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Fascinating: EPiC – Elvis Presley in Concert reviewed
EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert is a concert documentary that grew out of the 65 boxes of unseen Las Vegas performances discovered by Baz Luhrmann while researching his 2022 biopic Elvis. As I have little interest in “the King” I approached with a heavy heart. But now? I’m abundantly interested. In fact, I’ve shifted from indifference to thinking that if I could see one musical artist live at their peak it would have to be him. He’s that electrifying. A warning, however: it’s a 12A. “Elvis picks up a bra thrown on to the stage during a concert performance and puts it on his head,” notes the BBFC. I wish I’d had the chance to throw a bra that he’d put on his head. Hopefully, it would have been one of my nicer ones that day. They are of varying quality.
This has not been a half-hearted endeavor. The boxes, which contained 59 hours of footage, were in a Warner Bros vault down a salt mine in Kansas. It cost $100,000 just to go looking – which Luhrmann paid out of his own pocket. The negatives were at the point of perishing. And there was no audio, so the original sound had to be found elsewhere and synced. They engaged Peter Jackson and the team who had undertaken restorations for projects like Get Back, the Beatles archival docuseries. They also discovered a 45-minute interview that had never been heard before – although, if you’re not a fervent completist, you will find it all new anyway. Still, good work, fellas.
Elvis was in residence at the International Hotel in Las Vegas from 1969 to 1976. He was in his thirties and, even though the Beatles were soaring, he was still bringing it. (Thankfully, the film does not go near the sad, fat pantsuit years.) He was, at this time, such a sublimely beautiful physical specimen you can overlook the mutton chops and very obviously dyed black hair that would, usually, be deal breakers.
The film contains no talking heads. Instead, it’s that interview playing as we switch from the concert to the rehearsals for the concert, where, miraculously, we see him goofing around with his band and backing singers. Alongside this are excerpts from press conferences and star-studded after parties. There is no discernible chronology. It might give us a few minutes of footage of Colonel Tom Parker, as “Devil in Disguise” plays, then it’s back to a performance. I’d have liked more narrative structure. I was often at a loss as to what happened when. But this is, principally, Elvis, commanding the stage, spectacularly.
I wish I’d had a chance to throw a bra that he’d naughtily put on his head
Hopefully, you’ll catch it at an IMAX cinema where you can see every sequin and every pore and every droplet of sweat while the music throbs up your legs. His raw, instinctual musicality is phenomenal and the energy he puts into every song is extraordinary. There is a rendition of “Polk Salad Annie” that cuts between various performances, rising to such a crescendo that even his backing singers, who are doing this night after night, appear thrilled. “Suspicious Minds,” “Hound Dog,” “In The Ghetto”: it’s all here.
It’s also fascinating to see the audience at the time. They are mostly middle-aged, moneyed, sedate but there’s always a few who become so overwhelmed that they throw a bra that he’ll naughtily put on his head. There’s no sense that he will one day die on a toilet. He is endlessly aware and mischievous, playing the crowd as if it were another instrument.
The film is a mix of images, like a collage or dreamscape, flitting from here to there, which does mean, unfortunately, we never actually get to see a song in full. However, if you Google “Polk Salad Annie, Live, Las Vegas” you can watch it in its entirety and see exactly what I’m talking about.
How the culture war came for the Italian opera house
The Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci taught that for the revolution to succeed it should conquer the means of thought first rather than the means of production. Only if the dominant bourgeois culture is replaced by a communist counter culture will the working class come round to seeing the revolution as the commonsense thing to do.
The appointment of a woman to lead such a prestigious institution should have been cause for rejoicing, especially for the left. Instead it has provoked an outbreak of operatic sound and fury
In Italy, as everywhere in the West, the left has been remarkably successful in achieving what Gramsci, a co-founder of the Italian communist party in 1921, called cultural hegemony. The Venice opera house – La Fenice – is the scene of one battle among many being fought by Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government to try and reverse the capture of the citadels of Italian culture by the ‘comunisti al caviale’ (caviar communists).
Last September, the foundation that manages the state-owned opera house, currently under right-wing control, appointed the young conductor Beatrice Venezi as its new musical director on a four-year contract to start next October.
The appointment of a woman to lead such a prestigious institution should have been cause for rejoicing, especially for the left. Instead it has provoked an outbreak of operatic sound and fury like that in Federico Fellini’s 1978 film Prova d’Orchestra which sees members of an orchestra refuse to obey their conductor in the name of the revolution and as a result everything ends up being reduced to rubble.
Venezi, who is only 35, makes no secret of her solid right-wing views and prior to this appointment had since 2022 been music adviser to Meloni’s culture minister. Meloni herself has described Venezi as ‘a talented and courageous artist who refuses to bow to the dictatorship of thought and language.’
Naturally, the left are up in arms and arrabbiate come dei puma (furious like pumas). Though few believe them, the trade unions, the chorus and the orchestra at La Fenice claim this has nothing to do with Venezi’s politics. Indeed, they find such an accusation, they have written, ‘offensive’.
Instead, they insist that Venezi is totally unqualified for the post because her curriculum vitae is ‘not minimally comparable with that of the great conductors.’
In vain, do Venezi’s defenders point out that she has conducted 160 symphonies and 50 operas. Or that the professor who taught her conducting at the Milan Conservatory said on television she was ‘molto brava’ and got an almost unheard of maximum marks in the exams at the end of the course. Or indeed that she is one of only a handful of top female conductors in the entire world.
Last year, she was principal guest conductor at the equally grand Teatro Colòn in Buenos Aires. In January she was back in Italy to conduct Bizet’s Carmen in Pisa which earned her a ten minute standing ovation and Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall Stadt Mahagonny in Trieste an eight minute one.
Yet the orchestra at La Fenice has already gone on strike for a week in protest and threaten to do so again unless her appointment is rescinded. And if she should dare to take up her post, the orchestra promises they will refuse to work with her.
Meanwhile they have produced yellow protest lapel badges which they are dishing out to audiences and wearing during performances.
As for Venezi, she has said that La Fenice is ‘mostly in the hands of the unions’ with the situation there ‘totally anarchical’. People abroad ask her, she says, how this is possible in a taxpayer funded organisation.
Italy’s most famous conductor, Riccardo Muti, has always studiously avoided talking about politics but even he felt compelled to leap to her defence: ‘I’ve never seen her conduct, so I can’t comment, and even if I had, I wouldn’t comment because I’d find it unpleasant. I read a lot in the newspapers. Let her conduct, and then the various orchestras and choirs will decide.’
Arrigo Cipriani, the 93-year-old owner of the legendary Harry’s Bar and noble conscience of the city nicknamed La Serenissima, blames sexism.
‘What is the truth?… It is that Beatrice Venezi is a woman. That’s why they won’t let her work,’ he told Il Foglio. That and female jealousy. ‘She’ll have made the wife of some member of the orchestra jealous… It’s always the same old story.’
The opposition to her is not driven by politics and sexism alone, her defenders claim, but also by snobbery. Venezi is both very young to be a conductor and very glamorous and has a populist touch. She has done – God forbid – a shampoo advertisement on the telly in which she proclaims ‘La ricerca dell’eccellenza è continua’ (The search for excellence is continuous).
Worse, in 2021 she did an evening conducting the orchestra at San Remo – Italy’s annual week-long pop music talent competition at which the nation’s pop culture is paraded in all its glory – which attracts a massive 60 per cent TV audience share each night. And she caused a stir at San Remo when she refused live on air to be addressed as the orchestra’s ‘direttrice’, the female form of the word ‘director’, as required by the woke diktat. To do so in her opinion, she explained, perpetuates sexual inequality and she demanded instead that the male form ‘direttore’ be used. She also insists she is called ‘maestro’ not ‘maestra’.
Last October, nearly 150 season ticket holders at La Felice signed a letter to the foundation in which they threatened to cancel their subscriptions if Venezi was allowed to take up her post. But as she told the Argentinian daily newspaper Clarìn, in a rare public comment, La Fenice risked being reduced to a museum: ‘Venice needs to attract new audiences who come with tourism. The current subscribers are over 80 years old.’
Like Meloni, Venezi is a conservative who gets called a fascist, especially because her father Gabriele, an estate agent, was a regional leader of the tiny post-fascist party Forza Nuova which has so few supporters it was unable to field a single candidate at the last general election in 2022. He stood for mayor in their native city of Lucca in Tuscany in 2007 and got just 278 votes. That she believes in God and goes to mass does not help either.
When she conducted on New Year’s Eve 2023 at the Nice opera house left-wing activists displayed a huge white banner high up in the stalls above the stage just before the concert began which proclaimed in black and red: ‘Niente fascisti all’opera! Niente opera per I fascisti!’ (No fascists at the opera! No opera for fascists!).
They also shouted similar slogans but were whistled and jeered by most of the audience in defence. Venezi bowed to them then began the concert. Before the concert local activists had unsuccessfully urged the mayor to cancel Venezi saying Nice should not ‘give a blank cheque to Italian neofascism’.
But as Venezi told the daily newspaper La Sicilia last September: ‘I am the true democrat. I am the resistance to this type of one-thought-only dictatorship.’ Viva la Venezi!
MrBeast needs an education in schooling
You may never have heard of Jimmy Donaldson, but if you have unsupervised children they almost certainly have. He’s a billionaire YouTuber who specialises in inane viral challenge videos with eye-popping prizes. He has 468 million subscribers. Easily-pleased children love him like they love cans of Monster. His alias is MrBeast which, if Dan Brown were writing an eschatological thriller, would seem a little too on the nose. But Donaldson has drawn fire from a constituency normally unbothered by his risible online capering: teachers.
Easily-pleased children love MrBeast like they love cans of Monster
Ironically it happened because of a recent viral interview clip where he railed against modern schooling with the confidence of a man who just watched half a TED talk at 3am. ‘Education is silly,’ he grumbled on the Good Guys podcast. ‘We need more hands-on learning…more modern tech.’ His rancour seemed to stem from the fact that he didn’t enjoy school himself, characterising it as all boring lectures and terrible books. He doesn’t specify which terrible books, but you get a sense of what trends with him when he suggests that Walter Isaacson’s books on Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are two of his favourite. Ah, the canon.
MrBeast explains why the education system is completely broken
— Jack (@Jackkk) February 24, 2026
“Why are students today being taught the same way their parents were? Look at how much everything else has advanced. When I was in school the teacher would just stand there, read out of a book and write on a… pic.twitter.com/9Fjgf4EDNW
‘Why are students today being taught the same way their parents were?’ he complained. So, how should they be taught? The kind of short videos he likes: dynamic content, simple, punchy explanations, exciting pay-offs, and the kind of hi-energy delivery associated with a mariachi band on cocaine. Edits so sudden and vertiginous they should come with a warning for viewers affected by strobe lights.
He’s convinced that were school more like that, students would retain information more, more efficiently, and have more time for other things. ‘I’m a visual learner,’ he says as innocently and earnestly as someone who also believes that we only use ten per cent of our brains. ‘I retain information three times more effectively when I see it.’
Which is great apart from the fact that he isn’t, and Learning Styles is a completely discredited theory of learning that not only has no evidence base to back it up, but never did. Because everything we know about learning suggest that it is often hard work, and no amount of lipstick can change that. This is going to shock you, but MrBeast is not an expert on pedagogy.
But why should he be? I don’t know how to monetise other people’s online humiliation at an industrial scale, so I suppose we all have our lanes. But we know a good deal about how we learn, and teach, and little of it maps onto MrBeast’s views, which probably represents a lot of people. We know that learning requires effort (desirable difficulties), which is often hard. It needs repetition and review (retrieval practice). It needs scaffolded, structured incremental explanations (cognitive load theory). It needs high-quality feedback (formative assessment). Donaldson is like a man walking into an operating theatre and telling the doctors, ‘Why don’t you just make the patient better?’
Interestingly, Donaldson’s career probably helps us understand his views on pedagogy. He claims he spent years learning why videos went viral, like some kind of digital Jedi autodidact (which has real ‘While you were out partying…I studied the blade’ energy). He’s also candid about why some videos catch fire: they usually contain a simple challenge, an easily understood concept, in a finite timeframe. The challenges are amusing or novel. They lean heavily on extreme, variable reward loops (who will win? What’s the next twist?) which is very BF Skinner. The stakes are high; the drama is human. There is almost no dead air in which to get bored; every edit and cut is aimed at pace, like a TikTok video. His business model is obsessed with the algorithm and how it works, what gets clicks, what gets duration etc, and then optimises for that. Let’s be frank: they are not designed for an audience of rocket scientists.
Learning cannot be replicated by clamorous, dazzling videos soaked in money and enthusiasm
But this is nothing like learning; this is distraction. Learning requires struggle. It doesn’t provide the same, metronomic dopamine hit you get from doomscrolling people you hate getting dunked, or grazing videos about labradors making poor choices. The pleasure, the absolutely delicious satisfaction of learning is something grown and harvested over time, not instantly. Reading Ulysses or The Tempest may not have the same sugar rush as playing Angry Birds or Brawl Stars, but they are infinitely more enriching. The former changes you as a person; the latter plugs you into a Matrix where your attention is the commodity and you are the product.
In other words, learning cannot be replicated by clamorous, dazzling videos soaked in money and enthusiasm. The information they do provide rushes through your awareness like a disagreeable curry. You engage with them with as much depth and permanence as a grass seed growing on the runway of Heathrow. There are few short cuts in genuine learning. You cannot teach a baby to be musical by playing Mozart in the womb. You cannot learn a language subliminally through recordings as you sleep. You cannot trick yourself into learning. The brain is a stubborn sack of porridge with no cheat codes.
These are the luxury beliefs of a billionaire who is immunised from reality by a force field made of money. The rest of the world’s children need to know a little science, history, art, literature, and so on, in order to navigate not only their own lives but their lives in a world unattended by celebrity status or privilege.
So, here’s my extreme challenge for Donaldson: make a video called I taught myself to fly a helicopter using videos and then tried to fly one over the Grand Canyon, and see how secure he feels the learning is. Hit like and subscribe!
Tracey Emin’s victimhood is a poor foundation for art
It was a given that the critics would indulge in emotional onanism when they covered the Tracey Emin retrospective at the Tate Modern – apt enough when you consider the sexual content of so much of it. But what surprised me was that it wasn’t just women. For the art is almost entirely about Being Tracey: her abortions, her sexual abuse as a teenager by horrible men, her diaries, her cancer with pictures of the bloody stoma, her famous unmade bed, with its used condoms, granny slippers and teddy (it sold in 2014 for £2.5 million) and her death mask, which was done in life … obviously. That, you might have thought, would put off the men.
Certainly, women rallied round Tracey, with one critic on Radio 4 recalling that Tracey’s reaction to her abortion was absolutely hers. A Times columnist observed that she was the role model Gen Z needs. The Guardian reviewer declared: ‘Parts of this show left me in bits. The painting of her carrying her mum’s ashes totally broke me and left me missing my own mum, who died just before the pandemic. I was a teary wreck, it was overwhelming. It must be exhausting being Tracey. I couldn’t feel this intensely all the time, I’ve got to function and send emails and go to Tesco.’
But it wasn’t just the women. The Sunday Times critic, Waldemar Januszczak, declared: ‘I have no time for those in the art world who have no time for Tracey Emin. Frankly, if you don’t understand the significance and import of what she has given us then you need to find yourself another cultural interest, because art is not for you. Hopefully, her unmissable ascension at Tate Modern will silence the naysayers forever.’
How do I put this, Waldemar… no; just no. That magisterial pronouncement should be treated in much the same way as the little boy did, looking at the naked, promenading emperor. The person Januszczak is actually gunning for, as with most of the critics, is Brian Sewell, the late, legendary art critic of the Evening Standard, who not only knew more about art than all the current crop put together but was utterly unafraid to part company with the herd. His finest take on Emin deserves to be reread, written in the context of her retrospective at the Hayward Gallery more than a decade ago.
‘Being Miss Emin is her core activity,’ he wrote. ‘“Look at me, look at me!” she barks to get an audience and, then, like some fraudulent medieval marketeer of relics, gulls us into venerating the trivial keepsakes of herself that she now exhibits in glass cases… Now held in awe by deluded men as sage, sibyl and Margate’s thaumaturge, most women, I am told, see her as some sort of heroic victim, raped as a child, ravaged as a teenager, sweetly sentimental towards her miserable self, yet still full of longing for the status of adored princess, part fairytale, part working-class mythology.’
The thing is, authenticity, raw emotion, grief, resentment, victimhood etc may be the stuff of our therapy culture but it’s a poor foundation for art. It is not enough in itself to have survived bladder cancer and two abortions, ostracism and rape; all this needs to be transmuted into something else and it certainly isn’t transmuted into art. Page after page of agonised and misspelled diaries, a shelf of baby shoes for the abortions, Kodak pictures of her bloody stoma, the blankets with their crude and misspelled slogans; the cloth on which she stitches ‘why be afraid’ again and again; the unmediated confessional video installations. This is self-fixation, introspection, delusional infantilism venerated as art.
It’s often not the work that the critics are in awe of; it is the experience itself
It’s often not the work that the critics are in awe of; it is the experience itself which the output represents, so remote from that of most of them. Emin has indeed had a harder life than most – under-educated, ostracised, exploited by men. Being awestruck by all that is her admirers’ way of deferring to conditions – class, race, education – they don’t share. It’s virtue-signalling by extravagant admiration for the survivor. Moreover, the admiration is proof of their own empathy (that prized modern virtue).
For the work itself is mostly shallow. Granted, there is something powerful about some of her acrylic on canvas studies – of herself, obviously – often savagely incoherent figure studies in black and red on white. But the formlessness serves to demonstrate that she doesn’t seem able to draw (and yes, I know that she was professor of drawing at the Royal Academy, which makes you feel for those students). I have my doubts about Francis Bacon as a draughtsman, too, but at least he had other disturbing things to offer, not just his endlessly fascinating self. Emin has nothing but herself to put on show, and the marvel is that she contains multitudes. It’s a terrible example to young people of how to get on in art – have sordid experiences, then share, any way you like.
As for the stupid neon scribbles, which are to be seen everywhere, they’re what you get when a not-very-profound individual takes herself very seriously. And she does. Trouble is, she’s persuaded the entire establishment to take her at her own estimation too. And so we have the critical fawning, the damehood, being trustee of the British Museum, the extravagant valuation of her work. Granted, she spends much of her money on philanthropy in Margate, but that’s beside the point.
For the joke is on us now. Brian Sewell was, as ever, right.
The short attention-span war
It’s day seven of “Operation Epic Fury” – and the White House is posting through it. The war in Iran that Team Trump wants to show us is tailored for the short attention spans of the vertical video era.
Consider this clip posted on X by the official White House account last night, which intersperses declassified footage of US drones hitting their targets with scenes from Gladiator, Iron Man, Braveheart, Top Gun: Maverick and Yu-Gi Oh. Or the video from earlier in the week that cuts between planes and bunkers being blown up and… SpongeBob SquarePants. The Israel Defense Forces’ X account has been equally out of pocket, while UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s TikTok aping the White House style is, like Starmer, just a bit sad.
Then we have the daily press conferences from the face of the conflict, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. “This was never meant to be a fair fight,” he says, soundtracked by Hans Zimmer-esque strings as he talks up the might and precision of the US effort. “We have only just begun to fight.” The hawkish Hegseth of the Houthi groupchat is resurgent with the administration on war footing.
These videos come in concert with President Trump’s new preferred interview format: the sub-three-minute phone conversation with any reporter who calls him – as Cockburn described Tuesday.
All this adds up to a rather perfunctory view of America’s most consequential military activity in two decades. To cut through the PR, we’re left depending on more traditional avenues. “Did the United States air strike a girls’ elementary school and kill 175 people?” asked the New York Times’s Shawn McCreesh at Wednesday’s White House press briefing. “Not that we know of, Shawn” responded press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Subsequent stories from the Times and Reuters indicate that it’s “likely” the US was responsible. Cockburn wonders what soundtrack the White House social team will add to that footage. Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out,” perhaps.
Messi situation
President Trump took a break from waging war on Iran to show further support for “the Beautiful Game,” as he hosted the MLS Cup-winning Inter Miami soccer team at the White House yesterday afternoon.
The team, captained by eight-time Ballon d’Or winner Lionel Messi, presented Trump with a #47 shirt. Yet the conflict remained top of Trump’s mind at the start of proceedings. “All of their airplanes are gone. Communications are gone. Missiles are gone,” Trump said. “Other than that, they’re doing quite well.”
Trump reminisced about seeing the great Brazilian forward Pelé play, turning to Messi to say, “I don’t know, you may be better than Pelé.” The President also remarked on the squad’s looks. “Good-looking people. I don’t like good-looking men, you don’t feel so good about yourself.” Too right.
Iran’s soccer team was due to compete in this summer’s World Cup, with matches in Los Angeles and Seattle – but after the strikes, their presence seems unlikely. Trump, who was awarded the FIFA Peace Prize three months ago, said “I really don’t care” when asked about the prospect of Iran playing.
On our radar
ART OF THE NO-DEAL “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” the President wrote on Truth Social this morning. “IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. ‘MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).’”
LABOR PAINS The US lost 92,000 jobs last month as the unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
TEL US MORE German publisher Axel Springer has struck a $770 million deal to buy London’s Daily Telegraph, outbidding the Daily Mail and General Trust.
Markwayne my words
So farewell to Kristi Noem, the Trump cabinet’s top aura farmer, and her close advisor Corey Lewandowski, the “MAGA Pete Davidson” (Cockburn, 2023). Noem departs the Department of Homeland Security to become “special envoy to the Shield of the Americas” (because, say it with Cockburn, no one gets fired from Trump 2.0). Your correspondent doesn’t yet know what the “Shield of the Americas” is – but he hopes Noem doesn’t leave it lying around at Capital Burger.
In her stead comes Senator Markwayne Mullin. The Oklahoman has a much lower tolerance for tomfoolery: when he’s not squaring up to union bosses in Senate hearings, he’s spilling the tea about Matt Gaetz’s alleged antics with young ladies and ED medicine. Truly a safe pair of hands.
Trump isn’t the greatest threat to the Special Relationship
Britain’s refusal to fully back the United States over strikes on Iran has triggered an unusually public transatlantic row. It has also revived an old question about the future of the so-called “Special Relationship.”
When Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, many in Westminster doubted Keir Starmer could build a workable relationship with him. The two men could hardly be more different in temperament or politics, and predictions of an early rupture were widespread.
For a time, however, Starmer appeared to defy those expectations. Britain weathered Trump’s latest tariff wars better than most countries, and the Prime Minister seemed to have found a cautious way of managing Washington’s unpredictability. But the dispute over Iran suggests that fragile equilibrium may now be breaking down.
At the diplomatic level, the Special Relationship is spoken of reverently. Yet beneath the rhetoric there has long been unease in Britain about the country’s closeness to Washington.
In Donald Trump’s world, legitimacy is something Washington believes it can supply for itself
Critics have long worried that Britain behaves less like an equal ally than a dependable auxiliary. The sentiment was captured in the 1986 song “51st State” by New Model Army, mocking the idea that Britain had become an appendage to the United States. The anxiety resurfaced during the Iraq war, when Tony Blair was widely caricatured as George W. Bush’s “poodle.” Two decades later, the argument persists. What has changed is the context: the dispute over Iran suggests Britain may no longer be willing – or able – to follow Washington so readily.
Yet the more interesting question may be the opposite one. If Britain is no longer automatically lining up behind the United States, does that mean the Special Relationship is weakening? Or does it reflect something deeper about how the relationship itself is evolving?
For most of the post-war era, the partnership between London and Washington rested on a simple bargain. The United States provided overwhelming military power and global leadership. Britain, in return, offered diplomatic alignment, intelligence cooperation and – crucially – political legitimacy. When Britain joined American interventions, it signaled that Washington was acting as part of a coalition rather than alone. During the Cold War and the decades that followed, this symbolism mattered.
But that model assumed a particular kind of American leadership, one that valued alliances not only for their capabilities but also for the political cover they provided. The return of Donald Trump suggests that assumption may no longer hold.
Trump has never been sentimental about alliances. His approach to international politics is far more transactional. Instead of asking whether allies lend diplomatic support, the question becomes what they actually contribute: do they spend enough on defense, share the burdens of power and bring capabilities the United States finds useful? In that world, historical ties matter less than tangible strategic value – and Britain must demonstrate that it remains a partner worth having.
This is where much of the debate in Britain misses the point. The central question is not whether Britain chooses to support the United States politically, but whether it still possesses the national power required to matter in the partnership.
For decades, Britain could rely on a combination of military capability, diplomatic reach and economic weight that made it a natural partner for the United States. Today that position is less secure. Economic growth has been weak, productivity stagnant and investment lagging behind competitors, while Britain’s armed forces have steadily shrunk and the military has fallen to levels not seen for generations.
The crisis in the Middle East offered a telling illustration. After a drone strike hit the RAF base at Akrotiri in Cyprus this week, Britain announced it would send the destroyer HMS Dragon to reinforce air defenses in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet the ship was not ready to sail immediately, and critics argued it should have been deployed weeks earlier as tensions escalated. The delay prompted comparisons with countries such as France, which had already moved faster to reinforce the region.
This episode reinforced an uncomfortable perception: Britain still talks like a global security actor, but increasingly struggles to act like one. But the deeper issue is not only military weakness. In a transactional alliance system, influence flows from national strength across several domains at once. Military capability matters, but so do economic dynamism, technological leadership and industrial capacity. Countries that command these assets are treated as partners; those that lack them become followers.
Britain still possesses formidable advantages: world-class universities, a powerful financial center, a strong scientific base and a global diplomatic network. Yet many of these strengths have eroded as productivity stalled, industrial capacity shrank and investment in advanced technologies lagged.
In Washington these things matter: the American administration respects countries that bring real capabilities to the table. A Britain that leads in emerging technologies, maintains credible military power and sustains a dynamic economy is a Britain that America will want as a partner. A Britain that cannot project power or sustain technological leadership will find its influence diminishing, regardless of how often politicians invoke the special relationship.
The irony is that the steps required to sustain the relationship with Washington are largely the same steps Britain should be taking anyway in a more competitive global order. Rebuilding defense capability, investing in technological leadership, and strengthening economic dynamism are the foundations of national power in the 21st century.
The real question, then, is not whether the Special Relationship survives the latest quarrel between London and Washington. It is whether Britain can adapt to the way the relationship, and the world itself, is changing.
For much of the post-war era, Britain’s value to the United States lay partly in political support and diplomatic legitimacy. But in Donald Trump’s world, legitimacy is something Washington believes it can supply for itself. What matters instead is capability – and here the irony is uncomfortable for London.
Britain is already under criticism for its shrinking armed forces, delayed deployments and chronic underinvestment in defense. Yet the special relationship can only endure if Britain does precisely what the new strategic environment already demands: rebuild military strength, technological capacity and economic resilience. In that sense the future of British-American relations depends less on diplomacy than on whether Britain gets its own house in order.
The uncomfortable truth is that the greatest threat to the Special Relationship is not Donald Trump. It is the possibility that Britain may cease to be a country America actually needs.
Will the Iran war propel Gavin Newsom to the presidency?
“I’m very angry about this war,” said Gavin Newsom, the California Governor, on stage yesterday. Newsom has a memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, to plug, and a serious bid for the presidency in the offing. Like many other ambitious Democrats, he spies in Donald Trump’s new war an opportunity to cause grave damage to the Republicans in November’s midterms – and in the 2028 presidential election, too.
“Six Americans dead, including a young man from Sacramento,” he said, beating his chest in a nauseatingly theatrical manner. “You have a President who still cannot explain the rationale. Why now, and what’s the endgame?”
Operation Epic Fury, now into its sixth day, has united Democratic politicians in their condemnations of President Trump. At the same time, leading Democrats, such as Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his putative rival for the party’s presidential nomination in 2028, have taken care to emphasize that their objections to the war do not mean they support Tehran. Newsom insists he is “not naive” about the nature of the late Ali Khamenei’s leadership. “We know that the Iranian regime is brutal,” says AOC. “War is not the way we’re going to resolve that issue.”
New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich was more blunt. “I do think this begs for a moment of moral clarity,” he said. “And so yeah, the more clearly you say this seems like a really fucking stupid idea, I think the more people will appreciate what you’re getting at.” (Bad language is an effective way of cutting through the noise in modern politics.)
Congressional Democrats will push ahead with a “war powers” vote in an attempt to stress that a president must seek the authority of Congress before determining when and where America goes to war.
But the business of opposing the war is also likely to bring up tensions between the center and the left of the party over Israel, tensions which surfaced as the war in Gaza raged during the 2024 election. Kamala Harris fudged the issue, stating Israel’s right to defend itself while promising she supported the right to Palestinian self-determination.
But the mood of the party has since become ever more critical of the Israeli state, and potential Democratic challengers, while still cautious about frightening off Jewish voters and donors, are eagerly seeking to outdo each other by adopting positions that are critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
On the Pod Save America podcast, Newsom even referred to Israel as an “apartheid state.” When asked if the US should reconsider its military support for Israel, he replied: “It breaks my heart, because the current leadership is walking us down that path where I don’t think you have a choice about that consideration.”
But while discussion of Israel will always be fraught in high Democratic circles, the war in Iran could give the party an opportunity to win back anti-war Democrats who drifted towards Trump in 2024. While Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has kept a low profile in recent days, leaders of his Make America Healthy Again movement have signed a petition for “Health, not War.”
In 2002, a young state senator called Barack Obama gave a powerful speech condemning the invasion of Iraq. “When I look out at this crowd today, I know there is no shortage of patriots or patriotism. What I do oppose is a dumb war,” he said.
The political landscape has changed a lot in the last 20 years, and Newsom is not as convincing an orator as Obama. But if Operation Epic Fury turns into Trump’s quagmire, and if its impact causes another surge in inflation, the Democrats will have been given an anti-war, pro-America platform from which they can regain power.
This article originally appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
The good and bad news about Labour’s leaked social cohesion strategy
Some things in the government’s leaked social cohesion strategy will be deeply neuralgic to many. There is the creation of a “special representative on anti-Muslim hostility,” which will almost certainly hand an official bully pulpit to an activist such as Baroness Gohir, who has attacked media coverage of the grooming scandal as “disproportionate” and being “used…to fuel racism and Islamophobia,” or to a figure such as Dominic Grieve.
The leaked strategy is clear that Islamism is the country’s greatest extremist threat
There’s a claim that last summer’s widespread flying of English, Scottish and Union flags were “tools of hate” and the “misuse [of] national symbols to exclude or intimidate.” There’s the statement that “integration is a two-way street” – that the indigenous community must adapt to the practices of newer arrivals. And there is the party-political tone of the first chapter, jarring for something meant to be about bringing people together, which blames austerity and “immigration policy under the last government” for social tensions with far older, deeper, more complex roots.
The strategy creates clear free speech risks, pledging to crack down on “divisive content” online. But “division,” or disagreement, is necessary for democratic debate. If everyone agreed, or was forced to agree, it would not be a debate.
There are also, however, some policies here that would constitute major breakthroughs – if they actually happen. In contrast to last year’s dismal “counter-extremism sprint,” leaked to us at Policy Exchange and disowned by ministers the next day, the new strategy is clear-eyed that Islamism – responsible for three-quarters of the police’s counter-terror workload and 94 per cent of all terrorist deaths in the last quarter-century – is the country’s greatest extremist threat. And it recognises Islamism’s institutional strength.
There will be new powers to shut down extremist charities and suspend trustees, to “strengthen monitoring” of non-violent extremism in universities and to exclude hate preachers from the UK. There will be greater oversight of home schooling, sometimes exploited by extremists, and a “dedicated Home Office horizon-scanning function to identify and disrupt individuals and events of extremist concern” in hireable venues and outdoor spaces. There will be an annual “state of extremism” report, hopefully a counter to the one-sided work of groups like Hope not Hate.
In its chapter four, “resilient communities,” the strategy promises to “embed the [Conservative] government’s 2024 extremism definition across central and local government” and “embed the 2024 engagement principles so that public bodies do not confer legitimacy, funding or influence on extremist groups.”
That could be significant – though working out which groups fall within the definition does risk creating a buffet for lawyers. The 2024 definition was also attacked at the time, including by the independent reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation, as “very loose.” Three former Tory home secretaries feared that it could end up being used against legitimate organisations which inconvenience mainstream politicians. The left could try to weaponise any extremism definition against Reform, for instance.
A section entitled “resetting the social contract” makes clear that “those who come here must make a genuine effort to integrate into and engage with our shared way of life” and must speak good English, as almost a tenth of the non-white population do not: “the ability to use and understand our shared language should be a fundamental basis for participating in society and an expectation of those who wish to call the UK home.” Perhaps the same principle could be extended to Green Party election leaflets?
If Starmer falls, prime minister Angela Rayner and communities secretary Wajid Khan are unlikely to take the same view
After the scandal of the Batley teacher forced into hiding by a mob for showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed – where, almost five years later, he remains – the document makes a very strong statement that the government will “stand against those who try to intimidate, threaten and harass others because they are offended by so-called ‘blasphemy.’ We do not recognise blasphemy law in the UK.”
One potential ingredient of a blasphemy law – an official definition of Islamophobia, now rebranded anti-Muslim hostility but just as dangerous – is nowhere to be seen in the leaked strategy, though it may still be announced separately.
The risk, of course, is that the bad things in the strategy happen, and the good ones do not. As one colleague put it, the document reads like “Morgan McSweeney’s last hurrah.” That underlines that there is likely to be significant pushback from the left against some of the proposals.
The Government is unstable and has a record of policy reversals. If Starmer falls, Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Communities Secretary Wajid Khan are unlikely to take the same view. And at the operational level, the strategy suffers from the classic delusion that any objective can be achieved by setting up new boards and committees. These will almost certainly end up stocked with the same identity-politics activists, woolly-minded councillors and forty-watt policemen who helped bring about the mess we are in now. Previous efforts at resets, including by Tony Blair’s government, failed for the same reason. As the saying goes, personnel is policy.
The creation of an “anti-Muslim hostility” tsar, with his or her government megaphone, constantly finding tendentious new examples of “hostility,” constantly pressuring for new restrictions, constantly present on Radio 4, could alone cancel out a significant part of the good which the strategy’s other policies would do.
So it’s fingers crossed from me.
Revealed: Britain to get Islamophobia tsar
Britain is to get a new ‘anti-Muslim hostility tsar’ under plans to be outlined by the government on Monday, which will also include a new definition of Islamophobia.
The Spectator has been leaked a draft copy of Protecting What Matters, a document outlining Labour’s new cohesion strategy
The Spectator has been leaked a draft copy of Protecting What Matters, a document outlining Labour’s new cohesion strategy which is to be unveiled in a cross government push next week. The 47-page paper features a crackdown on extremism and names Islamists as the biggest threat to community cohesion. It also outlines fresh demands that new arrivals in Britain seek to integrate and speak good English, described as a ‘fundamental basis for participating in society and an expectation of those who wish to call the UK home’. It states: ‘Those who come here must make a genuine effort to integrate into and engage with our shared way of life.’ The last census found that more than a million people could not speak English well or at all.
The report states clearly that Islamists are responsible for three-quarters of the police’s counterterror workload and 94 per cent of all terror-related deaths in the past 25 years. The plan also rejects calls, predominantly from British Muslims, for blasphemy laws in the UK.
Following the case of the religious studies teacher at Batley Grammar school, who was forced into hiding after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, the document promises to ‘stand against those who try to intimidate, threaten and harass others because they are offended by so-called “blasphemy”. We do not recognise blasphemy law in the UK.’
Further powers will be established to close extremist charities and suspend trustees with ‘unspent hate crime convictions’, to ‘strengthen monitoring’ of non-violent extremism in universities and to exclude hate preachers from the UK. As part of this, there will be rules to ensure that ‘public bodies do not confer legitimacy, funding or influence on extremist groups’.
But the plans will also raise alarm bells on free speech by outlining new rules to tackle ‘divisive content’ and ‘ensure trusted news sources are prominent’. Critics fear these measures will be used to silence critics of Islamists or even TV channels like GB News which some Labour people view as too right-wing.
Andrew Gilligan, a senior fellow at Policy Exchange and a former No. 10 adviser, said: ‘There are clear risks to free speech. But there are also several worthwhile commitments, if they ever happen. The risk is that the bad things happen, and the good ones do not. The other risk is that the new strategy is implemented by the same old identity-politics activists, woolly-minded councillors and 40-watt policemen who have made the current mess.’
The creation of a ‘special representative on anti-Muslim hostility’ is likely to give a prominent platform to an activist voice. Their job will be to ‘champion efforts across the UK to tackle hostility and hatred directed at Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim’.
Alongside that is a new definition of anti-Muslim hatred, which has been watered down to avoid defining Muslims as a race, but which will still condemn ‘the prejudicial stereotyping of Muslims, as part of a collective group with set characteristics, to stir up hatred against them, irrespective of their actual opinions, beliefs or actions as individuals’. Critics think this will create a blasphemy law by the back door.
Reading the paper highlights the difficult balancing act ministers are attempting by hailing the way some marchers and campaigners have embraced displaying the union flag or the English cross of St George before, a few sentences later, condemning right wing groups for using them as ‘tools of hate’ in their demonstrations, a ‘misuse of national symbols to exclude or intimidate’.
The paper paints a picture of a country where traditional cohesion in communities has broken down by immigration and the use of social media, which enables people to cluster with like-minded people online rather than the people they live near. Britain’s ‘historic social cohesion that has kept us united in the face of adversity’ is now ‘under threat’, it says.
Despite the scale of the problem, the cohesion strategy comes with little new money
And the government admits the role mass migration has played in this. ‘For many living in the UK, the changes brought about by mass migration have been too much, too quickly, leaving people feeling as thought they are losing their local and national identity.’ Calling integration ‘a two way street’, it says calling for ‘respect for different cultures’ and that ‘newcomers have a responsibility to engage with and embrace what it means to be British’.
The strategy will also seek to protect those who speak out, though it is unclear precisely how this will combat cancel culture. ‘Many people feel they cannot air perfectly legitimate concerns about the change they are seeing in their local communities. There must be space for honest discussion without assuming bad intentions or policing language.’
However, it also states that everyone must ‘embrace’ LGBT rights, opening the door to censure of those whose religious views are hostile to homosexuality and those who do not embrace trans rights. Ministers will also float the idea of religious education in the national curriculum and suggests the government should ‘promote’ religious education councils.
The paper also goes further than the government has done before to acknowledge that anti-Jewish hatred is a growing problem in the UK. ‘Antisemitism is being normalised in many corners of society – from our schools and universities to workplaces and the NHS,’ it says.
Despite the scale of the problem, the cohesion strategy comes with little new money. Ministers will announce plans for £800 million over ten years for 40 areas where ‘social cohesion is under pressure,’ plus £750 million over four years for youth, sport, and community infrastructure and a £5.5 million fund to ‘restore local news where it has disappeared’.
A source close to Steve Reed, the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, whose department helped coordinate the strategy, declined to comment on the leaked paper, but suggested it was not the final draft. The document, as published, will include a foreword by the Prime Minister.
Wokery is a Christian heresy
‘Progressive’ or ‘woke’ politics is undoubtedly religious. But not in a good way. In championing transgender, ethnic minority or postcolonial ‘victims’, it fully embraces the zeal of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus to raise up the downtrodden. And it shares their righteous ire against those who do the treading down. But there’s a problem. Prophetic zeal unrestrained by other elements produces a distorted Christianity. Wokery is a Christian heresy.
In my experience, instead of behaving as if they were subject to God and his moral requirements, ‘woke’ prophets conduct themselves like little gods, subject to none but themselves, tyrannical and merciless
Since I was dragged into the culture wars in 2017, because I didn’t think that colonialism was simply wicked, I’ve spent over eight years dealing with ‘woke’ critics, many of them with the title ‘Professor’ or ‘Reverend’ in front of their name, or ‘Church Commissioner’ behind it. My consistent experience has been that they don’t behave like creatures and sinners. They betray no sign of feeling the need to learn or be corrected. They conduct themselves as if they have absolute possession of the truth and the only reason some might disagree is that they’re morally wicked (that is, racist). So, they don’t listen or reflect thoughtfully on what dissenters have to say. Instead, they respond with unscrupulous aggression – smearing critics’ reputations, misreporting their words, twisting them into strawmen the easier to blow down and seeking to intimidate them into silence. As Priyamvada Gopal, the Cambridge professor who first brought the culture wars to my doorstep, tweeted to her comrades after reading about my ‘Ethics and Empire’ project, ‘OMG. This is serious shit. We need to SHUT THIS DOWN’. In my experience, instead of behaving as if they were subject to God and his moral requirements, ‘woke’ prophets conduct themselves like little gods, subject to none but themselves, tyrannical and merciless. (Readers looking for further substantiation of my claims here can find chapter and verse in The New Dark Age: Why Liberals must Win the Culture Wars.)
A leading feature of decolonising ‘wokery’ is its exaggeration of the sins of western civilisation – the civilisation that Christianity has done most to shape. One common expression of this is the wholesale damnation of the British Empire. Now, we can argue about whether the Empire was, all things considered, more a force for evil than good. But no one holding themselves accountable to the facts of history can deny that it chalked up some major humanitarian and liberal achievements. Exhibit A: the Empire was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the hitherto universal practice of slavery and then led the world in suppressing it, from Brazil to New Zealand, for over a century.
Exhibit B: from June 1940 when France fell, to June 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Empire was the only military opposition to the genocidally racist regime in Nazi Berlin, with the sole exception of Greece. But these achievements the ‘woke’ prophets adamantly refuse to acknowledge, lest it muddy the simple waters of their absolute condemnation.
Why? Why the stubborn, truth-defying exaggeration? One plausible explanation is this. For Christians, the paradoxical mark of the genuinely righteous person is a profound awareness of their own unrighteousness. The saint stands out as one who knows more deeply than others just what a sinner she really is. Like all virtue, however, this can be corrupted into vice. As Jesus pointed out, humility can be infected by pride. So, don’t make a public display of your piety. Don’t virtue-signal. For genuine humility can degenerate into a perverse bid for supreme self-righteousness, which exaggerates one’s sins and broadcasts the display of repentance: holier-than-thou because more-sinful-than-thou. In The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, the Jesuit-educated Pascal Bruckner captures this when he writes of contemporary, post-imperial Europe (and by extension, the non-US West): ‘This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history… Europe is still messianic in a minor key.’
In this self-regarding display of virtue, the penitent hogs the stage: ‘by erecting lack of love for oneself into a leading principle, we lie to ourselves about ourselves and close ourselves to others… In western self-hatred, the Other has no place. It is a narcissistic relationship in which the African, the Indian and Arab are brought in as extras.’
This psychological speculation by a right-of-centre French philosopher is given empirical substantiation by the left-of-centre Australian anthropologist, Peter Sutton, in his book, The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus.
After spending several decades among the aboriginal Wik peoples of northern Queensland, Sutton became convinced that their social dysfunction was caused less by historic colonialism than by contemporary factors. Yet he found that ‘woke’ opinion was in thrall to an ideological ‘politics of compassion’ that resisted the implications of expert or statistical evidence and obstructed the crafting of realistic remedies: ‘Simplistic causal accounts continue to grow like healthy weeds’. For example: ‘The kids don’t go to school because the teachers are racists.’ ‘What enables the purveyors of such pap, and those who swallow it,’ he asks, ‘to so suspend their normal critical faculties?’ The answer he gives to his own question about the springs of such ‘uncaring kindness’ is career-interests: ‘Victimhood becomes, for many, the family business, a business of status as well as of economics.’
If ‘woke’ prophets really cared to liberate the oppressed, they’d be eager to understand the causes of their plight correctly, the better to craft effective remedies. So, when presented with evidence that their wonted diagnosis – say, historic slavery and systemic racism – doesn’t stand up rationally or empirically they’d react with keen, albeit sceptical, curiosity. But, as Sutton observed, that’s not how they behave. Instead, they move to shut contradiction down. Wokery isn’t really about raising up the downtrodden. It’s about puffing up the prophet.
The BBC cannot tax Netflix viewers
The BBC has described itself as being set to enter ‘managed decline’. The government is currently reviewing the broadcaster’s charter, and yesterday the BBC issued a response to its green paper saying that if the status quo remains, public service broadcasting will die. ‘Huge changes in the media market, audience behaviours, and an outdated funding model’, have apparently caused the BBC’s licence fee income to drop by a quarter.
What the BBC didn’t acknowledge was that these ‘audience behaviours’ amounted to people concluding it was no longer worth paying for. That isn’t because ‘huge changes in the media market’ mean people feel paying for broadcasting is ‘an outdated funding model’. Instead, they’re choosing to pay for something else. One of the BBC’s proposed solutions is to charge them anyway. Want to watch Netflix or Apple TV? You’ll pay the BBC for the privilege.
If you stream any live TV, you already have to. The Beeb is outraged that often people don’t pay up, but we should be outraged that they’re meant to. Funding the BBC via mandatory contributions from people trying to watch something else is absurd, and missing the point. Last year, 23.8 million households bought a TV licence, down by over two and a half million over the past decade. The BBC’s 118 pages of proposals for the charter review include no serious attempt to ask why people aren’t watching.
Politics comes easily to mind. The BBC has used the son of a Hamas member as a presenter for a documentary, and pursued Trump-bashing more than accuracy to such an extent that their director general and head of news had to resign. But politics is what we complain about in this country; TV has long been what we’ve enjoyed. If the programmes were good, people would swallow the bias.
The BBC is failing from a collapse of purpose. When it began it had a mission: to attract, uplift, and enlighten. The Light Programme pulled in audiences with what was easy, then the Home Service introduced substance, designed to ‘steadily but imperceptibly raise the standard of taste, entertainment, outlook and citizenship’. Finally the Third Programme offered culture – the best that has been thought and known in the world. Reith acknowledged ‘that we are apparently setting out to give the public what we think they need and not what they want, but few know what they want, and very few what they need.’
Against that, consider the recent successes. Popular programmes include The Apprentice, Call the Midwife, Great British Menu and RuPaul’s Drag Race. The question is not whether they are good but whether successful and commercial programmes like these need state support. ‘The legitimate object of government,’ said Lincoln, ‘is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves.’ He didn’t mean EastEnders.
Good television is not the exclusive possession of a lost age. I love Slow Horses, Only Murders In The Building, Fisk, Colin From Accounts, and Murderbot. These are shows that trust the intelligence of their audience. None have needed state support.
Rather than cheerleading for the best that has been thought and known, today’s BBC worships populism and holds high culture in contempt. Twenty years ago I turned off the Today programme in a moment of fury, and have never felt inclined to turn it back on. Radio 3’s deliberate drift towards Classic FM has diminished my two favourites: the intelligent presence of Ian Skelly, and the pleasures of the Mixtape. The last BBC I watched was a YouTube of Parkinson from 1973. Kenneth Williams and Jimmy Reid debated the function of the unions with a level of articulate disagreement that seems impossible today.
Without excellence and without ambition, the BBC isn’t an essential public service
It seems impossible because the BBC has made it so, by making us expect so much less. That Parkinson debate would never be commissioned today, let alone broadcast in peak hours. BBC news is biased, but the real problem is that it’s shallow.
Friends speak highly of In Our Time, From Our Own Correspondent, and other pockets of excellence. But do these warrant a regressive tax of nearly £4 billion, now potentially extended to those who have actively tried to opt-out? Targeted state support could avoid funding the vastly expensive mediocrity that makes up the rest of the BBC.
The corporation should be making programmes that are better than people think they want, more cultured than they feel they desire. When it pretends to uniqueness, but churns out commercial programmes no different to its competitors, the BBC loses its reason to exist. Without excellence and without ambition, the BBC isn’t an essential public service but state-backed banality. Forcing Netflix viewers to pay for it is shameless. People should be free to walk away.
Event
BBC: defund or defend?
The decline and fall of Tottenham Hotspur
How the mighty have fallen. Tottenham Hotspur, the fifth richest club in England, the ninth richest in the world, current Europa League Champions and a mere five years ago Super League aspirants, are now facing relegation to the not-so-super league, the Championship. After yet another dismal defeat last night (1-3 to Crystal Palace), our (full disclosure: I’m a fan) fifth loss in a row, Spurs sit 16th in the league, just a point ahead of West Ham and Nottingham Forest. As the commentator on TNT said, ‘the unthinkable has now become possible’.
We thought we were too good for the Premier League. The humiliating truth may be that the Premier League is too good for us
The scenes at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium last night somewhat recalled Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election night party after it became clear she had lost; a vista of blank, dumfounded faces, a few tears. Some had left before half-time even, but of those that saw it through to the bitterest of endings, many hung around, seemingly paralysed by the pre-grief of our looming demotion, a concept so remote from our hopes and expectations as to be virtually impossible to process. But process it we may soon have to, as may the Premier League and the wider football world.
For Spurs, the consequences have been described as ‘catastrophic’ with relegation from the top flight potentially costing the club as much as £260 million. The current £76 average price for a ticket would no longer be sustainable in the Championship, and lucrative hospitality packages would be unlikely to attract much interest if Preston or Swansea are the visitors. Broadcasting receipts would plummet, and sponsorship revenue (one major sponsor has already left) would evaporate. There would likely be a ‘fire-sale’ of players (some of the most marketable may already be looking around), and attracting first-class replacements would be difficult. Nor would an instant rebound be guaranteed; the Championship is a very tough league, and Spurs would be scrapping it out with a likely much reduced squad and greatly reduced budget.
As for the Premier League, it is fair to say that it was not designed with the idea of elite clubs being demoted in mind. The loss of one of the gilt-edged ‘big six’ clubs, especially one with a global fanbase, would be disturbing and likely provoke debate about the viability of the dreaded drop. The Premier League and Championship are separate entities, and promotion and relegation between the two take place only as long as the elite division’s executives permit it to. The fragile link between the two top tiers could be severed easily if deemed to have outlived its usefulness.
It has already happened in rugby union. Last week, Premiership rugby announced it was scrapping relegation for good from next season and turning its elite division into effectively a closed shop, thus ending 37 years of merit-based ascendancy. Henceforth, gaining access to the top tier will be extremely difficult and permitted according to non-sporting criteria, such as – you guessed it – financial stability. Premier League execs will be watching that situation closely. Last year, it was reported that some of the American owners (of whom there are 11) were unhappy with the concept of relegation, which is alien to US sports. “Nothing is off limits,” was the quote attributed to one US owner.
This is in line with the way elite football has been going for a long time, safeguarding future revenues by tweaking formats to ensure the top clubs are close to guaranteed slots in the most prestigious tournaments. The Champions’ League stopped being a league of champions in 1992 as a result of the irritating habit of the richest clubs in Europe often failing to qualify. Many want to go further; the concept of ‘legacy-based admission’, allowing super clubs who have had a poor year to qualify based on former glories, has been batted away for now but looks inevitable in some form.
If the Premier League executives are wise, they will go no further down this road. Even as a Spurs fan, I would have to admit that the jeopardy my club faces is one of the most compelling stories in the league in years. Our predicament is exceptional, but the relegation battle is usually far more entertaining than the often rather predictable business at the top of the table. Without relegation, it is hard to think of much reason for watching the last nine games of the domestic season. As it is, I and many others will be riveted.
It would provide a healthy reality check too. Many would question the word ‘mighty’ to describe Spurs that opened this article, preferring ‘high and mighty’ perhaps. Classic underachievers, we haven’t won the league in over 60 years for the simple reason that we haven’t deserved to. We have the most expensive stadium in Europe, but our feeble, panic-stricken team makes a mockery of it. Our attempt to join the European super league a few years back now looks like hubris on steroids. We thought we were too good for the Premier League, and the humiliating truth may be that, at least at the moment, the Premier League is too good for us.
A spell in the second tier might do us, and football, good. It might remind us who we are and encourage les autres at the same time. It might wean us, and hopefully others, off the ridiculous, cruel, and ruinously expensive habit of dismissing managers after every lean spell. We might remember the example of one of our most successful bosses, Keith Burkinshaw, who won more trophies than anyone apart from Bill Nicholson and was inducted into the Spurs Hall of Fame in 2004.
Keith Burkinshaw became manager in 1976, and in his first season, Spurs were relegated to the then quaintly but accurately named Second Division, where we spent one year. It did us, and football, good.
What Poilievre can (and can’t) teach the British Right
Over the last week, I have been stalking Pierre Poilievre. The leader of the Canadian Conservative Party has been in Westminster to renew the bonds of Anglospheric amity; consequently, I had the pleasure of watching him speak on two successive evenings.
The arc of history is long, but it bends towards Robert Jenrick
Until a year or so ago, Poilievre was the Prince Across the Atlantic – a punchy and pugnacious Conservative would who had united his party around a popular and populist message of more housebuilding, tackling inflation and championing those working-class voters that Canada’s Liberals had taken for granted for too long. He built a hefty lead over Justin Trudeau and topped the polls among young voters. Especially in the flaming wreckage of the aftermath of the 2024 election, he seemed the perfect model for our Tories to learn from.
And then Donald Trump returned to the White House. Suddenly, the central question of Canadian politics was not whether you could afford a family home, but whether you wanted to be annexed by the US. Since most Canadians did not want to be the 51st state, Poilievre was left somewhat high and dry as a rally-around-the-flag effect benefited the incumbents – especially when Trudeau sodded off to spend more time at Katy Perry concerts and was replaced by the effortlessly smooth and well-CVed Mark Carney. At last April’s election, Poilievre managed to win a healthy 41 per cent of the vote – but Carney won 44 per cent, the highest share for the Liberals since 1984. Poilievre found himself losing his own seat.
But now he is back in Canada’s Parliament, and with Carney still riding high, looking for something to do. Fortunately for Britain, that has manifested itself as a trip to the mother country to meet with politicians, commune with the root of our shared liberties at Runnymede and promote the cause of CANZUK – a proposed alliance of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. A shared head of state, historic ties, similar economies, shared language, overlapping trade and foreign policy interests – surely unity is a no-brainer?
This is a point I watched Poilievre make first at the Carlton Club, and then the annual Margaret Thatcher lecture of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). He was eloquent, historically literate and engaging. His habit of slipping into French mid-speech was something I was more prepared for after my sojourn to the Plaid Cymru party conference.
What should CANZUK mean in practice? Automatic professional recognition and regulatory presumption of equivalence, for a start. As Poilievre put it for the CPS, if ‘someone can perform heart surgery in Sydney, Australia, they should be able to do so in Syndey, Nova Scotia’; if ‘a drug or auto part is safe in London, England, it should be safe in London, Ontario’. It should be made easier for high-skilled workers to move between the four countries – just in case we weren’t losing enough NHS doctors to Oz – while defence procurement should be integrated and a critical minerals and energy compact signed to enable the ‘building blocks of modern defence’ to serve ‘to power [Canada’s] allies’.
All splendid stuff, even if his insistence that we should buy Canadian liquid natural gas seemed a little odd after his opening encomium to Adam Smith and the merits of free trade. Being a Daniel Hannan fan, I’ve always been quite taken with the CANZUK concept, but I fear it might be a century or so out of date. If Joseph Chamberlain couldn’t make it work, I’m not sure Poilievre can. There might have been too much change within and between our four nations – demographically, and with our post-imperial reorientation towards Europe and the US – to mean that those deep bonds of English-speaking amity he eulogised no longer exist.
Most importantly, it’s also an unfortunate fact of life that in three out of four of the countries – excepting stout and beautiful little New Zealand – there are currently centre-left governments in power. Both Carney in Canada and Anthony Albanese have received more accolades over the situation in the Middle East than Keir Starmer is managing – another suggestion that the UK might not be best placed to lead a push for CANZUK.
But it was about domestic politics that I hoped Poilievre might say a little more. Two decades ago, the Canadian Right was split between a party called Reform and a party called the Conservatives. My knowledge of their eventual merger isn’t what it could be, since all the best books of the subject have been snapped up and now go for extortionate amounts on AbeBooks. I was hoping Poilievre would fill me in; no dice. This was a missed opportunity.
Perhaps Poilievre didn’t want to lecture his hosts. Each unhappy set of Right-wing parties are unhappy in their own way. For most of the time when Canada’s Reform (later renamed the Canadian Alliance) and so-called Progressive Conservatives were battling it out and letting the Liberals win by default, Poilievre was still at school or university. But as important as it is to re-state the fundamental truths that Smith outlined, and as grand as the celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations deserves to be, one can’t implement his lessons if we’re not in power. We have an agenda, but the Right needs a vessel.
As a recent Spectator editorial outlined, the Right currently confronts a war without an enemy – a civil war, where the best talents are spread across both sides, and where a high-level clash of personalities, histories and shades of blue obscures an underlying unity of analysis and direction. It is a tragedy that Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage are at cross purposes, especially if it repeats the Canadian mistake of enabling the Left to keep winning.
Happily, the contours of a potential deal are starting to emerge. Reform have stalled in the polls; the Conservatives are down, but not out. After May’s elections it will become clear that the Tories are no longer a national party but might still function as a regional interest group for the wealthier bits of the South. If various seats can be won back from the Lib Dems in 2029 with a ‘Vote Davey, Get Starmer/Polanski/Rayner’ message, a hung parliament may be forced. The 2019 Tory coalition will be put back together, with Reform winning the Red Wall and the Conservatives the Blue. A hung parliament will provide an incentive to work together; a deal will be done, the Right reunited, the war without an enemy declared over.
Of course, such a union will not be facilitated under the current leadership of either party. Badenoch is too proud to admit the Conservatives are not a national party; Farage has dedicated himself to wiping the Tories out. But the pair are united by a shared disinterest in actually becoming Prime Minister, since both realise it would be too much like hard work.
Any union will require someone reassuring to both tribes – bringing Reform’s outsider elan without frightening Tunbridge Wells. Someone who can look like David Cameron but talk like Matthew Goodwin – our own Poilievre. Someone hungry for power, and supportive of the neo-Powellite agenda around which the Right will unite. Fortunately for Britain, that candidate exists. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards Robert Jenrick.
Israel wants to destroy Hezbollah once and for all
At around 2:30 a.m. on March 2, Israel bombed Beirut’s mostly Shia southern suburbs in response to a Hezbollah rocket attack on northern Israel. The road heading into Beirut from South Lebanon and the city’s southern suburbs was jammed with cars filled with Lebanese fleeing further reprisals. Some 52 civilians were killed and 154 injured, a hefty butcher’s bill even in this part of the world.
Most Lebanese are happy Hezbollah has been defanged, even if they wish it wasn’t thanks to Israel
Hezbollah’s actions were a demonstration of their ongoing support for Iran, but goading Israel was a cataclysmic miscalculation. Not only did it guarantee that the Jewish state would tear up what was left of the ceasefire agreement that ended the 2024 war, but it also prompted Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam to double down on his commitment to terminating Hezbollah’s resistance “contract.”
“We announce a ban on Hezbollah’s military activities and restrict its role to the political sphere,” he said, adding that the Lebanese army would “prevent any attacks originating from Lebanese territory.”
Hezbollah supporters were quick to accuse Salam and President Joseph Aoun of being “traitors” and “Israeli agents,” but the fact that a Lebanese prime minister can now make such an announcement shows how Hezbollah has gone from being Tehran’s untouchable regional enforcer to busted flush in the space of 18 bloody months.
Hezbollah’s military activities were sanctioned after the 1989 Taif Agreement, which ended the 1975-90 civil war. It was the only militia allowed to retain its weapons so it could “resist” the Israeli occupation in the mainly Shia Southern Lebanon which had begun in 1985.
Thereafter, the Syrian regime of Hafez, and then Bashar al-Assad, which effectively occupied Lebanon from 1990 to 2005, gave it political cover and logistical support. In May 2000 – after a 15-year low-intensity war – Hezbollah forced an Israeli withdrawal from its self-proclaimed security zone in Southern Lebanon. Overnight, the party’s armed wing had succeeded where Arab armies had failed; its fighters were hailed as stout defenders of Lebanese integrity, and the Shia, for so long the underclass, had found dignity.
But Hezbollah found multiple excuses not to disarm and it soon became clear to anyone not drinking the Kool-Aid that the whole resistance shtick was less about defending Lebanese land and more about establishing Iranian muscle in the Levant.
When Syria reluctantly left Lebanon in the wake of the 2005 Cedar Revolution, Hezbollah was forced to play a more high-profile political role to defend its interests. Successive governments, which by then included Hezbollah ministers, made it policy to include the “right of Lebanon, its people, its army, and its resistance to liberate occupied land and defend the country” in every ministerial statement until January 2025, when Salam was appointed.
The words meant nothing. For 20 years, like the PLO in the 1970s and early 1980s, the party rode roughshod over Lebanon, driven by a self-serving and bogus “resistance” narrative. It controlled nearly all the levers of power, eroding the legitimacy and self-determination of the state; stifling economic growth; taking Lebanon into wars it didn’t want and influencing the political process with the veiled threat of violence.
But for those willing to see it, the resistance mask slipped quite early on. In 2008, when the government tried to shut down its illegal phone network, Hezbollah took to the streets, spilling Lebanese blood for the first time since the civil war. In 2010, when it went in to bat for the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war, mothers of Hezbollah fighters asked why the party had gone off-script and was sending their sons to kill other Arabs. In 2019, it dispatched its thugs onto the streets to quell demonstrators demanding the resignation of the government following the financial collapse. On August 4, 2020, 2,750 tons of Hezbollah-owned ammonium nitrate exploded at the Port of Beirut, wiping out a segment of the city in one of the biggest non-nuclear blasts ever recorded.
But retribution would soon follow. Immediately after the October 7 attacks in 2023, Hezbollah joined the battle by bombing Israel’s northern border towns in support of Hamas, forcing the evacuation of nearly all the residents. In September 2024, Israel made its move, starting with Mossad’s by-now infamous pager and walkie-talkie attacks on the party’s rank and file, followed by the assassination on September 27 of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, along with most of the executive Shura Council and an entire Beirut block.
Two months later, after a seven-week war during which Hezbollah’s military capacity was further degraded and more civilians died, a tentative ceasefire was agreed.
Most Lebanese were, and still are, happy that Hezbollah has been defanged, even if they privately acknowledge that they would rather they didn’t have to thank Israel for it. Israel’s actions in Gaza have left many, even among those who would happily make peace with the Jewish state – and there are many – feeling uncomfortable. The majority of Lebanese were delighted with the ceasefire and appalled it effectively ended on March 2.
It remains to be seen whether Hezbollah, which still has an impressive arsenal of ballistic missiles and a thick seam of messianic zeal running through its ranks, will do the smart thing and step back from the brink or if it will take the war to Israel – and to hell with the rest of Lebanon.
Even if it does stand down, that doesn’t mean it will voluntarily disarm. Hezbollah weapons are still symbols of Shia dignity and forcing the issue could very easily ignite a civil war. Then again, it is no secret that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to expand ground operations against Hezbollah and finish the job once and for all. This war has given him that chance.
Gavin Newsom, the everyman elitist
Young Man in a Hurry is California Governor Gavin Newsom’s attempt to explain himself to a divided country that may soon find him vying for its presidency. He alternates between candor and wile in answering the book’s central question: who is Gavin Newsom? In these pages he constructs a striking hero’s journey, illuminating an insular world of inherited wealth, hereditary political power and ideological contradiction that few Americans will have been exposed to. But he also casts himself as a struggling underdog, a folksy type whose patrician image belies a life of perseverance and a unique set of emotional and psychological deprivations.
Growing up, Newsom would often board the Gettys’ private 727 and gallivant for two or three weeks
In producing this memoir, Newsom (“Newscum” to Donald Trump and, we are told, somewhat implausibly, his childhood bullies in Marin County) seems to have overcome his dyslexia, which prevents him from reading his speeches and caused him to underperform at school. He claims to have bombed the SAT (“three hours of dyslexic torture”) and fallen so far behind academically that he was “resigned to a stint at the local community college,” until Santa Clara University recruited him as a first baseman. That he admits to working with a ghostwriter is an example of the transparency he can exhibit throughout this work. But despite his attempts to control the more politically inconvenient – yet irrefutable – facts of his life, Newsom has done a surprising amount of fumigation.
Newsom is a fifth-generation Californian, a descendant of Irish and Scottish immigrants who arrived in the 19th century and never left. Until the governorship brought him to Sacramento, he had always lived in and around San Francisco. Through his father, William “Bill” Newsom III, he belongs to a powerful Bay Area milieu that traces its influence back to the Democratic machine politics of the 1930s. His mother, Tessa, was the daughter of a botanist who’d endured the Bataan death march during World War Two, struggled with alcoholism and died by suicide. His grandmother was also a bohemian who spent part of her life living as an actress in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
One doesn’t get the impression that Newsom shares the ideological vigor of his communist forebears. His reflections on life are far more concerned with people and personalities than ideas. When he occasionally invokes the rhetorical wokeism – “California was born in genocide,” etc. – it all feels cynical, rather than the mark of a true believer. In recounting his early political journey, he prides himself on banning plastic bags and going all-in so early on gay marriage that Barack Obama once refused to take a photo with him. He lambasts George W. Bush, the Iraq War and the PATRIOT Act; he coyly signals his fondness for big tech.
Newsom’s childhood was marred by his parents’ divorce. They wed in 1966 when she was 19 and he was 32. Five years later, Bill divorced Tessa during a “nervous breakdown” fueled, so he claimed, by his political setbacks. After losing his bid for San Francisco County supervisor and a subsequent race for state senator, the campaigns had “left him in such deep financial debt that he could no longer face our mother.”
Bill Newsom was extremely well connected. His father William (“the Boss”) had been a key San Francisco power broker, a prominent fixer who’d made his fortune as a builder and a “thinker behind the throne” during Pat Brown’s political rise. Perhaps to say thank you for his help, governor Brown allowed the Boss to lease the Squaw Valley resort from the state for a dollar per year, which became a major scandal during Brown’s 1962 reelection campaign against Richard Nixon. The whiff of backroom deals and inside baseball is strong in this account. While attending St. Ignatius Catholic school in the 1940s, Bill befriended the sons of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, an absentee father and the world’s richest man. The Boss was a quasi-father figure to Getty’s children while Bill became like a brother to Gordon and John Paul. This relationship allowed him to become the “family consigliere,” who would later help administer their multibillion-dollar trust and come to their rescue whenever “misfortune or scandal found one Getty scion or another,” which became a normal pattern as they struggled with drugs, affairs and even extortion-related kidnappings. The Getty heirs would develop a codependency with the elder Newsom: “When they needed to be rescued from a financial jam, say a car that had broken down, they often went to ‘Uncle Bill,’ my father,” Newsom writes.
Growing up, Gavin would often board the Gettys’ private 727 (“the Jetty”) and gallivant for two or three weeks before returning to his mother’s world, “a life of trying to make ends meet.” The Gettys knew how to travel in style: polar bear spotting at a remote outpost along the Hudson Bay, partying with Jack Nicholson in Venice, celebrating Thanksgiving with Arthur Miller in Barbados and frolicking with the Spanish royal family in Madrid. These anecdotes, Newsom argues, fail to capture the unique “duality” of his youth. While he mingled with billionaires, his mother was working as a realtor and a waitress to make ends meet.
After college, a hidden hand began pulling the strings for young Newsom. First it was a sales gig for his uncle Paul, then his father arranged a job with the real-estate mogul Walter Shorenstein while Newsom lived, rent free, in the Getty mansion. The next step was starting a wine shop. Newsom named the business PlumpJack, a nod to Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff (and perhaps to please investor Gordon Getty, who’d written an opera by the same name). Besides the Gettys, investors included several of Bill’s friends and “a Pelosi or two.” Newsom’s first foray into politics was his appointment by Mayor Willie Brown as chair of San Francisco’s traffic commission, aged 28. “Was this Willie’s idea of a joke?” Newsom asks with practiced self-abasement. In less than a year, Brown put him on the Board of Supervisors, where he was “the only straight, white male.”
Newsom goes to great lengths to preempt allegations of egomania or vainglory. Case in point: his 2004 magazine photoshoot for Harper’s Bazaar, which labeled Gavin and his then-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle the “new Kennedys” and featured a tuxedo-clad Newsom caressing his beautiful wife atop an oriental rug. The shoot, of course, took place at the Getty mansion, and in hindsight strikes the wrong chord for a champion of Democratic politics (Newsom was, at that time, mayor of San Francisco). “The critics mocked it, but none more than me,” Newsom says. “When the magazine came out, my sister was aghast.” It turns out Newsom has a weakness, one of many which he self-diagnoses throughout the book: he lets the women in his life push him around too much. Newsom uses his sister Hilary as a repetitive literary device. Every time he recounts a vain, foolish or reckless episode, she emerges as a beacon of moral clarity. With the glumness of a repentant schoolboy, he accepts her scolding and comes to terms with his wrongdoings (such as bedding his campaign manager’s wife – “The worst betrayal of my life”).
Newsom explains his misdeeds, in part, with an extended discourse on buried family trauma
He explains these misdeeds, in part, with an extended discourse on buried family trauma. I’m one of you, Newsom seems to argue throughout the book, to various unlikely constituencies. These include janitors, social outcasts, tech bros, minorities, those with fraught love lives, oenophiles and people with low SAT scores. But he makes little attempt to explain his political record, much less his years as governor. And despite his extensive travel and lifelong exposure to elites, there’s no coherent worldview. The closest he gets to geopolitics is an account of a boozy dinner in Shanghai with California senator Dianne Feinstein and former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. Meanwhile, his meditations on China amount to a vague nostalgia for San Francisco’s Chinatown and a neutral tale of the protests surrounding the 2008 Olympics.
In the final pages of Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom comes face to face with Donald Trump during his visit to California to inspect the ruins of the 2018 Camp Fire. “Kimberly,” the President murmurs with a grin, referring to the former Fox News anchor and Don Jr.’s then-girlfriend, who happened to be Newsom’s ex-wife. In this scene, he juxtaposes himself with the President. “I grew up around wealth, though it was a different sort from Trump’s grift,” Newsom writes. This wealth is not the leveraged, cutthroat world of the New York real-estate developer but a slower, more leisurely form of inherited power. Newsom’s portrait of his life inadvertently reveals a ruling class that has run out of ideas and instead appeals to a peculiar brand of individualist, mass democracy to maintain political power.
Newsom seems sincerely passionate about wine, the outdoors, his wife and children and the rhythms of California life. What remains far less clear is what he believes in beyond himself. Young Man in a Hurry makes for a fascinating sociological study of the privileged existence of Northern California’s ruling class, but as a political manifesto, it can’t help but frustrate the reader. Will Newsom become our next president? This is a book of ellipses. Should he succeed, these omissions will become crucial.
Iran isn’t only a threat in the Middle East
It must be a comforting thought to those who oppose the military action against the Iranian regime that it is, to coin a phrase, a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing. It’s not our fight and not our war, they argue.
The Iranians have plotted and planned the assassination of British citizens, on British soil, for many years
But the arrests this morning of four people – one Iranian and three dual British-Iranian nationals – on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service show how ludicrous such a view really is. (Six other men were also arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender.) Iran has been our fight – our concern – for decades, and not simply because of its plans for a nuclear weapon and its use of terrorist proxies to create instability across the Middle East. It is our fight for a far more direct reason: the Iranians have plotted and planned the assassination of British citizens, on British soil, for many years. As Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy put it this morning, after the arrests: ‘Iran is the biggest state sponsor of terrorism globally and sadly, that is in effect in our own society as well. Our intelligence services and counter-terrorism police have thwarted lots of action over the last few years.’
What an irony. The government has tried to pretend that none of what is going on at the moment in the skies above Iran is our business, and that our involvement now is purely defensive, a reaction to Iran’s response to an attack that we didn’t support. Lammy and the Prime Minister may not have supported action, but all that shows is how misguided they are. As Keir Starmer put it in his first remarks after Iran’s retaliation: ‘Even in the United Kingdom, the Iranian regime poses a direct threat to dissidents and to the Jewish community. Over the last year alone, they have backed more than 20 potentially lethal attacks on UK soil.’
Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, has reported that Iran’s ‘aggressive intelligence services’ actively plan terrorist attacks on British soil. In 2023, the then security minister Tom Tugendhat told MPs how the police and security services had detected at least 15 ‘credible threats’ to kill or kidnap UK citizens and residents in 2022. Iran had been gathering information about Jews as ‘preparation for lethal operations’. Tugendhat cited IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) member Mohammad Mehdi Mozayyani, who ‘worked to conduct a lethal operation against Iranian dissidents here in the United Kingdom’.
This has gone on for years. And yet no government – not the government of which Tugendhat was a member, nor the current Labour government – has done anything about it (Tugendhat should be exempted from criticism as one of the few ministers committed to real action, albeit that he was stymied at every turn). The IRGC remains a legal organisation, free to go about its business until the police and security services manage to interrupt its terror plots as, it seems, they have done today.
To describe this repeated refusal by governments of all stripes to proscribe the IRGC as an abrogation of the duty of protecting British citizens barely comes close to the scale of the failure.
But the IRGC is far from being the only issue. Tehran also operates a network of mosques, student bodies and other organisations. The fact the IRGC remains legal allows the likes of the Islamic Centre of England (ICE) to operate as a charity, despite being described in 2024 by the then chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Alicia Kearns, as the IRGC’s ‘London office’.
ICE was warned by the Charity Commission after a vigil to honour the IRGC leader Qasem Soleimani following his assassination in 2020. It was also ordered to remove a rule in its constitution ensuring that at least one trustee was a representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader – which the regulator said created a conflict of interest and demonstrated an ‘apparent lack of independence’. (The ICE says it is a ‘purely religious and cultural organisation, which provides various services to the local communities…It is an independent charity regulated by British law, which is totally funded by the local beneficiaries. The majority of the trustees, donors, and attendees are British citizens. Indeed, this charity is nothing to do with politics, while we strongly believe that the politically motivated lobbies are trying to drag the charity into their political disputes.’)
Elsewhere, at an online talk delivered in 2021 during lockdown, Saeed Ghasemi, a senior IRGC commander, told British students that if Soleimani had not been killed, ‘we could have taken over one after another the European countries you are studying in’. All of this is legal.
The idea that the Israeli and US military action against the Iranian regime is not our fight is a wilful rejection of reality. The repeated and large-scale threats to British citizens in Britain show how it is very much our fight, with our security at stake. But as Israel and the US now do our work for us in Iran, our government cannot even bring itself to say that the decision to act was correct, arguing – ridiculously – that it only became valid once Iran decided to retaliate, as if the world’s leading sponsor of terror should not be prevented from carrying out its terror.
It is worrying to consider what might come next here in the UK. This morning’s arrests show the reality of the domestic threat, which the security services have long believed is no less dangerous than that posed by Russian and Chinese agents. But when you combine the depth and reach of Iran’s proxy organisations here, the rise of Muslim sectarian politics and over two years of regular marches in support of Iran’s terror proxies – and, in recent days, demonstrations of explicit support for the Iranian regime – the ingredients are there for something deeply troubling.
The security services do an excellent job in seeking to intercept plots, but in every other respect governments have wilfully refused to act to protect us, allowing explicit support for the Iranian regime across all sorts of institutions – including a strong campus presence – and refusing to tackle this more insidious threat. The fear is we may now reap what we have sowed.
Is it wise for Spain to goad Donald Trump?
Spain’s refusal to allow the United States to use its military bases at Morón de la Frontera (Seville) and Rota (Cádiz) for its war on Iran, arguing that the US-Israeli attacks are “unilateral military actions outside the United Nations charter” has brought the simmering conflict between Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s socialist Prime Minister and President Trump to a head.
Sanchez’s carefully calculated strategy has been to position himself as one of Trump’s leading opponents on the world stage
On Wednesday Sanchez followed up by delivering a stunning rebuke to Trump. Speaking for ten minutes on national television, he said that his government’s position could be summed up in four words: “No a la guerra” (No to war). He described the attacks on Iran as a flagrant violation of international law that threaten to plunge the entire Middle East into terror, hinting that the real aim of the war is to line the pockets of a plutocratic oligarchy. He went on to demand – he was at pains to emphasize that he was demanding – that hostilities cease immediately “before it is too late.” It was an eloquent, impassioned plea that seemed to come from the heart: pacifism has deep roots in Spain.
Meanwhile a furious President Trump has lost no time in announcing that his administration is cutting off all dealings with Spain which he has described as a “horrible” and “unfriendly” ally. “We are going to cut all trade with Spain,” he clarified: “Spain has absolutely nothing that we need other than great people but they don’t have great leadership.”
This is not the first time that Trump has described Spain’s left-wing administration as “terrible.” Prime Minister Sanchez went out of his way to infuriate President Trump at last June’s NATO summit when he was the only one of the 32 leaders to refuse to increase defense spending to 5 percent, arguing that actually 2.1 percent would be quite sufficient. The two leaders are in opposite corners on a whole range of issues including Gaza (Sanchez misses no opportunity to refer to Israel’s “genocide”), trade with China (“You’ll be cutting your own throat,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned when Sanchez became the first world leader to visit Beijing after the tariff war broke out) and immigration as well as diversity, equity and inclusion regulations.
Sanchez for his part relishes taunting Trump, promising, for example, that rather than “Drill, baby, drill” it’s going to be “Green, baby, green.” He has also claimed that the European Union is going to “Make social media great again;” when he announced plans to ban under-16-year-olds from social media, Elon Musk called him “a tyrant and traitor to the people of Spain.”
Indeed, Sanchez’s carefully calculated strategy, ever since Trump’s re-election, has been to position himself as one of the President’s leading opponents on the world stage. He likes to frame Trump’s presidency as part of a dangerous global rise in far-right populism that it is his duty to confront. Presenting themselves as heirs to the Republicans who fought against General Franco during the Spanish Civil War, Spain’s socialists, led by Sanchez, suggest that they are uniquely well-placed to understand and resist what they describe as a “fascist threat.”
This narrative serves as a useful justification for Sánchez as he clings to power. Against all the odds he has now been prime minister for nearly eight years. With his fragile minority coalition government beset by serious corruption scandals, there is enormous pressure on him to call a snap election. But Sanchez has sworn to see out his term (a general election is not due until August 2027). He suggests that it is his moral duty to remain in office as long as possible since an early election would, opinion polls indicate, lead to a right-wing government that included Vox – a party with close ties to Trump.
Meanwhile, standing up to Trump plays well with the Spanish electorate. A YouGov poll last year showed that 81 percent of Spaniards regard Trump unfavorably and, in this profoundly pacifist country, that figure has surely risen over the last few days. In any case so far Trump’s bark has been worse than his bite. After Sanchez refused to increase Spain’s defense spending, Trump threatened to make Spain pay “twice as much” in tariffs but he has not yet followed through on that threat. And on Tuesday José Manuel Albares, Spain’s minister for foreign affairs, announced confidently that the Spanish government doesn’t believe that there will be any reprisals for preventing the US using its bases in Spain. The Spanish government thinks that the deeply interconnected structure of European supply networks will make it difficult for the US to single out Spanish goods without hurting other EU countries.
But if Washington is bent on punishing Spain it has of course a well-stocked toolkit at its disposal. Spain’s Achilles’ heel could, for example, be energy: in January the US supplied 44 percent of Spain’s liquefied natural gas. Despite his repeated promises Sanchez might have to go to the polls early if soaring energy prices force his hand. And Chatham House has suggested that the €33.7 billion investment in Spain that Amazon recently announced could also be in danger.
On Thursday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that Spain, having had time to reflect on the President’s words, had come to its senses and decided that it would, after all, cooperate with the US military. The Spanish government, however, swiftly and categorically denied that that was the case, doubling down on its total opposition to this war.
Sanchez has clung to power in the hope that something will turn up to prevent what otherwise looks like certain defeat in the coming general election. If this war spirals out of control, as he confidently predicted that it will during his television address – he referenced the Second Gulf War and its aftermath – then, he also predicted, the world will see that he was right all along.
On the other hand, this time Trump may well follow through on his threats to punish Spain – after all, as Bessent has said, Spain is putting “American lives at risk.” In that case, it may well turn out that Sanchez has just made a very big mistake.
Like that poor dog, Kristi Noem turned out to be untrainable
When Kristi Noem disclosed she once shot the family dog, Cricket, because Cricket was “untrainable”, the world wrote her off as unfit to be Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate. According to a new book, her dog-killing ruthlessness was, in fact, one of the key reasons Trump picked her for Homeland Security Secretary. It may have helped that Trump doesn’t like dogs.
Now that uncompromising approach has been her downfall. Trump has finally snapped and fired her for overshadowing his administration’s immigration achievements – achievements she has made – by turning public sentiment against ICE. There was the crackdown in Minnesota and the protester killings, but also the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars on unsanctioned ads, not to mention rumors that she is apparently sleeping with her advisor. Just like poor Cricket, Noem turned out to be untrainable.
Trump is in no way backing down. He is replacing a firebrand with a firebrand
Her final misstep came at a calamitous appearance at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Noem lied about the President signing off a $200 million ad campaign, featuring herself on a horse urging illegal immigrants to self-deport. She also potentially committed perjury in the process. “I never knew anything about it,” Trump told Reuters on Thursday when asked about the adverts.
Trump was also said to be furious about Noem’s non-answer when she was asked if she was having an affair with her top advisor Corey Lewandowski, who is married. Noem’s husband – a more understanding man than the President is – watched as she floundered and told lawmakers “I am shocked we’re peddling tabloid garbage in this committee.”
But Trump was shocked with her performance and he posted on Truth Social on Thursday that Noem would be replaced by Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. Which was clearly news to Mullin. “It happened quick,” the slightly befuddled looking senator told the press. It was unclear if Noem knew she had been fired before she delivered a scheduled address in Nashville or if she found out on the stage.
Whether it was the alleged corruption or adultery that was the final straw, the reason her neck was anywhere near the chopping block was her handling of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota. Noem managed almost singlehandedly to turn immigration – an issue that propelled Trump to the White House – into a net loss for Republicans.
Trump stepped in after Renée Good and Alex Pretti were shot dead by federal agents and Noem combatively branded them both “domestic terrorists.” White House border czar Tom Homan was dispatched to Minnesota to take over. Americans were already unhappy with the new confrontational ICE tactics ordered by Noem. A poll found that 47 percent believed ICE was making the country less safe, compared to 37 percent who said ICE was making it safer. And 46 to 43 percent said they would support abolishing ICE altogether. Noem was becoming a midterms risk.
That Noem survived so long was down to the fact that she had achieved what other administrations had considered to be the impossible: the southern border is effectively closed, migrant releases in the US have been at zero for nine consecutive months and drug seizures are down dramatically. Three million illegal immigrants have been deported, ICE arrests have doubled and the number of illegal immigrants in detention is at an all-time high.
Trump spoke proudly of her achievements at his State of the Union address: “We now have the strongest and most secure border in American history, by far.” But behind the scenes his fury with Noem was building. Allegations of wasteful spending and corruption go well beyond just one ad contract. Noem and Lewandowski have also been accused of using a luxury 737 MAX jet, with a private cabin in back, for their own travel, while claiming it was being used for deportations.
As he pushed her out of DHS, Trump did hand Noem a consolation prize – in all likelihood to spare his own embarrassment at caving to the negative headlines. He made her the Special Envoy for The Shield of Americas, a new coalition of countries in Latin America that will work together to help secure the Western Hemisphere, according to the White House. Marco Rubio is her boss now. Trump hands him all his thorniest problems.
Trump is in no way backing down. He is replacing a firebrand with a firebrand. Noem’s successor, Mullin, a married father of six, is a rancher, businessman and Cherokee Nation citizen. He is also a former mixed martial arts fighter who is known by colleagues to be pugilistic.
Congressional Democrats might find they get even shorter shrift from Mullin than Noem. The Democrats are currently trying to exploit what happened in Minnesota by blocking a DHS funding bill until changes are made to immigration enforcement operations. Mullin, who it appears will be confirmed on a party-line vote, is close to Trump and will continue pursuing the same tough-nosed immigration policies – just without the circus that Noem brought to town.
It is noteworthy that Trump 2.0 has been remarkably loyal to his team. It took him 409 days to find his trigger finger. At the same point in his first term, he had already fired or forced out 21 people from his cabinet and the White House.
We shouldn’t expect this to be the start of a bloodletting. Trump believes he has assembled a team of winners; Noem no longer had a place in that company because, by almost every metric, she had become a loser. Noem might even understand. She wrote that Cricket “was dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and putting a bullet in her head “had to be done.” Trump clearly felt the same.
Is it wise for Spain to goad Donald Trump?
Spain’s refusal to allow the United States to use its military bases at Morón de la Frontera (Seville) and Rota (Cádiz) for its war on Iran, arguing that the US-Israeli attacks are “unilateral military actions outside the United Nations charter” has brought the simmering conflict between Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s socialist Prime Minister and President Trump to a head.
Sanchez’s carefully calculated strategy has been to position himself as one of Trump’s leading opponents on the world stage
On Wednesday Sanchez followed up by delivering a stunning rebuke to Trump. Speaking for ten minutes on national television, he said that his government’s position could be summed up in four words: “No a la guerra” (No to war). He described the attacks on Iran as a flagrant violation of international law that threaten to plunge the entire Middle East into terror, hinting that the real aim of the war is to line the pockets of a plutocratic oligarchy. He went on to demand – he was at pains to emphasize that he was demanding – that hostilities cease immediately “before it is too late.” It was an eloquent, impassioned plea that seemed to come from the heart: pacifism has deep roots in Spain.
Meanwhile a furious President Trump has lost no time in announcing that his administration is cutting off all dealings with Spain which he has described as a “horrible” and “unfriendly” ally. “We are going to cut all trade with Spain,” he clarified: “Spain has absolutely nothing that we need other than great people but they don’t have great leadership.”
This is not the first time that Trump has described Spain’s left-wing administration as “terrible.” Prime Minister Sanchez went out of his way to infuriate President Trump at last June’s NATO summit when he was the only one of the 32 leaders to refuse to increase defense spending to 5 percent, arguing that actually 2.1 percent would be quite sufficient. The two leaders are in opposite corners on a whole range of issues including Gaza (Sanchez misses no opportunity to refer to Israel’s “genocide”), trade with China (“You’ll be cutting your own throat,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned when Sanchez became the first world leader to visit Beijing after the tariff war broke out) and immigration as well as diversity, equity and inclusion regulations.
Sanchez for his part relishes taunting Trump, promising, for example, that rather than “Drill, baby, drill” it’s going to be “Green, baby, green.” He has also claimed that the European Union is going to “Make social media great again;” when he announced plans to ban under-16-year-olds from social media, Elon Musk called him “a tyrant and traitor to the people of Spain.”
Indeed, Sanchez’s carefully calculated strategy, ever since Trump’s re-election, has been to position himself as one of the President’s leading opponents on the world stage. He likes to frame Trump’s presidency as part of a dangerous global rise in far-right populism that it is his duty to confront. Presenting themselves as heirs to the Republicans who fought against General Franco during the Spanish Civil War, Spain’s socialists, led by Sanchez, suggest that they are uniquely well-placed to understand and resist what they describe as a “fascist threat.”
This narrative serves as a useful justification for Sánchez as he clings to power. Against all the odds he has now been prime minister for nearly eight years. With his fragile minority coalition government beset by serious corruption scandals, there is enormous pressure on him to call a snap election. But Sanchez has sworn to see out his term (a general election is not due until August 2027). He suggests that it is his moral duty to remain in office as long as possible since an early election would, opinion polls indicate, lead to a right-wing government that included Vox – a party with close ties to Trump.
Meanwhile, standing up to Trump plays well with the Spanish electorate. A YouGov poll last year showed that 81 percent of Spaniards regard Trump unfavorably and, in this profoundly pacifist country, that figure has surely risen over the last few days. In any case so far Trump’s bark has been worse than his bite. After Sanchez refused to increase Spain’s defense spending, Trump threatened to make Spain pay “twice as much” in tariffs but he has not yet followed through on that threat. And on Tuesday José Manuel Albares, Spain’s minister for foreign affairs, announced confidently that the Spanish government doesn’t believe that there will be any reprisals for preventing the US using its bases in Spain. The Spanish government thinks that the deeply interconnected structure of European supply networks will make it difficult for the US to single out Spanish goods without hurting other EU countries.
But if Washington is bent on punishing Spain it has of course a well-stocked toolkit at its disposal. Spain’s Achilles’ heel could, for example, be energy: in January the US supplied 44 percent of Spain’s liquefied natural gas. Despite his repeated promises Sanchez might have to go to the polls early if soaring energy prices force his hand. And Chatham House has suggested that the €33.7 billion investment in Spain that Amazon recently announced could also be in danger.
On Thursday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that Spain, having had time to reflect on the President’s words, had come to its senses and decided that it would, after all, cooperate with the US military. The Spanish government, however, swiftly and categorically denied that that was the case, doubling down on its total opposition to this war.
Sanchez has clung to power in the hope that something will turn up to prevent what otherwise looks like certain defeat in the coming general election. If this war spirals out of control, as he confidently predicted that it will during his television address – he referenced the Second Gulf War and its aftermath – then, he also predicted, the world will see that he was right all along.
On the other hand, this time Trump may well follow through on his threats to punish Spain – after all, as Bessent has said, Spain is putting “American lives at risk.” In that case, it may well turn out that Sanchez has just made a very big mistake.
Two bets for Sandown before Cheltenham next week
Mondo Man and Wreckless Eric head the market for tomorrow’s big race at Sandown, the Betfair Imperial Cup Handicap Hurdle (2.27 p.m.), and a good case can be made for each of them landing the spoils.
Mondo Man, trained by the father and son Moore team, is well handicapped over hurdles based on his flat form and, as a five-year-old gelding, his best days are surely ahead of him. However, odds of around 3-1 for a 22-runner handicap make zero appeal.
Wreckless Eric, trained by the father and son O’Neill team, is well handicapped based on his run in this race a year ago when he was beaten only half a length by Go Dante, who will also be in the field tomorrow. Wreckless Eric re-opposes on 8 lbs better terms with Go Dante but that’s largely because he has run so poorly in three starts this season. That makes odds of no bigger than 13-2 on Wreckless Eric look skinny too.
I was tempted to put up Ooh Betty each way at 22-1 after her win at Ascot but she ran in this race last year off the same rating (132) as she will tomorrow and made no show, eventually finishing eleventh. On balance, I am happy to watch this race with no money down.
I prefer to put my hard earned on two horses at big prices in the European Breeders’ Fund Betfair “National Hunt” Novices’ Handicap Hurdle Final (Sandown, 1.50 p.m.). The first is the Jamie Snowden-trained CINQUENTA, who has been aimed at this race since hacking up in the qualifier at Market Rasen early last month.
Connections say that Cinquenta’s future lies as a chaser next season but hopefully this six-year-old gelding can land this £45,000 pot on the way. Back him 1 point each way at 16-1 with Paddy Power, paying five places.
My other fancy at even bigger odds is GET ON GEORGE, who has to be forgiven a poor runwhen pulled up at Doncaster last time out. However, that came at a time when the stable was a little out of sorts having started the season so well. Now Joel Parkinson and Sue Smith’s yard is back among the winners so back Get On George 1 point each way at 33-1 with BetVictor or Coral, both paying five places.
As usual with long-range ante-post betting, I have a mixed portfolio of good and bad bets looking forward to the Cheltenham Festival next week. My biggest disappointment is that my huge fancy Laurens Bay has picked up an injury and will miss the meeting and, almost certainly, the rest of the season.
However, I will put up one more bet now that Paul Nicholls’ TUTTI QUANTI has been supplemented for the Unibet Champion Hurdle on Tuesday (4 p.m.). I would fancy him more strongly on heavy ground, which he is not going to get, but he is still a real improver judged on his easy victory under top weight in the William Hill Hurdle at Newbury.
I am very happy with my first bet in this race – the mare Golden Ace each way at 16-1 – but I will go into the Champion Hurdle double-handed. Back Tutti Quanti 1 point each way at 20-1 with bet365.
That price comes without the Non Runner No Bet (NRNB) comfort blanket but surely all this six-year-old gelding needs to do is stay sound until Tuesday to run now that he has been supplemented. If the rain stays away, the course will almost certainly water to ensure “good to soft” going for the opening day.
I will be tipping horses daily at Cheltenham next week with my blog due to go up shortly after 9am on all four mornings of the Festival, starting on Tuesday. Good luck to one and all for the battles that lie ahead with the old enemy, the bookmakers.
Pending:
1 point each way Cinquenta at 16-1 for the EBF Betfair “National Hunt” Novices’ Handicap Hurdle Final, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places.
1 point each way Get On George at 33-1 for the EBF Betfair “National Hunt” Novices’ Handicap Hurdle Final, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places.
1 point each way Sober Glory for the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle at 12-1 NRNB, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Romeo Coolio at 16-1 for the Arkle Chase, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Mambonumberfive at 20-1 for the Arkle Chase, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Konfusion at 20-1 for the Ultima Chase, paying ¼ odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Golden Ace at 16-1 for the Champion Hurdle, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Tuttii Quanti at 20-1 NRNB for the Champion Hurdle, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Laurens Bay at 25-1 for the NH Novices’ Chase, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Derryhassen Paddy at 25-1 for the Brown Advisory Chase, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way La Conquiere at 16-1 for the Mares’ Novices’ Hurdle, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Helnwein at 33-1 NRNB for the County Hurdle, paying ¼ odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Haiti Couleurs at 14-1 for the Cheltenham Gold Cup, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Resplendent Grey at 50-1 for the Grand National, paying ¼ odds, 4 places.
Last weekend – 1.8 points.
1 point each way New Order for the Grimthorpe Handicap Chase at 8-1, paying 1/5th odds, 4 places. 3rd (Rule 4. 25p in the £ deduction). +0.2 points.
1 point each way Spectacularsunrise for the Morebattle Handicap Hurdle at 11-1, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
2025-26 jumps season: running total – 7.785 points
2025 flat season: + 84.12 points on all tips.
2024-5 jumps season: – 47.61 points on all tips.
2024 flat season: + 41.4 points on all tips.
2023-4 jumps season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
Total for six full seasons of tipping: + 126 points