How F. Scott Fitzgerald anticipated our modern age

It has never been easier, or less rewarding, to be a Great Gatsby bore. As the book that is frequently, and speciously, cited as the Great American Novel — perhaps because, at around 180 pages, people have bothered to read it — turns 100 this month, it has become the byword for a certain kind of middlebrow literary appreciation. Even people who are barely aware of the novel know certain images and lines, such as the omnipresent lighthouse, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” and the whole Ralph Lauren-esque visual aesthetic that F. Scott Fitzgerald appeared to anticipate.

The novel, published in April 1925, has achieved the impossible by breaking free of the page and reverberating across the world in a kind of endless meta-narrative. “You must know Gatsby,” is one of its lines. Certainly, everyone thinks that they know Gatsby.

Whether it’s via the DiCaprio or Robert Redford film adaptations — or those slightly cringeworthy theme parties, where bold attempts at flapper-inspired outfits can veer dangerously toward embarrassing drag shows — it’s hard to think of a book with more influence and resonance. From Broadway musicals, the most recent of which has songs provided by none other than Florence Welch, the Daisy Buchanan de nos jours, to literary spin-offs such as Michael Farris Smith’s 2021 novel Nick, which places Fitzgerald’s original wallflower and unreliable narrator, Nick Carraway, center stage for the first time, the world of Gatsby can begin to feel inexhaustible. (Surely the Daisy origin story is only a commissioning editor’s martini-fueled bright idea away?) With such enduring appeal, it is less a case of us being borne back ceaselessly into the past and more the novel’s legacy being ruthlessly exploited — somewhat in the fashion of the novel’s villainous bootlegger Meyer Wolfsheim.

The Great Gatsby has been deconstructed, filleted and repackaged into a Disney-fied version of the Roaring Twenties, which, according to the Hollywood and Broadway versions of the book, is little more than a surface-level spectacle of “Glitz & Glamour,” complete with near-incongruous unhappy ending. No wonder that the Luhrmann film’s introduction of DiCaprio’s character — raising a glass of Champagne smugly as fireworks explode behind him — has become one of social media’s most persistent memes.

Yet Fitzgerald’s novel has much more to offer than an opportunity for people to dress up in increasingly tawdry costumes, or for drinks manufacturers to produce bilious Gatsby-themed cocktails. As we stagger away, dizzy and deafened, from the sensory overload of the Luhrmann cinematic bonanza — complete with the multilayered vocals of Jay-Z, Bryan Ferry and Lana Del Rey in a bizarre fusion of hip-hop, jazz and sad-girl beats — it is salutary to return to the quiet hypnotic lyricism of Fitzgerald’s original prose, and remember that the writer’s genius lay in understatement:

There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

Indeed, for Fitzgerald, the Jazz Age — a term he claimed, with characteristic but forgivable hubris, he’d coined himself — was one of “miracles… it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.” Its evenings were well-lubricated with bootlegged alcohol (the kind Gatsby serves his guests) and while this signaled depravity, it also evoked a sense of wonder and possibility. Where would the night take them? Or as the novel so eloquently puts it, Gatsby — and, by extension, America — were already in the throes of a longed-for but non-existent “orgiastic future.”

World War One had wreaked its ravages, and the wild, decadent immersion in hedonistic bravado was as much escape from everyday sorrow as it was any kind of lasting catharsis or release. Fitzgerald would surely have appreciated T.S. Eliot’s line from his 1936 poem “Burnt Norton”: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Gatsby’s tragedy lies in the fact he, too, cannot bear reality. His parties are tawdry and loud, full of strangers drinking his illegally obtained booze and making snide comments about him. His love for Daisy should redeem him, but she is an insipid party girl who is incapable of depth or, indeed, true emotional attachment. So when Gatsby ends the novel unceremoniously shot dead in his humongous swimming pool by a man he’s never even met, it should feel like a moment of cosmic irony, an almost Hardy-esque aligning of the fates. But even before this anticlimatic end, he was one of Eliot’s hollow men, waiting for his turn to expire.

Gatsby is suffocated by his own unattainable idealism, and his relentless desire to relive the past becomes his fatal flaw, as the object of his desire “[tumbles] short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.” It’s this tendency towards ill-fated fantasy that is the key to The Great Gatsby’s enduring appeal. All humans have the capacity to dream, or more accurately to inculcate false narratives for themselves and others and become fixated on them. Like Gatsby, we blindly bow to the gods of Love and Envy. Like Gatsby, we worship at Mammon’s altar.

This notion of wish fulfillment is the fulcrum of the novel. As Fitzgerald remarked once to a friend, the whole idea of Gatsby sprang from “the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money.” He was writing from experience, having lived this injustice with Ginevra King, a Chicago debutante who served as the model for Daisy. Their courtship began after Fitzgerald had dropped out of Princeton to serve as a second lieutenant in the army but a match was forbidden by King’s father on the grounds that Fitzgerald was financially insecure at the time.

Seen through this biographical filter, the moral fable permeating Gatsby — namely that all that glitters is not gold — pales in comparison with the sadness which lay outside the novel. Fitzgerald remained infatuated with King for the rest of his life, and even the ostentatious antics of his troubled wife, Zelda, couldn’t distract from this particular obsession. He turned to the bottle to drown his sorrow and died at the age of forty-four. Fitzgerald’s own American Dream, or nightmare, lingered ominously throughout his life, forever out of reach.

Still, when he finished The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald declared it just “about the best American novel ever written.” Vanity aside, there’s little doubt the book is now acclaimed as a twentieth-century masterpiece. But at the time, the world did not agree and the novel was classed a “dud” by critics. Gatsby’s commercial success was obtained only after the US government distributed 155,000 free to US troops during World War Two and after being filmed (badly) in 1949 with Alan Ladd as Gatsby.

Naturally, our modern proclivity toward underdogs, antiheroes and down-and-out charmers has seen Gatsby become a figure whom we admire rather than despise. He might be a fraudster and criminal — and by contemporary standards, his Daisy obsession would come across as a tad creepy — but he, like that other glittering but flawed American sweetheart Judy Garland, only “dared to dream.” And if there’s anything modern America loves more than money, it’s a dreamer.

It’s a pity that today most people only remember the Bacchanalian side of Gatsby: the money, the parties and his “gorgeous” charm. His own mythology of unshakable desire has been usurped by our own consumerist gimmicks. But that version of the American Dream was always in the ascendancy. After all, 100 years on, America has hardly moved past Gatsby’s careless, sickeningly aspirational world. The Roaring Twenties have been replaced by the tech boom, the old-money elite by Silicon Valley magnates, the Champagne-fueled soirées by influencer-studded Met Galas. The green lighthouse is now the digital glow of our smartphones, beckoning us toward the ever-elusive ideal that, if we only keep scrolling, we will find what we were always searching for.

Gatsby ushered in an epoch of celebrity, an age of narcissistic dreamers. We’re still very much in its death rattle. We may know Gatsby, because we resemble him: we acknowledge his hunger, his delusions — even his doom. But can we really claim to recognize our own flaws? It’s what makes The Great Gatsby not just a brilliant encapsulation of an age, but a cautionary parable about our own; human nature, after all, has changed very little in the past century, old sport.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.

The trouble with Starmer’s plan for change

At his speech at a Hull business campus this morning, Keir Starmer was introduced by a man who proudly noted that the site was home to various brands, including Durex. So it was fitting that ‘protection’ was a constant theme throughout the Prime Minister’s speech on his planned reforms to the civil service – and his announcement that NHS England is to be scrapped.

‘National security for national renewal’, the PM promised, stressing the need to have an ‘active state’ to deal with challenges both abroad and at home. The beginning of the Ukraine war gave Boris Johnson’s premiership purpose in 2022; the conflict’s looming close offers Starmer a narrative for overhauling warfare and welfare.

To do this, Starmer wants public sector reform: that three-word phrase beloved of all politicians. In front of a group of beaming women, the PM declared he wanted to ‘tear down the walls of Westminster’, getting the state to ‘operate at maximum power’ by making it ‘closer to communities.’ Shirtsleeves rolled up, he paced back and forth, earnestly setting out his diagnosis to the nation’s ills. He noted how the state now employs more people than it has done for decades, yet, perversely, it is ‘weaker’ than ever before. This bloated, sprawling Leviathan tries to do too much and ends up, overstretched, unfocused and ‘unable to deliver the security people need.’ It was a critique which will have many Tories nodding along in agreement.

So what’s to be done about it? Starmer offered two solutions: a greater focus on growth and more control for ministers. He railed against regulation, citing examples of ‘jumping spiders’ and ‘cricket balls’ being used to stop new homes being built. With repeated reference to his party’s manifesto and talk of ‘democratically elected ministers’, he offered a much more Cromwellian view of executive power than that advocated by Lord Hermer. This led to the speech’s big flourish: the news that NHS England is to be abolished and taken back under ministerial control. Another top-down reorganisation of the NHS? Let’s see how this one fares.

There is already evidence to suggest that Starmer’s new-found loathing of red tape is working: his much-mocked letter to regulators appears to be the reason why DEI rules in the City are being dropped. Elite cues do matter and No. 10 is clearly intent on making the most of its bully pulpit. But there remains two tensions at the heart of Starmer’s much-touted ‘Plan for Change’.

The first is the refusal to say that Labour wants a smaller state – even though Starmer implied that 130,000 extra officials since Brexit is too many. The second is the innately authoritarian nature of government. Starmer told his audience today that he wants the state to ‘take the big decisions’ so ordinary people ‘can get on with their lives.’ Given his ministers’ plans on encryption, personal liberties and education, it seems implausible that his ‘strong state’ will really produce a politics that will ‘tread more lightly‘ on peoples’ lives.

Caroline Calloway wants to give you some advice

Caroline Calloway — “It” girl, Instagram phenomenon, scammer, grifter — wants to give you some advice.

Except, like most things in Calloway’s world, it’s not that simple.

What she actually wants is for Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation (1994), to give you some advice. But there’s just one problem: Wurtzel is dead.

No matter: Calloway is stepping in, updating Wurtzel’s unpublished advice guide with some of her own insights and social-media savvy. If this unbidden collaboration from beyond the grave sounds farfetched, that’s because it is. Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life is about as mad as you would expect from the self-published author of Scammers and no less extraordinary for it.

Of collaboration, Calloway knows a fair bit. Her first — and now infamous — collaboration was with her fellow NYU creative writing buddy Natalie Beach. Immortalized in an essay in the Cut, Beach describes being Calloway’s ghost writer, helping her to edit her Instagram captions from her time at Cambridge and co-authoring a book proposal which Calloway later sold for half a million dollars. According to Beach, the relationship turned sour when it emerged that there was only room for one person in the arrangement: “She was building a second version of herself in front of me and how could I compete with that,” she writes with a pathos that knows its own pointlessness. Calloway’s response to Beach, published on her website in 2019, not only outdid Beach in its daring but formed part of her bestselling memoir Scammer.

If there can be only one leading light in any collaboration, far better, then, to make the other unanswerable to the final edit. Guide to Life grapples with this question just as it breezily dismisses it: “I decided to republish as much of Wurtzel’s advice book as I could without breaking the law.” Admittedly, Calloway has never been troubled by risk. Instead, she produces an experimental broderie of a memoir that summons Wurtzel with its own irreverence. Using the pop-culture mediums of the listicle, illustration and advice column, Calloway deftly hopscotches along in the way you might scroll through a loosely curated Instagram story on someone else’s account (typos unredacted). Wurtzel may have missed the boat on social media — “she only had 12.9k Twitter followers!” — but Calloway loosely assembles her life with Instagram savvy, reminding her readers that she is simply producing “a breezy read when you need it most,” not the academic biographical exploration that Wurtzel “deserves.”

Did the two women, both dark intellectuals and self-confessed addicts — a category that Calloway defines in the first triptych of the book as “Cambridge Sads” — know each other? Yes and no. Wurtzel was aware of Calloway’s obsession with Prozac Nation, tweeting that she found it strange that Calloway owned not one but three copies that she “cracked open” in her dorm room at NYU. Calloway, for her part, describes the relationship as one of unidirectional fangirling, detailing how she managed to buy Wurtzel’s floor-length mink coat at an online auction before lying underneath it, hungover, in the fetal position, in a New York hotel room, “the park tulips sticking to my skin like damp, silky confetti.”

Like the park tulip petals, Wurtzel and Calloway stick to each other in strange ways. Both orbited a New York intelligentsia set that included Lena Dunham, Cat Marnell and Emily Gould. Both were connected to David Lipsky, the creative nonfiction professor at NYU whom Calloway and Beach fantasized about and Wurtzel eventually had an affair with. Both sought refuge from New York in Florida condos under the care of their mothers. But it is on mothers and daughterhood that the petals prove stickiest.

Leaving behind the guile and short form of the Instagram caption, Calloway produces prose that is lyrical and moving. “I’m obsessed with the way she writes about her Mom,” she says of Wurtzel, before moving into a detailed critique of working motherhood and its discontents: “Even in this current wave of feminism we still don’t have the language to parse and identify all the problems for wives and mothers at home.” The advice, when it comes, might be co-opted from narratives that are not her own, or even from the life of a woman she didn’t know, but who cares. Calloway is at her strongest when she crouches down in the lives of others, a haunting that can only come from having been ghost(written).

Calloway, once a child of Instagram, presents herself in Guide to Life as its now-jaded elder sister. Much of the advice she welds together with Wurtzel’s involves a nostalgia for a pre-internet age when it might, she hints, have been easier to finish the books you want to write (“DM me if you know a better way to finish a book!”), or form a romantic relationship without dating apps.

No longer the ingénue she was, Calloway has grown up enough to want to reach across the prelapsarian divide of the internet “using the black mirror of her phone” to grant Wurtzel the recognition that eluded her in life. The internet, Calloway notes, is an “invisible stadium” in which only the strongest can survive the laws of cancellation; a force “that follows her around like the opposite of a shadow” or “a strange unblinking sun.”

I finished Calloway’s book squinting, my eyes tired. A guide to life? Not so much. A show? Certainly.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.

Starmer scraps NHS England

It was widely briefed that the main focus of Sir Keir Starmer’s speech in Yorkshire today was his plan to do away with Whitehall red tape. What was kept under wraps was the Prime Minister’s plans for the NHS – specifically to scrap NHS England. In a bid to tackle bureaucracy in the health service, the PM this morning told reporters that the ‘arms-length NHS’ needed to go – adding that the move will ‘shift money to the front line’ and free the health service to ‘focus on patients’.

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The move – which will see NHS England taken back under the control of the Department of Health in a re-politicising of the health service – is another step forward in Labour’s war on NHS management. The government has insisted that the abolition of the ‘world’s largest quango’ will ‘empower’ NHS staff and lead to better prioritisation of patient care. It’s a reversal of the 2012 restructuring of the service which Starmer’s government has slammed as having ‘created burdensome layers of bureaucracy without any clear lines of accountability’. 

Health Secretary Wes Streeting has called for the health service to employ ‘more doers and fewer checkers’, blasting the current set up as ‘setting [NHS staff] up to fail’. This morning’s move comes just weeks after news that NHS England chief Amanda Pritchard would stand down at the end of March. Last week, Professor Stephen Powis, the national medical director for NHS England, announcing he was quitting too. Today’s announcement sheds a little more light on the flux within the institution.

Will taking the system back under the control of the Department of Health lead to noticeable improvements? The NHS has long suffered from bureaucracy problems affecting the way the health service is managed, how funding is directed and the ability of medical professionals to carry out their jobs. With how the NHS has been performing in recent years – wait lists growing and A&E delays piling up – it makes sense for ministers to want to have more oversight of the service. Doctors are on side too – one senior physician said the move was ‘long overdue’. Another medic pointed out that the ramping up of management tiers in the NHS following the 2012 reforms lead to ‘clinicians being pushed out from decision-making’ with hospital managers ‘not understanding that the health service runs differently to most businesses’.

Former health secretary Alan Milburn will lead the restructuring, after he was appointed the lead non-executive director of Streeting’s department in October. The Tony-Blair era health adviser, who himself has links to private healthcare companies, has long been an advocate of the need for ‘big reforms’ in the NHS to make the service ‘fit for the future’. While questions remain over what exact legislation will be required for this shift, the general mood among both medics on the frontline is that something needed to change – and this is a step in the right direction.

Scott Turow’s latest novel attempts to understand humanity

Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent burst into the world in 1987, zinging out of bookstores into bestseller-dom like nobody’s business. It concerned Rusty Sabich, a lawyer who became a suspect in the case he was prosecuting. There were enough twists and turns to satisfy the most Daedalian of labyrinth-makers, and its longevity was demonstrated by its being adapted into a new, Jake Gyllenhaal-starring show last year on Apple TV+. Presumed Guilty’s title plays nicely on its predecessor’s, and also points toward this new book’s consideration of racism within the American justice system.

Sabich is now an old man, nearing his eighties. But boy, is he active. We know this because he likes to canoe while stripped to the waist. He chops wood in the outdoors! He has a (very) active sex life! Whether we believe him about the last — the book is in the first person, though I’m not sure that Turow wants us to think he’s an unreliable narrator — Sabich is essentially an all-American hero, enjoying his last years in as much fullness as he can. (The reader notes that Turow himself is a lawyer, now in his mid-seventies.)

Still bearing the mental scars of the trial he endured decades ago, Sabich became a lawyer in a backwoods place where, as he ruefully notes, good dentistry isn’t necessarily that much of a thing. One of Turow’s strengths is his well-observed attention to slices of rural life: there is, for example, a very amusing put-upon wife who won’t testify because she disagrees with her husband. Do it in court, and she’ll never hear the end of it.

Sabich has shacked up with Bea, a high school principal twenty years his junior, who has an adopted black son called Aaron. There is a local, WASP-y family, the Potters, who vote Republican and do good deeds in the community; Sabich is a Democrat. Partisan politics, though, do not play a role in the plot, instead we are invited to understand the humanity of everyone involved. There is a sense, too, of the sad underbelly of American society. Despite the Potters’ immense wealth, influence and education, one of their scions, Mae, is a druggy dropout. She’s a kind of Laura Palmer, the prom queen who goes bad.

Aaron and Mae have been dating, on and off, since high school. They are a charming couple: when Mae is angry, she urinates on Aaron’s sleeping bag. One weekend they go camping together to discuss their future. But Aaron returns without her, and thus the plot creaks into gear, as it becomes clear that Mae isn’t coming back any time soon. Like Laura Palmer’s death, Mae’s shakes the county, disrupting the smooth world of the Potters, and casting suspicion everywhere.

Turow is a skillful writer, investing tension in the procedural aspects of the trial. The case against Aaron looks terrible. The prosecutor is a friend of the Potters, and all the cards are stacked against Aaron. Until, that is, Rusty Sabich saddles up and takes on the advocacy himself.

Sabich’s defense of Aaron is intensely poignant. He’s an old white man, at the end of his life, protecting a young black man at the beginning of his.

The race element is handled sensitively: there is a great deal of nuance in how the characters treat Aaron, and how Aaron views his role in a largely white world. The trial — and Turow is certainly alive to all the meanings of that word — exerts a huge toll on Sabich, as it does on the Potters and Aaron. It’s this understanding of human nature which lifts the novel above the level of a run-of-the-mill thriller.

Yet the book is not as gripping as its predecessor. The beginning moves very slowly, almost turgidly. Aaron acts in an insanely suspicious manner, which, of course, makes the reader think twice. But the main problem lies in the title itself: if Aaron is presumed guilty, then — well, no spoilers in guessing that he isn’t. Alongside this, the characters come very close to being mere types, and as such, it’s hard to be invested in working out who really dunnit.

Those who are familiar with the machinery of courtroom thrillers will recognize all the elements, popping up in the order in which you’d expect them to. It’s all here: the jokes in court; the apparently strange lines of questioning leading to important revelations; the evidence that can be interpreted in several different ways.

We learn a lot about cell-phone masts and the fibers from nylon ropes, and if you want me to take a quiz on the soles of Nike sneakers, I think I’d ace it. Sabich is a keen operator who knows all the tricks of the trade, and so is Turow.

If Presumed Guilty seems slightly hollow, that may be because it’s all been done before so many times that it’s difficult to be original.

Much has been written about how crime novels are a response to modernism’s attempts to understand personality and truth. How can we know anything about ourselves, when all is in flux? Trials are an attempt to discern the facts, and in the real world they can seem increasingly unstable. Detective novels are supposed to offer certainty. And in Turow’s vision of an America moving away from racism, guided by legal principle, yet imbued with love for humankind, Presumed Guilty certainly fulfills that function.

Turow’s well-oiled novel is certain to find many itself eager readers. Old dog, old tricks, but it’s comforting in its own sweet way.

A biography of Lorne Michaels that strays into hagiography

The gilt fell off Saturday Night Live’s reputational gingerbread almost from the moment of its inception. Long before the arrival of Bob Woodward’s Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi (1984) — its antihero dead at the age of thirty-three — whatever luster the show had possessed had been well-nigh obliterated by a tide of scuttlebutt. The girls were (apparently) all bulimics and anorexics. The guys were coke fiends and egomaniacs. Misogyny (exemplified by Belushi’s dislike of sketches written by women) and back-stabbing were endemic; drug dealers sat in on the writing sessions. That this perpetual orgy of all-night burn-outs, fast white powders and men’s room set-tos somehow managed to realize at least a handful of genuinely high-end comic moments might now, nearly half a century later, seem a matter for wonder and congratulation.

The curious thing, in retrospect, and with due allowance for information not necessarily available at the time — see above — is the (comparatively) innocent sheen that glimmers off the early episodes. Belushi’s furious exuberance; Gilda Radner’s effervescent bounce; Laraine Newman doing her Valley Girl impersonations (“And I mean, I had to get super-reflective: I had to ask myself ‘Sheree, why do you want to be a stewardess?’”) If it was not so very far away from a high-school improv troupe, then this, in a certain sense, was what it was intended to be — a world of short-term alliances and merciless in-joking, solidarity and fracture, sparkle and drift. The only difference lay in the high-octane talents on display and the seriousness, at any rate in career terms, of what was at stake.

As for what was at stake, Susan Morrison’s long, exhaustive and — to be frank — over-indulgent biography of SNL’s “onlie begetter” quotes its subject as remarking, at the close of a Monday night writers’ meeting, “In any event, in five years none of this will matter, and some of them will have careers and some won’t.” No doubt it’s significant that Lorne Michaels himself should turn up in what posterity usually marks down as one of the classic, fourth-wall-busting early sketches. In the sketch, Radner and Chevy Chase are the innocuous suburban couple wondering how to pass their evening. The radio at their side brings news of an invasion of South American killer bees. Within seconds, Belushi, in black-and-yellow costume with twirling antennae, knife in mouth, is perched in the open window, as a swarm of bees pours into the apartment to demand of the “gringos” where the pollen-stash is hidden.

And so it goes on. Episode host Elliott Gould is the bee-chieftain, strongly supported by cast-members Garrett Morris and Dan Aykroyd. Jane Curtin is Radner’s Aunt Betty, whom the bees have taken hostage. About halfway through, just as Gould is delivering a lachrymose speech about life back in the village (“My people are poor people,” etc.) the camera pans to offer close-ups of the nonparticipating Belushi and Morris. Michaels, summoned on stage to repair the damage, eventually stalks off to have it out with a drunken director and is pictured slapping his face, while a Belushi voice-over solemnly informs us that this is the “last chance” offered to a wounded industry veteran.

Even then, there is a sting — no pun intended — in the tail. Michaels, Belushi insists, is firing “his own father.” But Lorne’s dad died of a pulmonary embolism when his son was fourteen in the wake of a flaming and unresolved argument.

A herculean endeavor, conceived on the grand scale, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, sets itself two tasks: where did its hero come from? And why is he so good at what he does? Naturally, the two enquiries are connected and their seedbed can be found in 1950s Toronto, where young Lorne Lipowitz — the name-change came when he was twenty-three — grew up transfixed by such titanic figures of postwar entertainment as Johnny Carson and Mel Brooks.

To the dead father could be added some serious mother issues — there is a hilarious account, much later on, of Mrs. Lipowitz and her son edgily exchanging Christmas presents — and a burning ambition to make it in showbiz.

From an early age, Lorne had the valuable knack of being able to look in both directions simultaneously, keeping an eye on what was new and happening while always venerating the gods of old-style variety. Even as a young man, he seems to have known what the middle-aged folks wanted while somehow managing to stay true to the ideals — if that is what they were — of the boomer generation that followed.

And how exactly does a Jewish kid from Toronto scramble his way up the greasy pole of early 1960s light entertainment? The initial push for stardom came by way of a comedy act with a trainee lawyer called Hart Pomerantz, but Michaels seems to have known that his best work would always be done offstage. There were writing stints for Phyllis Diller and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, but by his mid-twenties he was already producing for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Then came a collaboration with Lily Tomlin for CBS, of which Ms. Tomlin sagely remarked, “Lorne had a lot of showbiz savvy. And he was hip, and that’s what we valued.” Morrison picks up this baton a few pages later when she notes that her subject, by now a habitué of such legendary Hollywood bunk-houses as the Chateau Marmont, “was as much an old showbiz buff as he was a young man in a hurry.” There were also hints, from Ms. T, that she was the stepping stone from which Michael jumped on toward Parnassus.

Saturday Night Live, commencing in the fall of 1975 and commemorated in a recent mythology-heavy movie, very nearly didn’t work, but righted itself to become the US TV phenomenon of the late 1970s, when the price of a thirty-second commercial leapt from $7,500 to a staggering $60,000. Morrison is good on Michaels’s sometimes ambivalent reaction to his prodigious success, his complaints about the less sophisticated jock audience brought in by Belushi’s frat-boy comedy Animal House and the demands of a household-name cast with secretaries and movie deals. Chevy Chase, in particular, does not come over well.

Morrison is also astute enough to realize that this is the part of Michaels’s career that matters. Certainly, her subject gets through a whole load of stuff after his early 1980s wilderness years, sidesteps into films, if not with any great success, has a finger in every late-night TV comedy pie worth the tasting, and at one point in the early 2000s controls NBC’s entire late-night operation, but there is a sense of diminuendo. As with rock and roll, a world with which Michaels has close connections, the real trails are blazed early on: the rest is consolidation.

As for the man himself, the thrice-married Michaels comes across as an amiable, self-contained kind of guy with a steely inner core, averse to confrontation but capable of sowing seeds of confusion through every hiring process and writers’ dispute he was ever involved in simply through a disinclination to come clean about his real intentions. Mike Myers was one among dozens of recruits who didn’t know whether they’d been given a job or not.

Some of the funniest bits of Morrison’s biography take in the stratospheric levels of name-dropping achieved by this friend of “Paul” (Simon and McCartney) and “Mick” (Jagger). Belushi once treated a reporter to his impersonation of Michaels keeping a guest waiting while he made some calls. “Nicholson, can you hold just a second? I have Mike Nichols on the other line. Mike, can you hold for a second? I’ve got Mick Jagger on the other line. Mick, I’ll be with you in a second…”

When he read about this, Michaels is supposed to have “gone nuts,” but there were other SNL trusties who wondered whether celebrity-schmoozing didn’t, in the end, have a vitiating effect, keeping Michaels up on deck when he should have been stoking the boiler down in the comedy engine room. “Where was the joy?” Jane Curtin wondered, of her boss’s friendship with Simon. “They outlived the joy.”

To which it might be added: was there ever anyone from the intensely introverted, if not entirely paranoid world of American showbiz who didn’t in some sense outlive the joy? The weakest bits of Lorne, it should be said, are the interleaving chapters which walk us through the great man’s professional week. Their awfulness lies in the uncritical, shading into sycophantic way they play up the legend (“Michaels stands about five foot eight, but his posture and nonchalant confidence belie his actual height. His eyes are close-set and dark, with a glitter of mockery. Crinkles sprout from the corners. The attitude he projects is perhaps best captured by a phrase that A.J. Liebling used to describe a wine: warm but dry, like an enthusiasm held under restraint.”)

There is a whole lot more of this portentousness — Michaels’s “four chief deputies,” his belief that silliness is “essential to the show,” the collective fawning on Jonah Hill — and the general effect is ultimately a little diminishing. I mean, how would Morrison treat Michelangelo or Tolstoy if they strayed beneath her lens? It’s no disrespect to this small-screen innovator, talent-fosterer and all-round cultural influencer, as well as subject of this frustrating, sometimes fascinating biography, to say that, really, you know, in the end, it’s only TV.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.

Can a TV series capture the extraordinary story of the Mitford girls?

We remain fascinated, even obsessed, by the Mitfords. Collectively, their existence is the stuff of legend: the affairs, the imprisonment, the polarized politics, the wit, the beauty, and the brutality, all in one glamorous package. In uncertain times, the sisters offer a flush of eccentric characters: Nancy the Novelist, Pamela the horsewoman, Diana the Fascist, Unity the Hitler-lover, Jessica the Communist and Debo the Duchess.

This year, the family will be immortalized on television, in a new six-part drama, Outrageous, which examines how the six daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale, two generally unremarkable members of the British aristocracy, spawned seven children (including one boy, Tom, who went on to die in World War Two), five of whom went on to be famous for wildly different reasons. (Pamela bred chickens.) As Lady Redesdale — “Muv” to her brood — once said in tones of resignation, “Whenever I see the words ‘Peer’s Daughter’ in a headline, I know it’s going to be something about one of you children.”

The eventual opposing directions of their lives and passions might point to a polarized world, but their childhood was one of confinement together, of nicknames (till the end of her life, Nancy would write to “9, Duchess of Devonshire,” her youngest sister’s supposed mental age) and, despite the odds, continued closeness through adulthood.

From the 1920s, when Nancy and Diana were the brightest young things of their era, their interpersonal dramas dominated the headlines and gossip columns alike. Uneducated country girls who had spent their youth licking the pews in church and administering “palsy practice” to their father, they took on society with gusto, each sister emerging from her chrysalis in turn, only to become an object of fascination. Lord Redesdale, who only ever read one book in his life, Jack London’s White Fang, once harrumphed: “I am normal, my wife is normal, but my daughters are each more foolish than the other.” But without family wealth to draw on, they had to make their way in the world — a pursuit some of the sisters proved more adept at than others.

Born over a sixteen-year period between 1904 and 1920, they defied not only their family’s expectations, but society’s too. The only one to embrace a traditionally aristocratic lifestyle was the last-born Deborah, the least acerbic of the bunch, who became Duchess of Devonshire, chatelaine of Chatsworth, years after she married Lord Andrew Cavendish in a bomb-damaged Priory Church of St. Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield in 1941. Even the largely passed-over second-born Pamela was unsuccessfully proposed to — twice — by future Poet Laureate John Betjeman.

Diana, the celebrated beauty, married the charming but effete brewing family heir Bryan Guinness, later divorcing him for the charismatic Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. They married in 1936 in the sitting room of Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler in attendance as guest of honor. Diana spent the war with her husband interned in Holloway Prison, the pair suspected but never tried for handing information to the Nazis. She died in 2003 at the age of ninety-three, and never abandoned her beliefs.

It was Nancy who had informed on her Nazi-sympathizing sister, telling MI5 that “She is a ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted fascist and admirer of Hitler and sincerely desires the downfall of England and democracy in general.” The novelist had briefly sympathized with fascism but later reviled it, splendidly turning down an invitation to celebrate Joachim von Ribbentrop’s 1936 appointment to the German Embassy in London in Yiddish.

But if Nancy’s politics led her to inform on her sister, they did not swing as far to the left as those of Jessica, who balanced the seesaw by marrying her distant cousin, the anti-fascist socialist Esmond Romilly, becoming a communist and eloping to Spain. (Even before this Jessica had once had her pocket money docked for calling her father “a feudal remnant.”) The two later settled in America where, after Romilly’s death in the war, she married a civil rights lawyer, exposed the iniquities in the funeral system through her book The American Way of Death, and worked as an investigative journalist. For this betrayal, she was cut out of her father’s will.

However, the most troubling among this sorority of “terrific haters,” was the Redesdales’ fifth child, Unity, who had been conceived — presciently — in the Canadian town of Swastika, a harbinger of a lifetime’s pursuit of taking Mitfordian passions to extremes. While Jessica carved hammers and sickles into the glass windows of the family home, Unity’s rejoinder was to carve swastikas and to declare, to anyone who would listen, how much she hated the Jews. Described by the British Secret Services as “more Nazi than the Nazis,” Hitler lauded her as “a perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood.” If their appreciation was mutual, it is likely that the adoration was all Unity’s. Even when young, she had dreamt of meeting him and, as Jessica wrote in Hons and Rebels, “Seldom have childhood predictions materialized with greater accuracy.”

Earlier this year, the Daily Mail uncovered Unity’s hitherto unknown diaries that run from 1935 to 1939, a time when she spent more time with Hitler than any other British person. The shocking nature of their contents is undiminished by time, and her groupie-like infatuation is writ large, alongside her antisemitic rants. February 9, 1935, for example, marked the moment she first spoke to her hero; she described it as “the most wonderful day of my life.” Over its 450 pages, the diary details their 139 separate meetings, the apartment he “found” for her (the family of Jews to whom it belonged had “gone abroad”), visits to Dachau, the way he kissed her hand, and the many presents he gave her. (The rumor that she carried his baby and gave it up for adoption might be fanciful, but it persists.) Notoriously, at the outbreak of war, a grief-stricken Unity shot herself in the head on a bench in Munich’s English Garden. With the bullet lodged in her brain, hers was a slow death. Cared for by “Muv” for nine years, she died of meningitis at the age of thirty-three in Oban, Scotland, in 1948.

All the while, there was Nancy, observing from the sidelines, distilling her experiences into glittering jokes for her friends’ — and our — delectation. In person, the legendary teases could be fond or they could be cruel. Once she took delight in telling her youngest sisters that the middle parts of their names were “nit, sick and bore”; on another occasion, she described to Deborah how everyone had cried when she was born.

Her book The Pursuit of Love, which celebrates its eightieth birthday this year, remains the definitive fictionalized chronicle of her family. “The charm of your writing… depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language,” wrote Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford’s long-time correspondent. He had entered the world of the Radletts and been seduced. An intimate of both Nancy and her younger sister Diana, the lightly fictionalized account of their family life would have felt so familiar to Waugh — who suggested the title — that, one imagines, Linda’s titular pursuit seemed impossible to distinguish from her creator’s.

All of Mitford life is there: the sprawling quantity of sisters, the passions undimmed by education, the bloodthirsty child-hunts, the uncontrollable boredom, the reflexive snobbery, the gossip exchanged in laundry closets and the wild vitality. All of it is enclosed within the walls of an unlovely but rambling Gloucestershire house based on the Mitfords’Asthall Manor, through which Uncle Matthew’s (a thinly veiled Lord Redesdale) bellowed volleys of “hog” and “sewer” would ring as standard. And, later on, there were, of course, les gens du monde.

The sparkling girlish chatter of Nancy’s narrative is underpinned by the evocation of bright young things coming of age against the backdrop of brutality, at home and afield. Not for nothing does The Pursuit of Love open with the image of Uncle Matthew’s entrenching tool, a gruesome, hair- and blood-encrusted wall-mounted instrument with which, family legend goes, he whacked eight Germans to death.

It is impossible to be bored by Nancy’s remarkable book, which is just as well; we are told in The Pursuit of Love that the Radletts abhorred boredom above all other things. Thus it played out in life and in art. The Nancy-Jessica stand-in, Linda Radlett’s first husband, Tony Kroesig, is rich, handsome but unforgivably dull. Linda falls for him because she mistakenly believes him vouched for by her neighbour Lord Merlin (inspired by Lord Berners), an aesthete who dyes his pigeons pink. “The Bolter,” Linda’s much-married aunt, may be wicked but she has undeniable glamour. The love of Linda’s life, Fabrice de Sauveterre, based on Nancy’s real-life lover Gaston Palewski, is a duke, a womanizer, and utterly seductive in his insouciant, Parisian, shrugging refusal to conform to expectations of monogamy.

There is a lightness of touch threaded through all of this that dusts over everything without discrimination. Whether the event is a ball, a love affair, a bomb crashing through the ceiling or the rise of a totalitarian regime, each is met with the same delicious levity. In an age when every piece of invariably dismal news is dissected with pained solemnity, thank goodness for Nancy Mitford and her Radletts, who were “always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives.” It remains to be seen whether Outrageous lives up to its billing, but long may we, like Nancy, remain staunch in our constant refusal to distinguish the “girlish chatter” from the “literary language” and by doing so make ourselves very Honorable indeed.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.

Why should cohabitees get the benefits of marriage?

One way or another in life, we end up making choices, even if we think we’re choosing not to choose. The choice not to marry, to live with someone instead, is one example. Passing on the public commitment and going for sex plus domesticity is a choice, one in which, I imagine, the absence of commitment is part of the appeal. You don’t fancy the for-better-or-worse stuff, the Waterford glass wedding presents, the joint pension provision? Well, that’s just dandy, but complaining that you don’t have the perks of matrimony when your open-ended arrangement breaks up does seem to be trying to have it both ways.

And having it both ways is precisely what the government seems to want to encourage.  It’s launching a consultation on giving greater rights to cohabitees. We all know, don’t we, what a consultation entails? It means going through the motions to arrive at the conclusions that you’ve already come to.

Labour has a manifesto commitment to reform the situation for cohabitees, especially women, in the event of the relationship breaking down, so we know where this is heading. At present, if you’ve been living with someone, you don’t have an automatic right to their property or their pension if he or she dies without a will or if you separate. You can claim for child support if there are children, but ownership of property is less clear cut than for married couples. Mind you, in Ireland I know of women who keep the house after separating on account of their children, even though the children may not be related to him.

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In the Netherlands, cohabiters can claim much the same rights as married people, but you do have to register the relationship. And I imagine that’s a bit of a ball and chain – I mean, how do you preserve the illusion of perfect freedom when you’ve got to troop to the town hall to make the affair official? You may as well get married.

There are potentially an awful lot of people affected by this alleged reform – around 3.6 million couples in 2021, so probably more now. It’s not clear that Labour envisages people having to register in order to qualify for the new rights, so the status of the relationship would be for the courts to decide.

It all has a bearing on the primal relationship, the foundation of society, which is marriage, and less than half the adult population was married in 2022. As most of us know, a relationship that comes with a public commitment is better for children. The Centre for Policy Studies spelled it out in a report by Cristina Odone five years ago, and its conclusion still holds:

‘Married parents are twice as likely to stay together as cohabiting ones. By the time they turn five, 53 per cent of children of cohabiting parents will have experienced their parents’ separation; among five-year-olds with married parents, this is 15 per cent… Even when controlling for income and education, children raised in unstable families suffer worse health, are more likely to be excluded, more likely to join a gang and end up as NEET.’

Would that situation change if cohabitees got more rights when there’s a separation? It might mean that children would be better provided for. But it may also mean that people will be even less likely to marry, less likely to commit, and less likely to stay together, if they think they’ll be looked after outside marriage – which is sub-optimal for the children.

Even for childless couples there’s something fundamentally odd about treating the unmarried the same as the married given they’ve decided not to commit. If the individuals concerned are grown up, they know there are consequences to sticking with an irregular union rather than making an honest wo/man of the other party.

The benefits of marriage, if this reform is enacted, will look even less obvious. Granted the Tories presided over the rot when they opted for no-fault divorce three years ago, a patently dishonest outcome, even in cases where it’s obvious to everyone that one party was at fault.

This reform will undermine an already rackety institution further. The government should be trying to make marriage look like the normal, grownup, regular, respectable thing to do, not rewarding what, in happier days, we called living in sin.

American cinema at its best

The extraordinary success of The Brutalist is not something that Hollywood, or anyone else, anticipated. When it was announced for last year’s Venice Film Festival, it was regarded with a degree of interest but not much else. After all, Brady Corbet’s previous two films — The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux — had attracted a degree of critical attention but neither had been an awards player, let alone making any money at the box office. Auteurs can auteur, but the wider Hollywood establishment will only take them seriously if their films make some decent bank. When Chloé Zhao won Best Picture and Best Director for Nomadland, her reward was to be given hackwork on Marvel’s first major flop, Eternals: fingers crossed that her next picture, Hamnet, restores her to critical favor.

In the case of Corbet, however, The Brutalist represents a Christopher Nolan-esque swing for the big leagues. It has a decent amount in common with Nolan’s Oscar-winner last year, Oppenheimer: considerable length, a 1940s setting, a decidedly adult-skewing perspective on the American Dream and a titanic lead performance, to say nothing of an almost casual disregard for the shibboleths and tropes of contemporary Hollywood. Likewise, neither Corbet nor Nolan have ever struck the wider world as laugh-a-minute figures, but project a measured and considered intensity when discussing their films that would be easy to dismiss as pomposity, even arrogance, if the work wasn’t so damn good.

That is, however, where the similarities between Corbet and the acknowledged king of intelligent Hollywood filmmaking end. Nolan earned his considerable reputation through making films that attracted a huge amount of commercial success. Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, Interstellar and Inception — all difficult, intellectual pictures that owe as much to arthouse and experimental filmmaking as they do to mainstream thrills — were hugely profitable Oscar-winning behemoths, and even if one does have to prepare oneself before watching them, it is an experience very much worth having.

The Brutalist, meanwhile, was made on a minuscule budget of $10 million, which will barely make you an independent drama featuring people talking in Los Angeles coffee shops these days. And Corbet’s picture is nothing if not hugely ambitious, a decades-spanning account of the life and work of Adrien Brody’s László Tóth, a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who comes to postwar America a broken man. He is taken in by his cousin Attila, a thoroughly assimilated Yank, and comes to the attention of the wealthy industrialist Harrison van Buren when he redesigns his library in a modernist, brutalist style, to van Buren’s initial displeasure and later pride.

The relationship between the two men comes to dominate the rest of the film, with the two lead actors giving career-best performances and perfectly capturing the mixture of resentment, pride, respect and anger that tends to permeate any business arrangement where one party is very talented and the other hugely wealthy.

There are unexpected twists — including one especially grim moment when Guy Pearce’s van Buren, makes his power and dominance over the other man brutally clear — and it is possible, even probable, that Corbet is intending to make a point about what it is like to be an artist working defiantly outside the mainstream in an increasingly debased Hollywood. Not for nothing does The Brutalist end with the disco song “One For You, One For Me” by the Italian duo La Bionda.

This is something that Corbet has been clear about in interviews, too. It was clearly a struggle to raise even the relatively meager budget (a tip: if you want to see how difficult it was to fund an independent picture, look and see just how many executive producers are included in the credits). In interviews earlier this year, Corbet and his wife-cum-writing-partner Mona Fastvold said that they were yet to make any money out of the film, which took years to conceive and realize. That should have changed by now. At the time of writing, The Brutalist has made over $30 million at the box office: a decent return for a 215-minute picture that comes complete with a fifteen-minute intermission but much less than the near-billion that Oppenheimer made in 2023.

Still, money isn’t everything, and one of the greatest pleasures of The Brutalist is in luxuriating in an old-school cinematic experience of a kind that can seldom be had these days. I saw it in my local cinema, a civilized place that boasts armchairs, wine coolers at every seat and cocktails on demand: I cannot think of a better or more appropriate place to have spent four hours. The film’s influences are clear. Corbet was inspired by the Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer, the designer of the former Whitney Museum of American Art, who fled Germany in the mid-1930s when it was becoming increasingly clear that the rise of fascism was unlikely to be sympathetic toward Jewish artists.

It is testament to the film’s commitment to telling Tóth’s story that many have left the cinema believing they have seen a biopic of a hitherto little-known architect, and indeed some have even felt outraged at a perceived con. Yet Corbet and Fastvold never pretended that The Brutalist was based on a real-life story, and indeed its chilly, precise evocation of van Buren’s seemingly limitless wealth and influence suggests a large number of quite different films.

I was variously reminded of Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America and, of course, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, still one of the definitive American pictures made about the immigrant experience.

There are other forebears. Ayn Rand’s once-totemic, now-ridiculed The Fountainhead, with its evocation of a visionary architect, is certainly in there, and also, quite unexpectedly, are the screwball, swift-talking screenplays of Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. I laughed frequently and hard at various parts of the film — some of Pearce’s line readings and facial expressions are memes for the ages, waiting to be plucked out — and most of the (packed) audience seemed almost surprised that someone in their midst was finding as serious a picture as this damned funny.

The Brutalist presents fortune and fate, in all their horrendous and wonderful twists, not as enemies to be overcome, but as compatriots to be walked with and understood. The film’s treatment of sex, in particular, is more real in its matter-of-factness than the overrated Babygirl. It connotes financial expediency — in one of the earliest scenes we see Tóth being fellated by a sex worker in a New York brothel, immediately dispelling any idea that we are about to watch the journey of a Great Man — or, in a series of heartbreaking vignettes between Tóth and his wife, Erzsébet (which gives Felicity Jones a role to compare to her still-underrated work in The Theory of Everything), their marital relations are shown with tenderness and compassion. This is a film for adults, by adults, and is all the richer and more successful for that.

Awards do not confer lasting reputation on a film. There have been enough second-rate winners of Best Picture over the past few years that the title has lost the gravitas that it once had: CODA, Nomadland and Green Book, let alone the truly dismal Crash. Corbet’s film should nevertheless stand on its own considerable merits as a great example of American cinema, a ballsy, risk-taking exercise in spectacle, intelligence and originality that makes the vast majority of what has been released in cinemas in the past twelve months seem dull and anemic indeed. And it means that its writer-director — a former actor who quit the profession because he was bored with playing minor supporting roles — has ascended into the reputational A-list. Where he goes next will be fascinating to watch. Let’s hope it’s not Deadpool & Wolverine 2: This Time It’s Brutal.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.

Bella Freud’s fashion inquisition

Sometimes the mind needs to take a break. And I can’t think of a better stopping-off place than the soothing, gloriously bonkers discussions on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, hosted by the British fashion designer Bella Freud. Its premise is that Freud, daughter of Lucian and great-granddaughter of Sigmund, encourages guests to recline on her couch and talk over any and every aspect of their relationship to fashion.

Her mellifluous, affirming manner is much more soft soap than steel wool, but this is not territory that requires a serious broadcaster, and the concept proves a surprisingly fruitful route into family history, personal stories and high-grade gossip. The pool of guests is a commendably eclectic one: they have thus far included Nick Cave, Kate Moss, Cate Blanchett, Zadie Smith and the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård.

Alongside the audio of each interview, there is a little video of Freud and her subject talking: the fact that interviewees are lying down somehow renders them more innocent and unguarded than usual, like rambling children at bedtime. Even those who favor low-key apparel reveal moments when fashion has delivered a notable thrill or anxiety. Knausgård, who exudes a thoughtful melancholy, arrives clad in his out-there-meeting-people outfit of black jeans, black T-shirt, black shoes and, for winter, a black sweater. In his early teens, he said, he annoyed his father by shaving his head and getting a cross-shaped earring in each ear. When his father saw the new look, “He said, ‘Well, you look like an idiot.’ And that was kind of what I wanted to achieve, I think.”

Still, his father delivered his own visual disturbances. As a local teacher and politician, he had once dressed “like a proper, proper adult” in tweed suits with elbow patches, an authoritative costume which the ten-year-old Karl Ove found “safe.” Then when his parents got divorced, his father started drinking heavily, inviting people over, and adopted a new, almost hippieish style which, ominously, involved “tunics.” To the late-teenage Karl Ove this sudden parental flamboyance signaled not liberation but a scary disintegration of the known order. Perhaps that’s why he prefers his own clothes to speak quietly. This was, he said of the interview, “my first therapy session ever.”

To others, such as Kate Moss, the dress-up box was always a reliable source of unalloyed joy. Moss lies on the couch rocking a carefully chosen combo of sheer tights and towering Vivienne Westwood heels, and reminisces dreamily in her sexy little croaky voice about outfits she has known. The curtain gradually goes up on her world of likeminded glamour addicts, and their zest in costuming themselves.

The model and Rolling Stones muse Anita Pallenberg used to come round to her house, she says, and “We would spend all night in my wardrobe, doing ‘looks’.” You can tell when one of the guests here is immersed full-time in fashion, because they freely deploy the verbal construction I call “the fashion singular”: unlike sartorial civilians, you’ll hear them speaking of “a red lip” or “a platform heel,” as though the concept is already reverentially placed on a designated plinth in their minds.

Perhaps my favorite guest was Nicky Haslam, the interior designer and playful arbiter of good taste, who is more fun than ever aged eighty-five. When asked what he is wearing, he immediately says, “Head to toe Primark!” and then he’s off, gamely admitting to everything, including tinting a quiff on his head and his pubic hair with eyelash dye, having a facelift — “God, yes!” — and calling Jean Shrimpton “gangly and hideous” before she became a star model and one of his best friends. He remembers the Duchess of Windsor, whom he adored, and “poor Marilyn” (Monroe) answering the door just a few weeks before she died, clearly troubled and “an absolute wreck.”

I’m looking forward to hearing who comes on the show next, but if Fashion Neurosis ever has a spin-off, I think Haslam alone could probably sustain at least one interview a week.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.

Republicans dare Senate Democrats to shut everything down

Call it the ultimate example of budgetary FAFO — or “F- around and find out”: Republicans are practically daring Democrats in the Senate to follow through on Chuck Schumer’s threat to vote against the six-month continuing resolution passed by the House Tuesday night on a near-party-line vote. With Senator Rand Paul joining his fellow libertarian-minded Kentuckyian Representative Thomas Massie in opposing the measure, Republicans likely need eight Democrats to cross over. And despite Schumer’s claim yesterday that Republicans won’t get those votes, everyone in the know in Washington believes the old man’s threat is fist-shaking at clouds. As Politico’s Rachael Bade reported, the mood from the White House is total confidence either way: “They’re 100 percent gonna swallow it,” one White House official told me. “They’re totally screwed.”

The dynamics of this CR are atypical, given that the recent experiences regarding shutdowns have pitted fiscal conservatives against big spending Democrats. This time around, you have the stalking green-eye shaded Mearcstapa threat of DoGE, ready to pounce in the event of a government shutdown that would necessarily require the furloughing of vast portions of the bureaucracy. For those who understand the potential of a Democrat-engineered, Republican-managed shutdown, you’d have to have an appetite for destruction to want it at this particular moment. And following the embarrassing display of chaotic behavior at Trump’s joint address to Congress, Democrats would be contributing to the impression that in the Trump 2.0 era they are flailing about to find the best path of resistance.

What this entire moment reveals is that Democrats truly haven’t figured out what path to take with confronting this president. They’ve already fallen into the trap of defending the most unpopular spending the federal government does — foreign aid and massive, bloated bureaucracies — and now they’re setting themselves up to provide a toothless, unserious opposition to what amounts largely to a typical DC can-kick. It’s the worst of both worlds: they’re wavering and ineffectual in opposing a president whose agenda is on tilt, speeding forward on a minute by minute basis. 

The speed-demon approach to leadership leads to mistakes, but it also leads to getting a lot of things done too rapidly for the opposition to keep up. How long can Team Trump keep it up? At the moment, given the scattered nature of the Democrats, it looks like it’s going to go as long as they want.

Defence cooperation with France would be a bad idea for Britain

Donald Trump’s recent decision to deny Ukraine access to American intelligence data in the war against Russia has concentrated minds on how the US could restrict Britain’s defence capability, from F-35 stealth jets to its independent nuclear deterrent. Some fears are well-founded. Others, such as the recent suggestion by a former French ambassador to the UK that a ‘dual key’ controls Britain’s submarine-launched Trident ballistic missiles, are a myth. 

The idea is growing in some quarters that now is the moment for Britain to switch away from the US to Europe for defence equipment cooperation. One need not look too far to detect its motivation or to see its naivety. Like the US, European states such as Germany or France are also able to deny the UK use of military systems developed in collaboration, depending on the agreements and export control mechanisms in place.

The Eurofighter Typhoon jet, a joint project between the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain, saw Germany block British exports in 2023 to countries like Saudi Arabia over its role in the civil war in Yemen, stymying UK arms sales. With the exception of the US, we collaborate with France on more defence projects than any other nation. But are we truly confident that France (any more than America) will not restrict the deployment of joint weapons systems in our hour of need should French interests not align?

During the Brexit fishing negotiations in May 2021, Paris threatened to cut off the electricity supply to the Channel Islands, 95 per cent of which comes by underwater cables from France. During the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out, Emmanuel Macron and the French EU Commissioner Thierry Breton were behind the Commission’s introduction of export control mechanisms to deny Britain vaccines manufactured in Europe by the British pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca. The EU also triggered Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, which, had it not been quickly rescinded, would have denied vaccine shipments to them too.

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More recently, Marine Le Pen – leader of the national populist National Rally party – has emphasised that her potential presidency would see more hard-line ‘France first’ policies internationally. The far left, meanwhile, has made no bones about pursuing internationalist policies based on disarmament. 

With European Union member states sliding ever rightwards, what becomes of Britain’s sovereign defence autonomy for military hardware and software developed in collaboration with EU nations with whom we no longer see eye to eye?

All this seems to be ignored in the Labour government’s rush to get its ‘EU reset’. In all the Trump-induced panic, Labour seems set on seizing this ‘divine surprise’ to implement its EU reset via the forthcoming Strategic Defence Review. But in tying Britain’s defence procurement to the EU, it would be a clear case of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Most jointly developed military equipment is subject to export and end-user agreements which permit partners to legally restrict their use. The US has international traffic in arms regulations (ITAR), allowing Washington to veto the use or sale of US-origin technology. Britain may have similar clauses for its equipment with which to bargain. But it is highly unlikely that the 15 per cent of British components in a F-35 could be used to stop America using the jets when it wanted.

Britain and France also operate ITAR-like clauses in many of their defence collaboration agreements involving end-use controls, technology transfers and licensing restrictions. The MBDA Storm Shadow/SCALP missile, co-developed by the UK and France, is subject to joint export approval, meaning either country can block sales if they want to.

The British-led MBDA Brimstone missile, for example, required negotiation with European partners before London could supply it to Ukraine. Marine Le Pen’s opposition to the supply of powerful weaponry to Kyiv would surely have blocked it had her party been in power, as would a minority French government containing just a couple of radical left La France Insoumise ministers.

The same applies to the Franco-British future cruise/anti-ship weapon (FC/ASW) expected to replace Exocet and Harpoon missiles, or the maritime mine countermeasures (MMCM) developed by France’s Thales and Britain’s BAE Systems. Though not as restrictive as the US, France and Britain’s defence collaboration could in some cases impact sovereign defence decisions.

Were Britain to shift focus from its American Trident missiles to collaborate more closely with France on nuclear ballistic missiles, there would be little or no improvement. Worse still, the UK would jeopardise the colossal strategic benefit derived from collaboration with America in the longstanding and mutually beneficial Five Eyes intelligence sharing partnership. 

Rather than using this moment for an EU reset, Keir Starmer should be looking to develop Britain’s home-grown defence industry through serious funding. The Prime Minister should also look to restrict takeovers by foreign companies to ensure Britain retains at least a semblance of strategic defence autonomy. 

Have we reached peak EDI?

As the old saying goes, ‘when American sneezes, England catches a cold’. This week, the two major city watchdogs announced they will be ditching planned ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ regulation. 

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the regulator for Britain’s financial services sector, first announced their plans to impose extensive new Diversity and Inclusion rules in 2023. After significant pushback at the time, they have finally declared it has ‘no plans to take the work further’. The Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), the Bank of England’s regulatory arm, has also issued a statement saying that they are not proceeding with similar proposals. Is this the first sign of a turning point in the creeping politicisation of business?

The FCA’s proposals represented some of the most damaging EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) requirements the financial sector may have seen. They intended to require all firms to put in place a ‘Diversity and Inclusion Strategy’ and expected companies to ‘set targets to address underrepresentation in their firms’. This would have taken place alongside mandatory reporting for larger firms on age, ethnicity, sex or gender identity, disability, religion, and sexual orientation.

Not only would this impose a huge cost to business – the FCA’s own impact assessment estimated £561 million in set up costs and annual ongoing costs of £317 million – it would also have politicised the workplace. Respondents to the FCA’s consultation warned that the proposals would have chilled free speech, caused the proliferation of ideological training schemes and undermined women’s sex-based rights.

The FCA and the PRA are the first UK regulators to take a step back from advancing EDI. Why have they done so? Across the pond, Donald Trump’s early Executive Orders directly targeted federal EDI (or DEI, as it is known in US) programmes. Major firms like Walmart, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs have followed suit, axing diversity orders – though others, such as Apple, have doubled down. Did our Financial Regulators realise that their proposals risked placing UK firms which operate in the US at a severe disadvantage?

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Opposition to EDI is sometimes portrayed as ‘ideological’ or part of a ‘culture war’. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that such programmes place extensive costs on firms; they undermine their ability to do business by hindering companies from hiring the most qualified candidate for jobs, and distracting them from their broader goals with questionable ‘targets’ or unpopular political campaigns. Importantly, there is not public support for this sort of activism in the workplace.

Polling for Policy Exchange, which has been documenting the shift in the debate over EDI, revealed that 75 per cent of people, including a clear majority of non-white respondents, believe that companies should prioritise hiring on merit, regardless of race or gender, rather than hiring to create a diverse team. The decision to row back from its proposals sees the FCA fall more in line with public opinion.

Policy Exchange’s research shows regulation places a ceiling on UK productivity. Earlier this year, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves called on watchdogs to cease regulations that hamper growth. She is right to be concerned: growth is flatlining while unemployment, inflation, and the cost of living are rising.

It’s important to be cautious, however, of reading too much into one positive signal by two regulators. Much of the state is moving in the opposite direction. UK Research and Innovation, which funds research in universities, recently announced that they would be requiring all those they fund to ‘embed diversity and inclusion’; the new Sentencing Guidelines will enshrine two-tier justice into the criminal courts; and the government is pressing ahead with an expensive Employment Rights Bill, and a Race and Disability Equality Act which will generate huge legislative costs for business.

The FCA themselves are sending mixed messages. Diversity requirements are embedded within much of their existing regulations – such as a new requirement in 2022 for mandatory reporting on the ethnicity and gender makeup of senior roles. None of these are being rolled back. Looking at their justification for abandoning plans for further measures, they cite ‘a very active policy and legislative agenda, including on employment rights, gender action plans and disability and ethnicity pay gap reporting’. It is possible that the regulators are sufficiently confident that EDI will be pursued by the state, that they themselves no longer feel the need to go ahead with unpopular policy proposals.

This week may have been a tentative step forward, but a step forward, nonetheless. EDI is embedded in every aspect of the British State – and is advancing in more areas than it is in retreat.

If the government genuinely wishes to prioritise growth, reduce the burdens on business and avert a two-tier society, it will need to communicate clearly that these sorts of initiatives are neither welcome nor desirable. It must be willing to act to enforce this across all of its departments, regulators and arm’s length bodies.

Instead, ministers seem to be pressing ahead with harmful policies, such as commencing the socio-economic duty in section 1 of the Equality Act – which could prevent all public bodies from making any decisions without considering how they could reduce economic inequality. It is an unworkable and expensive measure that will generate huge costs in implementation. A key test of the government’s commitment to sensible policy will be whether they ditch it.

Watch: Reynolds grovels over solicitor claim

Well, well, well. After Guido Fawkes revealed that Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds had previously – and inaccurately – referred to himself as a solicitor, the Labour man has now been forced to rather publicly correct the record.

While the Stalybridge and Hyde MP did receive solicitor training at Addleshaw Goddard for ten months, he left without qualifying to pursue a political career. Yet, similar to another of his colleagues, Reynolds was later found to have embellished his CV – even referring to himself as a ‘solicitor’ in a spoken contribution in the Commons. Not only has Reynolds never been registered on the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s register, the job title is legally protected – and using it incorrectly puts one at odds with the Solicitors Act 1974.

The revelation prompted the SRA to open an investigation into the Business Secretary – and now Reynolds has been forced to come clean. Speaking in the Commons on Wednesday, he confessed:

Madam Deputy Speaker, on a point of order, it has come to my attention that in a speech I gave on the 28th of April 2014, recorded in column 6.14 of Hansard on the subject of high speed rail, I made a reference to my experience of using our local transport system in Greater Manchester when I worked as a solicitor in Manchester city centre. I should have made clear that specifically, Madam Deputy Speaker, that was a reference at the time to being a trainee solicitor. This was an inadvertent error and although this speech was over a decade ago, as it has been brought to my attention, I would like to formally correct the record.

Given the inaccuracy was also recorded on LinkedIn, election material and in the media, Reynolds certainly has a lot of correcting to do…

Watch the clip here:

Trump’s security, dress codes and airport romance in Palm Beach

With President Trump spending so much time away from Washington at his home and club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, there are good spin-offs and not-so-good spin-offs for Palm Beachers. One of the good ones is for the local hotels: his security guard is of such a size that they are being billeted all over town. Less good is the sheer cost of security. The city council has this month had to transfer $20 million to the sheriff’s department for the costs incurred so far, and anticipates a further $25 million expenditure in the course of the year. It expects to be reimbursed by the federal government, as it was during Trump’s first term as president, but it won’t be paid before the next financial year.

The most eye-catching sum in the accounts is $13 million paid for 100,000 hours of overtime, served during the election campaign and the first few weeks of this year. That works out at $130 an hour. But security is certainly needed. The whole world knows about the two attempts on Trump’s life — last July at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire and clipped the President’s ear, and then in September, Ryan Routh broke into the Trump International Golf Course, leaving at his home a note in which he stated his intent on assassination.

What is not known more generally are the frequent attempts to get to Trump. No fewer than eight have been made recently, all resulting in arrests, prison time and up to $100,000 in fines. None of the arrested is regarded as especially sinister, though one Chinese suspect went right back to Mar-a-Lago after his release and trespassed again.

Here is an ad from the latest Palm Beach Illustrated magazine: “Questions To Ask Your Divorce Lawyer.”

One: How many cases involving more than $1 billion have you taken to trial and what are the names of those cases?

Two: How many cases involving more than $100 million have you taken to trial and what are the names of those cases?

Three: How many cases have you taken to trial that lasted longer than ten trial days and what are the names of those cases?

Four: How many cases have you taken to trial where there was litigation simultaneously in Florida and also in other states or foreign countries?

There is a small but far from invisible minority here that consists of “recovering alcoholics.” Perhaps not surprisingly, many are married to other “recovering alcoholics.” Their presence helps account for the great popularity of a non-alcoholic tipple, not a “mocktail,” though there are those, but something known as an “Arnold Palmer.” This is three parts unsweetened tea and one part iced lemonade and is named for the great golfer, Arnold Palmer who is not, so far as I know, a recovering alcoholic.

News just now that the Vineta Hotel, which has been renovating for some years, is close to re-opening. Under its old name, Chesterfield, it was the dancing hotspot of Palm Beach and its Friday nights at the Leopard Lounge were legendary. It was bought in October 2022 for $42 million by the Reuben brothers, David and Simon, British billionaires with a net worth, according to the Sunday Times of London, of £24.9 billion, making them Britain’s fourth-wealthiest family. Born in Mumbai to Baghdadi-Jewish parents, the brothers are part-owners of Newcastle United Football Club and have donated £80 million to the creation of Reuben College, Oxford.

The Vineta is being managed by the Oetker Collection, a luxury hotel chain that includes Le Bristol in Paris, and the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Cap d’Antibes. Though the re-opening of the hotel is imminent, it is still painted white, rather than its signature pink, as was promised.

Are standards slipping? One of the exclusive clubs here has found it necessary to remind its members of the dress code:

Hats: Never appropriate indoors and should not be worn backwards anywhere on the property.

Denim: Permitted only in Casual Dress areas (Pool Deck and Anchor Room) and must not be torn.

Tattoos: Tattoos larger than a fist must be covered up while on the property.

News from the “You Couldn’t Make It Up” department: Palm Beach Airport has been voted as the most romantic. A survey of 3,000 single travelers, by the DatingAdvice website (“2.4 million visitors monthly”), asked what they thought was the most romantic airport. Palm Beach Airport came top as “the best place to find a potential love connection.” Orlando was second and O’Hare (Chicago) fifth.

It also emerged that 31 percent of travelers have flirted with someone at an airport, while 47 percent said that sitting next to someone on a flight offered the best chance to begin an unlikely romance. A third thought that “bonding” was also likely when a flight was delayed.

That’s an encouraging way of looking at a travel nightmare, but one thing that Palm Beach International Airport has that most other airports don’t is a sizable private terminal, with Gulfstreams galore. It might account for some of the romance.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.

More booze won’t save France’s dying village life

Reach for the pastis, Jacques. A law is making its way through the French parliament to relax alcohol licensing, to make it easier to open bars and cafes in French towns and villages. French politicians are desperate to try anything to stimulate commerce in villages that are dying, the life sucked out of them by shopping centres with everything just five minutes away in the car.

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That more bars will be helpful is likely to be wishful thinking. The days when the Café de la Paix was at the centre of village life are long passé.

It is easy to over-sentimentalise the role of the café in France’s 40,000 small towns. Even the coffee was mostly terrible. I am still traumatised by my memory of the Café du Commerce, on my first trip to France, with my parents and siblings, in around 1964. There was a miasma of Gauloises, which at least concealed the smell from the bogs. The food was disgusting, some kind of mystery meat, probably horse. When it came time to empty the children, before returning to my father’s Ford Zephyr, the full horror was unveiled. Someone had apparently stolen the toilet. There was a foul hole instead. The only compensation, through the eyes of a child, was that instead of Coca-Cola, they had a soft drink called Pschitt, which was hugely amusing.

It is therefore only good news that the number of village cafes in France has fallen from around 200,000 in 1960 to possibly 36,000 now. It’s not obvious to me that the business model is viable anymore.

I have observed over the years, as a regular visitor and now resident, that the French have raised their game on the plumbing. A visit to Leroy Merlin is merely one point of confirmation. Pastis and a cigarette is out for breakfast, skinny lattes are in. Perhaps with a bagel, in the tonier quarters. Here in the southern vineyard empire, the meal of last resort is McDonald’s. We still have a café/bar in my village. There used to be two. They’ve bought some new furniture. A gigantic TV set. Painted. It’s not really a bar anymore, more of a restaurant, which also does tolerable coffee. There’s still a fairly vile pissoir out back, but they do a good prix fixe at lunchtime and it’s fun to watch the rugby there with the locals. I wouldn’t say it’s the centre of village life.

The new law, if passed, won’t make a great deal of difference in my village. The new legislation would allow café owners in rural towns with fewer than 3,500 inhabitants that do not already have a type-4 bar to request a brand-new permit instead of waiting for an old one to become free. It is difficult to estimate how many villages could benefit from such a law, but 31,000 out of 35,000 rural municipalities have fewer than 3,500 inhabitants, according to the association of French mayors.

The problem in France and doubtless elsewhere is that now almost everyone has cars, it’s just ridiculously easy to get everything you need at the shopping centre.

My own village of 2,600 people is so far weathering the storm in better shape than most. We have a busy pharmacy, a decent butcher and grocery store, a tabac, a post office, two restaurants and a bakery, in addition to the bar. There’s a small weekly market. But we’ve lost two bakeries, the fruit and vegetable shop has gone and the post office has reduced its hours. 

I was a councillor for five years here and my biggest worry was how to protect the village from becoming no more than a dormitory. A couple of years ago, when I visited the place of my birth, a small town in Saskatchewan, I spent the morning with the mayor there who had exactly the same preoccupation with a stagnant centre.

Is there a secret sauce that could help stimulate economic activity in villages that are everywhere facing the suck suck suck of commercial centres? A cafe doesn’t seem likely to cut it.

In Berlin they turned empty shops into offices and galleries. I’ve proposed doing that here, offering empty shops for peppercorn rents to artists and small businesses. I’ve not made much progress. Meanwhile, the shopping centre in nearby Roujan has just doubled in size.

Experiments with more bars in France, or 15-minute cities in Britain, don’t overcome the problem. Bars in France like pubs in Britain are struggling because people don’t patronise them. Small towns should be very agreeable places to live and do business, especially here in France with our fabulous fibre optic network. A much smarter strategy is needed if these places are not to become dead. 

Asteroid 2024 YR4 and the geekoisie

“Giant Asteroid” has been a popular also-ran in the last three presidential elections, at least judging from bumper stickers, and those wiseacres who preferred planetary annihilation to Hillary, Biden, Kamala and Trump may finally get their wish in 2032, when the newly discovered asteroid 2024 YR4 has — according to current calculations, liable to change — about a 3 percent chance of hitting Earth.

The geekoisie has been all a-twitter over this forecast, as visions of tsunamis and extinction-level events and the hot astrophysicists who adorn disaster movies dance in their heads.

“There is no situation in life but has its advantages and pleasures — provided we will but take a joke as we find it,” wrote Washington Irving, so I went on a weeklong comets-and-asteroids-destroy-our-world binge. I kicked it off with Lucifer’s Hammer (1977) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, an entertaining page-turner in which an Earth-clipping comet makes the waters rise and civilizations fall. The novel is indelibly stamped with its time and milieu: 1970s Southern California right-wing techno-libertarianism.

When the big one hits the survivors gather around two poles, which we might think of as the Ayn Rand Gang and the Hippie Hordes. The former are partisans of, to borrow a more recent term, the Science: rational, practical, hands-on men and the women they lay their hands on. The latter, the Luddites, follow a crazy-ass preacher and want to blow up the nuclear power plant.

My sympathies are naturally with the Luddites, but talk about stacking the deck: it turns out they’re also… cannibals!

That’s not playing fair, guys.

I’m guessing that Elon Musk has read Lucifer’s Hammer, which Niven and Pournelle stipple with pleas for space colonization. I can hear Neil Young in the Luciferian breeze — “Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun” — though something tells me ole Neil might not be sure which side he’s on.

On a wintry Saturday night, as the winds gusted and the snow fell heavily outside and I locked the doors against any cannibals who might be roaming the shire for a midnight snack, I settled down with ample libations for a triple feature of Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact (1998) and the infamously execrable Meteor (1979).

I confess that I gave up on this last film partway in. The killer rock was about as menacing as Jake from State Farm. I do hope this cinematic dog wasn’t the last thing on star Natalie Wood’s mind when she fell off that deck.

Deep Impact has Morgan Freeman as president, a teenaged astronomer as the comet discoverer, and a megawave that makes the one that overturned the SS Poseidon look like the splash in a kid’s bathtub. It borrows the idea of a survivor lottery from When Worlds Collide, the 1933 best-seller by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, which was adapted for a 1951 film starring the luminous Barbara Rush.

Armageddon is a Michael Bay production, all explosions and frantic shouting and un-PC humor and shit blowing up — and that’s only in the first ten minutes. It’s Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Owen Wilson, Steve Buscemi and Liv Tyler versus a rogue asteroid, and you don’t buy it for a second.

Assuming 2024 YR4 cuts us a break, the big winner of the coming Asteroid Sweepstakes will be the military-industrial complex and its aerospace division. Just as war and the threat thereof have been the most destructive engines in the growth of the American state, so has the curated fear of What’s Out There proved a boon to Big Government. The sky-is-falling lobby came into its own in 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite. President Eisenhower dismissed Sputnik as “one small ball in the air,” but congressional hysterics went bonkers. “We are in a race for survival, and we intend to win that race,” declared Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson.

“We” means the American taxpayer, and the most immediate spawns of Sputnik were the National Defense Education Act — through which the feds began their assault on education, theretofore a local responsibility — and NASA.

The great American historian Walter McDougall has explained how technocrats exploited media-stoked fears to “break down longstanding resistance by Republicans and Southern Democrats to federal involvement in education generally as well as other social areas and began the greatest flood-tide of legislation in American history, a tide that, as Lyndon Johnson recalled, ‘all began with space.’”

With Mars-coveting Elon Musk riding herd, I’m afraid we’re in for another round of Big Science welfare.

Lucifer’s Hammer co-author Larry Niven offered the classic plea of the Chicken Little lobby: “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don’t have a space program, it’ll serve us right!”

2024 YR4 — and American taxpayers — have been warned.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.

Ireland isn’t out of Trump’s firing line just yet

The Taoiseach Micheal Martin’s White House encounter with Donald Trump was controversial even before it was announced. Before any invitation had been extended, Sinn Fein said they were going to boycott the event in a show of solidarity with the people of Ukraine and Gaza and as a sign of their commitment ‘to humanity’. The People Before Profit party said Martin was endorsing America’s role in a genocide and Labour leader Ivana Bacik insisted the Taoiseach take the opportunity to publicly scold Trump on Ukraine, Gaza and his perceived failures to take action on climate change.

But Martin is a more experienced politician than that and knew there was only one real matter at hand: Ireland’s increasingly vulnerable economic reliance on American firms and Trump’s threats to impose swingeing tariffs if these firms didn’t return to the US.

The morning started well with a breakfast with J.D. Vance. The Vice President – who waxed lyrical about a previous holiday in Ireland, talked about his Irish friends and wore a pair of much mocked ‘shamrock socks’ – allayed some Irish fears. He said, ‘one of the more robust areas for us to work on with our Irish friends in the years to come is going to be technology and particularly Artificial Intelligence’. That phrase ‘in years to come’ will have been well received in Dublin.

But Martin’s subsequent meeting with Trump proved to be rather more unnerving. Of course, there was never going to be a ‘Zelensky moment’, as many of Martin’s Irish critics had hoped for. Instead, Trump paid a series of compliments to Martin and repeatedly expressed his admiration for Ireland, while also boasting about Doonbeg, his beloved golf course in county Clare.

In fact, Trump’s animosity towards the EU seems to stem from his initial involvement with Doonbeg, which he bought in 2014. Having sought permission to expand the complex, Trump said: ‘I got the approvals from Ireland so quickly. They were so professional… But I was told something that bothered me. They said, sir, you also have to get approved by the European Union… And then I hired somebody and he said the process will be from five to seven years… And then I found out that they weren’t playing games… That was my first experience with the European Union and I dropped the project… It was a very bad experience I had.’

Yet Trump’s velvet compliments failed to conceal an iron fist: ‘The Irish are smart, yes, smart people. You took our pharmaceutical companies and other companies… This beautiful island of five million people has got the entire US pharmaceutical industry in its grasp.’

He certainly has a point – the largest US pharmaceutical companies based in Ireland, such as Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Boston Scientific are large drivers of Ireland’s $60 billion a year export trade to the US. Ominously, Trump then added that he was determined ‘to take back our [country’s] wealth.’

When Trump referred to the EU’s successful legal action against Apple, which forced them to repay the Irish exchequer $11 billion in back taxes, Martin quickly interjected and pointed out that Ireland had fought in the courts alongside Apple. This prompted Trump to say: ‘I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming the European Union. The European Union has gone after our companies… We have a problem with the European Union. They don’t take our farm products. They don’t take our cars.’

From an Irish point of view, there will have been little consolation from his assertion that, ‘We don’t want to do anything to hurt Ireland. We do want fairness.’

If Trump had problems with the EU before the meeting, they will have been further exacerbated by the subsequent news that there would be more EU ‘countermeasure’ tariffs of up to $28 billion on US products in retaliation against America’s 25 per cent tariffs on steel and aluminium.

As the trade skirmish between America and the EU now threatens to explode into a full blown trade war, Ireland finds itself stuck in the middle of a conflict it can’t influence, while also being the most widely exposed of all the countries involved.

Having managed to keep expectations to a minimum before the Oval Office meeting, Martin can quietly content himself on a job well done. In fact, the Irish press pack in Washington reported a wide sense of relief.

There was one notable gaff, when Martin appeared to laugh as Trump made a joke about Ireland’s housing crisis being the result of such a booming economy. But that relatively minor, and subsequently clarified flub aside, it was a successful diplomatic mission.

But as they sift through the details of what was said, and watch the EU escalate its tariff war with the US, Martin and his team may yet find that any sense of relief was, sadly, rather premature. 

Why I won’t date younger women

I recently got some good news I’d like to share: I’m thirty-six years old. Yes, I know I’m chronologically seventy — but a blood and urine test I had reveals that I’m biologically thirty-six. (Your chronological age is the number of years you’ve lived; your biological age is how old your cells are.) Dr. Alka Patel, a brilliant British longevity expert tells me that she has never seen such a big gap between chronological and biological age as mine.

So, what does this mean? It means I will probably live to a ripe old age, free of any related diseases. But to me it means that while, on the outside, I might look like an old white guy with a wobbly chin, sad eyes and the scar tissue of one too many failed romances — inside, I’m a vigorous and virile thirty-six-year-old man. Oh, the wonders of science!

And all you hi-tech bros — such as the entrepreneur Bryan Johnson — who are spending fortunes following crazy fitness programs, dietary regimes, surgical procedures and popping hundreds of pills a day to be biologically younger — you can kiss my thirty-six-year-old tuchis!

I know that the quest for longevity has become very fashionable and I’ve leapt on the bandwagon and become a health nut. I text friends about my Omega imbalance and oxidative stress levels — and for some reason, they never reply. Consequently, I’m healthier and happier than ever before — but a complete bore at cocktail parties.

Anyway, my new discovery raises an interesting question: now that I’m biologically only thirty-six, can I date younger women? Let me make it clear. I’m not one of these old lecherous guys who lust after them. I actually prefer dating more age-appropriate women, for reasons I won’t go in to now. Even when I was in my twenties, I liked older women. It’s just that now I’m having trouble finding anyone — young or mature — to go out on dates with and I’d like to broaden my horizons.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. I admit it. I’m not having sex! There I said it. (Have a good chuckle on me.) One minute you’re a young lothario about town, the next you’re a seventy-year-old incel. (Without the nastiness!) How did that happen? Life happened.

When it comes to dating, romance and sex involving younger women — by which I mean women who are fifteen to thirty years younger than you — I’ve always had one rule: don’t do it. The spectacle of older men in hot pursuit of young women is not a good one. To do it requires the right mix of self-confidence and self-delusion; a mix which creates a form of erotic entitlement. Do the ancient lotharios of the world ever stop and wonder: am I too old for this woman? Do they ever ask if they really love their droopy butts and wobbly chicken necks?

It’s always struck me as unfair that older men who are rich, famous or of high status should be able to attract young, beautiful women. Even more unfair are the ones who are none of these things and still attract young women. But at least you know they must have charm or humor on their side. My no-younger-women rule began in my twenties when I saw an older man who constantly pursued young women. Actually he pursued any woman with a pulse. That man was my dad. Even in his nineties he was trying to chat-up younger women. I watched in horror as he approached, with the aid of his Zimmer frame, a pretty young woman at a bus stop and said, in his most debonair and raffish way: “Hello gorgeous would you care to join me for coffee — or maybe a cocktail or two?”

I would pull him away, explaining to the bemused or horrified woman that Mr. Landesman had not taken his medication and please accept our apologies. Once he turned and shouted: “Call me!”

Now here’s the funny thing. Every so often some young woman would actually join him for a cocktail. And they would later tell me what a “charming and interesting man” he was. Go figure.

Then there was the time when he was pissed at London’s Groucho club and made a kamikaze-lips lunge at a beautiful young woman next to him — and missed and crashed to the floor. I was sitting with a group of friends right at a table nearby and we witnessed the whole thing. This is where mere embarrassment mutates into trauma. Watching my dad spread out on the floor I made a solemn vow never to be like that.

And yet some women I know actually prefer dating older men. I asked my thirty-two-year-old friend why she liked them and she said she got fed up dating younger men because they had “no conversation, no desire for commitment and think anal sex is a form of foreplay.”

Still, I think I’m going to stick to my no-young-women rule. I may be thirty-six on the inside, but on the outside I definitely look seventy.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.

Taking the fast train back to imperialism

I’m on a high-speed train. Forty years ago, such a statement would have been notable and specific: essentially, it meant you were in Japan or France. Nowadays, being on a high-speed train is barely a geographical indicator at all. Most of Europe has them, from Spain to Italy to Poland. Morocco has high-speed trains. Uzbekistan has high-speed trains. Even Egypt, Vietnam, Turkey, Thailand and the USA either have high-speed railways, or will have them in the next year or two.

Just about the only country not powering ahead with high-speed rail is the birthplace of the railway — the United Kingdom — a fact that can either make you sob, or despair, or perform a kind of double sob etched with despair.

What makes my experience unusual is that my high-speed journey is happening in Laos. Yes, Laos. A country so poor that when I visited in 2009, the main road between north and south essentially consisted of one crumbling lane, often blocked by hens, boulders, playing children and soldiers sleeping on three-wheeled trucks.

And yet Laos, always among the poorest nations in Asia, has had a relatively high-speed rail link since 2022. And I’m sitting on it as it whisks me from the capital, Vientiane, through Luang Prabang, all the way to — crucially — the Chinese border at Boten.

There, the Chinese-designed train, running on a Chinese-standard gauge, connects neatly with China’s vast high-speed rail network (28,000 miles compared with the UK’s 68 miles). Theoretically, you could continue your journey from Boten to Kunming and then onward to Shenzhen, Chengdu, Wuhan, Shanghai, Xian, Beijing.

In other words, and without beating around the bamboo, China has loaned enough money to impoverished little Laos for it to have its own gleaming shinkansen — from the capital to the Chinese border. And this railway, by convenient coincidence (for Beijing), also happens to bind Laos even more tightly to China — not just through debt, but through infrastructure, economic interdependence, and, ultimately, influence. Laos is now an economic vassal of China. A protectorate, or feudal satellite — firmly in Beijing’s orbit. This is, on the face of it, not a startling insight. We’ve all read about Chinese economic penetration into Latin America — China is now the biggest trading partner for virtually every South American nation, supplanting the US in the last decade. Similarly, we’ve heard of China’s investments — and, depending on your level of cynicism, its debt-trap diplomacy — in Africa. I have personally travelled on Chinese-made roads in regional Ethiopia that put British motorways to shame.

At the same time, China has been surging north into Mongolia and Central Asia, encroaching on Russian interests — a fact that may yet haunt Putin and his successors. Further afield, China’s presence is expanding across the Indian and Pacific Oceans: from Sri Lanka (where it has built highways and ports) to the tiny Pacific Cook Islands (where China has recently announced a new naval base).

And now, of course, China is about to seize — via Mauritius — the Chagos Archipelago from Britain’s uniquely comedic Labour “government,” while demanding we pay them for the privilege. A transaction that feels like heftily tipping the man that cuckolded you. But China’s economic takeover of its immediate Near Abroad — Indochina — feels distinct in nature, and arguably more insidious. Because Beijing doesn’t just send in state-backed loans and construction firms — it first sends pioneers of a different sort.

Ever heard of Snooky? Probably not. But it’s the nickname for Sihanoukville, a Cambodian coastal city. Fifteen years ago, Snooky was a sleepy backpacker town where you could get a nice coconut fish curry on the beach. Then, in the late 2010s, Sihanoukville experienced a massive influx of Chinese investment, transforming it into a minor Macau with hundreds of luxury hotels and high-rise buildings. At one point, Chinese businesses dominated more than 90 percent of the city’s economy.

Soon, Sihanoukville became a gambling mecca with more than seventy casinos catering mostly to Chinese tourists. At the same time it attracted organized gangs — operating frauds, prostitution, drug deals, trafficking, kidnaps, phishing. It all happened in Snooky.

Eventually, it got so out of control that even Cambodia’s Beijing-friendly government began to balk at its tropical Dodge City. In 2019, Cambodia banned online gambling, leading to an exodus of Chinese businesses and a partial collapse of the local economy. These days, Snooky barely exists. When I visited last year, I found it eerily dystopian: half-built skyscrapers with black, empty window sockets, steel bars jutting from crumbling towers, wide but rubble-strewn pavements — a Wild West ghost town meets a half-finished mini-Manhattan. But Cambodia itself remains firmly anchored in the Chinese world. Nearly all major Cambodian real estate and development projects are financed by Chinese businesses.

And the Tale of Snooky isn’t unique. Right now, a near-identical “scam city” is rising in Myanmar’s rebel Karen State, by the Chinese border — it’s called Shwe Kokko. The pattern repeats: shady “businessmen” move in, socioeconomic ties are forged; by the time the locals push back, their country is already locked into Chinese dependence.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.