbles, I thought: serene interiors, serene soul. Not a bit of it. I found a man who kicked against authority, defied the ‘high-ups’ in every institution he encountered; a man generous to a fault, covetous to the point of sin; stingy and spendthrift; austere and extravagant; particular and cavalier. Kettle’s Yard, with its orderly rooms and perfect placement, has been a sanctuary to generations of visitors. But Jim was no hermit. He was a dandy, a gadfly, a chap about town. His life story is there in the art and objects he collected, but it’s a more scattered, uncertain story than his immaculate taste suggests.

What comes first – the story or the study? When I visited Alexandre Dumas’s chateau near Saint-Germain-en-Laye and climbed the slope through the woods to his petit-chateau, the prettiest gingerbread garden office you ever saw, I thought: ‘Here is a place for an ambush. Here d’Artagnan might have dropped from the trees. Here Aramis might have arranged an assignation. Here Porthos…’ Ah, but, Three Musketeers and Monte Cristo had already been written. It was Musketeers money that paid for Dumas’s writer’s retreat, not the retreat that inspired the writing. If the Maison de Jules Verne in Amiens feels a bit like a spaceship, a submarine, a shuttle for a lunar expedition, well: chicken, egg, egg, chicken.

A house alone won’t do it. I walked through the door of 48 Doughty Street, now the Charles Dickens Museum, expecting, if not quite Mr Wemmick’s Walworth castle, then at least the musk of ink and blotting paper, the echo of a scratching pen, the sense of an eternal deadline hanging over the place like secrets over Chesney Wold. Too many years have intervened, not enough Dickensiana remains. The rooms feel underfurnished. Boz woz here, but he isn’t now. You need stuff and you need it in situ.

Pitzhanger Manor, John Soane’s country house in Ealing before Ealing became zone 3, suffers from not-enough-stuff syndrome. The manor has been restored to a turn, but where is the clutter? The classical cast-offs, the gothic oddities, the death masks, life masks, sarcophagi and thousand curious thingummybobs? It is a Soanean skeleton with insufficient flesh or features. For the full portrait, make for the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, crammed from crypt to rafters with a lifetime’s shopping and hoarding. Imagine growing up in such a home. Scant space for toy forts among the cork models of the ruins of Pompeii and the Temples of Paestum. In adulthood, George Soane published a bitter attack on his father’s taste. At Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Soane Snr had ‘reared this mausoleum for the enshrinement of his body’. The library was a ‘satire upon the possessor, who must stand in the midst of these hoarded volumes like a eunuch in a seraglio; the envious… guardian of that which he cannot enjoy’. At the back of the house was Soane’s ‘lofty cave’:

Here are urns that once contained the ashes of the great, the wise and the good; here are relics broken from the holy temples of Greece and Italy; here is the image of the Ephesian Diana, once the object of human adoration, but now only valued as a rarity that by its high price may feed the grovelling pride of its possessor.

George didn’t put his name to the article, but his father knew exactly who it was. A room of one’s own is one thing, but a whole house of one’s own is hard on one’s housemates.

If you are to leave your house to a grateful nation, do it with grace. Offer the stuff, but stuff the stipulations. When Jim Ede went to America in 1931 and visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, he rebuked the house’s former chatelaine for stipulating in her will that nothing be changed: ‘not an inkpot nor a chair shifted’. Yet when he left Kettle’s Yard to the University of Cambridge 40 years later, he did just the same. Not a pebble to be moved, not a plant repotted. Curators ever since have battled to keep Jim’s rooms just as they were, while letting the house go on living.  

Rope off carpets, put teasels on every seat cushion, corral visitors along corridors and you create rooms no better than vitrines. Soft furnishings as taxidermy. The Mackintosh House in Glasgow must spend half its annual income on shampooing Charles Rennie’s cream carpets, but how nice it is to get in every nook and corner of the rooms.

In Kyoto, at the house of the potter Kawai Kanjiro, I jumped when a dark shadow in a room of dark lacquer opened one lazy eye and yawned. If, once in an autumn moon, a cat knocks over a vase, so be it. Good that a house should have a heartbeat long after the ghosts are gone.

The Britishness of Bordeaux

Burgundy or Bordeaux? We were discussing that unending question during dinner over the weekend. I think that there is only one answer: ‘Yes.’ ‘But which, you clot?’ ‘Either. Better still, both.’

It is so much a matter of sentiment, and of which great bottle you have been lucky enough to drink most recently. But there is an argument, which is nothing to do with quality, that Bordeaux – claret – is more British. This is as true in North Britain as in England. There are various versions of a well-known piece of doggerel. My favourite is: ‘Proud and erect the Caledonian stood / Auld was his mutton but his claret good.’ Even before the ’45 and the crushing of the clans, chieftains in some of the most inaccessible parts of the Highlands often surprised visitors by the riches of their cellars.

These days, the cellars will still be well-furnished, as the successors of the clan chiefs relearn the old lesson: that it is easy to make a small fortune in the Highlands. You merely have to start with a large one.

It may be that whereas Bordeaux is more Atlantic, Burgundy is nearer to central Europe and a Mediterranean culture. It may also be that the Rosbifs seem more at ease with Bordeaux than with Burgundy because Gascony used to belong to the Crown.

I recently discussed this with a French friend. He was torn between contempt for Emmanuel Macron as a human being and a belief that some of his reforms were essential but would almost certainly fail. Enthralled by the coronation, he was almost ready to agree that France was a failed state which had never recovered from the murder of Louis XV1. ‘Why don’t you come back to England?’ I asked. ‘Hmmm. Don’t interfere with the land settlement, send us the Prince and Princess of Wales as the governors-general and don’t allow Boris Johnson anywhere near the place… There’d be more support than you might think.’

Leaving that charming fantasy on one side, I was recently at a tasting of two St Julien wines. That is a commune which produces several classed growths and at its best harmonises masculinity and femininity: its neighbours are Pauillac and Margaux. I once wrote that while you drink a Pauillac, you undress a Margaux. St Julien is betwixt and between.

The Martin family have been involved in viniculture since the 17th century. In the 20th, entrepreneurship enabled them to acquire holdings, and two serious names. Château Gloria is the better known, but we also tasted Château St Pierre, which had passed most of us by. That will quickly be rectified.

In Bordeaux, 2003 was not much of a year and we were expecting to be reminded why. Not so: it was an excellent wine, with plenty of fruit and structure. If you should come by a bottle, forget about the year’s reputation and prepare for pleasure.

The 2010 was, of course, its superior, as one should expect from such a good vintage. A fine claret, drinking perfectly, it is likely to remain in good order for quite some time, The 2015 was not yet ready but had plenty of promise. I would be inclined to give it another five years.

This quality has not come about by accident. With the Martin family, wine has been bred in the bone. They revere tradition and are proud of their history. But they combine all of that with careful scientific study. So past, present and future combine – in a dance, one might almost say after a few glasses. The Martins are producing an excellent wine which deserves to be much better known.

The case against Ulez – by a cyclist

Whether you’re more afraid of the forces of order or the forces of chaos is generally a matter of disposition. A natural anti-authoritarian who despises being told what to do – especially when told to do something stupid – I’m more horrified by excesses of order. Granted, my greater fear of the state may simply betray that I’ve largely lived in an orderly western world, and after a few dog-eat-dog nights of mayhem and carnage I might change my tune. Nevertheless, during the Covid lockdowns, for example, I was less distressed by the odd neighbour who dared to invite a friend to tea than by most Britons’ blind, bovine compliance with an economically self-destructive, socially disastrous, politically despotic and medically idiotic regime.

So it’s a relief to see the British display some spunk. Apologies to my betters at The Spectator for celebrating law-breaking and the destruction of public property, but the systematic vandalism of traffic cameras in Greater London warms the cockles of my heart and puts a smile on my face. Due to go live in August, the vast expansion of Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone will hit about 700,000 motorists in London with a stonking £12.50 charge per day because their older cars don’t meet emissions requirements (dependent on historically dubious testing). In the surrounding ten counties, the owners of 1.6 million cars whose bumpers nose into the newly sprawling Ulez will also be fined the equivalent of ten litres of milk or 16 loaves of bread. According to Nick Arlett, the retired builder with mobility problems behind Facebook’s 30,000-member Action Against Ulez group, the expansion would leave him housebound.

In theory, Khan’s overreach is intended to improve the quality of the city’s air, which has never been cleaner. Yet the Jacobs Report, which Khan himself commissioned, found the carbon emissions reduction of Ulez-plus would be ‘negligible’, while disproportionately punishing low earners. Post-Covid, Transport for London has run in the red. Like so many top-down green tyrannies, this one is a fig leaf for picking the public pocket.

The folks behind the stealing and vandalising of at least 200 enforcement cameras are not your standard rabble-rousers: older, often of modest means and formerly apolitical. A semi-retired HGV driver organising UK Unites, which claims to represent 2.5 million people opposing this and other ‘anti-car’ initiatives, Phil Elliot believes even the police are on the protestors’ side: ‘They are us. They are driving old cars and they hate Sadiq Khan.’ Elliot believes that Ulez expansion may be the straw-on-camel event that ‘makes the country go bang’.

After all that spineless submission to lunacy and authoritarianism during Covid, I’ll believe this country has the capacity to ‘go bang’ when I see it. Yet a flood of heavy-handed control freakery in the name of greeniness and alternative transportation – the ‘15-minute cities’ that would imprison urbanites in their own tiny neighbourhoods, the crippling 20mph restrictions across swaths of residential roadways – seems to be triggering a gathering popular rage even among the commonly placid British people. I’m reminded of that prophecy from the Japanese admiral who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor: ‘I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.’

For two years now, popular resistance to local councils’ clumsy Low Traffic Neighbourhoods has gone well beyond passive indignation. All over the UK, the obstructive posts, bollards and planters that impede motorised vehicles have been run over, spray-painted, ripped out, sawn off and set on fire. Honestly? I think all this spontaneous civil disobedience is splendid.

I should declare myself. I live in London. I don’t drive. I cycle everywhere. Ulez expansion won’t directly cost me. This infernal constellation of interfering initiatives – from the very panjandrums charged with facilitating our getting from A to B rather than making it impossible – is supposedly in my interest. But I’m no sanctimonious cyclist. When I encounter a giant flowerpot plunked in a two-way street, deliberately positioned so that I personally can scoot beside it while cars heading both directions are squeezed into a single lane, I’m embarrassed. I do not require giant flowerpots to go about my business, and it infuriates me that these moronic policies are instituted in my name.

Furthermore, I sometimes require tradesmen, who travel with their tools in vans. I order immoderately from Amazon. The groceries I cram in my panniers at tills have all been delivered to the supermarket in petrol- or diesel-fuelled lorries. I rely on motor vehicles, too.

We’ve entered an era of unaccountable bureaucratic imposition that’s only going to get worse, especially as fines for violating all these new rules are nice little earners for municipalities. In pursuit of net zero, recycling, pedestrian safety or pollution control, fees and restrictions are raining upon our heads after no public consultation. Bans on the sale of new petrol cars by 2030 and gas boilers in new homes by 2025 that no one voted for are just the beginning of a self-righteous totalitarian tinkering with our daily lives that makes a mockery of the notion that democracies are governed by consent.

Yet in the big picture, governments do need our consent. They can’t easily enforce daft policies without us commoners’ co-operation. I’d not advocate rebellion via the kind of rioting seen in Ely last week. But earlier this year, farmers opposing the state’s massive co-optation of their land to halve nitrogen runoff brought the Netherlands to a standstill with tractors. Conjured solely from this protest, a whole new political party is now the largest in the Dutch parliament’s upper house. Authorities can’t do whatever they like to us unless we let them.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy discovered that she’d all along had the power to go home, because she was wearing the ruby slippers. Had throngs of Brits come out on the streets and said ‘No, sorry, we’re not having it’, Covid lockdowns would have been abandoned. Slow to anger, yes, but the British public should never forget that they’re wearing Dorothy’s shoes.

The Schofield saga has become an unedifying spectacle 

In the mid-90s when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate I did work experience at the now defunct The Face magazine. They put me in what they called the fashion cupboard. Looking back on it now, I recall I spent a hot fortnight in August either hoiking large volumes of clothing around London for various photoshoots or listening, usually at close quarters, to homosexual men – fashionistas, darling – discussing their sex lives in great detail over the telephone. I wasn’t terribly worldly and I found the whole thing fascinating.

Far more sophisticated than me was the other work experience boy, Lance, a skinny 17-year-old who was, as they say, as gay as Christmas. He worked in the post room and I remember talking to him in there one lunchtime when a member of the senior editorial team, a man in his mid-forties, brushed past him to check his pigeonhole. 

‘Don’t you dare touch me,’ Lance hissed at him furiously, and suddenly everything seemed to stop. Then in a blur of movement Lance was perched on the counter with his legs crossed, both hands resting on his knee, chin lowered and eyes wide. ‘Well, if you’re going to touch me, at least tell me a story first.’ He said it with maximal coquettishness and both of them immediately burst into peals of riotous, camp laughter. I was stunned – by the implication, mainly, but also by the familiarity. 

I often wonder what happened to Lance, who was very bright and funny. I’ve thought about him a lot in the last few days as the revelations about Phillip Schofield and his unnamed lover on the ITV payroll have become increasingly shrill. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if Lance had ended up working in daytime TV. You didn’t have to know him for long to know he’d have been a perfect fit. There’s a lot of Lances in light entertainment, after all. 

But isn’t that kind of the point of light entertainment – that behind the scenes it’s a finishing school for young gay men? I’d always assumed it was. When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously claimed in 2007 there were no homosexuals in Iran, I remember the jokes – made by the gay community – about who then made the TV there, or did the interior design, or cut the hair? The jokes were funny because they were true. There are professions that very evidently seem to exert a strong gravitational pull on gay men. 

I mention all this only by way of saying that I’m finding it difficult to remain terribly excited about the Schofield scandal, the implication of which seems always to be that some sort of terrible criminality has occurred, without any evidence yet of terrible criminality. As things stand, as far as I can see the story seems to be older gay man has consensual sex with younger gay man. Yes, Schofield first met him at 15, but there is no evidence yet that they had any sort of illegal relationship. 

I don’t feel sorry particularly for Schofield, but that’s only because I find him immensely irritating to watch on the telly – which he’s been on since I was a child. Clearly, he has many powerful enemies in his former workplace and perhaps there’s a good reason for that. But watching the scramble as former colleagues race to stick the knife in on primetime is both unedifying and dull, because without evidence of actual lawbreaking, it’s still just sour grapes – the airing of the kind of grievances that can build up in any workplace (‘he didn’t know the names of underlings!’) that, while all-consuming to those employed there, are of vanishingly little interest to the rest of us. 

Besides, who is naive enough to believe the reality of working on This Morning is the same as the vision of harmony that is daily broadcast into the nation’s sitting rooms between 10am and 12:30pm? Television more than any other industry operates on a lords and peasants model – the lords being the so-called onscreen talent, the peasants being everyone else. The peasants, it goes without saying, are utterly expendable, which is why generally they are paid so little. Who can blame them, then, for griping about their immeasurably better paid and better-looking colleagues? 

If Schofield has done something illegal, then please let us know. Yes, he lied to his wife – but surely the real lie there was the one he told her about being, errr, a heterosexual. And, yes, he lied to his colleagues, who very clearly on current evidence would have thrown a party on his professional grave at the first opportunity had he let on. 

And, yes, he lied to his dear viewers too – but perhaps they are a little complicit in that one, if we’re being honest, for being so quick to believe in the image and personal branding daytime television foists on you? These people aren’t your friends – and they don’t care about you. Deep down, we all know that. 

Perhaps there’s more coming – revelations of such luridness that in a few days not only will this column seem absolutely absurd, but the loss at a stroke of Schofield’s entire career will seem entirely justified. But if that’s the case, please put us out of our misery and tell us what they are. 

Kevin McCarthy can taste victory

The House will vote on Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden’s debt-ceiling deal this evening and, by all accounts, the speaker has stuck the landing.

Having reached an agreement with the White House, McCarthy got his way in a crucial Rules Committee meeting yesterday, fought off a Freedom Caucus rebellion and looks set to win support for his deal from a majority of his conference. 

To the great disappointment of those banking on a bruising Republican civil war, McCarthy evidently feels secure in his position. Asked about the possibility of disgruntled hardliners filing a motion to vacate today, McCarthy replied: “Look, everybody has the ability to do what they want. But if you think I’m going to wake up in the morning and ever be worried about that, no. Doesn’t bother me. If someone thinks they have the right to do it, call the motion.” 

McCarthy has, once again, outperformed the low expectations most of Washington had for his speakership. To be fair to the McCarthy doubters, there were good reasons to be skeptical: his tortuous path to power, razor-thin margins, a bitterly divided party and the concessions made to holdouts in order to secure the speaker’s gavel. 

But in an impressive feat of political judo, McCarthy has harnessed what some saw as weaknesses to his advantage: tight numbers have focused minds, the presence of some of his critics in key positions has encouraged broader buy in. In a weak position, McCarthy secured what the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $1.5 trillion in spending cuts — albeit with spending caps that are only enforceable for the first two years. There are a few unexpected baubles too — like a gas pipeline for Joe Manchin.

Progressives are up in arms; the New York Times editorial board complains of “one-sided bargaining” that leaves next to nothing for Democrats to cheer — a rebuttal to the complaints from the right that McCarthy hasn’t extracted enough from Biden.  

Along the way, he has made many on both the left and the right look silly. Among them: Joe Biden. The president gambled that the Republicans wouldn’t be able to present anything close to a united front, painting anything short of a blank check “MAGA extremism” and refusing to negotiate for months. Don’t listen to the cheerleaders heralding Biden the dealmaker. Things have not gone according to the White House’s plan. 

Those in the media who dutifully toed the administration line look silly too. Last year, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes was telling his viewers that a Republican-controlled House would never negotiate seriously over the debt ceiling and simply use it as a bomb to blow up the economy and undermine Joe Biden’s reelection chances. Those claims, once common on the left, have been memory-holed. Now we are told that the fact that McCarthy managed to compromise with Biden is evidence of the “ideological exhaustion” of the Republican Party. Writing in the New York Times, progressive journalist Ezra Klein almost seemed frustrated that the Republicans hadn’t held out for more: “Threatening default… in order to get a deal like this is like threatening to detonate a bomb beneath the bank unless the teller gives you $150.” Of course, Klein, doesn’t want Republicans to hold out for more, but to surrender the leverage they have.  

Some on the right look silly too. Witness, for example, the dust up today between Thomas Massie — the eccentric libertarian and hardline fiscal conservative who backed McCarthy in yesterday’s all-important Rules Committee vote — and Russ Vought, Trump’s former OMB director. Vought went after Massie for siding with McCarthy. Massie pointed out how little Vought and his colleagues did to cut spending when they were in power. “Your path to the dark side is now complete,” tweeted Vought. “You have become your enemy. Have a good day, Thomas.” Vought’s sudden discovery of hardline fiscal responsibility as soon as he is out of power is not unusual — and it isn’t especially persuasive. Most opposition to the deal has been met with a shrug, and seen for the electorally-necessary grandstanding it is.

The debt deal won’t satisfy many. But it is the clearest sign yet of McCarthy’s effectiveness as speaker — and to call it anything other than a big win for the boy from Bakersfield is disingenuous. 

On our radar

CHRISTIE SET TO JOIN 2024 RACE Chris Christie will announce he is running for president at a town hall in New Hampshire next week. His candidacy is a curious one: with favorability ratings in the toilet, it’s hard to see how it ends well for the former New Jersey governor.

TRUMP SLAMS MCENANY Donald Trump demands loyalty from his employees but doesn’t offer much in return. Yesterday, the former president turned on his one time spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany calling her ‘milktoast [sic]’.

*** Sign up to receive the DC Diary in your inbox here ***

Trump is the last of the Cuomosexuals

Last summer, it seemed clear to me, at least, that should Florida governor Ron DeSantis enter the 2024 primary, a major point of contention with former president Donald Trump would be the contrast in their responses to Covid. 

Where Trump gave decision-making power over to the cabal of Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx and the burgeoning public health bureaucracy, DeSantis defied their silly authoritarian approaches in his state to open beaches and businesses. The comparison is obvious and for DeSantis quite beneficial. The open question was how Trump would respond. 

Well, a week into the DeSantis campaign, now we know: Trump thinks DeSantis sucked on Covid, and so did Florida! Instead of sounding a note of ownership of the state’s successes — that such freedom was only possible under a White House that respected gubernatorial power to make such decisions — Trump has decided DeSantis’s local control was very, very bad, despite all evidence to the contrary. 

Has he hired whistleblower lunatic Rebekah Jones yet?

The best part of this approach is Trump’s decision to laud the disgraced Andrew Cuomo’s handling of Covid in New York, which led to immeasurable excess deaths. Ever the antithesis of hip, Trump has become the last of the Cuomosexuals, in thrall to the former governor’s every capable-sounding word and his hand sanitizer that was definitely not a convoluted grift. 

The exiled Cuomo hailed the praise from the former president: “Donald Trump tells the truth, finally,” he tweeted. Trump’s campaign later sent out an email blast containing “evidence” of the Florida governor’s “Lying Record on Covid.” The mailer criticizes DeSantis for praising vaccines and, gasp, being pictured wearing a mask… both things for which President Trump’s administration advocated.

Maybe Trump just never got around to having his merch restitched. But the idea that he alone, Democrat or Republican, would be out there defending Andrew Cuomo’s record just goes to show: there is honor among skeeves. 

–Ben Domenech

How much does Biden care about gay rights?   

Joseph Robinette Biden, a practicing Catholic, has traveled a long way when it comes to gay rights. In 1996, as senator for Delaware, he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which blocked the federal recognition of same-sex unions. Two years earlier he voted to cut funding to schools that taught the acceptance of homosexuality. In the 1970s, when asked about homosexuals in the US military, he replied: “My gut reaction is that they are a security risk but I must admit I have not given this much thought… I’ll be darned!”

But it’s 2023 and, I’ll be darned, the now President Joe Biden’s moral outlook has changed dramatically. It just so happens that his values have moved with those of his ever-more progressive political party, the Democrats. The polite thing is to say he’s “evolved.”

Biden’s White House has been arguably the most pro-gay administration in American history. It’s increasingly assertive in telling other countries off for failing to live up to twenty-first-century progressive morality on matters sexual. Take Team Biden’s reaction to a new law in Uganda, which includes the death penalty for perpetrators “aggravated homosexuality” — such as sex with a minor, or having sex while HIV positive, and incest. 

The bill criminalizes gay sex education and calls for “rehabilitation” therapy for homosexuals. Joe Biden has called it “a tragic violation” of human rights and suggested “all aspects of US engagement with Uganda” could now be withdrawn. “We are considering additional steps, including the application of sanctions and restriction of entry into the United States against anyone involved in serious human rights abuses or corruption,” he said.

Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni has described the international outcry over his country’s new law as “imperialist.” Most westerners, if they thought about him at all, would consider Museveni a nasty dictator. His views on homosexuality — “a deviation from normal” — sound archaic to our hyper-tolerant minds. But it’s worth considering that the Ugandan government’s position today is merely a harsher version of Joe Biden’s not so long ago. Perhaps he isn’t best placed to lecture Africans about sexual equality from the Oval Office.

What we probably can all agree on is the hypocrisy of an American government in threatening Uganda with sanctions and more over gay rights — at the same time as the White House still treats Saudi Arabia as a vital strategic ally. Homosexuality is a criminal offense in Saudi, punishable by public lashings and the death penalty. But Saudi Arabia is the world’s second-biggest oil producer and so it gets a pass. Uganda has little to offer the global markets in comparison.

–Freddy Gray

From the site

Ioan Grillo: How to stop the flow of guns south
Amber Athey: Can the Heritage Foundation unite the right?
Ben Domenech: What more could the House GOP have got in the debt ceiling deal?

Poll Watch

PRESIDENT BIDEN JOB APPROVAL

Approve 41.6% | Disapprove 56.1% | Net Approval -14.5
(RCP Average)

HYPOTHETICAL WEST VIRGINIA SENATE RACE

Joe Manchin (D) 32% | Jim Justice (R) 54%
(East Carolina U)

Best of the Rest

Janan Ganesh, Financial Times: Why DeSantis is losing to Trump
Tyler Page, Washington Post: Shalanda Young emerges as quietly essential figure in debt deal
William Voegeli, City-Journal: Revisiting Reagan country
William A. Galston, Wall Street Journal: Jake Sullivan and Biden’s ‘foreign policy for the middle class’
Caitlin Oprysko and Hailey Fuchs, Politico: Ramaswamy fires consultants who worked simultaneously for LIV golf
Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon: Russia pulled out of its nuclear transparency pact with the US. The Biden administration still shares sensitive data

Sign up to receive the DC Diary here.

The censorship didn’t begin with Kathleen Stock

It’s 2023 and a lesbian requires security guards to speak at the Oxford Union.

That image of Kathleen Stock arriving in Oxford yesterday, looking badass in shades and a baseball cap, surrounded by burly blokes who were tasked with protecting her from assault, shames Oxford university.

This is meant to be one of the highest seats of learning on earth. It’s the university whose name is synonymous with knowledge. And yet here was a thoughtful, moderate woman, a philosopher of repute, having to be spirited on to campus by bodyguards lest some hysteric attack her.

What has gone wrong, Oxford?

Ms Stock’s thoughtcrime is well known. She thinks men are not women. Worse, she thinks a man never becomes a woman, regardless of what he does to his body. This is blasphemy in the eyes of trans activists and their allies in the political class. Stock, to them, is a sinner deserving of censure, or worse.

Her lesbianism is central to their persecutions. Stock speaks up for lesbian rights. She has written movingly about how the redefinition of the category of woman to include men who think they are women threatens to empty lesbianism of all meaning.

‘Lesbians are traditionally understood as females with a sexual orientation towards other females’, she says. And she is concerned that if someone with a penis can claim to be a lesbian – yes, this is happening – then lesbianism will be all but erased. The right of women who love women to have their own spaces, to have their own name, is existentially undermined, Stock believes, if any Tom, Dick or Harry can be recognised as a ‘gay woman’.

She’s right, of course. Every sensible person knows she is. Yet to a new cadre of ‘queer’ agitators, who believe subjective feelings of gender count for more than the truth of biological sex, all talk of same-sex attraction is ‘transphobic’.

Some even refer to lesbians who refuse to sleep with trans women as ‘genital fetishists’. Stock herself has heard that homophobic phrase; that poisonous idea that lesbians who refuse to have relations with bepenised people – what we used to call ‘men’ – are bigots.

It is almost 130 years since Lord Alfred Douglas was censored at Oxford university for writing about homosexuality. His poem Two Loves contained one of the best-known lines in modern British poetry – ‘The love that dare not speak its name’. That is, gayness.

It was published in the Chameleon, an openly homosexual journal for Oxford intellectuals. The literary elites were disgusted. Jerome K Jerome denounced the Chameleon as ‘an insult to the animal creation’. It was banned – or cancelled, to use modern parlance.

Fast forward to the 2020s, our supposedly more tolerant era, and once again a gay person is hounded at Oxford in part for her sin of defending same-sex attraction. We’ve gone from the love that dare not speak its name to the love that must not speak its name lest some bloke who delusionally thinks he’s a lesbian should feel offended.

Every member of that rainbow mob that turned up to shout at Stock should engage in some serious self-reflection. They need to ask themselves how they got to a position where they are fuming against a lesbian who thinks lesbians – and women more broadly – should have rights. How they became the modern equivalent of the moralistic boors who harangued Bosie.

In fact, all of us should reflect. How did our universities become so hostile to reason? Sex is real, men are men, only a woman can be a lesbian – people who left school at 16 understand these truths, yet the lucky young of Oxford apparently do not.

The Stockphobia we saw last night is a testament to the grip censorship has over our institutions. And this dictatorship of the easily offended was made possible, I’m afraid, by the silence of the liberals.

Virtually every right-thinking person is speaking up for Kathleen Stock and her liberty of self-expression. Rishi Sunak, the Times, much of the commentariat – all can see the barbarism of trying to prevent a reasoned woman from expressing her views.

But where were these defenders of free speech when less appetising people were being banned or harassed on campus? Everyone from hard-right types to perfectly normal people who support the state of Israel to critics of Islamist theocracy have been no-platformed in recent years. And, often, there’s just been shoe staring from supposed liberals.

To defend liberty, it is not enough to challenge instances of censorship – we must confront the entire logic of censorship. We must reject the idea that it is ever acceptable to crush speech in the name of protecting feelings. It was the elite’s failures on that front that paved the way for the demonisation of Stock as a moral transgressor whose hurtful views should be silenced.

Consider the student efforts to block David Irving from speaking at the Oxford Union in 2007. Irving and Stock could not be more different. He denies reality – specifically the Holocaust – where she defends reality. He is irrational, she’s brimming with common sense.

Yet the logic of the attempted silencing of Irving is indistinguishable from the ideology that underpins the witch-hunting of Stock. In both cases the cry goes out that words hurt, that the audience’s self-esteem matters more than the speaker’s freedom, that the peace of censorship is preferable to the tempestuous consequences of freedom.

No way. These regressive claims must always be opposed, whether they are being made in relation to an intellectual fraud or an intellectual truth-teller. As the American essayist HL Mencken said, we must defend liberty for the vile as well as the nice, because ‘it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all’.

So here’s your uncomfortable truth – it was the failure to defend liberty for the objectionable David Irving that gave some people the idea that they could crush the liberty of the decent Kathleen Stock. For freedom of speech to have real meaning, it must apply to all, regardless of character, regardless of belief, regardless of how it makes other people feel.

Invitation: an evening with Johan Norberg

One of the great parts of my job is that you get to meet the people you’ve always wanted to. When I first became editor, I used this a lot – mainly abusing my expenses account. Then we acquired an events department and with it, the facility to invite others along too. So next month, we’ll be trialling a new format: inviting a guest with a small group of subscribers in The Spectator boardroom for discussion and, after, a drink in our garden. 

The first guest will be the Swedish writer, Johan Norberg. You may not have heard of him; in which case, I like to think I’m doing you a service with this blog. He’s a liberal (not really a conservative) whose 2001 book, In Defence of Global Capitalism, is in my view the best single-volume exposition of the merits of liberal economics. It was full, even then, of eye-opening stats: books like Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist and Steven Pinker’s Rationality came as part of the genre. These are all books that I book time off to read, understand, and look through the footnotes. They are incredibly original, widely-read and evidence-driven writers, who challenge all kinds of orthodoxies. 

We’re now 20 years on from In Defence and Norberg has written a new version called the Capitalist Manifesto. On 21 June he’s coming to The Spectator to discuss it with Kate Andrews and me. The tickets are pricier than normal but this a new format: a small group, given free champagne, and the intention is that all of us will get a chance to chat during and after the event. The Spectator garden is, anyway, one of the nicest parts of London this time of year and we’re looking for excuses to invite subscribers around. So those interested, click here: I imagine it will sell out quite soon. We’ll let you know about more events as they arrive.

Is it time to scrap the Covid inquiry?

Why do we have inquiries? The late Geoffrey Howe suggested six principal reasons: to establish the facts, to learn from the events, to provide catharsis for those affected, to reassure the public that matters are being resolved, to allocate accountability and blame, and the political urge to show something is being done. By those metrics, the Covid inquiry is not only failing, but becoming a farce.

The row over Boris Johnson’s WhatsApps between the Government, the ex-PM, and the inquiry chair Baroness Hallett may end up in court. The inquiry looks set to conclude its public hearings in the summer of 2026. Subjects such as Covid contracts and decisions on care homes will not be tackled until 2025 – five years after the pandemic began, and after Matt Hancock will have left parliament.

This may be good news for Johnson, Hancock, and any other ex-minister worried about having their records publicly scrutinised (and any lawyers they’ll be keeping on retainer). But it is terrible news for anyone who wants to learn the truth behind the decisions made at the height of the Covid pandemic, who want to prevent any mistakes being made again, or want justice for loved ones who died.

Voters are expected to go to the polls next year without having heard about the most important decisions the Conservatives made in office: why they locked us down, closed schools, spent hundred of billions on furlough, Test and Trace and Eat Out to Help Out. How does that enable the public to hold those responsible to account?

Any sense of catharsis will be impossible to achieve if the time frame of this inquiry is anything like that of its recent predecessors. The Bloody Sunday Inquiry took 12 years. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse took eight years, and the Iraq War Inquiry took seven. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry is in about to enter its sixth year and seems no closer to completion.

That was a tragedy that killed 72 people. There are 220,000 people with Covid-19 on their death certificate in the UK. We have been told the Cabinet Office has already handed over 55,000 documents and 24 witness statements. Johnson says he has handed over 5,000 documents and 300 pages of emails. With that and more to examine, seeing a final report within the decade seems unlikely.

Hallett promises a series of interim reports in the meantime. That is lipstick on a pig – an attempt to justify an inquiry which is clearly fundamentally flawed. Johnson was wrong to give the inquiry such a broad remit. What should have been an exercise establishing the choices that were made, who was responsible for failures, and ensuring they aren’t repeated has become inflated beyond recognition.

Should the inquiry focus narrowly on what ministers did and when? Or should it tackle, as the inquiry’s counsel has promised campaigners, ‘inequalities, including race’? Or should it be, as it already seems to be becoming, an opportunity to further drag the greased piglet through the mud? Does anyone really want the next few years’ headlines to centre on yet more Boris Johnson psychodrama?

Rishi Sunak certainly shouldn’t. Not because endless headlines about his predecessor undermine his own tenuous hold on his party, or because he was one of the few cabinet ministers to emerge from the Covid years with any credit. A failure to conclude an inquiry and learn its lessons quickly leaves us vulnerable to another pandemic. No statesman should accept that.

And so – before another £85 million is spent – Sunak should consider scrapping the inquiry. The government set it up; the government should be able to stop it. Doing so would obviously leave the Prime Minister open to charges of attempting to cover up ministers’ records, or of preventing those who suffered in those long dark months from getting the truth and achieving some kind of closure.

Sunak should therefore replace the current public inquiry with a commission of specialists with a duty to examine the evidence, learn the lessons, and report back as quickly as possible. He has the perfect model for this: Sweden’s Coronavirus Commission. Established in 2020, it delivered its 800-page report within two years. Another example of how the Swedes handled Covid better.

In that time our inquiry hadn’t even settled on its terms of reference. We cannot afford anymore dither on a matter this pressing, or allow it to be consumed by either the Johnsonian tragicomedy or the shibboleths of the race-obsessed left. Rather than hand over the WhatsApps Hallett demands, Sunak should set up a Covid inquiry that is really fit for purpose.

SNP Westminster group submits audited accounts on time

Talk about going down to the wire. With today’s deadline fast approaching, the SNP Westminster group has made, at the eleventh hour, a significant announcement: they have finally submitted their audited accounts. Had the group been unable to do so, they would have missed out on £1.2 million of public funds, so-called ‘Short money’, making it a little more difficult for them to carry out parliamentary work.

Now, at least one SNP crisis has been averted and the Westminster group’s treasurer, Peter Grant MP, couldn’t sound more relieved:

I’m pleased to confirm that the annual return for the SNP Westminster Group’s ‘Short money’ for 2022/23 has received a clean audit certificate and has been submitted, on time, to the parliamentary authorities. Throughout this process, SNP MPs have remained focused on standing up for Scotland and supporting our hard-working staff. We will continue to hold the Tories and pro-Brexit Labour to account for the damage their policies are inflicting on Scotland.

Mr S knows it’s been far from an easy ride for Stephen Flynn and his merry men (and women). When Flynn ousted former leader Ian Blackford from his role in December, he had no idea that the party’s usual auditors had resigned months earlier. When the news emerged, the SNP were sent scrambling for a replacement, cold calling almost every firm in the country. With less than a month to spare the nationalists eventually located new accountants, a small Manchester-based firm called AMS Accountants Group — who filed their own confirmation statement almost a month late and specialise in assisting, er, dental professionals. ‘Scraping’ and ‘barrel’ come to mind…?

One SNP source congratulated First Minister Humza Yousaf and his Westminster leader Flynn for getting ‘the job done’. Though perhaps it’s not so surprising. Where money’s at stake, the SNP will do all they can to avoid missing out…

The battle with the Blob

Most prime ministers fall out with the civil service at some point. David Cameron attacked the ‘enemies of enterprise’; Tony Blair spoke of ‘the scars on my back’ from battling the public sector. But the premiership of Boris Johnson brought relations to a new low, with prorogation and partygate fuelling paranoia on both sides. Under Rishi Sunak, tensions have been reignited by Dominic Raab’s resignation and the Cabinet Office’s attempt to hand over Johnson’s pandemic diaries to the Covid inquiry.

For some Conservatives, the mandarins involved in these dramas are the embodiment of ‘the Blob’. The etymology of this term shows how Tory criticisms of the civil service have changed throughout their time in office. Originally ‘the Blob’ was deployed by Michael Gove’s allies to ridicule unions, teachers and councils unwilling to accept parent-driven change. The term now refers to a much more partisan and activist group of bureaucrats, seeking to undermine the government of the day.

Such claims are nothing new. Denis Healey was forced to go to the IMF for a bailout in the 1970s after Treasury civil servants gave an exaggerated view of what his policies would do to the public finances. I understand that last year it was Simon Case, the head of the civil service, who wrote Liz Truss a memo telling her to abandon her economic agenda on the grounds that it was causing market chaos. From that moment, her premiership was doomed. It was a civil servant, not a cabinet delegation or opposition leader, who sounded the death knell for Trussonomics.

It’s easy to see why civil servants might think that they decide the fate of ministers. A bullying complaint here, a request for ministerial direction there: some Tories fear the tail is now adept at wagging the dog. Hence talk of Home Office staff going on strike in protest over the Rwanda deportation policy. ‘What’s happening at the Home Office is just another level,’ says one senior Tory source: ‘You don’t go on strike – if you don’t like what the government is doing then just hand in your pass and quit.’ Special advisers complain of ‘civil servants “go-slowing”, where they will come out of a meeting and just say “that won’t work”’.

More common than open obstructionism is inertia; according to a former adviser, there is an ingrained bias towards ‘small c’ conservatism to maintain the status quo in which ‘officials run down the clock when they know a reshuffle is coming’. One former cabinet minister, seeking to make the case for such a change, was met with the words: ‘That may be the minister’s policy but it is not the department’s.’

What about leaking against ministers? One battle-hardened government aide says it doesn’t really come from the civil service, estimating that ‘between 90 to 95 per cent of leaking is still political: spads, MPs, ministers’. Another asks: ‘How many civil servants are sitting down to lunch with journalists at Chez Antoinette [a popular Westminster restaurant]?’ A third points out: ‘We were working on the Rwanda policy for months and it didn’t leak. It shows what happens when you have good officials working on things.’

Ministers’ complaints about the civil service are more likely to relate to the unresponsiveness of the machine than any in-built bias against them. ‘It’s cock-up, not conspiracy,’ says one, who bemoans the lack of institutional memory in his department. Some 14 per cent of officials either moved ministries or left the civil service last year, the highest level of churn in at least a decade. This is encouraged by the pay structures in Whitehall, where the way to get ahead is to move from job to job to tick the boxes necessary for promotion and climb the ladder faster.

This leads to a split between the centre and the periphery. Those designing policy in Whitehall move on quickly, but those delivering it on the ground in agencies can become bed-blockers, resistant to change and making it difficult to shake up teams. There is often a not-always-unjustified assumption that the policy will be abandoned in about 18 months’ time. Again, hardly a new tactic. Peter Hennessy, a long-time watcher of the civil service, remarked as far back as 1989 that ‘like the Russian Army, they wait for the snow and time to take care of the invader’.

For all the talk of a sustained Tory ‘war’ on the civil service, the overall headcount is back up to pre-austerity levels. Annual dismissals have fallen by a quarter in the past five years. The last serious attempt to reform  it was made by Francis Maude, David Cameron’s minister for the Cabinet Office. His 11 successors have averaged nine months each. His plans for ministers to hand-pick staff for their private offices were dropped by Theresa May in 2016.

Now in the Lords, Maude has been given one last bite at the cherry, having been appointed by Johnson in July last year to lead a review into civil service governance. But major reform is not expected to be a Sunak priority this side of an election. ‘Now is not the time for big civil service reform because you’d do nothing else,’ says one aide.

Tory activists are certainly concerned. Polling for ConservativeHome shows that 90 per cent of party members believe the civil service is working against them. There are those, such as the ex-Tory chairman Jake Berry, who think it’s now time to ‘break up’ Whitehall and ‘politicise the upper echelons of the civil service’ – calls which are likely only to grow if the Tories lose power next year. One backbencher says of switching mandarins for handpicked appointees: ‘It would be like Brexit: we’d make mistakes but at least they would be our own.’

Labour’s reform plans focus less on efficiency and more on standards. Angela Rayner has pledged to turn the ministerial code from a political document interpreted by the prime minister into a set of legal rules with an ‘Integrity and Ethics Commission’ deciding whether to punish ministers for a serious breach. So: yet another arm’s-length body to decide the fate of government ministers. This is about the only comfort Tories can draw from the situation – that the Blob remains stronger than ever and waiting for a Labour government to ensnare.

Red Rishi: the Prime Minister’s political makeover

What kind of conservative is Rishi Sunak? This time last year, there was a clear answer: he was a fiscal hawk who was worried about how much the government had to borrow to fund the Covid crisis. As chancellor, he was always fighting with the prime minister over high spending. When Sunak tried to raise the national insurance rate, he did so partly to send his party an important message: the borrowing and spending has to stop.

Now Sunak is in No. 10 and Boris Johnson isn’t around to demand more spending. There has been a Budget and a list of priorities – and Sunak’s agenda is starting to emerge. It includes a tax burden not just higher than any time in the 1970s, but any time in postwar history. A record proportion of the workforce are paying the higher rate of tax. These are government interventions that Tories would have once mocked. Now they are happening every day under Prime Minister Sunak. 

On the surface, it seems as if few British politicians embody the capitalist spirit more than Sunak. He is the richest MP ever to become prime minister. He is a graduate of Stanford business school and a former Goldman Sachs man. He has been called ‘out of touch’ by his opponents for his various luxuries, such as his £180 temperature-controlled ‘smart mug’ and his heated swimming pool at his constituency home. But he doesn’t shy away from talking about the merits of markets and money. He reveres Silicon Valley and speaks unabashedly about ‘economic freedom and prosperity’. 

How did this ultra-capitalist find himself anywhere near one of the most economically illiterate proposals on the planet – price controls on ‘basic’ supermarket items? No. 10 insists that no compulsory plans are afoot, but the idea of a ‘voluntary’ price cap keeps being brought up in Whitehall as a supposed answer to skyrocketing food-price inflation (19 per cent on the year at the last count). Even Labour has been mocking this kind of economic interventionism. Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow welfare secretary, labelled him a ‘latter-day Edward Heath’.

Let’s be generous and assume that No. 10 was just planning to ask supermarkets to cap the price of certain goods. Even this suggests ministers believe prices are high because shopkeepers want them high. In a competitive market, the reverse is true: shops want more customers and appeal to them by offering lower prices.

You don’t need to go far back in British economic history to see that price controls are a devastating mechanism. A price cap is less likely to ensure costs go down and more likely to mean that people can’t get basic goods at all.

Sunak knows these economic laws better than anyone; he is perhaps the most financially literate politician ever to sit in No. 10. But it was the Conservative party that ushered in price controls on units of energy in the autumn (announced by Liz Truss, extended by Sunak).

A tendency is emerging with the Tory government: to politely ask businesses to do something, and if they don’t oblige, command them. When Sunak was chancellor, he asked energy chiefs to invest more in the UK. The threat of a windfall tax on North Sea oil loomed over them if they didn’t. At the time, his allies thought this was a bluff. Surely Sunak, an evangelist for liberal economics, wouldn’t actually impose such a levy? 

He did – and an even bigger one than Labour was calling for. The results have been predictable. Harbour Energy, the biggest energy producer in the North Sea, says its tax bill ate up nearly all of its profits in the last tax year, so its returns were ‘all but wiped out’. Harbour employs 1,500 people in the UK and is now shedding hundreds of jobs (it also recently dropped out of the FTSE 100). TotalEnergies, a French oil and gas giant, blamed Sunak’s tax for its decision to cut North Sea investment by £100 million. Once, Conservatives understood that the arbitrary confiscation of profits would lead to less investment and make everyone poorer. But instead of modifying the tax raid, Sunak doubled down. In November, he extended the levy – which amounts to an effective 75 per cent tax rate – to 2028. 

Politically, these tax raids have a knock-on effect. Keir Starmer, who’s never shy about outflanking the Tories, has now said he wants to ban all new production in the North Sea. Given Labour’s popularity in the polls, it’s not hard to see why the energy giants are deciding to invest in other countries.

It’s the same story with corporation tax: the government is pro-business until government and business stop agreeing. When, as chancellor, Sunak announced in his March 2021 Budget that corporation tax would rise from 19 per cent to 25 per cent, he claimed it was an emergency post-pandemic measure. Now it is a core part of his agenda.

A phenomenon of the 2010s was that the corporation tax rate fell but revenues rose. Most low-tax Tories argue that one led to the other. But Sunak rejects this as a simplistic argument. Better, he thinks, to hike corporation tax and let his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, micromanage, using tax breaks to force investment. This carrot-and-stick approach is not really working: only half of all companies used Sunak’s original tax break to reinvest. The conditions for investing over the past few years have been abysmal, and it’s hard for Hunt to persuade investors otherwise.

The PM’s supporters argue that circumstances have demanded huge state intervention on his watch. When he ran the Treasury, his job was to fund lockdowns. He borrowed more in ten months than Gordon Brown borrowed in ten years. Last year, his plans to start scaling back spending were interrupted by the invasion of Ukraine. 

Sunak has often spoken out against the ever-expanding state. ‘People are asking whether this level of intervention is the new normal,’ he said in his Mais lecture in the City last year, asking if government should be ‘a permanently bigger presence in the market and our lives’. His answer was no: his ‘different vision for our economy’, he said, was a ‘culture of enterprise’ focused on innovation, productivity gain and, crucially, getting the state out of the way.

But governments are judged by what they do, not what they say. And the state under Sunak is becoming larger and more interventionist. Lockdowns and the Ukraine war may have needed drastic responses, but there is a long list of unforced policies, such as corporation tax hikes and windfall taxes.

The welfare bill is expected to surge by 16 per cent over the next four years, to £330 billion. At his last Budget the PM dished out 30 hours of free childcare to middle-class families at a cost of £5 billion. This was seen in No. 10 as politically deft, leaving Labour unable to outbid them. But to low-tax Tories, that bribery equates to intellectual surrender. ‘It seems like we’re selling Tory language with Labour policy,’ says a Tory MP. ‘I suspect the public will eventually pick Labour policy – and it won’t be us delivering it.’

‘To be interventionist and heavy-handed is now a Tory trait,’ laments one minister. ‘I’m not so sure we’re dressing up as Labour. I think we’re morphing into them.’

Starmer likes to complain about how his ideas keep getting stolen by the government. But this allows him to lurch further to the left, proposing compulsory land purchases, even higher taxes on business and smoking bans. As long as the Tories continue to steal Labour’s plans for tax and regulation, they give the opposition more leeway. (They steal their anti-business language too – Hunt even used the phrase ‘unearned income’ to describe economic activity.) If Starmer manages to find his way into No. 10 next year, it’s not clear how the Conservatives might argue against higher taxes or rent controls, given that they gave up the principle of opposing such policies long ago.

The sad irony is that over the past few years Sunak has been more honest about the need for trade-offs than almost anyone else in Whitehall. In the summer’s leadership campaign, he said in an interview with this magazine that he was ‘prepared to tell people that you can’t have your cake and eat it’. He was proven correct in the autumn, when Truss went for tax cuts and huge spending sprees at the same time. His truth-telling landed him in No. 10 eventually. But since he became Prime Minister, we’ve discovered which trade-offs he is willing to make. So far he’s been choosing more tax, more spending and more intervention. His only advantage is that there is, at the moment, no obvious political challenger to the right of the Tories.

At the next election, how is Sunak going to sell the idea that the Tories have a different way of seeing things to Labour? If voters approve of an interventionist tax-and-spend agenda, why not vote for the party that really believes in it?

‘We’re not heading towards the 1970s,’ said Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, when challenged about price controls this week. That a Tory has to give this assurance says a lot about how far to the left the party has drifted. He’s right to say things aren’t the same as 50 years ago: the tax rate is higher and the state is twice as big. 

In the 1970s, it was the Conservatives that looked at the trajectory of the country and decided that another way was possible. Is there the will to do so again? There are enough five-year forecasts flying around Whitehall to make it clear that this is not a blip: high taxes and high spending seems to be the new Tory normal.

Portrait of the week: Rishi Sunak defends Kathleen Stock, food prices rise and AI extinction warning

Home

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, supported a visit to the Oxford Union by Professor Kathleen Stock, who believes that there are such things as women: ‘University should be an environment where debate is supported, not stifled,’ he said. He said in a separate announcement that he would ban companies from giving out free samples of vaping supplies to people under 18. He then packed his bags for a visit to Washington, DC, in the coming week for talks with President Joe Biden. Delaney Irving, aged 19, from Vancouver Island, won the women’s race at the Cooper’s Hill cheese-rolling event near Gloucester.

Food prices continued to rise rapidly, according to the British Retail Consortium, by an annual rate of 15.4 per cent in May, compared with the even steeper rate of 15.7 per cent in April. The government discussed plans for supermarkets to introduce a voluntary cap on the price of basic food items. But Lord Rose of Monewden, the chairman of Asda, warned that any such agreement might have the contrary effect of limiting price reductions, tantamount to an illegal cartel. Banks and building societies withdrew more than 800 different mortgage packages, and mortgage interest rates crept up. BT laid plans to cut 55,000 jobs or 42 per cent of its workforce by the end of the decade, citing the effects of AI technology. The Rugby Football Union offered London Irish a stay of execution as the club faced financial ruin and suspension from the Premiership. Five men who streamed Premier League association football matches to 50,000 subscribers and received more than £7 million were jailed, the ringleader for 11 years, after a private prosecution brought by the Premier League. Train drivers went on strike on two separate days, affecting travel to the Derby and the FA Cup Final.

The official Covid inquiry demanded that the Cabinet Office should hand over Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages from his time as prime minister. A spokesman for the former prime minister said: ‘Mr Johnson has no objection to disclosing material to the inquiry.’ The Covid inquiry announced that it did not aim to finish hearing public evidence until the summer of 2026. Hundreds of travellers were delayed at airports after electronic passport machines failed; soldiers manned posts at Heathrow.

Abroad

Kyiv was hit by its 17th drone attack from Russia in a month, one coming in daylight; Ukraine lost 133 civilians in Russian air attacks in the first three weeks of May. Moscow reported an attack by eight drones, damaging buildings and wounding at least two people. ‘We have nothing to do with this,’ said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, adding that Kyiv was ‘watching with pleasure and forecast an increasing number of attacks’. President Vladimir Putin of Russia said: ‘They are provoking us into responding in kind.’ President Isaias Afwerk, the ruler of Eritrea for 30 years, paid an official visit to Russia.

‘Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,’ said a statement signed by leaders in the field, including the heads of OpenAI and Google Deepmind. The value of the chipmaker Nvidia soared above $1,000 billion. The possibility that the Covid virus leaked from a laboratory should not be ruled out, according to Professor George Gao, the head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda signed into law the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which increases penalties to life imprisonment. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey began another five years of rule after winning 52.16 per cent of the vote in the second round of elections. Pedro Sánchez, the Socialist Prime Minister of Spain, called a snap general election after his party did badly in local elections, being overtaken by the moderate People’s party. President Biden urged Congress to pass measures agreed by the Democratic and Republican parties to raise the government’s borrowing limit. A truce declared in Sudan failed to stop the fighting. Two or three dozen Nato soldiers were wounded by Serbs protesting against the installation of ethnic Albanian mayors in northern Kosovo; the United States objected to the forcible nature of the installations. Two people working for the Italian security agency and a retired member of the Israeli security forces were among four who drowned when a boat sank in a storm on Lake Maggiore.

Covid and the politics of panic

It is 15 months since Sweden’s Coronavirus Commission presented its final report. The 770-page document analysed how the country handled the pandemic and came up with numerous suggestions for how things might have been done better. The initial response, it concluded, was too slow, but the report vindicated the decision to make social distancing measures voluntary rather than compulsory.

Why, then, has it taken the UK’s own Covid inquiry so long even to get going? In two weeks’ time the chair of the inquiry, Baroness Hallett, will finally start to hear evidence for module one – which looks at Britain’s pandemic preparedness – but she has said that she expects to be collecting evidence for three more years. And then of course the report will have to be written. Perhaps by the tenth anniversary of the outbreak we may finally have some answers.

Meanwhile, the same apparatus that failed Britain so badly is still in place. If a new pathogen were identified tomorrow, we would be thrown back to the old Sage advisory system. There is still no proper emergency response protocol or any official requirement to check that public health interventions don’t cause more problems than they solve.

In the pandemic, the normal mechanisms of government were supplanted by impromptu WhatsApp discussions. We know this because Matt Hancock, the health secretary at the time, has since given all his WhatsApp messages to the investigative journalist Isabel Oakeshott so that she could ghostwrite his memoirs. Oakeshott in turn decided that it was in everyone’s interest to make the messages public in order that lessons could be learned, and the Daily Telegraph published them in what became the Lockdown Files.

Hancock’s messages make it very clear why the Cabinet Office does not want to pass WhatsApp records to the Covid inquiry now. They reveal that Simon Case, the head of the civil service, accused the then business secretary Alok Sharma of ‘pure Conservative ideology’ simply because he worried about side effects of lockdown. Case also joked about travellers being ‘locked up’ in ‘shoe box’ rooms in quarantine hotels. If other civil servants are on record making similar remarks, it would reveal a shockingly cavalier approach to the powers that were assumed. It is easy to see why the Cabinet Office would want this covered up.

The lockdown WhatsApp messages offer a psychological profile of what happens when a small group is given too much power. They show how quickly normal protocol is abandoned. Civil servants end up just as tribal as the ministers they advise and just as happy to wield power without bothering with the usual checks and balances. Our politicians and civil servants are not malign or unusual. Without transparency in politics, this is the result. When the normal conventions are discarded, politics is all.

Baroness Hallett need not waste her time looking into the pandemic planning that was in place before Covid appeared. It was all overruled and replaced with a draconian plan devised by Neil Ferguson, an academic at Imperial College London. The Ferguson plan was rejected in Sweden on the grounds that the evidence did not justify such harsh measures, but it was implemented in the UK without any of the scrutiny that should and would have been applied to even minor public health interventions in normal times.

Basic democratic protections in Britain were easily swept aside. Academics who questioned the necessity of lockdown or pointed out the horrific side effects of shutting a country down found themselves the targets of smear campaigns from Tory MPs. How could this have happened? The answer lies in the politics of panic. This is what governed the pandemic, with fateful consequences – and we must understand that if we want to mitigate the effects next time.

As a rule, inquiries in Britain have become a form of cover-up, not elucidation. We still haven’t had the final report into the Grenfell Tower fire – a single event which occurred in a single night in 2017. It took 12 years to produce Lord Saville’s report into Bloody Sunday – which ended up being published 38 years after the events themselves. The Chilcot inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq war took seven years to conclude.

There is a very good reason why Baroness Hallett’s inquiry will not be reporting in the next 18 months: that would put its publication before the next election. From the government’s point of view, in other words, the more modules the better.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Sweden looked to Britain for guidance. Its policy of keeping society as open as possible mirrored the UK’s pandemic plans. Sweden’s public health advisers were dismayed when Boris Johnson’s government tore up those plans – leaving only one country in the western world that stuck to an evidence-based approach. The latest global mortality figures show a striking trend: Sweden has had a lower level of ‘excess deaths’ (from all causes) than any country that locked down. There’s a lesson here. It does not need to take years for the British government to learn it.

2604: Snap – solution

The unclued lights are card games, as is the puzzle’s title, SNAP. The pair is 15A/29.

First prize Mark Rowntree, Greenwich, London SE10

Runners-up Frances Whitehead, Harrogate, N. Yorks; Alan Pink, Crowhurst, E. Sussex

The Battle for Britain | 3 June 2023

2607: Streetwise

The unclued lights (three coming first and one coming last, two pairs and four of two words) are of a kind.

Across

12    One record after another oddly omitted rulers’ postscripts (9)

13    Compact disc’s first seen spinning (5)

15    Omits plan about philosophical belief (9)

16    Impassioned male getting date wrong (6)

20    Resin on imperfect coin from Sparta (7)

21    Pangs oddly to consume uncooked seafood (6)

22    VIP is out of reach (4-2)

24    Booster rockets seen when north-east rivers are in spate (8)

26    Face being laid back (4)

28    Neeson regularly appearing in Keanu Reeves’ role (3)

29    Marsh stifles river plant (4)

32    Suspect CIA names one might forget (8)

35    Press release involving some introductions (6)

37    Umpire’s error about mobile phone’s card before visit (7)

39    It’s fabulous! Goodness! Almost 11! (6)

43    Confiscate trawler catching small fish (5)

45    Deal with Turkey ultimately establishing pact (6)

Down

2    Highest points of a public house dispensing one ale (7)

4    Poor Zoe has left home, after oil started to percolate (4,3)

6    Another thematic character at church meeting (6)

8    Figure one has only half a buck (4)

9    Tank-wire woven into cardigans and jumpers (8)

10    Ruhrland city’s distinctive nature without church (5)

11    Relinquishments of claims about diplomatic errands (10)

14    Cite hefty changes to desire to travel (5,4)

17    Elf’s special ceremony (6)

23    Clergyman’s responsibility at capital hotel (6)

25    Old record by plot white blood cell (8)

26    Settling an issue on 1/12 is upsetting heartless Vince (8)

30    BMX repaired by Cecil (7)

31    Crossing in Drake’s ship (7)

33    Speechless in the morning with Sunday crossword (6)

36    Made-to-measure governor? (5)

38    It provides the bite as Gooch nears another ton, for starters (4)

40    Heathens oddly reveal Venezuelan composer (4)

41    Jail fence’s ultimate punishment (4)

Download a printable version here.

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 19 May. There are two runners-up prizes of £20. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2607, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery. The dictionary prize is not available at present.

My northern honours list

Exciting news arrives. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has let it be known that he wants more northerners nominated for honours, as part of the ‘levelling up’ programme to which this government is so deeply committed. This will change every-thing and I foresee a Conservative majority at the next election of at least 200. I thought that as The Spectator’s north of St Albans correspondent I should identify some of the brilliant northerners who will shortly be in receipt of OBEs, MBEs, knighthoods and what have you.

– Wayne Rafferty, aged 33, a pharmaceutical distribution executive from Manchester, who even at the height of the Covid pandemic ensured that his customers in Moss Side were fully supplied with fentanyl and horse tranquillisers. (CH)

– Norman Redwall, aged 79, from Mexborough, for innovation. Since 1963 Mr Redwall has refashioned dentures salvaged from the local crematoria and sold them cheaply to townsfolk. (MBE)

– Mohammed Jihadi, aged 63, from Keighley, for services to the community. Mr Jihadi founded the Keighley and District Inter-Faith But Not Jews Dialogue forum and has reached out as a ‘mentor’ to many young white girls in his area. (Knighthood)

– Sheila Pigg, aged 41, from Peterlee, for services to the community. Sheila’s vibrant puppy farm has provided local people with many hundred adorable American pit bull terriers, only seven of which have eaten toddlers. (OBE)

– Ian Lavatory, aged 57, of Cumberland, for innovation. A popular local Labour politician, Ian has shown extraordinary innovation in ensuring that miners’ welfare payments ended up in exactly the right pockets. Or pocket. (Life peer)

– Jayden ‘Ratboy’ O’Byrne, aged 15, from Toxteth, for services to young people. An influencer, Jayden has produced many videos, always to an uncompromising ‘drill’ soundtrack, explaining to his peers how best to rob the homes of pensioners and smack them about a bit if they get lairy. (CBE)

– Woman, full name and age unknown, known locally as ‘Mad Aggie’, for providing local colour. For more than 30 years ‘Mad Aggie’ has stood on a piece of wasteland adjoining the A688 in Bishop Auckland, watching a mattress burn while shouting abuse at passing motorists and swigging from a can of cider. (OBE)

– Roz Harridan, aged 57, a social worker from Leeds, for political commitment and dedication. For 30 years Roz has striven to convince local people that every ill which has ever befallen them is the work of ‘Tory scum’. In 2008 she formed the organisation Middleton Women Against Everything. Before 2006 she was known as Roy Harridan.

That’s enough comic northerners (Ed).

My feeling at the moment is that Rishi and co. should give up pretending that they wish for something called ‘levelling up’, because I do not know of a single person up here who takes the claim seriously. Further, the more it is mentioned, the more cynically the northern electorate views it. The problems are long ingrained and a five-year parliamentary term could not even begin to scratch the surface.

The area in which I was brought up, Teesside, has still to recover from the de-industrialisation and recession of the early 1980s. Those many readers who worship at the shrine of Margaret Thatcher may well argue that the closures in uneconomic iron, steel, coal and petrochemical industries were necessary for the financial health of the country. Perhaps. All I would say is that it wasn’t very good for this part of the country. Unarguable is the fact that the jobs that went – especially in the steel industry – were skilled and semi-skilled and comparatively very well paid indeed. They were replaced, in almost every case, by McJobs. Cold calling, retail and so on.

The problem with, particularly, the north-east is low wages and has been for an entire generation – and you do not cure that simply by transferring a few Treasury posts up to Darlington, with its handy two hours and 30 minutes express train service to London. I agree with the dispersal from London of key posts in various institutions, if only for the fun of watching the bald young clerks trying to fathom out the local accent. But it is no more a meaningful change than when the BBC moved half of its staff up the M6 to Salford. What happened then was that the Beeb – well-meaning enough in intent – simply shipped up its southern staff and all those political prejudices so that there was little or no impact upon the way in which the country was portrayed. Salford remained a kind of exclave of Kensal Rise.

While low wages are the main cause of the inequality between the north and the south, there is perhaps a little bit more to the picture. Migration of our best-educated people to the south doesn’t help, but then nor does a chronic lack of investment in science, technology and industry. And we might add to that the stuff that the reporters talk about too rarely. Often inept, predatory or downright corrupt local authorities, for one.

The decline of the traditional nuclear and extended family is something else which has financially and emotionally hamstrung the poorest parts of our country. I once stood outside the dole office in Middlesbrough and interviewed those who went in and came out across a single day. Almost all were from broken homes and had gone on to break up homes themselves. This had ruined them, just as it will hugely disadvantage their children. So you might add bad life decisions to the list, too – that and a predilection for alcohol and awful food. All of this stuff is somewhere in the mix when we talk, or don’t talk, about levelling up.

If Rishi and co. wish to retain at least a handful of seats in the old Red Wall, then I would suggest they major on the issues of immigration (which is, I concede, difficult to do when you are letting 600,000 people in per year) and the wokery to which the Labour party and even more so the idiotic Lib Dems are still wedded. That at least has a bit of resonance.