What does the faith school shake-up mean for Anglicans?

Why do faith schools excite such passions? Obviously people care a lot about religion, and education, but there’s something else at work too. Schools are microcultures, bubbles, little versions of society, in which the secularism of our culture can be shut out, defied. It sounds like a strange exaggeration, but if a religion has its own schools, it has a small but vital link to the old era of its cultural dominance. 

Is this why Roman Catholics like Melanie McDonagh are so happy with the government’s decision to allow new faith schools to have a fully religious selection process? The shake-up overturns the current rule, that a new faith school can only select half of its pupils on religious grounds, meaning that a lot of agnostic locals will be admitted, whose parents’ attitudes will weaken the school’s religious character. 

You might suppose that the Church of England is equally happy. But in fact the Anglican approach to education is subtly different. It sees its own schools as microcosms of the nation, or an idealised version of the nation, with the established Church quietly in the background. It doesn’t want strongly Christian schools, it wants schools in which Christianity gently blends with mainstream culture. For this keeps the Anglican idea alive, of a Church inspiring a sort-of Christian culture. Accordingly, the Church’s chief education officer, the Revd. Nigel Genders, said that a change in the rules would not affect CofE schools: ‘We provide schools for the whole community and have a vision for education which is for the flourishing of all children. We have always sought to open new schools to promote this vision for education which is deeply Christian, serving the common good.’

The Church of England should make it even clearer that it rejects the idea of confessional schools. It should do so by rejecting any admissions policy in its own schools that prioritises churchgoing parents. For such policies encourage disingenuous churchgoing, and make the average agnostic suspicious of the Church; it seems more interested in clinging on to the remnants of its cultural power than in serving the common good. I was glad to see that Rowan Williams opposed the change of policy. I hope that more Anglicans speak up, and clarify their different vision of religion’s role in state education.

Tory members prefer Farage to Sunak

Happy local elections day, one and all. As voters head to the polls across the country, the talk in Westminster is how bad the result is going to be for Rishi Sunak. His party is tipped to lose around 500 councillors, with mayors Andy Street and Ben Houchen among the potential casualties. Faced with the loss of so many seats, it is no surprise that Tory plotters are talking about a leadership challenge. So it is with exquisite timing then that new polling by FindOutNow for Labour Together offers little comfort to the Prime Minister, with his own party activists saying they would prefer a different leader.

More than half of Tory party members surveyed say that they would rather see Penny Mordaunt in the top job than their incumbent PM. Nearly six out of ten said that they would rather vote for the sword-brandishing Leader of the House than Sunak, after ‘don’t knows’ were excluded. And in a sign of how despondent party members are about current events, more than half of the Conservative membership would swap out their Tory leader for, er, a politician from a completely separate party. Their preference would be, of course, none other than Reform’s Nigel Farage, who beats Sunak in member preferences by 55 points to 45.

In fact, Farage fares rather well in the membership survey of 537 activists, conducted from 12 to 17 April last month. When quizzed on their preferred pick of party leader from a long-list of high-flying Tories – including Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly – the membership went for Farage again. In fact, the Reform UK leader comes in at four points above Mordaunt who, in turn, is four points above Sunak in third place. And in fourth place, above the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Michael Gove, comes the, er, ‘don’t knows’. Inspiring stuff… 

And how does the membership feel about today’s local elections? It’s mixed news for Sunak: activists would support their current leader if the Tories lost a third or even half the council seats that they are defending. But if, under the incumbent PM, the Tories lose more than half of the seats that they are currently defending, 41 per cent of party members believe he should do the honourable thing and resign. Good luck Rishi…

It’s time to abolish Police and Crime Commissioners

When the idea of having Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) first arose it seemed so promising. These would be locally elected candidates, tough and charismatic and they’d be given the power needed to transform the country. Bureaucrats have taken control of British policing, said David Cameron at the time, and cops should be dealing with anti-social crime not fining motorists. PCCs were the local heroes who would revive proper policing, and hold bad police to account. 

At the Conservative conference in 2011, the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, declared that the commissioners would be ‘powerful public figures’ of ‘the highest calibre’ who would ‘make the police truly accountable to the people’. 

More than a decade later, as voters in local elections prepare to chose new police and crime commissioners, what happened to those high hopes? What happened to the great policing reform that the PCCs were supposed to deliver? The commissioners have neither captured the popular imagination nor presided over a programme of major police reform.  

Far from heralding a new era of local democracy, they have in fact achieved only more bureaucracy. 

PPC offices are a microcosm of modern public-sector officialdom, filled with underworked staff in their citadels of waste, where paper-shuffling, headline-grabbing, organisational tinkering and holding meetings serve as a substitute for real action.   

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In the Thames Valley commissioner’s office, for instance, there is a chief executive, a head of partnerships and community safety, a head of governance and compliance, three partnership analysts, two partnerships delivery managers and one partnerships project manager.

Like so much of the state’s machinery, the fashionable obsession with inclusion and diversity runs through the 41 commissioners’ fiefdoms, reflected in a plethora of race strategy plans, positive action programmes, ethnic monitoring, gender audits, training courses in unconscious bias and the celebration of awareness-raising days. Virtue-signalling is part of the job description. So when North Yorkshire Police unveiled a rainbow-coloured van for the York Pride Parade in June 2018, the local commissioner, Julia Mulligan, said, ‘I am very proud to support the Pride event, and I hope it goes some way to reassuring LGBT+ communities that policing is alive to their concerns regarding hate crime and other issues.’ This is hardly, in most people’s eyes, the promised return to proper police-work. The problem yet again is that much of the public feels that the police care less about burglary, fraud and assault than they do about their own image. Faith in the justice system has collapsed, and the commissioners, once held up as the heroes who’d cut through the red tape, have been partly responsible for this trend.

A briefing from the House of Commons Library in 2021 set out starkly some of negative perceptions of May’s model: ‘Public understanding of and engagement with the PCCs is poor,’ said the paper, adding that PCCs are viewed as ‘ineffective and provide weak leadership of policed forces’ while they are also ‘too parochial and struggle to drive collaboration on crime threats’.

The commissioners have never really recovered from a disastrous start to their existence. The think tank Policy Exchange had rejected the idea of sheriff-style Commissioners on the grounds that police should be accountable to local mayors, and as it turns out they were right. The turnout for the first commissioner elections in 2012 was between 10 and 20 per cent, and the controversies began almost as soon as the winning candidates took up their posts. Kent’s Ann Barnes caused widespread embarrassment with a bumbling, incoherent appearance in a fly-on-the-wall TV documentary called Meet the Police Commissioner, only to exacerbate doubts about her suitability by appointing Paris Brown, a hopelessly unqualified, foul-mouthed 17-year-old as her youth commissioner. Barnes attracted more negative publicity when she collided with a taxi, only for the police to discover that she did not have the correct insurance. The reputation of the PCC’s office in Bedfordshire also took a blow in 2014 when the deputy commissioner Tafheen Sharif had to quit after she broke judicial rules. 

That same year, Shaun Wright had to resign as the South Yorkshire commissioner because of his central role in the Rotherham grooming scandal, having been head of children’s services at the council for five years. At a time of austerity, more damage was caused by the extravagance of some PCCs, who are paid between £68,000 and £101,000, depending on the size of their force. Richard Rhodes, the Conservative commissioner for Cumbria, spent £700 on two chauffeur-driven trips and in Norfolk, Stephen Bett claimed £3,000 in expenses for car journeys from his home to police headquarters.

The stature of the office holders much improved since the early days. Only last month Northamptonshire commissioner Stephen Mold left office after a row over his appointment of his friend Nicci Marzec as head of the county’s fire service, even though she had no experience for such a role. He denied they were lovers, but Ms Merzec lasted just ten days in her post and Mold followed her out of the door, his position made untenable after he reportedly told a meeting, in reference to Merzec’s successor: ‘I’ll dump the bitch.’

In a moment of candour in 2016, Theresa May confessed she feared she had ‘created a monster’. Not so much a monster as a useless blob of expensive officialdom that is doing nothing to make out country safer.

London deserves better than Sadiq Khan

By any measure, Sadiq Khan deserves to lose the London mayoral election. Khan has been terrible for the capital, yet Londoners are stuck with him. Barring a near miraculous upset by the Tory candidate Susan Hall, Khan will almost certainly win re-election today. Surely one of the world’s great cities deserves better? 

Under Khan, London’s streets have become more dangerous and unpleasant. Knife crime is terrifyingly high. Shoplifting is rife. Traffic is dreadful. Pavements have become dumping grounds for unwanted bikes. Housing costs have soared. The ‘nighttime economy’ has collapsed. Jews are fearful about the future. Pro-Palestine protests have made Whitehall a no-go area at weekends. Gang violence has spilled out on the streets of central London. Even the suburbs don’t feel safe: knife crime in some outer areas of London has climbed dramatically. 

Khan has been busy during his four years in office, but too much of his energy has been spent spouting platitudes about Brexit, climate change and Gaza: things over which he has no control and shouldn’t be distracting him from the day job. 

Instead of going to war on the gangs that plague London’s streets, Khan has picked a softer target: the police. The mayor once said of stop and search – the police’s main weapon in the fight to get knives off the streets – that ‘I’d do everything in my power to bring it down further.’ In 2022, following the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer, Khan effectively forced out the Met Police commissioner Cressida Dick. Khan’s response to the Met’s recent handling of a pro-Palestinian protest suggests he is determined to make the Met’s current boss Mark Rowley his latest scapegoat. But the mayor cannot entirely dodge the blame for what has happened under his watch: more than one in five Londoners have been attacked or threatened in the past five years; 14,577 knife crime offences were recorded by the Met last year – equivalent to nearly 40 a day. Yes, the police could have done more to make London safer, but by blaming rather than supporting the Met, Khan has made the job of ordinary officers far harder.

Understandably, Khan doesn’t like to talk about crime. When the issue of ‘gangs running around with machetes’ arose during election hustings last week, the mayor told his Tory opponent she should ‘stop watching The Wire – we’re not living in Baltimore, USA, in the noughties.’ Instead, Khan prefers to chat about his flagship Ultra Low Emission Zone. But the rollout of Ulez to London’s outer boroughs has been cack-handed. Rather than try to properly make the case for why it’s needed – and attempt to win over opponents – he has chosen instead to slur those against the scheme as far right, Covid deniers and Tories.

The backlash to Ulez has been entirely predictable: cameras have been routinely vandalised and traffic lights cut down. Ulez’s opponents shouldn’t behave in this way, of course, but it’s hard not to think this acrimony might have been prevented if Khan had handled things differently and tried to aim for consensus. Instead, Khan chose to write a polemic on climate change: Breathe: Seven Ways to Win a Greener World. It’s a book that his voters will lap up but persuade no one to change their mind. 

Not all Londoners are worse off under Khan. The mayor’s ‘Night Czar’ Amy Lamé has seen her pay packet leap by around 40 per cent to almost £120,000 in the past year. Khan’s ten – yes, ten – deputy mayors are all doing very nicely for themselves, not least the vehemently anti-Brexit Seb Dance who earns £140,000 a year for encouraging people to walk and cycle. It’s a nice earner if you can get it.

Khan has plenty of cash to chuck around when it suits him: as well as paying his City Hall team huge salaries, London’s mayor has splurged on freezing transport fares and giving free school meals to kids. The latter is presented by Khan’s supporters as a vital lifeline to the most desperate Londoners in a cost-of-living crisis, but needy children get free school meals anyway. It’s more likely that Khan has extended the privilege of free food to the kids of middle-class parents who don’t need the help. 

The timing of handouts like this is convenient for Khan, coming as it has in the lead-up to the mayoral election. He probably could have saved the cash: Khan will be re-elected this week, but the bad news for him is that his life is about to get harder. When trouble looms, Khan’s approach is simple: find someone to blame, preferably a Conservative. A Tory government has made life easy for Khan. But if the polls are correct and Keir Starmer wins the general election, who will he blame then for London’s troubles? 

Chess on the telly

What is it like to play chess? Once in a while, I try to convey the atmosphere of a competitive chess tournament to someone who has never witnessed it. I liken it to sitting an exam, in that it lasts for hours and makes your brain hurt; at least everyone can relate to that. But that fails to explain why you would want to do it. So I also mention the thrill of a mental cage-fight, which resonates with some while horrifying others, and then I sow confusion by adding that the game is deeply beautiful.

Here’s hoping that Chess Masters, an eight-episode series to be broadcast on BBC2 next year, will succeed where words often fail, and bring the game’s drama to a new audience. According to Catherine Catton, Head of Commissioning, Factual Entertainment and Live Events, the production company Curve Media ‘has devised a format that makes chess both entertaining and accessible for all’. The BBC press release (spectator.co.uk/bbc-chessmasters) explains that ‘highly skilled players from all backgrounds will battle it out across a series of rapid games before one will be crowned the title of Chess Master.’ Anyone with a passion for chess is invited to apply by email to casting@curvemedia.com.

I wonder what inspiration they will draw from The Master Game, which aired on the BBC between 1976 and 1983. Grandmasters competed in a real tournament, and recorded their thoughts after each game. That footage was then spliced with the live games to create the illusion of hearing their thoughts unfold as the games progressed. The production – once innovative but now quaint – remains gently compelling, and several episodes are available to view online.

More recently, the format was resurrected in a TV series Checkmate, which lasted for two seasons in 2015 and 2016. Presented by Anna Richardson and grandmaster Simon Williams, it featured a selection of top male and female players, including Ju Wenjun, who is now the reigning women’s world champion. She first won that title in 2018, wresting the title from Tan Zhongyi in a ten-game match held in China. Six years later, Tan has earned the right for a rematch after her resounding victory with 9 points from 14 games at the Fide Women’s Candidates tournament, held in Toronto in April.

One quandary modern live commentators face is how much to use the instant feedback from chess engines. The evaluations, often presented as a thermometer-like ‘bar’ to the side of the board, offer an easy way for viewers to gauge what is going on. But explaining every minor fluctuation can distract from the flow, and can anyway be misleading, as the bar may present equality even when both sides are walking a tightrope. At other times, the swings heighten the excitement, as in this game from Toronto. In the diagram position, the crude 32 Bxf6+ was best, since 32…Bxf6 33 Qxf6+ Kh7 34 Ne7 creates overwhelming threats. But Tan was tempted by a more elegant move.

Tan Zhongyi-Anna Muzychuk

Fide Women’s Candidates Tournament, 2024

32 Rxf6 Remarkably, this throws away the win, even though the potential discovered check from the b2 bishop makes the White queen immune from capture: 32…Rxg5 33 Rf8+ Kh7 34.Rxe8 wins another bishop. Bxf6 33 Qxf6+ Kh7 34 Ne7 Re4 Muzychuk had just a couple of minutes left, but this plausible try is a decisive error. The cool 34…Bxe6! saves the day, e.g. 35 Nxg8 Qxg8 36 Qe7+ Qf7 37 Rxe6 Qxe7 38 Rxe7+ Kxh6 with a draw. 35 Rxe4 Nxe4 36 Nxg8! Qxg8 36…Nxf6 37 Nxf6+ wins with a fork 37 Qf7+ Black resigns

No. 799

Black to play. Adorjan-Lobron, the Master Game Final, London 1982. White’s far advanced b-pawn looks likely to win the game, but Lobron’s next move turned the tables. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 6 May. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 Bc6!, e.g. 1…Kxc6 2 Qe6# or 1…exf6 2 Qxf6# or 1…e5 2 Qd7# or 1…e6 2 Qc5#

Last week’s winner Michael Blott, Fulbourn, Cambridge

Spectator Competition: Nursery crimes

Comp. 3347 invited you to write a hard-boiled nursery rhyme. This inevitably led many to think of Humpty Dumpty, hence his multiple appearances (the consensus is he didn’t fall, he was pushed). Philip Marlowe was smouldered at by various femmes fatales including Little Bo Peep and Miss Muffet. A special mention goes to David Silverman’s scandi-noir Måry Had a Little Lamb/Five Little Ducks: ‘D.I. Lund surveyed Nyhavn from the discomfort of an Ektorp chair. One candle lit the gloom, which was decidedly un-hyggelig.’

Some strayed from the brief enjoyably. The winners, printed below, get £25 each.

There was no ducking it: I had to go down to the woods today and boy, was I in for a big surprise. The rain was falling fast as a widow’s tears and twice as serious and I was dressed in tennis gear (I’d figured I’d better go in disguise). What I wouldn’t give for my gabardine mac. I found the crew quickly enough. They were all there: Pudsey One-Eye (he lost the other in a knife fight with Big Bird out of Chicago); Winnie, called ‘the Pooh’ because, well, you really don’t want to know; Big Paddy Paddington, representing the South American drug interest; Fozzie for the New York Italians; Crazy Rupert in his trademark golf pants; Shotgun Sooty with his hired muscle in tow, the Big Sweep. And I was just one guy with a tennis racket instead of a ’45. This was going to be no picnic.

Joseph Houlihan

As I drank, I reviewed what I knew of the vics:

We’d found their dark glasses, their tiny white sticks.

I knew they’d been running, blood splatter don’t lie,

But the question was where, and the question was why.

Were they chasing their killer, or running away?

Then forensics came back: it was mouse DNA.

I leant on the farmer, but all he would say

Was he didn’t see nothing, he was out making hay.

A search of the kitchen turned up a sharp knife,

And the fingerprints on it belonged to his wife,

Who swore blind she’d just used it for carving up beef,

That she loved little critters, wouldn’t give them 

                  no grief.

Then she told me she thought it was Fat Bob, the cat.

Sure, something was off here, sure I smelled a rat,

But she pressed up against me, her hand on my thigh.

Now Fat Bob’s in handcuffs. That cat’s gonna fry.

Matt Quinn

A good egg who got himself scrambled; that was the story they were telling about Dumpty. When I got to the scene, I found more horses than seemed helpful – none whatsoever would have been the optimal number, I figured. Together with a whole bunch of braying guys with a monarchy fetish, they were busy turning a hopeless rescue into a badly botched postmortem. Questioning these guys, I heard the same story so often it might as well have been on a phonograph. Dumpty, they said, had fallen from a wall. It was something they were certain of, something they’d no more seen that I’d had sight of a paycheque lately. I wasn’t going to buy that any more than the wall, itself a pretty low affair, was going to provide a witness statement to the NYPD. No, this was a hit and I knew the King ordered it.

Russell Chamberlain

Guys and dolls get out of bed,

The moon is up, come, blow your bread!

Skip your fodder and skip your kip,

Rattle the rubbernecks, give ’em lip.

Tread the ladder rungs, scale the wall,

Let’s go on a bender and have a ball,

Come with your irons and come with your blades,

Hide your faces behind your shades.

Sidestep the flat feet and dodge the dumb dicks,

Trash the seats in the flea-pit flicks.

Light up your gaspers and flimflam the mugs,

Slug the trouble boys, boozehounds and thugs.

Swell the kitty; we’re none of us skint,

A nicker apiece and we’ll rake in a mint.

You bake the wacky cake, I’ll brew the Joe

And we’ll all bite an egg in a hour or so.

Alan Millard

The blonde wore a pink gingham dress that missed her knees by a mile and a straw bonnet with pink streamers. That’ll get stares even in L.A., where the freakish is the average. The killer touch was the shepherd’s crook. I wondered what games they were playing in the local bordellos.

She gave me the eyes and I waited for her to speak. I was in no hurry. She looked fine silent.

After a daydream or three I told her, ‘Surprise me.’

‘Why, Mr M – Marlowe, I hardly know where to begin…’ She had the ingénue’s hesitation waltz off to perfection. This called for a drink. I poured one.

‘Mr Marlowe, I’m old enough to drink.’ She was still giving me the eyes, so we toasted crime then got down to business. Guess what, she wanted me to recover her sheep. Easiest 25 bucks I ever made.

Basil Ransome-Davies

Peter Piper, mobster sniper,

had a wife who was a griper;

popping her would be a doddle,

then he’d get a newer model.

‘Sweet Cheeks’ as he used to call her,

even though her name was Paula

found out what she had in store,

felt she too must break the law.

Daniel Diller, hired killer,

hid behind a front porch pillar,

bludgeoned Peter, crushed his head,

spilled his brains and left him dead.

Peter Piper’s mobster boss

looked into his hitman’s loss,

soon discovered Paula’s ruse

and gifted her with concrete shoes.

Paul A. Freeman

In a New York summer, hot enough to boil your brains, this high-class dame was baking jam tarts for her man. Crazy. I guess she loved him. He was respected in the neighbourhood, perhaps feared. Nobody messed with him. It was pretty damn tough for him to discover his no-good son had made off with the tarts. The big man went after him. He felt ready to kill. Mad as a skunk, he beat the hell out of the kid who promised never to steal again and so lived to tell the tale.

Dorothy Pope

No. 3350: Beg to differ

You’re invited to write a refutation of any famous line from literature, e.g. ‘The past is a foreign country [etc]’; ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’ (150 words/16 lines max). Lucy Vickery is away for a short time so please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 15 May.

2652: A and M

The unclued Across lights are of a kind, as are the related unclued Down lights. The yellow and red squares, when read in order row by row, confirm the theme.

        Across

   1    Feel rip-off by stewards providing obligatory features on board (4,10)

11    Section of grammar review of Aeneid (three chapters) (9)

17    Pulling evenly, stripped part of a bone (5)

20    Vintage model – it crashed (3-4)

21    Daub top layers of special paint on gatehouse (7)

24    Threaten to drive around small state (7)

25    Learn about description of organ (5)

26    Passions and fashions! (5)

28    Small middle-distance runners are happy folk (7)

31    Go back on poetry (7)

34    Dance as a rule? (7)

37    Stunner shed tears having again taken test the wrong away (5)

38    Fish kept on board (5)

39    Fender, say, mostly good for Mac on the road? (6)

40    Con artist regularly produces pastoral songs (4)

41    Catching four points on a jewellery item (9)

42    Old army and navy department at lake (4)

43    Spreading panic about Amen Corner gigs (14)

         Down

   1    Chemistry student’s test paper (6)

   2    Loud isn’t very soft (5)

   3    Cut, we hear, in two? (6)

   4    Corrupt police leader leaves bug (1,4)

   5    European fellows set up metal soldiers (7)

   6    Municipal official caught out booking more goods (7)

   7    Pastry from Bloom, cycling (6)

   8    He’s loyal – about to answer the phone (3,5)

10    Aerofoils a panellist reconstructed (10)

13    Recommend guests get changed around midnight (7)

15    Faded white mixed with scarlet (8)

23    Reblochon and Morbier, say, out of time (8)

27    Not mad about unfashionable priest’s cassock (7)

32    Countenance struggle to contain decline (6)

33    An offence, in, say, relaxing (6)

35    Finch, French canary or some passerine (5)

36    Kenyan warrior tribe appeal during 31 days in France (5)

Download a printable version here.

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 20 May. There are two runners-up prizes of £20. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2652, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery. The dictionary prize is not available at present

2649: Shut up shop – solution

The unclued lights, with the pairs at 1D/18, 17/6A and 26D/5, are stores which are no longer trading.

First prize George Kingston, Sutton under Brailes, Oxon

Runners-up Mrs J. Smith, Beeston, Kings Lynn, Norfolk; C. Stafford and F. Daniels, Cremorne, NSW, Australia

Wales is facing a US-style opioid crisis

00:00 06:50

Kara Kennedy has narrated this article for you to listen to.

In Europe at the end of the Noughties, the problem drug was krokodil. The semi-synthetic, necrosis-causing alternative to heroin was cheap. My father favoured it so much before his death that he started importing it from eastern Europe into Wales. Across the pond right now, the problem drug is fentanyl, which has made its way into much of the US drug supply. Indeed, it’s become so synonymous with death that many casual users have given up the bag all together (‘I love a line, but I’m not going to die for it,’ one Manhattanite told me recently). More than 75,000 Americans died from synthetic opioids in 2022. And now the opioids crisis has arrived in Wales.

When I asked friends back home in south Wales whether stories about the new influx of synthetics were just something the papers were using to fill their pages, people told me that no, it’s real – and noticeable. A colleague of my old next-door neighbour dropped dead; a friend’s cousin had an overdose at Christmas. But it’s not fentanyl they’re worried about. What faces Wales, and perhaps the rest of the UK, is something even deadlier.

Since the Taliban clamped down on opium cultivation two years ago, reducing Afghanistan’s poppy crop by 95 per cent and devastating the European heroin market, a new type of drug has stepped in to fill the gap: nitazenes. A strain of synthetic opioids first developed by pharmaceutical companies in the 1950s but never approved for medicinal use, nitazenes are being shipped across the world from Chinese labs and are ending up in the arms or up the noses of unsuspecting customers. Some strains are 500 times stronger than morphine; all are stronger than heroin, the drug they try to replicate. After a spate of deaths in Wales and around Dublin over the past six months – including more than 50 overdoses in one weekend – drug charities are warning that the nitazenes boom is here.

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‘The dealers are trying the drugs out. They know that they are stronger, and they don’t want to kill their market,’ says Crispin Watkins of the Wales-based drug and alcohol charity Kaleidoscope Project. ‘They want their customers to come back. So they want to present something that looks and behaves and has the user experience like heroin.’ The problem with this is that when there is more money to be made, some dealers get greedy. Across Wales nitazenes have been detected in street-dealt benzodiazepines and cannabis products. Wedinos, a drug-testing lab in Wales, has even found strains in vape pens. While the average heroin user may not notice or mind that their usual stuff is being swapped with a stronger, synthetic opioid, the average benzo and cannabis user – or kid buying his first vape – certainly isn’t looking for a heroin high.

From April 2022 to March last year, 36 bags of nitazenes were handed over to Wedinos by worried buyers, none of whom had set out to get the drugs specifically. I reached out to people who had accidentally taken them. One, who tried a fake benzodiazepine cut with the synthetic opioid, told me: ‘It feels like you’re being held in place. I couldn’t speak. I could move my mouth, but nothing would come out. I could stand, but I couldn’t move my legs.’ Another friend who’d unwittingly tried it compared it to feeling like ‘when you take too much ketamine. Like, so much ketamine your legs go from underneath you and you lose the ability to see. But it takes much longer to snap out of and you feel like you’re going to die.’

There is every reason to think this is just the beginning. ‘We are very worried,’ Watkins says. ‘What we’re seeing in Wales is just the start of the drug’s disbursement.’ It is likely that nitazenes have been here in some capacity for well over a year. Kaleidoscope Project first noticed them 12 months ago, although strange deaths around the country had been happening periodically before that but were put down to a ‘bad batch of spice’. The true damage so far is not known precisely because of how new these drugs are.

America provides a dire warning about how bad the spread of synthetic opioids can get. Using heroin isn’t ideal, obviously. We’ve all watched Trainspotting and seen what happened to Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse. We’ve all had a run-in with the local smackhead. In Wales in the 1990s, my own father turned from a normal nice guy into what can only be described as feral after becoming addicted to the drug, finding cash wherever he could for his next fix, generally by selling the stuff. But when heroin disappears, addiction to it does not. Even worse replacements soon crop up.

Two people in Wales were arrested last week in connection with supplying drugs laced with nitazenes to inmates at HMP Parc. Six prisoners died earlier this year after taking drugs and, at the time, the prisons and probation ombudsman, Adrian Usher, claimed that it was probable the ‘deaths are all spice-related’. ‘There has been a national public health warning issued about this particular drug, the name of which is yet to be determined,’ he added.

Post-mortem examinations later determined that four out of the six deaths were due to nitazenes. ‘Right now we can trace the distribution of nitazenes through certain bad batches of heroin. Parc is an example of that, where one batch of drugs came in and several people took from that batch,’ Watkins says.

Kaleidoscope Project is worried that the rumours of a fatally strong, heroin-like superdrug could backfire as the press spreads the word about the danger. ‘People start hearing there is a new, super-strong batch of heroin out there, there are some users who say, “Great, where do I get it?”’ Watkins says. But nitazenes are on a different planet to heroin, and the usual opioid reversal drug, naloxone, doesn’t respond to them in the same way. ‘One can of naloxone has five doses in it, and if you get to someone in time, within a few doses you could take a person out of overdose and stabilise them until they’re able to get to hospital. A few weeks ago, a paramedic had to administer eight doses of naloxone, but [the user] just kept relapsing and relapsing. After they recovered in hospital for two days, they left the hospital and overdosed and died.’

Do many women want to be train drivers?

Hold your wine glass steady: the BBC has news for you. This week it splashed the news that train drivers in the UK are ‘overwhelmingly middle-aged white men’. The story was accompanied by a picture of a black woman driving a train – under the supervision of a white man, it might be noted – as though to signal that this glass ceiling too can be smashed.

Personally I would expect train drivers to be overwhelmingly middle-aged, white and indeed male. Most of the UK is white and half of the UK is male. And the male half of the species tends to be more train-oriented. You don’t see many single women standing at the end of Reading station noting down train numbers in a little book. There may be hardwired reasons for this. So I would put the BBC’s train-driver story into the same ‘breaking news’ list as ‘most kindergarten teachers are women’ and ‘most people who run successful corner shops are immigrants’. In other words: not a story.

But of course it’s not really about news. It is another example that tells us something deeper about the age.

Until recently, the only professions in which people obsessed about ‘representation’ were the more high-status ones. One of the madnesses that came out of the #MeToo movement was the idea that if an actress in Hollywood is paid eight million bucks and her male co-star is paid ten million for the same movie then we should all take to the streets to protest this appalling inequality and indeed oppression. Pity the stunning multi-millionaire actress, everyone; we are all Angelina Jolie now, etc.

Company boards were another focus – as though most of the public were regularly bothered by the question of which company boards to sit on. It was decided at some point in the past decade that any company whose board had too many men on it must be ‘diversified’. Which means it’s been a boom time for any potential ethnic–minority board members, while some of the cannier gays spotted a useful ladder. And then there were women, of course. California passed legislation a few years ago insisting that all companies registered in the state must have a quota of people from a list of minorities. That list was itself pretty interesting. It included trans people, obviously. Because if you are after diversity of thinking, it is always good to have input from somebody whose body is being pumped full of oestrogen or testosterone.

The Californian list also included Pacific Islanders. I did the maths and worked out that given the demand for trans and Pacific Island board members vs the relative supply in the state, if you were a trans person or a Pacific Islander living in California, you should clear your diary for the 2020s, because you’ll be shuttling from board meeting to board meeting with never an hour for yourself.

Personally, I had expected this diversity obsession to remain fixed on high-status professions. Because it was noticeable that, for example, while the vast preponderance of road-layers who mix the tarmac to sometimes fill in the nation’s potholes are men, there is yet to be an outcry along the lines of ‘none of us are free until women are made to lay more tarmac’. Now it seems that the age is indeed even madder than I thought.

This is why we now have the idea that even train driving must be diversified. Take the words of Zoey Hudson, who is the head of talent, diversity and inclusion at Southern Railway. You may not have known that such a role existed, but it does, and Zoey is able to spout the usual verbiage that comes with her line of work. As she told the BBC, diversity ‘freshens’ the rail network. ‘It’s really important that we have diversity of thinking within the railway, which is as important as diversity of ethnicity. It brings creativity.’

For my part, I’m not sure I want much creativity in my train drivers. In fact I prefer them to be slightly plodding, uncreative types. Loyal, punctual, good in a crisis: these are the sort of qualities that I look for before boarding the 7.48 to Totnes. But creativity?

Happily for their own career prospects, a diversity officer’s work is never done. Because only one in ten British train drivers is a woman, it seems that Zoey and her colleagues are also on a mission to push more women into the railways. It’s something to do, I suppose, but there is a rather glorious perversity in the idea of persuading women to qualify for a profession that is about to go fully automated. And what will all those creative female train drivers do then, desperate as they will remain for the thrill of the railway while their profession goes driverless?

Let me show my own cards: I don’t believe any of this. I think the whole thing is bunk. This desire to concentrate on stories where middle-aged white men can be cast as blocking the way for everyone else seems a deliberate policy not just of highlighting but of demeaning and demoralising anyone who belongs to what in Britain is still the majority. There is nothing wrong with being white and male. And in a country which is still predominantly white, you would indeed expect white people to be the majority in many industries, as they are in the general population. If you go to India you will find an awful lot of Indian people, and China is strikingly Chinese. But none of these countries have their majority populations addressed as though their very existence is some sort of affront to minorities.

The latest phrase to wheedle its way into the corporate world is ‘global majority’. While job advertisements in Britain used to ask for people from ethnic minorities to step forward, this has been flipped. ‘Ethnic minority’ has become ‘global majority’. If you think that has a slightly menacing air to it, you’d be right – that’s the point. As I have often said, none of this is about justice, equality or letting talent fly.

The government’s pathetic response to the Now Teach scandal

One Saturday last July, a couple of hundred people gathered in a conference centre on the bank of the Thames to talk about education. In an earlier life they were lawyers, bankers, engineers, publishers and software engineers, but now they are all secondary school teachers and here they were giving up part of their weekend to talk about how better to help the kids they teach and the schools they work in.

All these people joined the profession through Now Teach, the charity I co-found in 2017 when I was still a columnist on the Financial Times. Back then, at the age of 58, I wanted to become a teacher but didn’t know how to begin. Surely, I thought, given that schools struggle to find teachers and that many ageing professionals out there want to retrain to do something meaningful, there should be an organisation aimed at putting the two together. There wasn’t, so I joined forces with Katie Waldegrave, an ex-teacher, to set one up.

As I surveyed the room, I marvelled not only at how many of the 800 or so teachers we’ve recruited so far had turned up, but at their sheer enthusiasm for teaching – even after a grim year of strikes, Ofsted terror and unbearable workload.

That spirit of optimism seems like another world. The Department for Education has just informed us that it is cutting our funding. We have done nothing wrong it seems: it has simply been cleaned out by the teacher pay rise, which is costing an estimated £1.5 billion, and so it can no longer afford the £1.4 million a year it pays us.

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This makes no sense at all. The government is in the middle of a teacher recruitment crisis and so to scrap a scheme that beats its targets in bringing great new people into schools is madness.

Anyone who is a parent of school-age kids must have noticed how bad things are: there simply aren’t enough teachers. Last week it emerged that in primary schools, teachers who have quit or are off sick are being replaced by underpaid and untrained teaching assistants. In secondary schools, the government last year only recruited half the number of teachers it needed and fewer still in STEM, where Now Teach is strongest. This means that vital subjects like maths, physics and computer science are routinely being taught by any old randomer who happens to have a free period. One year I was roped into teaching computer science – which might have been comic, given my sheer incompetence with tech, were it not so worrying. In the language of economics, (which I usually teach) this is a micro disaster for individual children and a macro catastrophe for the economy.

Now Teach is a small part of the answer to teacher shortage. We are aimed at older people, which is the only group of trainee teachers that is growing. While the numbers of university leavers wanting to teach are shrinking, fifty somethings joining the profession this year are up by a third. We can’t claim credit for all the rise, but we know that the positive noise we have generated has helped. Since our launch, the idea of the ex-banker-turned-teacher has caught the public imagination to the extent that there have been nearly 250 stories about us, reaching an estimated 24 million people.

When we announced that we were being axed by the DfE, I expected an outpouring of angst on social media from Now Teachers. ‘Bonkers news,’ wrote one of our best maths teachers. He said if it wasn’t for the article he’d read in the FT in 2016 calling for people to join me in the classroom, he would still be working in the City. ‘That’s 850 students I would not have taught over the last seven years. What a disgrace.’

What I did not expect were protests from students themselves. On LinkedIn, one who was taught by a Now Teacher at a school in east London wrote how much she’d benefited from the experience. She has turned into the sort of student Rishi Sunak would love: she’s doing a PhD in maths.

The government has answered our outrage by saying that it values career-changers and will take over the mantle of doing the recruitment itself in future.

I’d like to see it try. I daresay some older people will continue to become teachers, and some of those will be great. But there is another group that may never make the switch. We know that the promise of our network and support draws people in. One of the Now Teachers who joined at the same time as me said the last time she’d felt part of a gang was 30 years earlier, when she’d been at university. It felt that way for me, too.

Even if the government does find older trainee teachers, it may not manage to keep them. The latest figures show Now Teachers are 20 per cent more likely to stick with it than older trainees who go it alone. Part of the secret is the network, but it’s also that we’ve learnt how to deal with the inevitable wobbles that go with such a bracing shift in career. One Now Teacher who has recently been promoted to head of sixth form at her school posted online: ‘I definitely wouldn’t have stayed without Now Teach. I wept my way through the first year.’

Last Monday, the schools minister was asked by the Lib Dems what on earth he was doing in cutting our money. By way of an answer, Damian Hinds pointed out that we’re a small organisation – last year we recruited only 250 people. That simply won’t do. For a start, our influence goes far beyond head count. And second, we are growing and would like the chance to grow more. But since his own longevity may be limited, perhaps that doesn’t interest him.

Meet Hillingdon Man, Britain’s unhappiest chap

It’s official. I live in the unhappiest place in Britain. Who says so? My neighbours here in Hillingdon, that’s who. They’ve been polled by the property company Rightmove, along with citizens the length and breadth of the country, and Richmond came top(seems money can buy you happiness, after all) while my own London borough, Hillingdon, a few miles away, came rock bottom.

For me, this was a complete surprise. In 2011, my wife and I moved to Hillingdon, from insufferably trendy Chiswick to profoundly unfashionable Ruislip, and we’ve never been happier. We raised our two children here, and even though they’re now both away at university they return home whenever they can.

What’s so good about living here? Well, we could actually afford a house, rather than being cooped up in a flat in Chiswick. Our children loved having a garden to play in, playing fields right on the doorstep and woods and meadows nearby.

Our neighbours seemed to like it too. When my daughter started at the local primary school, just around the corner, we met lots of parents who’d been to the same school themselves, even a few grandparents too. It was the same story when my son and daughter went to local comprehensives. Finally, we’d found a community in London that spanned several generations. Who knew?

We soon got to know our neighbours. It felt strange (and rather nice) knowing virtually everyone on our street, not like the London we used to know. Having good neighbours turned out to be a lifesaver. When my son went down with meningitis, I knew the lady who lived across the street was a nurse. I hammered on her door at dawn. She rushed over the road, gave an instant diagnosis and commanded an ambulance to come immediately. She saved his life.

The street where we used to live in Chiswick had been lively but anonymous. Sure, sleepy Ruislip and the surrounding suburbs were a bit boring by comparison, but they felt like villages, rather than part of London. Yet with three Tube lines within walking distance, it was easy to get into town.

So why are so many of my neighbours so unhappy? After 13 years in the neighbourhood (an era that has coincided, more or less, with the current government), I reckon the root of it is house prices.

The reason Hillingdon suburbs feel like villages is because until a century ago they were villages, surrounded by virgin countryside. It was the Metropolitan Railway which turned them into suburbs, building new lines out to far-flung places like Chesham and Amersham, buying up the surrounding farmland and selling it off to developers.

Back then, between the wars, a brand-new house here in Metroland cost around £250 – about the average annual wage for a clerk commuting into town on the new railway. That £250 bought you a semi with a proper bathroom, an indoor lavatory, a garage and your own garden, front and back.

Compared with the rented inner-city tenements where these first-time buyers had lived before, it was paradise. They raised their children here, and when those children left home they could afford to buy a similar Metroland house nearby. Now one of those Tudorbethan houses will cost you upwards of half a million pounds. In our brave new world of short-term contracts, that’s more like 20 times the annual wage.

And so the current twentysomething generation must move far away to find a proper home, out to Bedford and beyond. People used to grow up and get married and raise a family and grow old here. No longer. A multi-generational community, built up over a century, is beginning to come apart.

Of course, this problem is not unique to Hillingdon. There’s surely hardly anywhere in Britain where you can buy a family house for a year’s salary.

Yet I reckon the sense of disenfranchisement in Hillingdon is particularly acute, because we live fairly near some of the richest places in the country (Richmond, for instance), where house prices are going up and up yet people can still afford to pay.

Most of my neighbours here in Ruislip do regular jobs. They’re builders, electricians, tilers, driving instructors. They don’t do something fancy in the City or the media. If house prices go up they get priced out of the market. They can’t get their children on the property ladder, not like their parents did for them. And that hurts.

At the next election, will this disillusionment filter through into local politics? Unlike most London boroughs, Hillingdon voted Leave, and with Brexit so far failing to deliver on its lavish promises, these Brexiteers have every right to feel disappointed.

My constituency, Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner – unlike most seats in London – is rock-solid Tory, with a 16,000 majority at the last election. Could it turn red this time? A few years ago, to ask such a question would have seemed preposterous. Yet after recent by-elections this fat Conservative majority seems almost within Labour’s reach.

The constituency next door to me, Uxbridge and South Ruislip, hit the headlines last year when Boris Johnson stood down and the Tories defied predictions in the subsequent by-election and clung on (a victory widely attributed to anti-Ulez sentiment, although I reckon the matter-of-fact manner and the no-nonsense credentials of the Conservative candidate had a lot to do with it).

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At the time, this improbable result gave Rishi Sunak a glimmer of hope, but it’s now looking like a false dawn, delaying the departure of a PM who sorely lacks the common touch, especially with the sort of folk one finds in Hillingdon.

My wife and I were lucky. We were able to trade in a flat in Chiswick for a house in Ruislip. Most of our neighbours aren’t so fortunate. For the first time in a century, since Metroland was created here in Hillingdon, a local family home is forever out of reach for their children.

If Rightmove had discovered that the unhappiest people in Britain lived in some Labour heartland, Sunak could sleep a lot easier. But these folk are Thatcher’s children. They left the inner city for the suburbs. They left unionised employment and set up their own businesses. They’re the swing voters who decide elections, the C2s, the Mondeo men (and women).

That’s why that Rightmove survey is so revealing. John Major won the 1992 election thanks to the optimism of Essex man. Sunak looks like losing the 2024 election thanks to the pessimism of Hillingdon man.

Unlike Essex man, who loved Thatcher, Hillingdon man has no love for Keir Starmer. But his disappointment with Sunak’s Tories runs so deep that he might just change the habit of a lifetime and give Labour a go.

Listen to William Cook discuss more on The Edition podcast:

How to survive in the ancient world

A recent analysis has concluded that ‘British public opinion has got so used to things being bad/chaotic it’s hard to imagine anything else.’ But what ‘things’? Perhaps electioneering politics (always chaotic), but more likely the myriad social, legal and medical services the state claims to provide. No such services (let alone ‘rights’) were available in the ancient world. Family apart, you were on your own. Simple survival was the aim.

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The farmer poet Hesiod (c. 680 BC) came up with his advice on the issue in an attack on his lazy, disputatious brother Perses: a man can have time for arguments when he has a year’s worth of grain laid up in his barns. Straight-dealing men do not suffer famine or blight: they work hard and become rich in flocks. Store up a little regularly and often; do not put things off till tomorrow. Real application yields results. Make friends with good neighbours and they will be good to you; ignore your enemies.

Ancient literature is full of such homespun advice on the various ways of surviving. Stobaeus records 147 crisp sayings emerging from Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, many on the vital skill of keeping friends (‘fulfil a favour’, ‘restrain the tongue’, ‘pursue harmony’, ‘speak sincerely’). Others preached self-awareness. ‘Know yourself’, i.e. be aware of what you can and cannot do, is still popular (though the Greek comic poet Menander suggested it was far more useful knowing other people); so too is ‘Nothing in excess’, one aspect of self-knowledge. Many made political observations: ‘Wrongdoing can be avoided only if those who are not wronged feel the same indignation as those who are’ (Solon); ‘Men’s differences with each other have nothing to do with politics but with personal advantage’ (Lysias).

As for the long-term, Bias suggested ‘Measure your life as if you had both a short time and a long time to live’; and ‘Make wisdom your passport on the journey from youth to old age. It provides a far more secure guarantee than any possessions’.

Not bad recommendations for a world of modern chaos.

Who decides which politicians are liars? 

00:00 04:40

Toby Young has narrated this article for you to listen to.

This week the Welsh parliament has been debating a law that would ban politicians from lying. Assuming it ends up on the statute books, any member of the Senedd, or candidate standing to be a member, found guilty of the new criminal offence of ‘deception’ will have to give up being a politician for at least four years. What could possibly be wrong with that, you ask?

The vital question, as with all efforts to ban bad speech, is who decides? After all, part of the art of being a politician, dating back at least as far as the Roman Senate, is to massage the truth to promote whatever side of the argument you’re on. That doesn’t mean you’re at liberty to make things up out of whole cloth, but most successful politicians operate in the grey zone where the rules are a bit fuzzy. They tiptoe up to the blurry line, but rarely venture all the way across to the other side. In 99 per cent of cases in which politicians are accused of lying, it’s not an open and shut case.

Take the infamous Vote Leave battle bus which claimed Britain was shelling out £350 million a week to the EU. Was that a lie? Yes, say the advocates of this new law, singling it out as the sort of egregious dishonesty that politicians shouldn’t get away with. But was it a lie? Defenders of the figure, such as Boris Johnson, said it was calculated by dividing our annual contribution to the EU budget by 52, but critics pointed out that this failed to take into account the UK’s rebate – roughly £4 billion a year – and the money the EU spent on subsidising the UK’s public sector (another £4 billion).

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Ah, said Boris, but we don’t control that £8 billion, so if we leave the EU we’d take back control of £350 million a week, even if we’re not technically writing a cheque for that amount. Wait a minute, said the critics. The annual rebate cannot be scrapped without the UK’s consent, so we do effectively control that, even if we don’t control the subsidies. Round and round the argument went, with Leavers thinking it was true – or at least no more economical with the truth than claims made by their rivals – and Remainers convinced it was an outrageous lie.

So would Boris have had his collar felt if the Welsh bill had applied in the rest of the UK at the time? According to its proposer, the former Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price, politicians will be exempt from prosecution if they’re stating their belief or opinion. But that doesn’t help us here, since Boris– or anyone else accused of lying under this new law – would say he firmly believed what he was saying, even if his opponents disputed it.

The defenders of the bill acknowledge that judging whether a politician is guilty of lying won’t be straightforward, but say that will be a matter for the courts, which are used to deciding whether a person is telling the truth. It’s not clear, however, how they’ll be able to resolve these particular disputes objectively and impartially, given that their decisions will be irreducibly political. Ultimately, it will come down to the normative values of the judges. That wouldn’t be a fatal flaw if there were a constitutional process for ensuring there was a balance of political views on the bench, as there is in the United States, but no such mechanism is being proposed in the bill. On the contrary, the fate of Conservative politicians accused of lying may be decided by judges who include their pronouns in their bios.

The Welsh bill is the latest salvo in an ongoing campaign being waged by activists of various stripes to ‘clean up’ British politics and ‘raise standards’ in public life. They want to do this by making politicians accountable, although not to the constituents they’re supposed to be serving, to whom they’re already accountable. Rather, the people they think should be sitting in judgment on elected politicians and enforcing various ‘codes’ and ‘principles’ and whatnot are courts, civil servants and parliamentary commissioners – unelected officials, in other words.

As in the Welsh case, the pretence is always that these investigations and hearings can somehow float free of the grubby business of politics, when in reality they are just a device for one political tribe – the professional managerial class – to impose its will on the other – the populist disruptors. These are reforms designed to ensure that something like Brexit can never happen again.

Don’t be fooled that the Welsh bill is a benign effort to keep politicians honest. On the contrary, it’s an assault on the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.

The Battle for Britain | 4 May 2024

The strikers giving Southgate a headache

Poor Gareth Southgate. Having three outstanding finishers is giving him a thumping headache ahead of the European Championship. Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham and Phil Foden are thrilling football crowds with their goal-scoring talents in three of the best domestic leagues in the world. Most national team managers would welcome such a golden trio: but for Southgate it is a case of pass the paracetamol. He must wish the quality in his squad was more evenly spread so he didn’t have to keep picking Harry Maguire as the central defender when he has the turning circle of a small ocean-going liner.

Kane is the only one of the trio who’s an out-and-out striker; and of the three, City’s Foden is clearly the problem for Southgate. Were he eligible to play for any other home nation, he would be the first player on the team sheet for the next ten years – but he seems more of a pain in the manager’s side than a gem to be permanently embedded in the England team.

The issue is where to play him. Pep Guardiola seems happy to use him centrally now, though he can send him out wide too. Southgate almost always uses him wide. The romantics among us would like a midfield three of Declan Rice as a holding midfielder, Foden as the traditional No. 8, going from box to box, and Bellingham as a No. 10 behind Harry Kane. But Southgate is always cautious and wants to make sure he has defensive solidity in midfield, so he will probably go for Manchester United’s Kobbie Mainoowith Rice and Bellingham. This would push Foden – who will almost certainly win the Player of the Season award – out to the left of a front three with Kane and Bukayo Saka of Arsenal. Fine, but is it a waste of Foden’s immense talents? Discuss.

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Meanwhile are tabloid newspaper proprietors exercising undue backroom influence on the appointment of Liverpool managers? First we had Klopp, now it’s going to be Slot, and both appointments have clearly been made in the interests of editors having to write massive punning headlines with just a few characters.

Jurgen Klopp’s retirement from Anfield has been an object lesson in how not to do it. Would Mo Salah, all£400,000 a week of him, have had that nasty bust-up with Klopp at West Ham if the manager had been staying? My feeling is Klopp has punctured the necessary intensity of the relationship between manager and players, all of them multi-multi-millionaires, by announcing so far in advance that he was off. He is clearly a good man and a great leader and felt he was doing the right thing. But it’s not so obvious now that he was.

Reassuringly in the anniversary year of ‘Waterloo’ (that’s Abba’s Eurovision hit, not the battle) the eminently sensible nation of Sweden has decided not to introduce VAR any time soon. Something to think about over here, no? The offside law was invented to prevent goal-hanging, not to make tiny calculations based on a player’s toenail sticking out, which bear no relation to the rest of the game. Now VAR spoils every goal because fans can’t trust that it’s not going to get wiped out because of a misplaced elbow. So come on Premier League, be more Swedish. Be more Abba.

Sadly no television match official was available for the incident at 4 a.m. in a Majorca nightclub in which England rugby giant Billy Vunipola was tasered by police. Vunipola said it was ‘an unfortunate misunderstanding’. Of course it was. Sometimes these players do get away with it. Imagine if Jack Grealish had been involved in a mid-season bar fracas involving a double tasering: headlines for months. Big Billy gets fined a couple of hundred euros and it’s over before his flight has touched down at Luton.

Dear Mary: how can I help pay for an expensive lunch without seeming rude?

Q. My husband and I (both in our eighties) recently visited a carpet shop with a view to replacing the stair carpet in our four-storey house. The salesman showed us various carpets and we discussed their relative merits. When I asked him how hard-wearing a particular carpet was, he looked at us carefully and said: ‘Well, it is not going to need to be very long-lasting is it?’ We were a bit surprised and will be taking our business elsewhere. But can you suggest how we might have been able to indicate to him politely that this particular form of words was unlikely to secure a sale?

– R.H., Cheltenham

A. You might have cried pleasantly, ‘What do you mean? We’ve just extended our lease by 20 years!’ and then stared at him enquiringly while he struggled to answer.

Q. Every year a friend invites me out to dinner on or around my birthday. Despite falling on hard times, he insists we go to the same high-end restaurant in Mayfair as he knows it is my favourite. I know he would not hear of my going halves with him, but the restaurant has become so expensive. How can I can contribute this year without offending him?

– R.B., London NW3

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A. Go on to the chosen restaurant’s website and pay for a gift voucher to the value of some of the approximate cost of the evening. Print this off. When the bill arrives, pause the waiter while you forage for this voucher as though you had just remembered that you had it, then lunge it forward and explain that another friend gave it to you and, as it’s about to expire, it must be used or it will go to waste.

Q. Dear Mary must know the Russian proverb ‘Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead’ (27 April). If my spouse told someone to tell a third party that I fancied someone whom I didn’t, just to tweak a seating plan, he’d find himself on the floor. Wouldn’t better advice have been simply for this lady to go to the lunch party alone?

– A.F., Barnard Castle

A. You refer to the device suggested for preventing a socially recalcitrant husband from being put off socialising for good. It is true that the ‘secret’ would inevitably have been widely circulated afterwards, as all secrets are. But while half the recipients would have dismissed the intelligence as absurd and unlikely, and probably a result of Chinese whispers, the other half would have been intrigued by the eccentricity and, wanting to know your husband better, would have extended invitations of their own. Thus you would have increased his social cachet.

‘Vital but fraying’: Five Guys reviewed

Five Guys is a burger house from Arlington, Virginia, based on the premise that if you can serve a drink, cut a fringe, or make a hamburger, you will always make money in America. Thirty years and 1,700 restaurants later, it sits on Coventry Street off Piccadilly, soaking up the alcohol of a thousand British stomachs. If central London is a strip-lit bin alley between palaces, this is its restaurant: vital but fraying.

I am here because I will not eat at McDonald’s, even when I am sad. I do not think my McDonald’s burger is all from the same cow, and this disturbs me: I can eat one cow happily, but a multitude frightens me. McDonald’s doesn’t fill you either, no matter what you eat: is it just an idea? So I am here – though I do not know how many cows constitute each Five Guys burger either – and at some point you will be here too. If you haven’t the wit to book set lunches, or the energy to queue in Soho for suave nibbles in dark rooms, you will wash up at Five Guys eventually. It eyeballs the Angus Steakhouse opposite: a perfect storm of cow angst. It is vast, glass-plated, decorated in red and white tile and plastic. I think of the Nite Owl in LA Confidential, clean and bloody.

The atmosphere changes with the time of day in a restaurant like this: atmosphere is weather. On a weekend lunchtime in London – a child’s sitting – it is panic. I blame inflation: normal parents walk around London patting their wallets these days. There are queues to browse at the Lego Store and a glance from a souvenir hawker feels like theft. They pile into Five Guys with relief, because it is as noisy as a football game and as bright as dawn. The staff, in homage to this, are sweeter than any nursery maid. They guide you through the bewildering options of toppings – if expensive food infantilises, so does this, which is fair – and never get impatient. Then you queue: soon the food arrives wrapped in silver foil, as if from some loving yet generic American mother.

It offers more Americana than mere Noir. Virginia isn’t in the top ten of potato-producing US states – the winner is Idaho, I checked – but Five Guys styles itself on a potato farm. Either that, or the storage rooms are under water or on fire. I’m not sure. As you walk to your operating-theatre-coloured plastic table and chair, you pass a huge pile of 25kg sacks of potatoes, and a bigger pile of boxes of peanut oil. The sacks and boxes wear the Five Guys colours, as if they might have a fight with McDonald’s potatoes or peanut oil given the chance. I wonder if the potato sack décor is deliberate and, if so, if it will soon transmogrify into dining in a field or forest in the manner of fleeing partisans. Everyone is getting in on cottage-core – this is the Piccadilly version – because no one is happy with what they have.

To me, a child of low inflation, the prices are immense. The burger is £9.95 with ketchup and onions. It’s good: dense and wet and tasty. I do not feel as if I have eaten a slogan and some misery. The hotdog is £7.25 and less good, but hot dogs should be pig, not cow: it’s not one of their talents. The chips are over-seasoned and over-coloured: a perfect chip is pale yellow, not brown, and fresh. The chocolate milkshake is £6.25: I read the ingredients list and I wish I hadn’t. It’s tasty, though: sweet and milky as childhood itself.

Can MPs really defect? 

‘He did it years before William Donaldson did The Henry Root Letters,’ said my husband querulously, as though I had accused him on peak-time television of saying the opposite.

The ‘he’ in question was Humphry Berkeley, who as a Cambridge undergraduate just after the second world war pursued an elaborate hoax by assuming the identity of a fictional public school headmaster, Rochester Sneath, to write embarrassing letters to the famous, eliciting risible replies. The collection was not published until 1974. The Henry Root Letters were published in 1980.

Berkeley wrote another book about leaving the Conservatives and joining Labour, published in 1972. It was called Crossing the Floor. The title was misleading because the phrase refers to MPs who move over to the opposing benches, and Berkeley had already lost his seat, in 1966 – partly, it was said, because the electors of Lancaster did not care for his prominent attempt to decriminalise homosexual acts. ‘The House didn’t like Humphry Berkeley,’ explained Leo Abse, the MP who carried through the reform in 1967. ‘He was an enfant terrible who never grew up.’

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The phrase crossing the floor has been thoroughly supplanted by defecting. That is what Dan Poulter, MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, is universally said to have done by joining the Labour party. It is Cold War language. ‘Of the half million Russian refugees in western Germany,’ reported Life in 1950, ‘more than 100,000 fought in the Soviet army and defected to the West between 1946 and 1948.’ Churchill never said, ‘The opposition occupies the benches opposite, but the enemy sits behind you.’ Yet the language of warfare is applied to domestic politics of even the friendliest kind. It transfers easily to quotidian habits. A writer in the Telegraph wondered how wearers of Adidas Samba trainers had reacted to Rishi Sunak’s donning a pair: ‘What’s a man to do when it feels morally wrong to defect to Nike, Puma, Reebok or Asics?’ It is harder to adopt a rival style of clothing than a new ideology. For one of the Tramecksan of Lilliput, with high heels, it is, Gulliver discovered, unthinkable to become a Slamecksan, with low heels.