Even John Lewis is struggling in this Labour economy

It is a worker’s cooperative. It promotes sustainability, emphasises its social responsibility, invests in its people, and, of course, has an attractive range of home accessories in every shade of beige you could possibly imagine. If the government is looking for a company that symbolises the kind of economy that Labour is trying to champion it would surely be John Lewis. But hold on. It turns out that even Labour’s favourite chain has been hammered by the tax raid in the last budget. And if even John Lewis can’t survive all the extra costs the party has imposed on business then who can.

There were signs that John Lewis, including its Waitrose unit, was starting to turn the corner after the hapless mismanagement of the former Treasury mandarin Dame Sharon White. Under the Tesco veteran Jason Tarry it was getting back to basic, well managed retailing. Today, however, that has come to a juddering halt. Pre-tax losses jumped from £30 million in the first half of 2024 to £88 million in the first half of this one. The reason? It has been hit by the extra cost of national insurance after the rate that employers have to pay was pushed up sharply on the last Budget, plus the government’s new Extended Producer Responsibility levy, a packaging tax that has been imposed as part of the drive to create a net zero economy. Put together, those extra charges cost the chain £29 million. 

The losses perfectly illustrate the shambolic incompetence of Labour’s economic ‘plan’. To start with, green levies are imposed because they sound good at climate change conferences, and make politicians feel better about themselves. But the costs to businesses are ignored. Next, the NI increase, far from being a tax on the mega-rich capitalists, is paid by chains that are struggling to survive. The taxes are imposed regardless of whether a company is making any money or not. Even loss-making businesses that are trying to turn themselves around have to pay them. 

Those losses matter. If John Lewis loses money it won’t be able to make any extra payments to its staff under its profit-sharing scheme. Perhaps even more seriously, it will limit its ability to invest in its stores, most of which still need to be constantly upgraded to keep up with its rivals, and complete its recovery. It may even mean store closures, and job losses, and it will certainly mean higher prices and fewer special offers for customers. You might think that a socially responsible workers’ cooperative such as John Lewis would be thriving in Labour’s Britain. But if it is struggling, it is hard to see much hope for anyone else. 

Lord Mandelson sacked as US ambassador

Peter Mandelson has been sacked as British Ambassador to the United States after further revelations emerged about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The Prime Minister Keir Starmer dismissed Mandelson less than 24 hours after insisting: ‘I have confidence in him’. Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty told the House of Commons this morning that Mandelson was dismissed ‘in light of additional information’.

It follows two days of controversy after emails between Mandelson and the paedophile financier were published. In one letter, he called Epstein his ‘best pal’. The messages revealed that the former Business Secretary had maintained contact with Epstein when he was facing charges of procuring a child for prostitution. In those emails, Mandelson cast doubt on the validity of Epstein’s 2008 conviction – something which Doughty told the House was partly responsible for sealing Mandelson’s fate this morning.

In a statement this morning, the British Embassy in Washington said that ‘Peter Mandelson’s suggestion that Jeffrey Epstein’s first conviction was wrongful and should be challenged is new information.’ The departure of Britain’s most senior man in D.C will cause headaches on both sides of the pond, ahead of president Trump’s state visit next week. Some within government had hoped that Mandelson could brave the storm until after the visit. Clearly, that was a misjudgement.

The context of Labour’s ongoing deputy leadership election and the effective Tory efforts to prosecute a case in parliament will likely mean more awkward questions about Mandelson, including what No. 10 knew and when. Mandelson has now become the first public figure in modern British history to have been forced out office for three different scandals across four different decades.

Appointing the ultra-networker to the UK’s most senior ambassadorial appointment was to be a ‘high-risk, high reward’ approach. Ultimately, the strategic risk was not worth the short term reward.

Will Prince Harry keep quiet about his meeting with King Charles?

The King received a man at Clarence House yesterday afternoon who has a justifiable right to be aggrieved with the ill treatment that has been meted over to him over the years. He has been unfairly discriminated against for reasons that are not his fault, and he has dealt with the opprobrium that has been hurled his way with dignity, maturity and personal righteousness. If he has a persecution complex, then he can hardly be blamed for having developed such a thing. He deserves our respect and admiration.

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Yes, King Charles’s encounter with Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg, for whom he performed an investiture, was important and no doubt affecting for both men. Yet it was immediately overshadowed by the arrival of the King’s estranged younger son, Prince Harry, appearing in the rain in a black Range Rover for their first face-to-face meeting since February 2024. The two had what was described – euphemistically? – as “a private tea”, which lasted just under an hour.

Pity the poor broadcast journalists, waiting in the damp and drizzle outside Clarence House to find out precisely nothing of any substance. Briefings from both Buckingham Palace and Camp Sussex afterwards were bland to the point of irrelevance. When Harry, attending an engagement with the Invictus Games Foundation, was asked how the King was by eager reporters, he simply responded “Yes, he’s great, thank you.”

It was reported that the brief meeting between father and son took place under several pre-arranged conditions, many of which may have been bashed out during the ‘summit meeting’ that took place at the Royal Over-Seas League club in July. It is likely that these included Harry offering no public comments to the media during his visit to Britain about his family (although his passing remark at the WellChild awards on Monday about challenging sibling relations was, probably rightly, taken as throwing shade at his very much estranged elder brother) and there being no indiscreet briefing about the substance of any conversation that he had with his father. We shall see if these conditions are adhered to; past experience suggests otherwise.

Although I was sceptical that the reunion between the two would happen as quickly as it has done, I also suggested that “there will be many at Buckingham Palace, and beyond, who would like to see such a harmonious meeting take place, with a view to putting this prolonged squabble to bed.” So it has come to pass. It must also be said that Harry’s behaviour on this trip has been impeccable. The angry, narcissistic court-botherer, suing his father’s government to be allowed to hire the police as his personal protection squad, was not in evidence. Instead, we saw glimpses of the old, likeable Harry, joking about his love of jerk chicken and declaring his love for Nottingham, as well as warmly interacting with members of the public he encountered on his (admittedly carefully scheduled) travels. The decision to make a private donation of over a million pounds to Children in Need was a generous and wise one, ensuring favourable headlines and decent PR.

Barring a last-minute disaster between now and his departure, the duke can head back to Montecito happy in the knowledge that a high-risk, high-reward gamble has paid off handsomely. (It is not expected that he will be attending the Duchess of Kent’s funeral next week, although who knows if he might be tempted to return for it.)

Admittedly, there was no encounter with Prince William, but there was never on the cards. Instead, he has successfully charmed many who had otherwise written him off, reconciled with his father and, most impressively, navigated central London in the traffic-strewn hellscape of a tube strike. It may be a false dawn – an awful lot can happen between now and 2027, when it is hoped that the King will attend the Invictus Games in Birmingham, of which Harry continues to serve as patron. But those who so confidently predicted that the duke’s actions had cast him into reputational Siberia as far as the royal family are concerned will now be eating their words.

Still, it is currently not known what the tenor of the conversation inside Clarence House really was. Should a suspiciously well-informed and detailed account appear in the papers in the next couple of days, the whole, miserable saga will just carry on going, without any apparent end in sight. For sanity’s sake – if not curiosity’s – let’s hope that Harry can remain discreet, just this once.

Left-wing violence is still being normalized

Six months before being shot in the neck and murdered, the popular conservative commentator Charlie Kirk retweeted our study on political violence in America. Warning the nation that assassination culture was spreading amongst the left, Kirk highlighted our study showing that 48 percent of politically left-wing respondents in a recent poll said it would be at least somewhat justifiable to murder Elon Musk. He noted, too, that 55 percent of them also believed the same about killing President Trump. And, most acutely, he highlighted that this is the natural outgrowth of a left-wing political culture that has tolerated violence for years. Sadly, tragically and unbelievably, we learn that he has become its latest victim. Left-wing violence is still being normalized. And once more, it is continuing to bear ugly and bitter fruit. 

The ongoing events around the shooting of Charlie Kirk murder remain in motion. At the time of writing, few details have been squeezed out; yet we cannot imagine that, given his overt political posture, this was anything short of a targeted assassination incubated by the same pathological trends that are expanding online. Charlie Kirk is a well-known right-wing commentator with strong views on a variety of topics that are salient to vast swathes of the Western world. Within hours of his shooting in Utah yesterday, individuals ranging from Donald Trump, Candace Owens and even Benjamin Netanyahu took to X to offer prayers and consolations. Even for a country growing used to calls for corporate executives and conservative politicians to be “luigi’d” (slang for assassinated, named for Luigi Mangione) this act is breathtaking in horror. This assassination occurred while he was surrounded by thousands of idealistic college teenagers. 

Given the high likelihood of his shooting as politically motivated, there is simply no doubt that this represents another, more serious escalation in the growth of political violence in America. In July’s edition of The Spectator, our research showed that the rise in left-wing violence was both unmistakable and unprecedented. In polling, we discovered a sea change in American life, partly reflected in surveys and partly reflected on meme cultures on social media. And within a few hours of Kirk’s shooting, posts generating hundreds of thousands and even millions of views expressed delight, amusement and pleasure in this unprecedented act of political violence against a cultural commentator. Many of those X handles who did so carried the red triangle of Hamas affiliation with pride. Others accused him of being hateful, demagogic, Zionist fascist. A panelist on MSNBC, meanwhile, suggested that it might merely be the result of an accidental shooting of a gun in celebration.

The rise in left-wing violence reflects a US society that is tearing apart at the seams. Images, memes, and public glorification of such actions found their folk hero in the rise of Luigi Mangione, after his public killing of Brian Thompson last year sparked a firestorm of public debate on drastic polarization in the US. This murder ricocheted through social-media ecosystems and video-game forums, generating a panoply of bizarre memes that celebrated his act as noble and just response to the evils of corporate America. All of these alarming changes rest on growing psychological distortions, as more and more Americans feel like they lack control over the events of their own life. Civic responsibility increasingly dissolves into utter nihilism, as public revenge against political “enemies” takes center stage for aggressive individuals seeking a moment of glory. They know enough people online will mourn them. Luigi Mangione’s defense fund has already raised a staggering $1 million dollars. 

Soon we will hear who the shooter was and why he committed this shocking act of extreme political violence. Inevitably, we will learn where his or her political commitments lay. Undoubtedly, too, we will learn that he believed himself to be fighting for a good cause. Tragically, he is unlikely to be the last one to do so.

Left-wing violence is being normalized. The question remains about whether it can be stopped. Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.

Emily Thornberry drops out of Labour deputy leadership contest

Emily Thornberry has this morning dropped out of the race to be Labour’s new deputy leader. The one-time shadow foreign secretary was the first to signal that she wanted the job, using an interview on the BBC on Sunday to politely fillet Keir Starmer’s government. But, in a race dominated by identity politics, she was always going to struggle. Despite her many fans in the media, Thornberry could not muster more than 13 public declarations of support from MPs. Too many of her colleagues reasoned they could not elect a north London lawyer to act as deputy to another north London lawyer. ‘At least Emily has a personality,’ mused one older MP yesterday. Angela Rayner’s departure has left a vacuum that much of the parliamentary party feels can only be filled by another northern woman.

That is a consensus that has been only encouraged by the two frontrunners, Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell. The former is the choice of No. 10; the other was sacked by Starmer less than a week ago. Phillipson, a Blairite loyalist, hails from the north east; Powell, an ally of Andy Burnham, from the north west. Fans of both have played the northern angle for all it is worth. The Tribune group of soft-left MPs endorsed Powell partly on that basis while Jo White, the chair of the Red Wall Caucus, said Phillipson’s background was a factor in her endorsement. The pair are the only two candidates who look likely to hit the necessary threshold of 80 MPs by 5 p.m. today. Phillipson was on 116 supporters when the nominations list was updated last night, with Powell on 77. The only other candidate left, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, is on 15 names, after Paula Barker dropped out too.

It therefore looks increasingly like party members will have a choice of only two contenders. There are still 160 odd Labour MPs yet to endorse a candidate and Thornberry’s 13 declared backers can go elsewhere. But, given how the votes have broken so far, a straight Phillipson-Powell fight is the working assumption across much of the parliamentary party. At a hustings last night, the Education Secretary insisted that only she could ‘unite’ the party and see off the threat from Reform, while Powell stressed her campaign record. For now, the contest has been an amicable one. But with six weeks to go and the party conference looming in Liverpool, there is plenty of potential for rancour.

The killing of Charlie Kirk is an assault on America itself

He was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Freedom’. A one-word rallying cry emblazoned in black across his chest. It was his core belief: that liberty, especially the liberty to speak, is preferable to tyranny. Then, following the crack of gunfire, that word was stained red with blood. We’ve heard of blood being spilt for freedom: here it was for real. Not a metaphor, not an analogy: the literal drenching of liberty with the blood of a young man who devoted his life to fighting for it.

The killing of Charlie Kirk has horrified the world. It is, in President Trump’s words, a ‘dark moment for America’. It was first and foremost an act of wilful cruelty. He was a 31-year-old father of two. A woman widowed and two kids orphaned at the brutish, unilateral behest of what we can only imagine to be a despicable person. But it was an assault on America too. It was a bullet not only in the neck of a young man but also in the beating heart of the American republic: the First Amendment.

Kirk was the kingpin of America’s new conservatism. He famously forswore college – a wise move these days – to devote himself to battling the immoral excesses of what passes for leftism in the 21st century. He built not only a brand but a movement: Turning Point USA. He and his earnest crusaders brought the conservative case directly to schools and colleges. Kirk is credited with winning untold numbers of young voters, especially young men, to the Trump camp.

I met him in LA once, fittingly while recording a podcast on the urgency of liberty. I was on his TV show, The Charlie Kirk Show, a couple of times. He always struck me as a sincere young man. His guiding belief was that open, unfettered debate, about everything was America’s best hope. ‘Prove me wrong’ was the slogan of his viral campus events. He sought not to shun or silence his critics but to hear them. He invited them to challenge his ideas, and to air their own. ‘Because when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens’, he prophetically said.

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There was something Milton-esque about his faith in free debate. ‘Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?’, said Milton. This was Kirk’s belief too: that truth will always fare better than fallacy in the free town square. It is unconscionable that someone at Utah Valley, we don’t yet know who, responded to Kirk’s good-faith invitation to debate with extreme violence. The barbarism of cancel culture wielded against the life-giving endeavour of truth-seeking.

The hunt for Kirk’s killer goes on. So we don’t even have a name yet, far less a motive. But it feels safe to say this terrible assault will have been fuelled at least in part by intolerance. A deep, burning, savage intolerance, presumably for Kirk’s ‘MAGA’ beliefs or perhaps his love of free discussion. The contrast between Kirk’s bustling, rowdy gathering at Utah Valley and the gunfire that brought it to an end is so striking. On one side, the free and noble exchange of ideas; on the other the violence of suppression. Freedom literally cut down, in broad daylight.

These are the Two Americas. The America that still loves freedom and the America that fears it. The America that still adheres to its traditions of liberty as forged in the fires of revolution, and the America that is rejecting those radical democratic ideals in preference for the alien culture of cancellation. The America that still believes in the public square and the America that prefers to seek sanctuary in the ‘safe space’, far from that madding phenomenon of alternative points of view.

It is possible we have just witnessed the savagery of grievance culture, the apocalyptic endpoint of the neo-medieval belief that ‘words hurt’. After all, if speech is violence – as so much of the wet left says it is – wouldn’t that make violence a legitimate response to speech? We are potentially seeing the dire consequences of re-educating an entire generation to fear disagreement, to cherish their own self-esteem above all else, even liberty. It seems to me that a young man might just have paid the highest price for this lethal ideology.

This is America’s Charlie Hebdo moment. Violence wielded against ideas, a man punished for his ‘blasphemies’, gunfire cutting down discussion. And so we should say of Charlie Kirk what we said of Charlie Hebdo: Je suis Charlie.

The far-left failed to bring France to a standstill

There were over 500 arrests and numerous violent incidents across France on Wednesday but the far-left failed to bring the country to a standstill.

The Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, thanked the ‘responsiveness’ of the police and rejoiced that the ‘blockaders did not block France’.

Over 200 of the arrests were made in Paris, where thousands had gathered throughout the day, first at the Place de la République and later at the Place du Châtelet. There were some scuffles late in the day at the Place de la République between protestors and police but the mayhem that the authorities feared never materialised.

In Paris at least it was a very white middle-class protest. Most of the demonstrators I saw were students and freeing Palestine, not saving France, was their preoccupation. There were more Palestinian flags on display than there were French ones, and I lost count of the keffiyehs I saw draped round the shoulders of demonstrators. The first chant that rippled round the Place de la République at 11 a.m. was ‘Free Palestine’. The second was ‘Macron, Démission!’ (Resign). That rather summed up the day of protest in Paris.

Retailleau claimed that the ‘Block Everything’ movement, which drew an estimated 175,000 people onto the streets, had been ‘hijacked’ by the far-left, and he was right. What was launched in the summer as an apolitical protest against the mismanagement of the country by a disconnected elite became a show of strength from the far-left.

Across the country, union-led blockades were set up from the crack of dawn onwards. In some cases there were angry confrontations between the protestors and people going about their business.

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It was these people, the working silent majority, who have suffered most from the collapse of France under Emmanuel Macron. Probably the most grotesque sight of the day in Paris was the pupils of the prestigious Henri IV joining the protest. This is the school of the French elite, the alma mater of Macron. In a few years, no doubt, most of the pupils who confronted police on Wednesday will be running France, and probably making the same mess of it as their most famous old boy.

If the silent majority had their protest hijacked on Wednesday, so they saw their vote hijacked for a third time as Sebastien Lecornu was sworn in as Prime Minister. This was not who they voted for when they went to the polls last summer. Macron’s centrists were the big losers of the legislative elections, trailing in third behind Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party and the left-wing coalition led by Jean-Luc Melenchon.

In a healthy democracy, a president would recognise that he had lost the support of people, but France under Macron is undemocratic. He continues to ignore the result of the election, appointing a third centrist premier in 12 months.  

Lecornu is a Macron loyalist who will fare no better than his predecessors, Michel Barnier and Francois Bayrou, because he is the patsy of a president universally loathed by the people.

This contempt is the only thing that unites the far-left and the silent majority, those millions of men and women who vote for the right.

For the moment their voice is being ignored on the street and in parliament but elections are coming. The silent majority will be able to express themselves next March in local elections and then a year in the presidential and legislative elections. 

That will be the occasion to take their revenge on those who have stolen their protest, and their vote.

Free speech should never be fatal

Charlie Kirk was not storming a government building. He was not brandishing a weapon. He was not even shouting. He was on stage, mid-sentence, addressing a university audience at a speaking event. Then he was shot in the neck. And now he is dead.

What occurred at Utah Valley University is not just a shooting, but an event that punctures the illusion that liberal democracies are still safe places to think aloud. However you viewed Kirk’s politics, whether you found him a bracing truth-teller or a contrary demagogue, he was, in the most basic sense, a political communicator. He built his career around public speech. He was attacked while exercising that speech on a US campus, in broad daylight. The implications are unignorable.

Kirk’s style was divisive, deliberately so. His rhetoric was sharp, moralising, often confrontational. He relished provocation. But he did not advocate violence. He debated. He wrote. He toured campuses. He invited questions. And for doing so, for speaking with clarity, certainty, and ideological conviction, he was targeted.

A single bullet, reportedly fired from 200 metres away, ended his life. But it cannot end the conversation. This was not the chaos of a riot or even the collateral damage of a protest gone wrong. This was something colder, more intimate: the calculated silencing of a man on stage with a microphone.

One does not have to agree with Kirk, on guns, on universities, on Trump, on anything, to recognise the gravity of that image. It is the image of a country losing its grip on the most fundamental of liberal principles: that words are not violence, and violence must never be the answer to words.

For years, Kirk warned that it had become dangerous to speak openly if one held conservative views. Many dismissed that claim as theatrical. Now, it looks like prophecy. His books, his speeches, his podcast appearances, all returned to the same theme: that expressing dissenting views in public life, especially on campuses, came with mounting costs. Not just reputational or professional costs, but personal ones. Threats. Ostracism. Hostility. He argued that universities had become places of ideological conformity and subtle coercion. He said that tolerance had been redefined as submission. Now, the country must reckon with whether he was right.

But this moment is larger than Kirk himself. It is larger than the American right. It is about whether political discourse in the West can survive the current climate of mutual contempt. Speech is being policed by mobs, by institutions, by informal hierarchies of outrage. And increasingly, speech is being met not with argument, but with force. That is the climate in which a man like Kirk could be attacked, not for plotting, not for conspiring, not for harming, but for speaking.

Earlier this year, in May, Kirk spoke at the Oxford Union. In his own account of the event, he noted that the students were appalled by views that have become mainstream in America, that they seethed and muttered when he described lockdowns as pointless, and erupted in uproar when he questioned the official narrative surrounding George Floyd’s death. He wrote that they laughed when he said Britain and America were two of the least racist countries in the world. Kirk saw this as evidence of a cultural lag: that elite students in the UK were clinging to ideological scripts already waning in the United States.

When I spoke at the Oxford Union just six months earlier, I was advised by my security to bring bodyguards. At the time, it seemed an overreaction. But when I arrived, I saw at once that it was not. The atmosphere was hostile, the crowd volatile. The sense of potential escalation was real enough to justify the precaution. The combination of vitriol and visceral mob behaviour made it abundantly clear that, had the opportunity arisen, something worse could have occurred. That such measures were even considered necessary, at a debating society in a Western democracy, speaks volumes about the moment we are in.

Kirk was also a fierce advocate of the Second Amendment. And so his shooting will raise questions he himself would have maybe debated. Are we still capable of distinguishing between liberty and nihilism? Are we arming ourselves against tyranny, or against each other? Is the right to bear arms being used to protect freedom, or to obliterate the conditions that make freedom meaningful?

No civilised society can survive a situation in which public speech becomes a life-threatening act. And no society that cannot tolerate ideological diversity deserves to call itself free. The murder of Charlie Kirk is a warning. We are drifting, or hurtling, towards a political culture in which people are not debated or challenged, but eliminated. And once that line is crossed, once bullets enter the space where arguments should be, the whole premise of democratic life collapses.

Kirk was doing what he believed in: standing up and speaking out. He believed speech should be fearless, provocative, even risky. But it should not be fatal. Not in America. Not in 2025. Not on a university campus.

A revolution is coming to the UK

When I was growing up, people often said British politics were where America’s would be in five, ten or 20 years. What this meant was that Britain was more to the left of America: more secular, more socially liberal, more environmentalist, more globalised. The assumption was that, over time, the left would always win out, so wherever Britain was now, America would soon be.

I travelled to the United Kingdom in May to debate the students and faculty of Cambridge and Oxford Universities in large part because that old assumption is dead and gone. Donald Trump’s political revolution has destroyed it. Now, Britain is the country trailing behind America. Make no mistake: Trump’s revolution is coming to the UK. But as I learned, just like in America, the students of elite universities may be the last to realise.

My first stop was at the Cambridge Union. Stepping onto the Union’s debate floor was like stepping into a time warp, and not just because that floor was once used to plot a map of the D-Day landings. The Cambridge student body might as well be stuck in the high summer of 2020. For all their learning and talent, the students were unprepared and appalled to hear takes that, by now, are mainstream and even boring in America. When I described lockdowns as pointless and forced submission to mRNA shots as tyranny, they seethed and muttered. When I said George Floyd died from a drug overdose rather than under a police officer’s knee, they went into an uproar. While these students have long abandoned the faith that named Trinity and Jesus Colleges, they remain deeply hostile to heresies against a different religion. The Oxford Union was slightly more open-minded. When I described America and Britain as two of the least racist nations in the entire world, the students merely laughed instead of going into a collective paroxysm.

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In a way, the students at Britain’s two oldest universities were identical to those I meet in the US – namely, they were completely obsessed with the fine details of American politics, even our domestic issues. I was prepared for a lot of questions about tariffs, Ukraine and Israel. What I wasn’t expecting were complaints about American tax rates the students would never have to pay and Supreme Court decisions they would never have to abide by. One young man even brought up the Stormy Daniels case. It turns out that Stormy has been a guest speaker at both the Oxford and Cambridge Unions. Don’t Brits have their own dumb sex scandals to follow? Why are they so invested in a half-baked foreign one? More than once, students fretted about President Trump’s decision to admit white South Africans as refugees into America. How much do these students know about the asylum laws of their own country? Many were deeply outraged about Trump’s bid to abolish birthright citizenship, when Britain got rid of it in 1983. Keir Starmer shows no signs of bringing it back.

As in America, a distressing number of British students seem unable to deliver a question without reading it off their phones. That said, the students of Oxbridge are certainly bright – and better at insults than the average American. Some are impressively well-informed. When the Gaza war came up, I thought I could expose the excessive focus on it by asking a student to name what African state is now in civil war (Sudan); and what Asian country is seeing ongoing ethnic cleansing (Myanmar). Unfortunately for me, he aced both questions. But being clever is not the same as being wise. If Oxbridge students were long on wit, they were short on wisdom.

In the US, an ideological transformation has swept almost every campus I visit. Five years ago, I’d typically meet a wall of hostility like the one I found at Cambridge. But in today’s America, college-age students have moved toward Trump more heavily than any other demographic. The decline of religiosity among young people has halted and may be in reverse. On dozens of campuses in the past year I’ve met thousands of young people refusing to passively accept the decline of their civilisation. In contrast, at Oxbridge I found the dominant outlook to be a depressed and depressing near-nihilism. They were students who hardly cared their country has less free speech than 50 or 100 years ago. They were appalled that a person might think life begins at conception, but not that their own country is being steadily Islamicised. They loved the abstract fight for ‘democracy’ in Ukraine, but find the actual outcome of democracy in America very icky. That fixation on America says it all. There’s more interest in moralising about the bad man across the Atlantic than in salvaging their own declining country.

In Britain at large, a very different attitude prevails. I spoke to everybody I could while there, from drivers and blue-collar workmen to journalists and the shockingly large number of people who recognised me in the streets. What I heard from them was clear. They’re angry at Britain’s net-zero-driven energy stagnation. They’re furious at the Biden-esque levels of immigration inflicted on them by their ‘Conservative’ government in the past decade. Over and over, they told me they were ready to smash the British party system to bits and elect a Reform prime minister. The great turn in Britain is coming. And when it arrives, the students of Oxbridge will be the most surprised of all.

Charlie Kirk saw himself as holding back a revolution

Charlie Kirk was, from an incredibly young age, the sort of person willing to try things that seemed impossible. Last night, in his remembrance of meeting Charlie for the first time, my Fox colleague Guy Benson realized that he was probably one of the first conservative speakers Kirk had invited to share ideas to students in Illinois – at the ripe age of around sixteen. In lieu of a typical trajectory for a person with political ambitions, Kirk took a different path, believing that through engagement, debate and organization, he could achieve a mission many political professionals thought was a fool’s errand: win young people over for conservative ideas

In the midst of the Tea Party moment, when the American right was synonymous with boomer (and older) voters and Barack Obama was the coolest thing on campus, riding high with millennial voters, this concept was absurd. But Kirk believed it was possible. He invested all his effort in pursuing it, he built a team across the country to make it happen and, most incredibly of all, he actually pulled it off. He was the biggest difference maker in a movement that saw an influx of young activist voters that changed the course of the country. And for that, he was murdered.

The truth about Charlie Kirk is that he believed in the power of engagement. He would consistently do what the American left refuses to do: walk into the places dominated by opinions from the other side, and take on all comers, welcoming their disagreement and arguing not in an attempt to demonize but in an attempt to evangelize. Despite the left’s active campaign to describe him as a white supremacist, a radical, a reactionary, comparing him to Nazis and the Klan, Kirk was one of the most forthright and emphatic voices against that extreme of the far right. His assassination is so jarring in part because he is such a mainstream figure. He was beloved by millions of young conservatives across America not because he was a frothing at the mouth provocateur, but because he was a clean-cut earnest patriotic inspiration, someone who showed them how to stand up for what they believe on campuses where the number of academics who share their traditional Republican views are practically nil. And along the way, Kirk showed you don’t have to lose your soul in the process – openly embracing faith and family as the most important things in life, calling his young followers to think beyond the political realm.

Kirk exemplified a belief in the American values of civil debate. His free-speech battle truly was part of a happy war, one that actively seeks out those who disagree not to destroy them but to prove a point. The overwhelming number of people ensconced at networks or as late-night hosts would never be brave enough to do what Kirk did on an active regular basis: to put themselves in a position where they are surrounded, and attempt to win the debater, or more often the audience, to your side. And in their cowardice, they chose to lie regularly about him instead – even in death, as the same ghoulish leftists who regularly hope for Donald Trump’s death and cheered Luigi Mangione rejoiced publicly on social media, as if to say if they can’t get Donald or Elon, they’ll settle for Charlie.

In the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, there was a brief moment where people of both parties seemed to hope that it would mark a change in direction for the course of the country – an end to the demonization of the other side, a tamping down on the tone of our virulent political debate. That was as fleeting as an election cycle. But now with Kirk’s bloody violent murder while doing exactly the same thing he encouraged so many young people to do – using free-speech rights to stand up for what they believe, publicly and without fear of debate with the other side – the lesson many on the right may take away is that there is no future for such engagement. 

The consequences of such a move would break from Kirk’s mission, and serve to accept the message the American left, from its most powerful elites to its core electorate, has been sending loud and clear since 2016: that there is no place for Republican views in society, that they are Nazis and fascists and existential threats, people who should be hounded and punched, and whose deepest pain is your path to joy. And why shouldn’t they take that lesson? There is no purpose to debate when at the end, the other side just wants you dead all the more. Can we even share a country with these people who hate us so much?

The reason not to take that path is because it’s the opposite of what Kirk himself believed and exemplified, as he told us over and over again. In a profile in Deseret published on the eve of his fall campus tour just last week, he vocalized his purpose as calling his fans and fellow young conservatives to something higher than just hating the other side:

“My job every single day is actively trying to stop a revolution,” Kirk said. “This is where you have to try to point them toward ultimate purposes and toward getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children. That is the type of conservatism that I represent, and I’m trying to paint a picture of virtue, of lifting people up, not just staying angry.”

The worst thing the young American right could do now in this moment is turn Charlie Kirk’s martyrdom into a lesson fundamentally at odds with his mission. Really, after all this, could you blame them? The American left hated Charlie Kirk. They mocked his approach to debate. They smeared him for his conservative beliefs. But they and the country may be about to learn what comes next, and learn it hard.

Charlie Kirk believed in free speech. He died for it

Charlie Kirk was shot on stage yesterday, speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University. The Turning Point USA co-founder was announced dead by the President of the United States. ‘The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social. ‘He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!’

While the President and millions of others pray for the Kirks, others aren’t hesitating to share horrible sentiments. The 31-year-old Kirk was speaking at Utah Valley University, near Provo, a serene town in the foothills of Utah’s majestic mountains, when a gunman murdered him. Yet an early MSNBC pundit decided to suggest that the person who shot Charlie Kirk in the neck (the shooter, at time of writing, is still at large) might have been a ‘supporter shooting their gun off in celebration.’ What? 

This is a growing trend, in the wake of senseless violence: to water it down. Or even defend it. A flurry of commentators on the left are not hesitant to express Schadenfreude over this act of pure violence, like they did when Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson, the healthcare CEO, in cold blood. Kirk, they say, was a conservative activist, and that crime meant he deserved comeuppance for his various transgressions, including his support of gun rights. Their malignant comments do not deserve repetition. If you must read their horrible takes, you can find them easily on BlueSky, by simply searching ‘top posts’.

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Those who are feverishly revelling in the shooting, or at least tut-tutting about it, should think again. This was a soulless act, which has taken a young father’s life. To find any small glimmer of joy in that is to erode one’s own soul. If that happens to enough of us, the soul of the nation rots, too. 

We should also pause before turning this unspeaking tragedy into a political talking point. Seizing on the shooting as a pretext for a wide crackdown on civil liberties, or to broadly lump together ‘these lunatics leftists,’ as Laura Loomer put it, is also guaranteed to injure further an already injured nation. The spiral of loathing and delegitimisation of other human beings must come to an end. No one wants to discover what happens if we go any further down this cesspit. 

The last time America experienced a spate of political assassinations was during the 1960s, when the murder of President Kennedy was followed by those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. These were atrocities that were supposed to be confined to history. But something is going terribly wrong again, which is clear in this particularly ominous killing of Kirk. It is once again not just the man, but the idea, that these killers are looking to take out. American campuses have not been immune to violence. But this was, more than likely, an act of political violence, one that could easily spread to think-tanks, journalists and academics: to anyone who speaks out. Debate is supposed to be the essence of the college experience, and the American experience. Today, it was cut short with a bullet. 

As it happens, Kirk himself could not have appeared more vulnerable. He was wearing a white T-shirt while holding forth with several hundred students. Now his mission has come to an abrupt terminus. Kirk wanted to revive America, but now it is even less certain if the country can avoid a lurch into a fresh orgy of violence.

When will we learn the truth about Saudi involvement in 9/11?

Will Saudi Arabia ever be held to account for the 9/11 terror attacks? For decades, the Kingdom has successfully parried lawsuits in the United States accusing it of providing logistical and financial support to a network of Islamic extremists who launched a global terror campaign, culminating in the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Those attacks occurred 24 years ago and since then survivors and victims of the 9/11 hijackings have had to counter not only vigorous Saudi denials mounted by their well-funded American legal team but also repeated attempts by the US government to thwart the lawsuits.

But there are signs the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. On August 28, US District Judge George B. Daniels, in a little noticed ruling in Manhattan, denied a motion by the Kingdom to dismiss the case, opening the way for a trial. In his decision, Daniels found that a small cadre of Saudi government employees tied to the consulate in Los Angeles had formed a support network for two of the 9/11 hijackers in 2000 and 2001 and probably had advance knowledge of the plot. In his opinion, Daniels raised the prospect of wider involvement by Saudi officials. Daniels ruling is the first judicial finding in the United States that the government of Saudi Arabia may have played a role in the 9/11 attacks.

A key piece of evidence in the case, what plaintiffs lawyers call an al-Qaeda surveillance video of the US Capitol, came from the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service. The Met obtained the video during a raid of the Birmingham home of a suspected Saudi intelligence operative, Omar al-Bayoumi, two weeks after 9/11. 

Daniels said the evidence suggests Bayoumi, employed ostensibly as an accountant for a Saudi aviation firm, and Fahad al-Thumairy, a radical cleric based in the Los Angeles consulate, assisted two of the hijackers in advance of the attacks in their official capacity as Saudi government employees. “Thumairy and Bayoumi were not just acting as an imam and accountant,” Daniels declared. “Their employment with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia likely had some connection with assisting the hijackers.”

Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists, 15 of them Saudi nationals, hijacked four commercial airliners in the United States the morning of September 11, 2001, and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. A fourth plane, which the terrorists apparently intended to use to attack the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers revolted and rushed the cockpit.

In all, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, including 657 at the investment firm of Cantor Fitzgerald, who were killed when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Cantor’s former CEO, Howard Lutnick, now US Commerce Secretary, is a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits against the Kingdom.

Plaintiffs lawyers have been collecting evidence of Saudi involvement almost from the day of the attacks – the first lawsuit against the Kingdom was filed on September 10, 2003 – and those facts have long suggested that the Saudis provided logistical and financial support to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The plaintiffs’ theory rests in part on uncontroverted evidence that the Saudi royal family and Saudi government officials, beginning in the mid-1980s funded Islamist charities that in turn supplied weapons and logistical support to mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan.

That movement later spread to the vicious Balkans war of the 1990s, which pitted indigenous Muslims and their al-Qaeda allies against local Serbs and Croats. From there, al-Qaeda quickly leapfrogged to attack other western targets including two US embassies in East Africa and the US Navy destroyer, USS Cole, culminating in the 9/11 attacks.

Regional offices of the charities employed al-Qaeda members in senior positions and these charities supplied money, travel documents, arms, safe houses and other assistance to al-Qaeda cells, the plaintiffs allege. Absent the assistance of Saudi government funded charities, a half dozen of which were designated as terrorism supporters by the US Treasury Department, al-Qaeda and bin Laden never could have mounted the logistically complex 9/11 operation.

So alarmed were US government officials by the role of the Saudi charities in funding international terror that then-vice president Al Gore met privately in 1999 with then crown prince Abdullah in the White House to ask for assistance in tracking down terror groups based in the Kingdom. Abdullah agreed to put senior US intelligence officials with their Saudi counterparts, but US officials said nothing came of it.

“We went to the Saudis as a government, showed them what we had, asked them for more information, warned them of what might take place and ultimately nothing happened,” said Jonathan Winer, then deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement. 

Central to the lawsuits against the Kingdom are reports that emerged within days of the attacks that Bayoumi and Thumairy, the Saudi consular official, assisted Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the first 9/11 hijackers to arrive in the United States, getting settled in southern California in January of 2000.

Bayoumi’s ostensible employment as an accountant was with a Los Angeles based Saudi aviation company named Dallah Avco, in a government funded position. While Bayoumi drew a salary, fellow employees told investigators he only rarely showed up for work. He did, though, have multiple contacts with the hijackers, along with Thumairy, helping them find an apartment and co-signing a lease for a rental in San Diego, and arranging for them to take flying lessons and learn English. 

When interviewed by the FBI shortly after 9/11, Bayoumi said he had met the hijackers by chance in a Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles on February 1, 2000, near the Saudi consulate, where he had traveled to clear up a visa problem. He claimed to have taken the initiative to introduce himself to the hijackers when he heard them speaking an Arab dialect common in the Persian Gulf and felt it was his duty as a fellow Muslim to help them get settled.

This claim was dismissed early on by FBI investigators who concluded that Bayoumi’s luncheon meeting with the hijackers had been planned and that he likely was a Saudi intelligence operative with links to al-Qaeda. “(Bayoumi) acted like a Saudi intelligence officer, in my opinion,” an FBI agent told congressional investigators. “And if he was involved with the hijackers, which it looks like he was, if he signed leases, if provided some kind of financing or payment of some sort, then I would say there might be a clear connection between Saudi intelligence and UBL (Osama bin Laden).”

Bayoumi moved to England before 9/11, but soon after the attacks FBI agents who had picked up his trail in southern California, alerted British authorities of his potential role and the Met Police searched his Birmingham home. Among the items taken from the house was a video recording Bayoumi made of the US Capitol building in 1999 along with the Washington Monument and other landmarks. Also confiscated was a drawing of an airplane with a calculation that experts for both the FBI and plaintiffs lawyers later concluded was a mathematical formula showing the rate of descent necessary for an airplane to collide with a target on the ground.

While he made the video, Bayoumi was accompanied by two Saudi embassy officials from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, a branch of the Saudi government staffed at the time by radical clerics whose role was to propagate a militant form of Wahhabi Islam that vilified the west. In the video, Bayoumi takes pains to note the Capitol’s main entrances and points out locations of the capitol’s security staff.

Former acting CIA director Michael Morrel, and other former US intelligence officials have described the video as a casing film made in preparation for a terrorist attack. “No doubt in my mind that al-Qaeda tasked him to do this casing video,” Morrel said in an interview with CBS news.

One of the more salient aspects of the aftermath of 9/11 is the degree to which the United States government has sought to conceal what it knows about the origins of the plot, a tactic that has frustrated efforts by the plaintiffs lawyers to get at the truth while greatly benefiting the Saudis. The stonewalling began with the administration of President George W. Bush, which insisted on classifying and keeping from public view portions of the first congressional investigation, the so-called Joint Inquiry, raising questions about Bayoumi and the potential role of the Saudi government.

The late Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the investigation, then went so far as to accuse Bush of protecting the Kingdom because of Bush family ties to the oil industry and Saudi royals. 

The equivocations and evasions continued through each succeeding administration. The FBI, for example, has been in possession of the Bayoumi video of the Capitol building since 2001, but failed to turn it over to not only plaintiffs lawyers but also the 9/11 commission. The plaintiffs only were able to access the video when the Met Police agreed to give it to them in 2022.

Some of the foot dragging at times has resembled theater of the absurd. Early in the case, when plaintiffs lawyers requested the Justice Department make public a copy of the Interpol bin Laden arrest warrant, the answer they got back was the warrant was protected by privacy rules and that department couldn’t release it without bin Laden’s permission.

At other points, the government obstruction was of far greater import. In 2009, then US Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now a US Supreme Court Justice, filed an amicus brief in the litigation asking the Supreme Court not to hear an appeal of a lower court decision dismissing the case against the Kingdom. Kagan argued there was no persuasive evidence of Saudi government involvement, even as the FBI continued to pursue evidence Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence operative with possible links to al-Qaeda. The Supreme Court, heeding Kagan’s request, declined to hear the matter.

Later, in 2016, the Obama administration lobbied heavily against legislation intended to aid the 9/11 victims by expanding the basis for suing foreign governments that foment terrorism. Administration officials warned the Saudis would withdraw upwards of $750 billion in assets from US financial institutions if the bill became law. Obama vetoed the measure after both the House and Senate passed it overwhelmingly. Congress overturned the veto and the bill became law.

That measure, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, clarifies the US State Department need not designate a foreign government a terrorism supporter as a condition for being sued in US courts, a requirement that had hampered the 9/11 lawsuits. It also makes clear that not all of the tortious conduct must to take place in the United States.

The dire scenarios depicted by the Obama administration never came to pass, while the measure gave new life to the plaintiffs’ litigation and set the stage for Daniels’ groundbreaking decision on August 28. 

Now that the lawsuits seem to be headed for trial, 9/11 victims and their families, along with the nation as a whole, may finally get answers to questions about Saudi Arabia’s involvement that have been swirling around the case since the beginning.

The usual suspects were curiously quiet about Iryna Zarutska’s brutal murder

Did Iryna Zarutska’s life matter? Judging by the delayed, sheepish media coverage of her killing in North Carolina last month, it seems not. Apparently the violent death of this young, beautiful refugee to the United States was a non-event, undeserving of the liberal rage and tsunami of pained thinkpieces that tend to follow other senseless killings in the US. For two weeks her tragedy was disregarded, her suffering ignored.

We need answers on the cold indifference of the activist class and the media establishment to this abominable slaying of an innocent. Zarutska was 23 years old. She was born in Kyiv. She fled Ukraine with her family in 2022 to escape Russia’s invasion. They thought they’d be safe in the great American republic. But on 22 August, on a bus in Charlotte, North Carolina, Iryna was knifed in the neck in an act of almost unimaginable inhumanity. She died at the scene.

The suspect is one Decarlos Brown Jr, a mentally ill, African-American vagrant. He has been charged with first-degree murder. There is CCTV footage of the rage-fuelled assault on Zarutska. I cannot bring myself to watch it. I have seen a still, though, showing Zarutska covering her mouth in quiet alarm as she realises what has happened and what is likely to happen next. A young woman resigning herself to a cruel, quick death – it is one of the most chilling images I have ever seen.

There is fury across social media over Zarutska’s death. I can understand why. Yes, there are around 20 murders a day in the US, but this one seems to shine an especially harsh and unforgiving light on America’s crisis of morality. For a start it raises the question of why so much public space has been surrendered to the unhinged. Brown had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He had 14 prior criminal convictions. His own mother sought to have him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric unit after he became violent at home.

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And yet he was free to walk the streets – a mad man, literally, set loose among the law-abiding. We need to talk about how the ‘compassionate’ approach to mental illness can end up unleashing hell on good people. If we’re being honest, we have all, at some point, felt uncomfortable around unstable individuals. I’ve felt it in London when that wide-eyed babbler or shrieking vagrant boards my Tube carriage. But you’re not meant to say anything. It’s considered discourteous, possibly ableist, to wonder out loud if such people might be better cared for away from society.

Even now, in the wake of this grimmest of killings, there’s a perverse sympathy for the mentally ill man over the well, targeted woman.

‘It’s difficult’, said a CNN host, ‘because when you are mentally ill, you have a hard time knowing that you are mentally ill’.

‘We don’t know how to deal with people who are hurting in the way this man was hurting’, said CNN’s Van Jones. Excuse me? The only ‘hurt’ I saw in the stills from that calamitous event was the quiet, agonised demise of a woman stabbed.

The truth is we do know how to deal with men like Brown. There is, for all the protestations of the cop-hating left, a ‘carceral solution’ for men like this. A civilised society should surely recognise that precautionary commitment to a psychiatric facility, justly administered, is preferable to the endangerment of the lives of innocents. A left that thinks interfering with the liberty of a man like Brown is more protest-worthy than the savagery visited on Zarutska is a left that has truly vacated the realm of reason. It’s a left that now dwells in a purgatory of inhuman moral relativism.

This brings us to why so much of the ‘liberal’ media were initially silent, shamefully so, on the death of Zarutska. Here’s the thing: we all know why. It’s because that dystopic image of a young white woman with blonde hair being savagely set upon by an African American man with ‘mental health’ problems grates against the identitarian narrative these people are intoxicated by. It doesn’t compute. It’s not convenient. So they look the other way, preferring callousness to any calling into question of their rigid belief system.

It’s only now, more than two weeks later, that Zarutska’s death is being discussed in America’s national media and the global media too. Some say it was just a local crime story and those don’t often break through to the mainstream. Nonsense. The violent death of a young woman who had sought sanctuary in America, allegedly at the hands of a man with a long rap sheet, is unquestionably a national event. It’s a story of monumental moral importance.

No, it was the pathology of the new racialism, the dogmatic belief that black people are victims and white people are oppressors, that led to the instinctive memory-holing of this unconscionable crime. A young life full of promise sacrificed to the delusions of an unstable man, her name and memory sacrificed at the altar of political correctness. This terrible event and its fallout are all the confirmation we need that identity politics has broken souls as well as minds, leaving basic humanity in ruins at the foot of ideology.

Will Nato pass – or fail – Russia’s great test?

Poland woke yesterday morning to what its prime minister, Donald Tusk, called an “unprecedented violation of Polish airspace.” In the early hours, a “huge” swarm of Russian drones – at least 19 by Warsaw’s count, perhaps 23 according to Polish media – crossed the frontier during overnight strikes on Ukraine. Polish and Nato fighters scrambled, including Dutch F-35s, to bring them down. Airports were closed as air-raid sirens wailed. In one village, falling debris from an intercepted drone crashed into a residential block.

This was not business as usual. Drones have strayed into Poland’s skies before, but this was the first time Polish and Nato forces together have shot down multiple aircraft. It is, as Tusk warned, the closest Poland has been to war since 1939.

The timing is no accident. Only days earlier, Russian missiles struck buildings in Kyiv linked to Britain and the EU. It is all part of a campaign designed to test the ability of Nato to respond to Russian aggression – and to respond in a way that doesn’t destroy the alliance in the process.

For Vladimir Putin, Ukraine is not the goal but the stepping stone. The true prize is the destruction of Nato, and with it the collapse of the American-led order that has underpinned Europe since 1945. Moscow has concluded that if the alliance can be fractured on its eastern flank, Washington’s authority across the West will unravel in turn. This is the essence of Russia’s Great Test: a campaign of probes and provocations designed to prove that Nato’s vaunted guarantee of collective defence is a hollow promise.

With Nato broken, Putin would be granted the freedom he craves, and a return to the pre-1914 world of great-power politics, when Russia could bargain, bully and expand without the inconvenience of collective security. That is why each act matters, whether it is drones over Poland or missiles into Western offices in Kyiv. Russia cannot defeat Nato’s armies in a conventional fight. But it can grind away at confidence, exploit divisions, and bleed the alliance into failure.

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Russia does not act alone. China also wants to undermine U.S. global influence, and is investing heavily in developing a parallel world order through institutions like the BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The huge recent Victory Day parade in Beijing was designed to show the world (and its domestic audience) that U.S. military power, for so long the guarantor of the Western-led order, is now matched.

Russia dresses its aggression in the language of self-defence. To hear the Kremlin tell it, Nato is forever plotting to carve up Russian territory. The alliance, whose founding treaty commits members to collective defence rather than conquest, has never threatened an offensive war against Moscow. But for Putin, the myth is indispensable. It sustains repression at home and dresses imperial ambition as patriotic necessity.

The script is depressingly familiar. Before rolling tanks into Ukraine, Moscow ranted about “Nazis” in Kyiv and Western plots. Now, the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev warns that Finland – freshly ensconced in Nato – is preparing to attack Russia. It is a surreal inversion, but a useful one: a ready-made pretext should the Kremlin ever decide to test Nato’s newest member.

In this propaganda war, truth is irrelevant. What matters is narrative. By portraying itself as the besieged victim, Russia clears the ground for its own aggression.

Faced with this campaign, Nato’s options are uncomfortably narrow. Sanctions are the default response, but Russia’s economy – buoyed by oil, gas and Chinese and Indian trade – still bankrolls the war. Alliance air patrols are already under way over Poland and the Baltics, but they are ruinously expensive compared to the Russian drones they swat down. Europe, which has promised to rearm sometime in the next five or ten years, has precious little in the way of missile defence or stockpiles to spare. Putin understands this. The British government, for all its lofty talk of “global leadership,” knows that the UK only possesses a token shield against incoming missiles but still won’t find the money to do anything serious about this in the immediate term.

One option open to Nato is the murky realm of deniable retaliation: cyber strikes, sabotage, quiet but violent pressure on Russia’s supply chains. It is the one language Moscow understands. But it is not one that a consensus-driven alliance handles easily.

An alternative would be to go hard and invoke Article V, the alliance’s collective-defence clause. This declares that an armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all, and obliges every ally to assist with whatever measures are deemed necessary, including military force. In theory, Poland would be showing the alliance’s strength by invoking this. But it could easily backfire if individual countries refused to come to Poland’s aid, such as Russia-friendly Hungary or Slovakia. Nato would be shown to be a disjointed paper tiger, and its future would be placed in serious doubt.

The real danger though is America. Nato could survive without Hungary, but not without the United States. And the signs are ominous. Whereas European leaders have been quick to support Poland and castigate Russia following the drone strikes, Washington has been noticeably slow. It took more than twelve hours for the first official statement, from the US ambassador to Nato, which confirmed that the U.S. stood by both Poland and Nato. But President Trump has so far been silent.

For three quarters of a century, Nato’s deterrent has rested on the assumption that America would defend Europe as if it were defending itself. Now it wobbles, with both the president and vice president Vance repeatedly placing doubt on America’s desire to come to Europe’s aid. Although Trump appeared to partly row back on these comments at the Nato summit in June this year – “We’re with [Europe] all the way” – Moscow’s hope is that when push comes to shove, Washington will not defend its allies. This is what the Great Test intends to find out.

This week’s drone strike on Poland is a severe escalation of Russia’s ambitions. Drones buzzing over villages and missiles into Western buildings in Kyiv are not irritants but deliberate stress-tests. Putin’s purpose is clear: to show that Nato is brittle, America unreliable, and the post-war order hollow. Europe, meanwhile, still speaks of raising defence budgets to the required 5 per cent at some point over the coming decade. The Great Test is here now. Pass it, and the alliance endures. Fail, and the West dissolves.

Lower your expectations for Spinal Tap II

This Is Spinal Tap is now such a deserved comedy behemoth that it’s easy to forget how gradual its ascent to generally agreed greatness was. Only over the years did so many lines and scenes from a low-key 1984 mockumentary about a heavy-rock band (amps that ‘go to 11’, a tiny Stonehenge, a classically inspired piece called ‘Lick My Love Pump’) become part of our lives.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, by contrast, comes amid a loud fanfare – which may be part of the problem, because the result certainly doesn’t live up to expectations that are inevitably sky-high. Then again, the sad truth is that it mightn’t have lived up to lower ones either.

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The premise is that an old contract has emerged obliging the band to perform a final gig, 15 years after they last played – or spoke – together. Back in his role as fictional documentary-maker is the film’s real-life director Rob Reiner, who tracks down the three members to a series of effortfully whacky locales. Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) is running a shop in Berwick-upon-Tweed that sells cheese and guitars. Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) owns Tooting Bec’s Museum of Glue, thereby enabling a sight gag in which he gets stuck to an exhibit. David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) is part of a mariachi band in California where he also composes music for callers on hold.

The three then meet in New Orleans where the gig’s to be held. So what should they give the punters after all these years? It’s a question that duly faces – and ultimately stumps – the movie itself.

Not that it doesn’t try a wide range of possible answers. The most obvious is simply to serve up a collection of greatest hits: quite literally when it comes to the songs and almost literally in the slight variations on jokes from 1984. Another ploy, increasingly popular with musicians these days, is the use of guest stars, leading to mildly funny cameos from Elton John and Paul McCartney – the presence of whom adds to the film’s sporadic resemblance to Peter Jackson’s Get Back, which also featured lots of scenes of a band noodling about (except that there, the noodlers were the Beatles).

Or how about acknowledging how much the business has changed since Spinal Tap’s glory days? For this one, the film introduces Simon Howler (Chris Addison), who, as the name cunningly suggests is a Cowell/Fuller-style impresario entirely indifferent to music and much given to saying things like ‘in terms of legacy going forward’.

The trouble here, needless to say, is that satirising such corporatism would be old hat even if Cowell and Fuller hadn’t been somewhat superseded themselves. But at least this Howler is better than the movie’s fourth tactic: throwing in more or less anything else in the hope that some of it will stick. Hence the many jokes that run for a bit before dropping out to pant at the side of the track.

Granted, the film has its moments. Amid the longueurs, there are some genuine laughs, and there’s still something touching about the relationship between Tufnel and St. Hubbins, friends since childhood, whose resolutely unspoken love has never quite been destroyed by rock‘n’roll life.

Granted, too, reunions often rely on a fair amount of goodwill to get by – and Spinal Tap has rightly built up plenty of it. So, if you’re determined to enjoy the new iteration, you might find that the sight of these old troupers doing their stuff in their late seventies is enough. But even for the most die-hard fans, I’d suggest, only just. 

I saw the bullet hit Charlie Kirk

I saw the bullet hit Charlie Kirk, and I saw him close his eyes and slump. 

I am a reporter for the Deseret News, based out of Salt Lake City. I was sent down to Utah Valley University yesterday morning to cover Charlie Kirk’s Prove Me Wrong tour. 

At around 11a.m., my friend and fellow reporter Emma Pitts and I walked from the campus library to the outdoor amphitheater with tickets in hand, but there was no need. There was no one scanning tickets; there were no bag-checkers – we just walked in with the other 3,000 people who attended. We were later informed that only six officers total had been assigned to the event. 

The atmosphere was rowdy. We walked down the grass and cement steps to the center, where the stage was, and we talked to several UVU students proudly holding a cardboard cutout of Trump. One freshman girl told us she was at the debate because she felt Kirk had brought on the dawn of the new conservative generation. Another older couple near us was there with their granddaughter.

When Kirk finally arrived, we could see him talking to the university’s Turning Point USA chapter in the parking lot behind the stage. After a couple of minutes with them, Kirk emerged and started throwing hats into the crowd.

He made no introductory speech; he went straight into the debate. The first debater came and went without a hitch.  The second participant asked him how many mass shooters in American history had been transgender. Kirk responded, “Too many.” Then the questioner spoke for a moment more and followed up, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?”

Before Kirk could answer, what sounded like a firecracker popped in the air. I watched him fall from his chair, and for a second, everyone stopped. Emma and I dropped to the ground, and she told me we needed to pray. She asked God to bless Charlie Kirk and protect us. 

Then people started to run, so we did too. At this point, I believed there was a real possibility I would be shot in the back as I ran, but as footage now shows, the killer was running too – just on the roof.

We sprinted and ducked – and ironically, the first door I flung open was the university’s mental-health office. Under the receptionist’s desk in the corner we went, and we both cried.

Then I looked at my phone. The first thing I noticed was that I was still recording audio. It had only been two minutes and 50 seconds since the beginning of the second debater’s question. 

Charlie Kirk has two children: a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son. 

His killer has neither been identified nor found.

Flight 93 heroes deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Twenty-four years ago, Muslim terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 innocent civilians – the vast majority of them Americans – by hijacking three passenger aircraft and ramming them the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in suburban Washington, DC.

But a fourth, United Airlines Flight 93, failed to reach its target thanks to the bravery of the passengers and flight attendants, who sacrificed themselves to save who-knows-how many.

Twenty-four years later, those heroes have yet to receive their country’s highest civilian award.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom, instituted by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, can be given to anyone “who has made an especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” The medal can be awarded posthumously; such recipients include Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Babe Ruth.

Given that the award can be given posthumously for “an especially meritorious contribution” to national security, the 40 passengers and crew members of Flight 93 obviously qualify – especially given the details of their heroism.

On September 11, 2001, Flight 93 left Newark, New Jersey for San Francisco at 8:42 a.m. At 9:28 a.m., four al-Qaeda terrorists commandeered the Boeing 757. Wielding knives, they claimed to have a bomb, forced passengers to the back of the aircraft and breached the cockpit. In the process, the hijackers stabbed pilot Jason Dahl, co-pilot Leroy Homer Jr., flight attendant Deborah Walsh and passenger Mark Rothenberg. Walsh and Rothenberg immediately died from their wounds.

“Uh, is the captain,” Ziad Jarrah, the terrorist flying the plane, said over the intercom. “Would like you all to remain seated. There is a bomb on board and (we) are going back to the airport and to have our demands… Please remain quiet.”

Flight 93 was traveling over Ohio when it turned east toward the Capitol, the intended target. Meanwhile, passengers were calling their loved ones to explain what was happening. Through those calls, they learned about the World Trade Center.

“It’s Lynn,” passenger Linda Gronlund told her sister. “I’m on United 93 and it’s been hijacked… Apparently, they’ve flown a couple of planes into the World Trade Center already and it looks like they’re going to take this one down as well.

“Mostly, I just wanted to say I love you… and… I’m going to miss you… and… and please give my love to Mom and Dad, and (sigh) mostly, I just love you and I just wanted to tell you that. I don’t know if I’m going to get the chance to tell you that again or not. (sigh),” Gronlund continued before giving her sister the combination to her safe.

Passenger Todd Beamer surreptitiously called Lisa Jefferson, an operator for an airline telephone service, and in the midst of tears, asked her to call his wife.

“You have the same name as my wife,” he said. “We’ve been married for ten years. She’s pregnant with our third child. Tell her that I love her… (choking up)… I’ll always love her… (clearing throat). We have two boys… David, he’s three and Andrew, he’s one… Tell them… (choking) tell them that their daddy loves them and that he is so proud of them. (clearing throat again) Our baby is due January 12… I saw an ultrasound… It was great… We still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy.”

But the passengers refused to submit to the inevitable. They chose to act.

“We have decided we would not be pawns in these hijackers’ suicidal plot,” Beamer told Jefferson. “We’ve hatched a plan. Four of us are going to rush the hijacker with the bomb. After we take him out, we’ll break into the cockpit. A stewardess is getting some boiling water to throw on the hijackers at the controls. We’ll get them… and we’ll take them out.”

Beamer then asked Jefferson to pray the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 25 before turning to his fellow passengers.

“Are you guys ready?” he asked. “Let’s roll.”

Jefferson, who described Beamer as “a soft-spoken, calm gentleman,” believes he “played a great role because when he told the guys ‘Are you ready?’ I assume that they were waiting on his cue,” she said.

Alice Hoagland, the mother of passenger Mark Bingham, described what happened next.

“They ran up the length of the 757 with all their improvised weapons,” Hoagland said while listening to a recording of the flight’s final moments. “You could hear them coming. It became louder and louder, people yelling, ‘Get ’em!’

“They rattled the heck out of those guys in the front. They were terrified.”

Deena Burnett Bailey, widow of passenger Tom Burnett, elaborated.

“You could hear the scuffling,” Bailey said. “There were several people working together. You could hear a hijacker being hit with some type of object and you could hear the pain that he felt when he was hit. It was a cry, a wail as if he had been fatally struck. They were realizing that the passengers and crew members were coming to get them.

“Then we all heard Tom’s voice. All of us just jolted. Tom said, ‘I’m injured.’ It was in a way that you had the sense that he was saying, ‘Don’t wait for me. Keep going.’ “

The frightened terrorists responded by violently steering the 757 up, down and sideways to try to throw the passengers off balance. When the passengers remained undaunted, the hijackers – amid cries of “Allahu akbar” – chose to crash the plane in a Pennsylvania field.

At 10:03 a.m., frenetic activity turned into morbid silence.

In recent years, the Presidential Medal of Freedom has become just another token of political patronage, with recipients reflecting a sitting president’s political agenda. Such recipients include Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editorial director and a fundraiser for President Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns; Sister Simone Campbell, a Catholic activist nun who helped get “Obamacare” passed, George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who received it “with distinction.”

But President Donald Trump can help restore the award’s original luster by bestowing individual medals to 40 ordinary men and women who performed an extraordinary act that must never be forgotten.

Exploring the enchanted gardens of literature

‘If Eve had had a spade in paradise, we should not have had all that sad business with the apple,’ claims the narrator of the novel Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). The author, Mary Annette Beauchamp, eventually adopted the pen name Elizabeth von Arnim, merging her identity with the fictional character she had created. Both Elizabeths lived in Nassenheide in Pomerania (now Rzedziny, Poland), but whereas the fictional one had a spectacular garden, with a majestic clematis ‘Jackmanii’, giant poppies and delphiniums, the real Elizabeth, according to E.M. Forster (who was briefly employed as a tutor to the von Arnim children), did not have much of a garden at all. 

Forster might have been being a bit catty, but the relationship between the real and the imaginary resonates throughout Sandra Lawrence’s Literary Gardens. The author adopts von Arnim’s episodic style, filled with confidences and confessions. She has chosen 30 eclectic literary gardens to showcase in this lavishly illustrated book andopenly admits:

Even I don’t approve of my choices. Or rather, I berate myself for the gardens I had to leave out, some of which were on the list from the very start but fell by the flower-strewn wayside as the word count caught up with me. 

Lawrence’s gardens are a pleasing mix of the predictable and unexpected. ‘The Sheridan garden’, from von Arnim’s cousin, Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘The Garden Party’, is described as ‘a garden for non-garden-fanatics, for people that just like “nice things”’. ‘I shall have a garden one day,’ Mansfield wrote to her husband John Middleton Murry four months before she died in January 1923. And there is now a garden in Wellington, New Zealand, at the Katherine Mansfield House and Garden Museum, but it is a memorial one. Mansfield’s own created garden lives on only in her fiction. 

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Some of the best known gardens are in children’s books: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. While it would be hard to justify omitting any of these, finding something new to say about them might be challenging. But Lawrence does this with disarming ease. Writing about ‘The Apple Orchard of Cair Paravel’, she notes that as a child, Lewis

had been unmoved by gardens, but he later spoke with great emotion of a toy ‘forest’ his brother made on a biscuit tin lid when he was very tiny. A moss ‘forest floor’, decorated with twigs and flowers, it was ‘the first beauty I ever knew… as long as I live my imagination of paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.’

Lawrence writes in her introduction: ‘I promise that everyone who reads this book will grind their teeth due to at least one or two scandalously obvious omissions.’ But that was not my experience. On the contrary, I was delighted to find two gardens from novels I reviewed more than 20 years ago making the list. ‘The Lipton Street Maze’ from Carol Shields’s Larry’s Party (1997) was inspired by a turf maze that the Canadian writer encountered in Saffron Walden:

If the section in Larry’s Party where Larry goes ‘mazing’ around the UK and Europe reads a little like a tourist gazetteer, there is good reason: Shields herself was dazzled by the intricacies of mazes and labyrinths. 

Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists (2012), begins: ‘On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.’ Lawrence comments: ‘Novel openings do not get more fairytale-like… but do not be fooled.’ The novel’s Yugiri garden is located in Malaya (now peninsular Malaysia).

Searching for a suitable location for his fictional Yugiri, Tan Twan Eng found only two Malaysian regions with a climate conducive for a Japanese garden. He chose the wild/semi-wild landscape of the Cameron Highlands, where the density of the rainforest meets the mystery of the mountains and uniformity of seemingly endless tea plantations, all scarred with a dark history of colonialism, occupation and civil war. 

‘The Garden of Monsieur T–’, from Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow (Point de Lendemain, 1777), is ‘built for clandestine rendezvous’. Denon wrote erotica before the French Revolution, avoided the guillotine, unlike many of the pleasure-seekers he described, and re-invented himself as the official artist on Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, before becoming the first director of the Louvre. The erotica was reprinted under a pseudonym, Claude-Joseph Dorat, and remained popular with those nostalgic for pre-revolutionary hedonism. ‘I owe you many pleasures,’ Madame T– tells her baffled young lover in her husband’s garden, ‘but I have paid you with a beautiful dream.’

The 30 gardens are far-flung geographically and range across great swathes of time, from ‘The court gardens of the Empress of Japan’ in Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book (c.1000) to ‘Mrs Bulpit’s yard’ in Edmund White’s The Hanging Garden (2012). They are united by Lucille Clerc’s distinctive illustrations. Lawrence and Clerc have worked together before and there is something defiantly joyful in their collaboration, even where ‘Death’s garden’ in Terry Pratchett’s Mort (1987) is concerned: ‘Sir Terry Pratchett’s greatest contribution to botanical science is, without doubt, the reannual, a plant that you sow this season to harvest last year.’

 Somewhat incongruously, visitor information for 15 of the gardens is given at the end, despite Lawrence’s repeated observation that they can only really be visited imaginatively. By chance, before I finished reading the book, I came across a beautiful description of the power of an imagined garden in Antonia Fraser’s latest book, The House that Spoke:

The Garden. That word. And I hadn’t even been and looked at it. Yet in my picture of myself, a picture in which I aimed to charm the reader without words, I perpetually walked among flowers. Yes, there must be a Garden. 

The first time Fraser visited the house that has been her home for more than 66 years, she heard it speak to her in ‘a voice like a stationmaster on a country platform: clear and notably polite’ and it said ‘DON’T GO’. Afterwards she wondered if that voice was ‘all the work of a petulant imagination, determined to live in London in a house with a garden’. I have visited Marie-Antoinette’s biographer in her home and garden many times to discuss, among other shared interests, the French Revolution. Now that she has put her garden into a book, it will always be possible to return to it and meet her there – just as we can visit the 30 gardens Lawrence has chosen simply by opening the pages of the books they come from.

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Horoscopes and horror – the reign of Septimius Severus

Rome’s first African emperor, Septimius Severus, was renowned during his reign (193-211 AD) for the mass killings of his rivals (ruthlessness even by ancient standards); for his genocide against the Scots (a rare recourse, despite Rome’s bad reputation as imperialists); and his budget-stretching generosity to his soldiers. He had an unusually glamorous Syrian wife, Julia Domna, who indulged her pet philosophers and her husband’s superstitions while setting a hairstyle trend. He had women Christians thrown to wild animals. His two sons, Caracalla and Geta, notoriously hated each other. The Roman empire ran economically while Severus was alive (with many old buildings repaired and renamed, as though Severus had built them) but collapsed into a century of chaos a few decades after his death. Simon Elliott, a military writer of books on Roman Britain, accentuates the positive where he can.

Severus’s African birthplace did not in itself make him an unusual choice as emperor. Roman Libya was as Roman at the end of the 2nd century as Roman Greece or Gaul – and through the corn trade much richer. By murdering his potential enemies in Rome after publicly promising not to, Severus came to exercise more physical power than anyone born in Africa ever had or would, ruling an empire from the Firth of Forth to the Euphrates. That is quite enough of a claim for Elliott to justify the title of a book that does not confront the intellectual revolutions of the time, much of them in Africa, but examines every military campaign.

Severus rose to the top through the army. He became a senator and a provincial governor, but only by impressing his troops did he move to the front of the chaotic race to succeed the Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s manic son Commodus. Once Severus had defeated rival generals in clashes that included the greatest civil war battle in Roman history at Lyons in 197, he fabricated a story that he himself was the son of the author of the Meditations. But this was a tale only for the faraway. Severus ruled by horoscope and horror, killing senators on a scale that Nero had never come close to matching. Lest his enemies should read his stars, he had a false chart painted in a public room in his palace, the truth preserved only for his bedroom. His historian friend Cassius Dio won favour as a determined recorder of the supernatural. By war and wizardry, Severus brought wealth to Rome, which he divided prudently between the public treasury and his own.

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Britain became a symbolic target. Severus’s most dangerous Roman rival, Clodius Albinus, had been based there. Though not a source of wealth beyond dogs and slaves, it was a stronghold behind whose defences plotters might plot again. It was the island where Julius Caesar had failed, where Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, had promised but not delivered, and where no Roman had conquered the furthest north. In 210, Severus led into Kent the biggest Roman force ever deployed against Britain. Elliott begins his book with a chilling promise, devotedly recorded by Dio, to all northern tribes who preferred living in swamps on strange beans to the comforts of southern civilisation. Not a single one of them was to be left alive, ‘down to the babies in their mothers’ wombs’. The whole people was to be ‘wiped out of existence, with none to shed a tear for them, leaving no trace’.

While many such an ancient boast was to impress the people back home more than the fact-checkers of the future, Elliott argues that there was a genuinely genocidal campaign that emptied the Scottish lowlands for generations. Meanwhile, Julia Domna, accompanying her husband for prophetic purposes as she almost always did, was free to play the anthropologist, patiently hearing from a tribal leader’s wife how British women openly satisfied their sexual desires with equals, while Romans preferred secret assignations with the lower orders. Or so Dio tells us.

In the south-east, London gained its first walls – still visible today – not so much to intimidate enemies, says Elliott, but to remind friends who was in charge. Britain also gained an official north-south divide, a line between the two parts of the province. It was on a visit to York, the capital of the uncivilised part, that Severus, aged 65 and immobilised by gout, died of British cold in 211. His last words to his sons were to ‘be of one mind, enrich the soldiers and despise the rest’ – advice which they followed, except in the first part. Caracalla, the more assiduous student of his father, had Geta killed and his face erased from every memorial he could find.

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A simple life fraught with difficulties: Ruth, by Kate Riley, reviewed

‘The only solution for anger at your husband is to bake him a pie,’ says the eponymous heroine of Kate Riley’s first (and, she claims, last) novel, Ruth. ‘She heard it first from her mother and understood: daily acts of love were the best way to express anger.’

This is advice that Ruth both eyerolls and obeys. Born in the late 1960s and raised in a closed, communist, Christian community, she’s a beguiling, original character whose playful wit and innocent anarchy poke holes in the bubble world she inhabits without ever trying to push her way out. Instead, she invites us to imagine a society in which there are no possessions or individual choices, no recorded music or tampons, but lots of tray bakes and time to think.

She appears to be describing the American chapter of the Bruderhof community of pacifist Anabaptists who live in 23 communes around the world. It’s an insular faith with only 3,000 members and three communes in the UK. Riley has offered only sparse specifics of autobiography. Her protagonist also keeps the details vague. Readers, like community members, should be content with higher truths instead of seeking worldly facts. Our narrator isn’t sure of what’s ‘normal’ and what we’d need to know about her world anyway. This means your inner gawker is craning around the corners of each weird lifestyle quirk.

What we do learn is that the community is patriarchal. Men do both intellectual and outdoor work – with a few venturing into the wider world – while women cook, clean, tend children and police each other’s morals. Families share accommodation with other families, shunting their children around to ensure blood ties don’t breed pride or trump the equal love that community members should feel for all. Those assigned to live ‘single-hearted’ are billeted separately. They’re all led by ‘the Servant’ and his wife (whose seniority is vaguely defined though clearly felt). But all decisions are prayed over and sought through such laborious consensus that community members are often thrown into comical disarray when a long-standing item on their shopping list is discontinued.

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Ruth’s separation from America’s wider culture means she finds her own language for forbidden thoughts. It’s delightful. When she gets a crush on a boy and he glances back, she ignites with the knowledge she’s ‘on to something’. Her more eccentric acts don’t fit into the standard concepts of sin and punishment, bewildering her brethren, who have ‘no balm for oddness’. Her many unvoiced questions lead her to suspect both language and herself: ‘She heard lies in every word, especially if she was the one saying them.’

Although this is a slim novel, it spans most of its heroine’s existence. We bear witness to curiosity dulled by submission. Ruth is assigned a husband and gives birth. Postnatal depression is a devil she must fight alone. The hope of christening her daughter ‘Idea’ is quickly snuffed. In this world, it’s a bad idea for women to have ideas. Most of the men’s ideas (including an eccentric plan to raise money by breeding dogs) also founder. They’re all stuck with the same songs, recipes and Bible verses.

The downside of this spiritual erosion is that Riley’s prose loses its glitter and momentum in reflecting Ruth’s experience. Snapshots of her in middle age – wondering absentmindedly about emailing those who’ve left the community – are so tenderly sad I suspect they could be portraits of the author’s mother. 

By the end of this visit to a freak world, readers may be questioning how frequently we all submit, with age, to the oppressions and hypocrisies of our own cultures. Most of us end up cracking on, seeking consensus through democracy; all abiding by the rules of capitalism and the tech bros who pitch themselves as the servants of technology. If friends suggest opting out – going to live off grid, say – we’d probably respond much the way Ruth does when a friend urges her to flee her community. If this really is Riley’s first and last book, then she’s played a blinder.