Starmer made Boris squirm at PMQs

Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer both came to Prime Minister’s Questions today wanting to talk about the rail strikes. The Tory leader was keen to pin the blame on Labour, pointing out that 25 MPs from that party joined RMT picket lines yesterday. Starmer meanwhile thinks, as I explained here, that he can be bullish on this too because the public are blaming the government.

The Labour leader asked whether Johnson was ‘genuine about preventing strikes’, calling for details of meetings he or Transport Secretary Grant Shapps had held with ‘rail workers’ (a way of avoiding saying ‘unions’) this week. Johnson’s line was that the Conservatives were the party of the ‘strivers’ rather than the strikers and that ‘we know why he won’t condemn the strikes’ – that Labour needed the unions’ money. ‘That’s the fee that the learned gentleman opposite is receiving for the case he is failing to make,’ he said, in reference to Starmer’s legal career.

Starmer moved from the rail strikes to the contradiction of public sector pay restraint against plans to remove the bankers’ bonus cap: 

‘Pay rises for city bankers, pay cuts for district nurses. That’s the new approach. Mr Speaker, I didn’t see that on any leaflets in Wakefield.’ 

It was a good line and will become harder for Johnson to defend himself against in the coming months. But it is also true that Starmer is struggling to make his case at the moment. He still lacks the oomph that Angela Rayner recently said he needed to put into his interventions. He may well have reasons to be confident that the rail strikes aren’t hurting Labour in the way the Conservatives hope. But he does have an authority issue in that a section of his party defied his very clear order not to join picket lines, which allowed Johnson to give this pay-off to his final answer: 

‘They’re out on the picket lines, literally holding hands with Arthur Scargill. It’s worse than under Jeremy Corbyn. This is a government that is taking this country forward. They would take it back to the 1970s.’ 

Though it is worth pointing out that if the current Cabinet has few members who can remember the 1970s, figures like Scargill – a big beast in the long ago days of the 1980s and himself aged 84 – may not have the hold over the wider public consciousness in the way Johnson hopes.

What Johnson didn’t want to talk about was the question – raised first by Labour MP Chris Elmore and then recalled by Starmer – about whether he ever considered getting his wife Carrie a job in government or a post with the royal household. Elmore urged him to be honest, and Johnson’s response was to accuse the Opposition of not wanting to talk about the economy. He also dodged the questions on the bankers’ bonus cap. 

Johnson had much to be uncomfortable about today, whether on his own conduct or the lack of joined-up thinking in his top team. Starmer didn’t demolish him, but the Labour leader will have been relieved that this was a much better performance than the past few weeks at PMQs.

Councils take the biscuit with food bonanza

In his search for gossip, Mr S has few qualms about perusing other august publications for inspiration. So it was in that spirit that his eye alighted on a story in a recent edition of Private Eye which noted that ‘food bank clients in Liverpool’ were left ‘not impressed’ after 90 city councillors recently tucked into a £6,000 buffet at the council’s annual general meeting.

It brought to mind Steerpike’s favourite piece of local journalism of the past decade: a 2013 edition of the Brentwood Weekly News, whose front page had an exasperated-looking Eric Pickles next to the headline ‘I did not spend £10,000 on extra biscuits’. That story concerned departmental expenditure by the-then Communities Secretary but Mr S thought it might be worth looking at what councils at a local level are spending on grub across the country.

Well, the results are now in. Freedom of Information requests have established that local authorities spent nearly a quarter of a million pounds on refreshments in 2021-22 as elected officials and council staff began returning to their offices. More than £225,000 was spent with the highest spending authorities being Westminster on £22,000, followed by Wokingham on £17,000. Both were Tory run until May: let’s hope it wasn’t the biscuits that lost it.

Antrim and Newtonabbey came third with nearly £15,000 followed by Hull and Barnsley who spent more than £10,000 apiece. Some authorities revealed fun details too: SNP-run East Ayrshire spent more than £7,500 on refreshments including homebaking, scones and finger buffets while Enfield spent £1,320 on refreshments, including ‘cheese, wine, beer and biscuits’. Bottoms up! Lisburn and Castlereagh’s spread included ‘shortbread, mince pies and sandwiches’ with Norfolk preferring ‘soup, sandwiches, bacon rolls and biscuits.’ Worthing meanwhile plumped for ‘luxury, hand-made biscuits.’

Harry Fone, grassroots campaign manager at the TaxPayers’ Alliance told Mr S that: ‘Taxpayers struggling with council tax rises and a cost of living crisis will be fuming at these figures’ adding ‘while households are forced to tighten their belts, councillors and council officials are loosening theirs.’ Food for thought for voters, perhaps, the next time they cast their ballots…

In praise of Mick Lynch

The RMT union boss Mick Lynch is currently dominating TV screens and social media, making mincemeat out of politicians and broadcast interviewers alike. Hapless Tory MPs that attempted to recite pre-rehearsed cliches and dodgy statistics have been gunned down by the mature, considered and, yes, gruffly charming manner of Lynch.

In a previous life, I had the unenviable job of being the Sun’s industrial correspondent, when such jobs existed. It was the late 1980s and early 1990s when unions were important red-top fodder for the very simple reason that, no matter how militant the organisation, their members read the tabloids even if they disagreed with the politics. As a result, union leaders (with a couple of notable exceptions) would talk to me realising that even if the paper was against them, their message stood a chance of getting through. Later, after leaving the paper, I freelanced and spent a few years doing media training. In both lines of work, I dearly wished I had dealt with more like Mick Lynch.

There were always those who, like Lynch, had come up through the ranks having ‘worked on the tools’, doing the jobs of the people they would go on to represent. But they often lacked the calm composure needed to deal with awkward questions and would bluster or say the wrong thing. In contrast, those who were career union leaders were often too smooth, too polished and cleverly evasive in a way that made you think you had got a good interview only to look at your notes later and realised they had not said anything of interest.

Mick Lynch is not a normal union leader in that he is, well, normal. It’s as if he has taken the best bits of previous examples of the job and moulded them into a finished article – the working-classness of a Ron Todd, the temperament of Bill Jordan, the passion of Rodney Bickerstaffe and the wit and wisdom of another rail union leader, Jimmy Knapp, one of the nicest I ever dealt with.

When Sky News’ Kay Burley tried to conjure up images of Grunwick or NUM-style flying pickets violently preventing workers and commuters from entering stations, he simply stood to one side to show her a handful of RMT workers allowing passengers to go by. Though she continued to goad him and later accused him of being ‘flustered’, by the time the interview ended you felt that if this was a boxing match her trainer would have thrown the towel into the ring after the first few seconds, it was that one-sided.

When Piers Morgan used Lynch’s Facebook profile picture of Thunderbirds’ villain The Hood to suggest it meant he aligned himself to an evil megalomaniac wanting to take over the world, he simply pointed out it was a vinyl puppet from a 1960s children’s show to whom he bore a resemblance.

When Richard Madeley continued to ask him if he was a Marxist, Lynch laughed and simply pointed out he was talking twaddle. No change there, his tone seemed to suggest. To be fair to Piers (not a comment made lightly) it was a 15-minute interview, an unusual long-form in this age of snapshot social media clips, in which the RMT boss was able to make an extended and well-presented case for the strike.

On other occasions, he has merely sat back and let the other side ramble on before volleying back a short and pointed retort to completely demolish their argument. It is a masterclass in how to handle the media. Time and time again he is being goaded, provoked and insulted in the hope he will explode like Arthur Scargill on ecstasy.

He has stuck to his guns, confounded his opponents, and used simple, plain-talking language. He comes across as a working-class man who has made it to the top of his profession without selling out his principles, someone who makes it quite clear why the union is doing what it is doing irrespective of whether or not we agree with him.

It strikes me he is bringing to the screen the same persona he uses in negotiations, which I imagine his opponents from rail management would find infuriating. One imagines his style of delivery serves him well in the world of negotiating dirty tricks, something inherent in almost all industrial disputes. 

The ones I remember are only the most obvious. Management would sometimes get the unions to travel down to central London, drawing the meeting out till it was too late to get the train home. Sometimes one side might supply the other with lots of refreshments but not enough breaks, hoping that the desperate need to use the toilet would lead to a quicker compromise. Sometimes the little things matter – I can remember a famous carmaker agreeing to supply the shopfloor with free copies of the Morning Star as a carrot in negotiations with a hard-left shop steward. One former union leader told me:

The postal union would employ ‘good cop bad cop’ tactics. As they entered the negotiating room, one of the union team would rage at management calling them every name under the sun before another would apologise for his colleague’s outburst explaining ‘feelings are running high’. It left management not sure which way to turn.

In an age of stock answers and interview clichés, it would be easy to dismiss Mick Lynch as a throwback, a dinosaur from the bad old days. But for the sake of us viewers, let’s hope politicians follow his lead and actually start answering a few more questions. 

Inflation is a social evil, so why don’t our leaders care?

It was a ‘destroyer of society’, a ‘tax on ordinary people’s savings’ and a threat to social order. You don’t have to spend very long browsing the history books to find thumping quotes from Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher denouncing rising prices as an evil that had to be defeated. And today? Even with prices in the UK now rising at 9.1 per cent, the fastest for 40 years, there are just a few mumbled apologies, coupled with some evasive excuses. That is not good enough. If we are going to defeat inflation all over again, it will take some leadership.

We learned today that inflation has nudged up again, this time well past the 9 per cent barrier. The Bank of England is already forecasting it might go above 11 per cent, and given how cloudy its crystal ball is – only a few months ago it was arguing inflation was just a blip – it might well climb a lot higher than that. Real wages are falling at the fastest rate in a generation, and living standards are getting squeezed.

And yet we have heard very little about why rising prices matter. Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak appear to think it is something that can be fixed with a few more handouts and a couple of gimmicks. Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, seems to think it has nothing to do with him, and certainly nothing to do with the billions of pounds the Bank has printed over the last few years. Labour uses inflation as a stick to beat the government with, but offers nothing to fix the crisis except giving in to every trade union that asks for some money.

In reality, as Thatcher and Reagan understood, inflation is a threat to the social order and economic stability. It undermines savings, punishes hard work, distorts the market, and destroys the currency. It can be defeated, but it takes commitment, a willingness to make tough choices, and the boldness to face down opposition. 

To get inflation down from 9.1 per cent to an acceptable 2 per cent is going to involve cuts to real wages, a squeeze on company profits, smaller returns to shareholders, and cuts to government spending, which in turn will lead to fewer services. In short, it will take a lot of sacrifices. But people are usually willing to make sacrifices if they feel it is worthwhile. Leaders need to argue that there is a tough road ahead, but that there isn’t any alternative. At the moment, there is no sign of that – and so long as that is true, prices will just keep on rising.

Joe Lycett’s donkey joke isn’t a matter for the police

There’s a word for countries in which you might get collared by the police because someone took offence to your jokes. And it isn’t a nice one. It’s the sort of thing you read about going on in Erdogan’s Turkey or Putin’s Russia. But it is also the sort of thing that now happens in allegedly liberal Britain. As Joe Lycett has found out.

The stand-up comic and former Great British Sewing Bee host says he was contacted by the cops over a joke in his new show, referring to a donkey’s genitalia. ‘Someone came to my tour show a few weeks back and was offended by one of the jokes. And their perfectly understandable response to this was… to call the police’, he posted on Instagram yesterday.

It seems like the officers knew this was all ridiculous, but had to go through the motions: 

‘To be fair to them, the fuzz were very nice about it all but felt they had a duty to investigate. This involved me writing a statement explaining the context of the joke for them; I particularly enjoyed putting the words ‘giant donkey d***’ into a message to a police detective. Charmed, and hopefully amused, the rozzers have since closed the matter.’

Now, Lycett is a noted wind-up merchant: he recently ‘caused chaos’ in Westminster by ‘leaking’ an obviously and comically fake summary of the Sue Gray report. We can only hope this is all a big joke and promotional stunt. But regrettably it seems to be genuine. And it is hardly out of character for the cops, who seem to have taken the phrase PC police far too literally in recent years.

It’s unclear what law or protocol Lycett was investigated under, but police today have many to choose from. Perhaps he’d been accused of committing a so-called non-crime hate incident. More than 120,000 people have had these black marks put against their name on the basis of an allegation alone. This Orwellian practice still hasn’t been fully overhauled despite the courts declaring the current process an unlawful interference in free speech.

In a sense, Lycett got off lightly. In recent years, the British state has routinely arrested, fined and even jailed people for telling offensive jokes. Granted, these were often less-than-amateur comedians – often drunk, idiotic students mouthing off and saying disgusting things on the internet. But just because their jokes weren’t always funny, and some were genuinely offensive, the principle of the thing should still chill us.

Back in 2012, 19-year-old Matthew Woods from Lancashire was jailed for 12 weeks for making jokes online about April Jones and Madeleine McCann. He pleaded guilty at Chorley magistrates court to ‘sending by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive’. The chairman of the bench told Woods he deserved the longest sentence the court could hand down.

In 2020, a group of 18 and 19-year-olds from Gateshead were arrested by police on suspicion of committing a hate crime. They had filmed a video of themselves mockingly re-enacting the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. The video showed them swigging beer and laughing. They posted it on Snapchat and it later went viral, causing outrage. Some demanded the police get involved, which they dutifully did. 

Then of course there is the infamous case of the Nazi pug. In 2018, Scottish YouTuber Mark Meechan was fined £800 for uploading a ‘grossly offensive’ comedy skit of him teaching a dog to do a Hitler salute – the joke being that he was trying to annoy his girlfriend by turning her cute pug into the worst thing imaginable. The humour was apparently lost on the Scottish authorities.

Now, to many people’s ears, a sick joke about Madeleine McCann or George Floyd will be infinitely more distasteful than Lycett’s more mainstream material. But humour is entirely subjective. And we should make no distinction between censoring one and censoring the other. Such censorship is always wrong and infantilising, regardless of whether the joke in question is funny, satirical or indeed a thinly veiled bit of bigotry. 

We also risk sleepwalking into a situation where only professional comedians are given the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, the sort of offensive jokes teenagers have been locked up for are not that far away from what Frankie Boyle’s material used to be like before he went woke. Feted alternative comic Jerry Sadowitz – whose act is wilfully, disgustingly and brilliantly offensive – continues to tell Madeleine McCann jokes with impunity. And rightfully so.

Unless we want a world in which you’re asked to produce a licence for your edgy joke, we need to kick the cops out of comedy. No one should be arrested, investigated or prosecuted for saying something offensive, whether or not it has a punchline at the end of it. The authorities should not be in the business of telling us what is and isn’t appropriate or funny – whether we’re joking about Nazis or a giant donkey d***.

The Tories are picking inflation winners and losers

Inflation rose to 9.1 per cent on the year in May, taking the UK’s consumer price index to a 40-year-high. Optimists are noting the slowdown in pace, rising by 0.1 per cent between April and May. But I suspect we are in the eye of the storm. This price spiral is nowhere close to over, not least because the next energy price cap review is currently estimated to lift bills by an additional £1,000.

The Bank of England’s latest forecast predicts inflation will peak at around 11 per cent, but it must be said that the Bank has consistently underestimated the inflation rate, playing catch-up with its forecasts, as well as its rates policy. Today’s figures will further convince the Bank that its snail’s pace interest rate hikes to combat inflation are still the right way to go, making it increasingly likely that the next meeting of the monetary policy committee will see rates go up again by a relatively meagre 0.25 per cent.

But while we’re used to central bankers rightfully taking the hit for failing to gauge inflation properly, focus is starting to shift to the government, as overtly political decisions are creating winners and losers in this inflation crisis. Yesterday it was announced that the ‘triple lock’ on state pensions will return next year, which means the value of the state pension is about to skyrocket. Under the policy, the value of the state pension rises by the rate of inflation, wage growth or 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest. There’s no doubt which variable will take the cake. The decision is based on September’s CPI forecasts, which could be when inflation is nearing a double-digit peak. This means as working people’s salary rises fall behind the pace of inflation, pensioners will storm ahead with an estimated 10 per cent rise to their state pension, a huge boost to their purchasing power in this high-price economy.

The triple lock was suspended during Covid, on the grounds that hiking the state pension using skyrocketing inflation figures was an unfair measure, especially what younger generations had just gone through – in many cases losing their jobs, and in nearly all cases missing out on major life events, in a bid to protect older, more vulnerable people from the pandemic. Now, the lock is being reinstated, despite the only meaningful change to circumstances being that inflation is significantly higher, set to further widen the gap between pensioners and workers.

Inflation tends to help the assetocracy, which owns their home and sees the value of their assets go up over time. In the UK, the chronic under-supply of homes meant that throughout post-crash years these people tended to be older, or the beneficiaries of parents and grandparents with deposits to spare. By protecting (in full) the value of the state pension too, the government is positioning itself as the defender of the gerontocracy against the younger generations, who have more or less been told there’s very little the government can do to help curb inflation.

And it’s getting tricky to defend. This morning the deputy prime minister Dominic Raab suggested it was reasonable to hike the state pensions by 10 per cent while simultaneously telling workers not to ask for a pay rise, as this was consistent with the idea of ‘protecting the most vulnerable’. Low-wage workers who are struggling to pay the bills are likely to take issue with this narrow definition of ‘vulnerable’. But more broadly, reinstating the triple lock is estimated to cost north of £20 billion, almost quadruple what the new National Insurance tax is estimated to bring in.

Suspending the triple lock last year offered the perfect opportunity to scrap the policy altogether. Instead, it’s being ushered back in at a time when workers are being squeezed with a tax burden hovering at a 70-year-high. It will do nothing to reassure most folk that No. 10’s inflation policies are designed to best protect them from rising prices. Instead, it will solidify further the belief that public policy, on the most important of issues, is crafted with voter blocs in mind.

Rishi continues the crypto-craze

Poor Rishi Sunak. The Chancellor was once the golden boy of British politics: the free-spending, Insta-loving, charm-oozing toast of the Wetherspoons’ bartenders. But now Sunak has lost his shine after a disastrous three week period in which his Spring Statement was lambasted, his ratings went into free fall and he ended up being fined by the Met police after his wife’s tax affairs came under scrutiny.

It was during this three-week period too that the Treasury revealed that Sunak wanted the Royal Mint to issue a ‘non-fungible token’ (NFT) by the summer in order to show ‘the forward-looking approach we are determined to take towards cryptoassets in the UK.’

Unfortunately, in the ten weeks since the announcement, Sunak’s reverse Midas touch appears to have extended to the crypto industry which is currently enduring a difficult bear market. Figures from the CryptoSlam NFT Global Sales Volume Index suggest that the volume of NFT sales around the world have now dropped from $3.7 trillion in April to less than $650 million in June so far. Average sales have fallen over that period by more than 60 per cent, according to the NonFungible market tracker.

Despite all this, Treasury sources have confirmed that an NFT with the Royal Mint is still in the works. Both a Freedom of Information request by Mr S and a parliamentary question by Tulip Siddiq have failed to elicit answers as to the cost to date. According to the Treasury: ‘Ministers and officials need space in which plans, and options can be refined as a project develops, in order to ensure good decision making.’

That would make a nice change.

In defence of Carrie Johnson

One is not usually surprised by opinions volunteered to parliamentary hopefuls by voters on whose doors the candidate has knocked; but last week, dropping in on the Tiverton and Honiton by-election, I was taken aback by a subject that came up a number of times. It seemed so relatively unimportant.

The door-knocker in this case was Richard Foord, the Liberal Democrat candidate in a safe Conservative seat that looked in imminent danger of falling to his party. I was following him around as he canvassed in the Devon town of Honiton. You may know by the time you read this whether the Conservatives clung on, but you don’t need reminding that they were up against it.

I should say at once that my sample of opinion was minuscule: I had perhaps an hour with Mr Foord. And I mostly heard what one would expect. Almost everyone was out of love with Boris Johnson but – despite him – there were still some who were thinking of voting Conservative. So far, so predictable, though (predictably too) Mr Johnson’s stance on Ukraine was generally approved of. Cost of living came up, of course; Brexit no longer seemed a big issue; Keir Starmer was never mentioned; and the thought was expressed that ‘levelling up’ ought to be applied to the West Country, not just the Midlands and the north of England.

None of this was surprising. What was, was that the Prime Minister’s wife seemed to be an issue. Who did she think she was? Should an unelected person wield the influence she did? How much power did she have over government policy? Oughtn’t we to be told? That sort of thing.

It’s perhaps to Carrie Johnson’s credit that she has already carved herself a name as an influencer, and voters do have some sense of what she thinks important – green policies, the plight of endangered species, environmental threats. But still I found myself suppressing an urge to join the conversation and spring to her defence.

I do not know Mrs Johnson at all. I don’t think I’ve even met her. I know she’s a friend of the interior designer Lulu Lytle, and Ms Lytle’s a big supporter of the Wild Camels Protection Foundation and so am I, and that’s my closest link to Carrie: a positive one. But all this is beside the point, which is that we seem to have it in for prime ministers’ wives, we give them an often rotten time, and that’s mean, unjust and a tiny bit misogynistic.

Why shouldn’t Mrs J have ideas about the environment, why shouldn’t she express alarm about global warming, and why shouldn’t she urge her opinions on Mr J? He doesn’t have to take any notice, and if he chooses to be compliant for the sake of a quiet life that would be a weakness in him, not a fault in her.

It appears that influence by a male spouse over his female partner is considered unexceptional – we joked about Denis Thatcher – but when it is the other way round, it’s seen as somehow sinister. Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth is evidence that suspicion of undeclared female influence in a marriage runs deep and ancient in our culture. Feminists might put it down to male contempt for women; but I wonder whether it might be male fear of women.

Eleanor Roosevelt had to put up with this all her life, and indeed FDR was almost certainly influenced by his wife, and a good thing too. But it does seem, even today, that a PM’s wife has to choose between being seen as (1) a boring house-mouse; (2) too independent, and neglectful of her husband’s need for support in the poor lamb’s lonely life; or (3) a scheming minx, twisting our apparent leader around her little finger. Or all three.

One incident stands out in my memory as being, though in itself trivial, an injustice for which those who gave media wings to the image and those who lapped it up should still feel a bit ashamed. Around 8 a.m. on the morning after Labour’s 1997 general election victory, flowers were delivered to the Blairs’ Islington front door, probably only hours after the couple had laid their heads down to sleep. That’s all really – except that Cherie opened the door to the courier, and in the second while she stood there, hovering media photographers managed to snap and video her in a nightie, looking as dishevelled as you or I would in those circumstances. Ha ha ha.

This marked the beginning of ten years in which the print media seemed uneasy about Cherie Blair, not quite knowing what to make of a conspicuously successful lawyer who was also rather left-wing, and united only in the vague suspicion that she was some kind of leftie battleaxe (why are men never battleaxes?) pouring socialist poison into her mildly unideological husband’s ear. Remarks caught off-camera were ‘outbursts’; any indication that she had sharp-edged convictions was seized upon; and such minor blunders as would befall anyone trying to juggle a distinguished legal career, four children, interests and pursuits of her own, and a husband who was prime minister, were turned into stories.

Cherie Blair’s mistake, perhaps, was being human, and I’m not (I think) oversensitive in concluding that she caught the force of a political media finding it hard to get a handle on her husband, and so slipping easily into the ready-made narrative of husband on stage, wife in the wings.

Carrie Johnson, too, makes an easier target than her Teflon husband. ‘Cherchez la femme.’ I don’t share Mrs Johnson’s taste in wallpaper, but Mr J could have said no. I do share her interest in the future of the planet and I’m sorry he does seem to have said no. Whether I’d like her if I knew her, I have no idea – maybe not. But I dislike our culture’s predilection for seeing something threatening in a prime minister’s wife with a mind of her own. So carry on Carrie.

Boris is falling into the Macron trap

You can’t blame Boris Johnson for jetting off to Kyiv last week for another meet-and-greet session with Volodymyr Zelensky. He got a warmer reception from the Ukrainian President than he would have in Doncaster, the town he snubbed in order to grandstand on the international stage.

Johnson was scheduled to have made an appearance at the conference of northern Conservatives, where organisers had hoped he would woo Red Wall voters by explaining how, two and a half years after they loaned him their vote, he intends to ‘level up’ their town.

But to the consternation of many MPs, Johnson decided he had more important issues on the other side of Europe with his ‘great friend’ Zelensky. It’s not just the President who can’t get enough of the British PM; he’s also captured the hearts of Ukraine’s Cossack community who have officially made him one of their own, bestowing on Johnson the name ‘Boris Chuprina’, which means ‘a long lock of hair’.

It beats ‘the clown’, which is how he is known – if the rumours are to be believed – in the Elysée Palace. Not that Emmanuel Macron is in a position to mock Johnson after his Ensemble coalition was humbled in Sunday’s parliamentary election. Jupiter, as Macron was called when he became President in 2017, has himself been struck down with a bolt of lightning and unless he can temper his legendary hauteur with some humility his presidency will be moribund for the next five years.

It was his hubris that was Macron’s undoing, a flaw that has characterised his presidency, but recently he also made the mistake of devoting more of his time and attention to Ukraine than his own country’s myriad domestic ills.

During the presidential campaign, Macron was a peripheral figure, the only one of the 12 candidates not to participate in a televised debate. Only when the polls began to show that Marine Le Pen was closing the gap on what had, at the start of March, been a 15 point lead, did Macron divert his focus from Ukraine to address the rising energy prices and the cost of living crisis, issues of far more importance to the French than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As the director of one polling company put it in April: ‘I don’t think that this war has fundamentally modified the choice of the French.’

And therein lies an uncomfortable truth for Macron, and for Johnson; namely that their electorates are far less preoccupied by events in Ukraine than they are. War fatigue set in a long time ago; that’s not to say that people living on the poverty line in Doncaster or Dunkirk don’t care about the war, but they are understandably more concerned about their daily hardships: filling their cars with petrol, the impossibility of seeing their GP, rising crime and the spiralling cost of food.

Yet what was Macron’s priority last week? Ukraine. It stuck in the craw of many French, receiving another of their President’s [7] bombastic addresses about rejecting extremists and rallying to the republican cause, moments before he hopped in a plane for a photo opportunity with Zelensky.

The major preoccupations of voters during campaigning for the legislative elections were purchasing power (53 per cent), the health system (36 per cent), the environment (29 per cent) and then delinquency, immigration and pensions, all tied on 22 per cent. The war in Ukraine? That was an issue for only 18 per cent of the electorate. According to Brice Teinturier, director general of the Ipsos polling company, the principal reason why over 50 per cent of the electorate didn’t vote was that these issues were not addressed during campaigning. ‘The disinterest of the French is also the responsibility of the politicians, notably Emmanuel Macron,’ he said.

The BBC reports that something similar has been seen in Tiverton and Honiton, ahead of tomorrow’s by-election, where people are feeling the pinch just as the French are. ‘Our wages and universal credit aren’t coming up as much as everything else is,’ explained one mother. ‘It is just a general struggle.’

Johnson made a mistake last week in ditching Doncaster for Kyiv, and he compounded his error with Macron-esque pomposity on his return to the UK. ‘When Ukraine fatigue is setting in, it is very important to show that we are with them for the long haul,’ he declared. What about the fatigue of the British people, like those in Wakefield, scene of this week’s second by-election, where more than a third of families with children live in poverty and more and more households are struggling to pay their bills?

Rather like climate change, the obsession of the political and media class with Ukraine is not reflected in wider society, at least not among the more impoverished sections of the population. Hard-nosed but not cold-hearted, they have enough problems of their own without worrying about what’s going on more than a thousand miles to the east. Their leaders should remember that because it is not Ukrainian voters who have their fates in their hands.

The EU’s solidarity for Ukraine is a sham

The EU will formally add Ukraine to its list of candidate countries this Friday. But if you look carefully beneath the pomp, you will see this is much less of a big deal than Brussels would have you believe.

For one thing, the gesture is symbolic. The list of official EU candidates is a bit like the waiting list for a smart London club. Being on it may be flattering, but it does not guarantee a quick decision; nor does it rule out the possibility of one or more black balls if and when your name eventually comes up. 

Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey are all current candidates on the list. All are respectable nations, but don’t hold your breath as regards an early admission for any of them. The formal inscription of Ukraine on this list looks more like a public relations exercise by Brussels, which is desperate to show its support for a good cause, than a serious commitment to anything much further.

Secondly, if you think all this demonstrates some kind of EU solidarity in support of Ukraine, think again: it doesn’t. European unity here is almost entirely superficial, limited in practice to uncontroversial matters like calling out Russian atrocities, piously denouncing Russia as the antithesis of democratic European values, and intoning ‘slava Ukraini’ from a safe distance. Whatever the view in places like Poland or Lithuania, a European think-tank last week found large majorities in many European countries, notably Germany and Italy but also France and Sweden, favouring ‘peace’ over ‘justice’. Put bluntly, this means standing aside and leaving Ukraine to negotiate the best terms possible with Vladimir Putin.

There is no more unity on Ukraine’s eventual EU admission. Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, the Baltic states and Slovenia openly advocated not only admitting Ukraine but fast-tracking the process: so, too, has Hungary. That is anathema to Brussels and will not happen. 

On the other side of the table, although Portugal, the Netherlands, and Denmark have agreed to Ukraine’s candidature, they are reportedly lukewarm about actually admitting the state at all, at least any time soon. Finland has stressed the need for major changes before membership can even be considered; and according to Belgian premier Alexander de Croo, membership ‘won’t be for tomorrow. It will take a long time.’ Some unity. 

Since admission of new members requires unanimity, no wonder president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen retreated into saying that any further decision must be ‘merits-based’ and go ‘by the book’ after initially fulsomely welcoming Ukraine to the waiting-list.

The lack of enthusiasm from western EU members may be disconcerting, but is actually understandable. These countries largely bankroll the EU operation. Were Ukraine to join, it is a racing certainty that for many years it would cost the EU, and hence them, big money. It’s not only the war, which will leave Ukraine severely scarred even if and when it wins it. Before that even started, Poland and Hungary, both with a per capita GDP of something over $15,000 (£12,000), were major beneficiaries of EU regional funds. The corresponding figure for Ukraine was $3,700 (£3,000). You can work out the cost for yourself.

The older, western EU members, to whom the supremacy of Brussels and EU law is second nature, are conscious that some of the keenest support for Ukrainian membership comes from Poland and Hungary, notoriously the most vociferous in promoting their own national interests and resisting all attempts by the EU to interfere in what they see as their internal affairs (witness most recently Hungary’s veto over the EU minimum tax plans, and Poland’s continuing resistance to what it sees a unjustified interference in its judicial system). The western members think, almost certainly rightly, that Ukraine would tend to side with such attitudes. Once the fog of war has subsided, it is hard to see Kyiv, having resisted the attempt of one bully to destroy its statehood, agreeing meekly to accept the dictat of Brussels and a largely pro-centralist European court.

This worry will also be shared in Brussels. Only last week, the central EU bodies produced their response to the Conference on the Future of Europe, an exercise in consultation that had been going on for over a year. Their view is clear: they want to give more, not less, power to Brussels. They suggest subjecting almost all decisions to some form of qualified majority voting and thus further whittling away the power of individual member states to hold up decisions.

Already engaged in delicate attempts to bring Budapest and Warsaw to heel, and with an agenda to cut down the pretensions of member states in the future, the last thing they want is the addition of another potentially maverick country with over 40 million of its own bloody-minded citizens likely to oppose any such measure, and if anything to add to the centrifugal forces within the EU.

When Friday comes, Kyiv will, of course, officially celebrate the compliment being paid to it by the EU. But Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is no fool. One suspects he will realise that, despite the kind words coming from the EU this week, this is all he is likely to get. As for eventual EU membership, it’s a case of wait and see, possibly for a very long time. It’s something he can and should put firmly in the pending tray, while he concentrates on more immediate needs, for which the EU is frankly an irrelevance.

Have you ever had ‘The Ick’?

You’re in a bar, on a date and it’s Saturday night. The lighting is low, the music is good and the drinks are flowing. Your opposite number is everything you thought they would be: intelligent, interesting and attractive. The conversation is easy and the evening looks promising. You start to think this one might be special. 

But then you hear their laugh for the first time – it’s a grating string of huh-huh-huh’s – and it’s all over. The attraction flips to disgust and, try as you might, you can’t look at them in the same way. It’s the moment you anticipate but never hope for…It’s the ick.

Last week Keir Starmer cracked a cringeworthy Love Island joke in the Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions. The Labour leader said ‘contestants that give the public the ick get booted out’ and suggested either the public or the party do the same to Boris Johnson.

The joke was met with groans from his side of the house despite whips telling MPs to laugh at his cultural quips. A party insider told The Sunday Times: ‘They were encouraged to show appreciation for the joke they preferred.’ You have to feel for Keir Starmer; in trying to appear on trend, he became the living embodiment of ‘the ick’.

The ick is a modern dating phenomenon where an attraction to a current or potential mate morphs into revulsion upon discovering an off-putting mannerism or habit. It can be triggered by anything but is instant, primal and violent. If you believe today’s daters, once an ick is in play, the relationship is doomed. 

Being rude to a waiter is a classic ick, but often they are far more niche – something seemingly innocuous that makes your skin crawl. 

The term first arose as long ago as 1967, although not in a dating context. It meant a phrase ‘used to express disgust at something unpleasant or offensive’ – like a foul smell or nasty texture. It is probably derived from the earlier adjective ‘icky’ – a 1930s jazz term used by swing lovers to describe more saccharine or sentimental jazz music, which later came to mean ‘sticky or repulsive’. 

But ‘The Ick’ gained its iconic status during the third series of Love Island in 2017 when contestant Olivia Atwood said: ‘When you’ve seen a boy and got the ick, it doesn’t go. It’s caught you and it’s taken over your body. It’s just ick. I can’t shake it off.’

Many have turned to TikTok to share their icks and the hashtag now has more than 959 million views on the app. Icks aren’t to be confused with red flags, which are warning signs you wilfully ignore because you like someone. But there is a fine line between the two. 

It’s any jarring behaviour that puts you off your date for good. Pushing a pull door, incorrectly guessing your date’s order in a restaurant, cracking a joke no one listens to, eating too loudly, eating off a paper plate, skinny jeans, Crocs and saying the word ‘bossman’ all came up in a snap survey of 20-somethings for this article.

Icks range from silly or embarrassing scenarios to niche hygiene preferences like not rinsing a toothbrush before and after applying toothpaste. 

But shouldn’t we call time on ‘The Ick’? A politician uttering the phrase at the dispatch box is a surefire sign that it has reached its cultural apogee. And the everyday reality of relationships should teach us to handle it with caution. In a world where singletons no longer meet through friends, work or hobbies, but on Tinder, Bumble and Badoo, it’s easy to discard someone when, underneath their filtered, flawless profile, we discover an actual human.

As many daters have found, you can run from relationship to relationship because the other person doesn’t tick all your boxes. In our throwaway culture, it’s easy come, easy go. Dates can be lined up as swiftly as an Uber, or an Amazon delivery. Why tolerate a person’s faults when you’re only a few taps away from endless opportunities with countless others?

Hopefully they don’t give you the ick too.

Why you no longer need a driveway to go electric

Entrepreneur Jonathan Carrier reckons more people would drive electric cars if they had portable chargers in their boots. The electrical equivalent of a can of petrol.

So he’s launching one. Called the ZipCharge Go, he claims it’s a design world first. There are portable battery packs that work with electric cars. Generally, these are designed for giant American recreational vehicles, some of which have their own solar panels, and if you search YouTube you’ll come across allegedly comic videos of people recharging moribund Teslas with petrol generators, but the Go has been designed from the off to charge vehicles, and has the necessary software to pair up with them.

‘The inspiration was my business partner’s brother, who lives in an end of terrace house in Twickenham and bought an EV for personal use. He was always queuing to charge it up, and I thought; ‘there must be a better way,’ said Carrier.

You can buy halfway house EV chargers like the ThirdRock Energy Commando Plug, which comes with various electric outputs and plug types, but still needs to be connected to a building or a piece of street furniture before it will charge a car. Carrier’s product, which uses lithium-ion battery cells, and will be sold in three different power outputs (4, 6 and 8kWh), is entirely free standing and portable. Taking a little over half an hour to charge, it provides a claimed range of about twenty miles, so would be suitable for getting you home from work rather than getting across the country.

Carrier is hoping the charger, which is set to be available in the second quarter of 2023, will have a ready market, claiming that 8.5m, or 40 per cent of car owning households in Britain don’t have access to off street parking, so the luxury of a reasonably rapid home charging box is denied them.

Carrier has a background in vehicle engineering, as does Richie Sibal, ZipCharge’s co-founder (the pair have worked for the likes of Lotus, Jaguar and McLaren) and talks about how the Go’s light, space frame aluminium sub structure is a homage to the way some sports cars are built.

It can be charged in a domestic setting using a regular three pin socket (or ‘granny plug,’ as Carrier puts it), and will do this during the cheapest tariff periods.

It’s designed to be used as a household power source as well as a vehicle charger, and its co-creator envisions buyers making use of power saved by the Go during cheaper periods instead of taking juice direct from the grid when it’s more expensive.

Wind and solar power generation have the advantage of producing a lot of electricity with zero emissions when the weather is right, but are relatively useless when it isn’t, and Carrier sees his device as having potential to store some of that energy when it’s being generated, to be used when there’s a lack of wind or sun.

‘When it’s not being used as a charger, our device can be plugged into the home and be used to feed electricity back into the grid,’ said Carrier. ‘We can save people a significant amount of energy, that would pay for EV charging with some surplus.’ Apparently, this ability to discharge both AC and DC current makes the Go ‘bi-directional.’

Electric cars are hefty things thanks to their batteries, and around 25kg for the 4kWh and under 49kg for the 8kWh Go, this box of electric tricks is no lightweight either, although its creator points out that its light enough to be taken on a plane, and being on wheels will help when moving it about.

If it’s left on a street plugged into your car, will they also help nefarious types from making off with it? Carrier doesn’t think so. The cabling locks on, the handle acts as a tether, and it’s controlled by a phone app. There are tracking, remote disabling functions and a ‘geo-fencing’ facility that means it will only work in a designated street, should you find your Go has gone. Whether the more gormless thieving practitioners will be deterred from reaching for their bolt cutters remains to be seen.

How much will it cost? The outright purchase price hasn’t been officially announced (think £1,500-£2,000, so not cheap), and the company is also touting a subscription model at around £49 a month.

All this could have been yours now were it not for the component shortage that has resulted in 18-month waiting lists for some electric cars. ‘We have a supply chain problem, with lead times of 52 weeks for some components,’ said Carrier.

But the new technology will surely allay fears from terraced home owners and those living in flats that they will be left behind in the push for more EVs and the phasing out of petrol cars. As more powerful and efficient chargers reach the market, living in these sorts of properties needn’t be a barrier to going electric.

Why won’t Gary Lineker name those who racially abused him?

Gary Lineker is the BBC’s top earner: he was paid £1.36m last year. The popularity of Match of the Day, the programme he hosts, is often given as the reason for that astronomical pay cheque. Yet the reality is that most fans tune in to watch the goals, not to hear Lineker’s presentation.

Lineker, however, insists that he has never had it easy. In a podcast interview, the former England footballer says that he suffered racist abuse at school and during his career because of his ‘darkish skin’. It’s appalling if Lineker really was picked on for his skin colour, but it’s unclear why Lineker is telling us this now. ‘I wouldn’t ever name any names,’ he says of those who abused him. Why not? Should those who face similar unacceptable abuse do the same as Gary and keep schtum about their abusers? Surely if we are to kick racism out of football it’s better to name and shame the perpetrators.

Lineker also claimed that, without football, he might have been picked on in the playground. As a ‘tiny, geeky kid’ in Leicester, Lineker told the High Performance Podcast his life wouldn’t have been so rosy:

‘Without being good at sport, life would have been very different for me because I think I would have been bullied at school.’

The truth is that Lineker’s talent on the pitch means we will never know whether what he is saying is true. Yet whether he would have been targeted in the playground or not, hearing Lineker pose as a victim is a bit much.

Lineker should think carefully about what message he is trying to send here. Are those poor kids who do get picked on in the playground meant to take solace from the fact that, without his talent, Lineker might have been one of them? If so, it’s hardly much reassurance for the chubby boy who isn’t good at football. Lineker seems to be telling such children: ‘Don’t worry, I almost know how you feel’.

Lineker’s football career has earned him untold millions, adulation on the pitch, lucrative corporate deals, a post-football broadcasting job, a huge following on Twitter, a jet-set lifestyle and at least one beautiful house (as well as an environmentally-friendly electric Mini). Rather than focus on these ups though, Lineker wants to talk about the times where everything hasn’t gone right. On the podcast, he says:

‘I don’t think you can really get to the top of something without really believing in yourself, and I did believe in myself. But I didn’t see myself on the same level as the other great players.’

Of course, if Lineker didn’t see himself on the ‘same level’ as other greats, that might have been with good reason. But whatever he really meant, Lineker’s words are revealing. He clearly sees himself in the pantheon of footballing idols, even though he has had more wives than World Cup wins.

Yes, Lineker was a talented footballer whose greatest achievement was managing to avoid getting booked, but hearing him pose as a victim – or listening to his claims of imposter syndrome – are hard to take.

How long can Boris hold the line on railway strikes?

Is the government’s approach to strikes and public sector pay too blunt? Today Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak took the opportunity of the Cabinet meeting to underline ‘the importance of fiscal discipline’. The Chancellor told the meeting that ‘the government had responsibility to not take any action that would feed into inflationary pressures or reduce the Government’s ability to lower taxes in the future’. That’s a roundabout way of saying to ministers (and the public, given this part of the private meeting was briefed out) that he’s not budging on public sector pay increases. It is a far cry from the ‘high wage, high skill economy’ that the Prime Minister was promising just months ago at the Tory party conference.

The meeting also saw Johnson condemning the rail strikes, saying ‘the union barons need to sit down with Network Rail and the train companies, and get on with coming to a sensible compromise for the good of the British people and the rail workforce’. Government sources are reasonably happy with the way the first day of the industrial action has gone, given two years of working from home for the white collar population has blunted some of the effects of the first day. One says: 

‘There is a productivity-driven fair settlement to be had. Talk of the government desiring a long series of attritional strikes to exhaust the RMT is nonsense.’

There are two problems for the government, though. The first is the polling out this evening that the public does blame ministers for the rail strikes, despite their repeated assertions that it’s down to the unions and the network and train operators, not them. 

Savanta ComRes released a survey that found a majority of voters – 58 per cent – think the rail strikes are justified, against 34 per cent who say they aren’t. But most strikingly, 66 per cent say the government hasn’t done enough to stop the strikes, with 61 per cent pointing the finger of blame directly at Transport Secretary Grant Shapps – and 57 per cent blaming Network Rail. The RMT is also criticised by 49 per cent. An Opinium poll for TalkTV found more of a split, with 41 per cent in favour and 42 per cent against.

The second is that it’s not just the rail sector where industrial action over pay and other conditions is an issue. Teachers, barristers and posties are also contemplating protests against the lack of wage rises to match inflation. And while it’s easy to point to some of the well-paid workers on the railways to dent public sympathy for those strikes, few think teachers are well-paid. The Opinium poll also found that 46 per cent of people are supportive of teachers striking, and 48 per cent of nurses and doctors (though they don’t like the idea of criminal barristers striking, presumably because most people assume they earn the same dizzy wages as their commercial colleagues). It is going to be much harder to hold the line on public sector workers like teachers.

But there are also fears that even the line on the rail strikes isn’t quite right. Robert Halfon, who has long pursued a ‘hug a trade unionist’ campaign, tells me that while he thinks the strikes are wrong and that the ‘union bosses have not covered themselves in glory in any shape or form’, there is a risk the public won’t be as supportive as Johnson and co. think. He said: 

‘What might bring the public on board is if we can do something for the lower-paid railway workers like the ticket inspectors and security guards and other people who are not on the much bigger salaries that they’ve tended to focus on.’

Halfon was once known as the ‘most expensive MP in the Commons’ because his campaigns on fuel duty were so successful. He knows – as well as Sunak and Johnson do – that the pay line is going to be hard to maintain. Which is why they were so anxious to talk about it at Cabinet.

P.S. Halfon’s comments first appeared in my Evening Blend email, a free round up and analysis of all the day’s politics. Sign up here

More than 3,000 Tube drivers earn £70,000 each

Londoners have today been cursing the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) trade union for the misery that its 24-hour walkout has inflicted across the capital. The strike is about a dispute with Network Rail and Transport for London (TfL) over pay, jobs and working conditions, with the RMT asking for a pay rise of seven per cent, which is lower than inflation but higher than that offered by employers.

It all comes down to the age-old question about how much staff should be paid for a day’s work. So it was with serendipitous timing therefore that Mr S received a Freedom of Information reply from TfL today about how much London Underground train operators or instructor operators are currently receiving in compensation. And it transpires that Tube staff are being paid up to £100k a year in salary, pension contributions, allowances and perks including season ticket reimbursements; though not any time off in lieu.

No less than 32 London Underground train operators or instructors are listed as being in the £80,000 to £99,999 category of total remuneration, including three who get between £90,000 to £99,000: more than the annual salary of some of the Labour MPs sponsored by the RMT in parliament. A whopping 3,056 train operators or instructors receive between £70,000 to £79,999. A further 158 qualify for the category of £60,000 to £69,999; higher than the £58,543 yearly salary of a Greater London Assembly Member.

These figures are taken from TfL’s payroll records until the end of April 2022: presumably they will be even higher come next year. Mind the gap, indeed.

China hawks demand TikTok answers

In Westminster these days, WhatsApp and Twitter are decidedly old school. Now the current craze is TikTok where MPs compete to gain followings through video clips. Zarah Sultana, the Coventry Corbynista, has the most TikTok supporters but the irresistible online app also has fans in at least two different Cabinet ministers’ households.

Not all in Parliament though are impressed with the firm, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance. Over the weekend, Buzzfeed News reported that leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings detailed Chinese-based employees of the popular video sharing app repeatedly accessing US user data. The audio suggested that in some situations US employees could not access user data and instead relied on Chinese employees to do so, according to BuzzFeed.

Elizabeth Kanter, TikTok’s director of government relations, appeared at the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee in March 2021. In response to questioning by Nus Ghani MP she said that ‘None of our user data goes to China’ adding subsequently ‘TikTok does not share user data with ByteDance in China.’ However Chinese law requires TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance to share its data with the Chinese Communist Party whenever requested.

This has led Ghani and others members of the China Research Group to demand answers from the social media giant. She said:

It’s looking an awful lot like Tiktok misled Parliament during my Select Committee hearing. I’ll be writing to them to demand an explanation, and if we fail to get one, I will be seeking ways to make clear to them that the UK Parliament cannot and will not be mocked in this way.

TikTok did not respond to a request for comment from the Telegraph on whether British users’ data could be accessed from China. However the firm told the newspaper that:

We know we are among the most scrutinised platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of US user data.

TikTok had been expected to announce that its non-US headquarters would be based in London but reportedly backed out of the plan in 2020 amid growing tensions between the government and China. Conservative MPs had called for it to store British users’ data in the UK as part of the plans.

Of course, that’s not the only business consuming the China hawks in the Commons. There’s also the upcoming All Party Parliamentary China Group (APPCG) summer reception. This event last year sparked something of a diplomatic row after the Chinese ambassador was barred from attending the reception on the House of Commons terrace after Ghani and other sanctioned MPs complained to Lindsay Hoyle.

This year the APPCG has wisely taken steps to avoid a repeat of such embarrassment, inviting MPs to a ‘location close to the parliamentary estate’ which will only be revealed to ‘registered attendees on the day’. Those going get to be joined by ‘UK and Chinese guests of honour.’

Will that include the ambassador? Might be nice for Beijing’s new man in London to actually get to go to one of these summer soirees…

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande misses the point of sex

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, the new film starring Emma Thompson, doesn’t know what sex is. It portrays a brief liaison between a widow (Nancy, played by Thompson) and a male prostitute as liberating for her, a blessed introduction to the world of sexual pleasure. The marital sex she knew was functional, orgasm-free (for her). Maybe religion’s to blame; she was an RE teacher. I don’t know if the film specifies whether she has a religious background, but it’s at least implied. And in an interview Emma Thompson blames religion for the shame that has denied so many people sexual pleasure.

Back to my opening claim. Such a plot entails a two-dimensional view of sex. The physical act, detached from an enduring relationship, is seen as something that brings pleasure, and indeed psychological liberation. And spiritual healing: she calls her liberator a ‘sort of sex saint’.

In real life, sex is two things. It is the act itself, and it is also something else: the desire for the fullest intimacy with another person. This is harder to talk about: it’s vaguer, and it’s linked up with soppy stuff about falling in love, and moral stuff about fidelity. But that second thing isn’t ‘sex’, you might say, it’s a context in which sex might or might not occur. No, that’s reductive and naive. In real life, sex is also this context, this wider desire, this framing of the act itself. It has this psychological and cultural dimension.

So sex is a problematic, contradictory coupling of two things. The problem is that sex in the narrower sense retains the power to destabilise sex in the wider sense, and can always claim to be the real thing.

Our culture would rather pretend that sex were simpler. Let’s pretend that the liberating power of sex can be located in the act itself, divorced from the stuff about fidelity and trust. In real life, it is sex in the wider sense that is psychologically liberating – that’s why most of us end up settling down, more or less. But saying so is not edgy, cool or well…sexy. And it might veer into moralism, and the seeming criticism of alternative lifestyles. And it’s not so easy to base a titillating film around it. 

So let’s pretend that sex in itself is good in itself, profoundly good, a liberating life-force, pure and true. Let’s pretend that casual sex, or sex with a prostitute, is the full whack. In reality such sex is not full sex, it’s semi-sex, for the other thing is lacking.

China’s increasingly authoritarian Covid pass

A Chinese health app, developed to enforce the Communist party’s draconian Covid-19 restrictions, is being repurposed to tighten political control on dissidents and others deemed to be troublemakers.

Only the very young and very old are exempt from the compulsory National Health Code System. The ‘traffic light app’, as it has been dubbed, assigns Chinese citizens a colour code: green, yellow or red to signify Covid infection risk. Those with green are free to move around; red can mean instant quarantine. The app requires users to submit information about their health status and other personal details, while at the same time harvesting online behavioural and location data. The precise way people are categorised is far from clear, but the authorities, including public security, have unfettered access. The information is managed by what are described as local ‘big data management bureaus’.

Cities are blanketed with automated code readers – at the entrances to underground stations, offices, malls, apartment blocks, banks and even in taxis. Movement is nigh-on impossible without a green code. Main roads into the southern city of Shenzhen have even been policed by drones hovering above traffic and displaying a QR code which drivers had to scan before being allowed entry.

But it seems that Covid isn’t the only thing that can affect your traffic light status. Earlier this month hundreds of desperate investors, victims of an alleged financial scam, were grounded by the app when they tried to travel to seek redress from a bank that had frozen their money. They had been fighting to get their savings back, but when they tried to reach the bank’s headquarters in Zhengzhou, they received red health warnings on their Covid-19 apps. These investors were then herded into quarantine hotels guarded by police and put on trains home the following day. Others never managed to leave home before getting the red light – even though they lived in Covid-free areas. They had shared their grievances online and had discussed travel plans on China’s heavily monitored social media.

A coincidence? Many in China don’t seem to think so. The plight of the Henan investors has attracted such widespread anger on social media that the party’s usually hyper-vigilant censors have struggled to erase it. One post likened the manipulation of the codes to ‘the plot of a dystopian novel that couldn’t get past the censors’. While another said, ‘Sooner or later, this sort of thing is going to happen to us all. Wake up people’. Even state media weighed in, blaming overzealous local officials. ‘If some officials abuse their position by turning healthy people’s health codes red, they are crossing a dangerous red line,’ said the newspaper China Daily.

Beijing is clearly worried that the outcry will undermine its zero-Covid policy, which is already facing unprecedented internal criticism, by shattering trust in the technology at the heart of it. ‘If speculation of the abuse of power to misuse the health code is allowed to circulate on the internet, it will generate damage to the government’s credibility,’ warned the Global Times, a CCP tabloid.

The action in Henan is not the first time the traffic light app has been used to suppress political dissidents. Late last year, Xie Yang, a Changsha-based human rights lawyer, tried to travel to Shanghai to visit the mother of a citizen journalist who had been jailed for reporting on the initial Covid outbreak in Wuhan. He was stopped at the airport and was thrown into quarantine when his app turned red, flagging him as high risk of the virus. His home city had no cases of the virus at the time. ‘The Chinese Communist party has found the best model for controlling people,’ he said shortly afterwards. In January he was detained and accused of inciting subversion and provoking trouble.

The CCP has already floated the idea of making the app permanent once its seemingly never-ending fight against Covid is over. In Hangzhou, where the traffic light app was pioneered, officials have suggested it become what they call a ‘personal health index’, with everybody required to carry it. The city’s Communist party secretary described the app as an ‘intimate health guardian’, without ever explaining how it would be developed beyond Covid.

China is not the only country where repressive technology has been adopted in the name of fighting a health emergency. The UK government nearly brought in its own vaccine passports – some officials openly praised China’s efforts – before dropping the legislation. Vigilance is needed everywhere to prevent emergency measures from being repurposed and made permanent.

China should serve as a warning, where the concept of good health starts with loyalty to the party. For the country’s deeply paranoid leaders, dissent is the ultimate disease.

Could Lithuania be Putin’s next target?

When Russian troops started ‘military exercises’ on Ukraine’s borders, those of us living in Kyiv had grounds to worry. Putin operates by bluff, disinformation and false flags. He blows smoke, but sometimes his troops march through that smoke. That’s why we ought to pay attention to reports on Russian state media that there are to be military ‘manoeuvres in the Kaliningrad region,’ the Russian enclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.

‘About 1,000 military personnel and more than 100 units of military and special equipment of artillery and missile units are involved’, says RIA News on its Telegram account. ‘Artillerymen and rocket launchers in Kaliningrad will carry out ‘several hundred firing missions’ using ‘Grad’ and ‘Uragan’ multiple rocket launchers, Hyacinth large-calibre cannons and self-propelled artillery units’, they add. There have been no official announcements to this effect; it may well be misinformation. But it fits a trend.

On Friday last week, Vilnius enforced EU sanctions that stop certain goods from being sent via EU territory – in this case, stopping Russia from sending building materials, steel and other metals via train to Kaliningrad. There has been recent discussion in Russian media about creating a corridor to the enclave – the so-called Suwałki Gap – to bypass Lithuania. Some regard this as Putin’s next military target and ‘Nato’s weakest point’.

The language in Moscow has been hardening. ‘This [goods blockade] can be assessed as direct aggression against Russia, literally forcing us to urgently resort to proper self-defence’, said Andrei Klimov, Russian senator. The agreement with the EU about simplified transit from Russia to the Kaliningrad through Lithuania has worked since 2002.

So what’s being stopped? According to the governor of the Kaliningrad region, Anton Alihanov, 40 to 50 per cent of trade between Russia and the enclave has been stopped by the EU. ‘This includes building materials, cement and metals,’ he said. Alihanov has also published a letter from the Lithuanian carrier LTG Cargo which explained that sanctioned goods cannot pass through EU territory even if they’re going from one Russian territory to another.

Moscow is threatening retaliation. ‘They must understand the consequences – and the consequences, unfortunately, will come,’ said an official from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Russia-1 TV.

Lithuania has emphasised that the decisions were made in Brussels, not Vilnius. Gabrielius Lansbergis, the foreign minister (recently interviewed in The Spectator) said, ‘First of all, these are not Lithuania’s actions, they are European sanctions… steel and other products made of iron will no longer be imported through Lithuania, in consultation with the European Commission and in accordance with its guidelines’. Here is Arvydas Anusauskas, Lithuania’s defence minister:

The European Union has taken restrictive measures on certain goods moving from Russia’s mainland to Kaliningrad (steel and similar metal products). This was called a ‘blockade’ by Russia. However, in reality, the transit of passengers and goods (food, medicine, etc.) that are not subjected to EU sanctions continue to be transported to and from Kaliningrad through Lithuania… let’s not lose the ability to separate the disinformation and propaganda from real possibilities.

When it comes to Russia, separating truth from propaganda is becoming increasingly difficult. Those living in the  Suwałki Gap risk being swallowed into Putin’s reality gap. 

Emmanuel Macron’s future looks bleak

The single headline across the front page of the centre-left daily Libération said it all: ‘La Gifle’. But much more than a slap in the face, Emmanuel Macron has taken a heavyweight sock in the jaw. With only 245 seats for his ‘Ensemble!’ grouping, the French president is a country mile from having a parliamentary absolute majority (289). Then there is the drubbing his lieutenants took with the ousting of three ministers, the president of the national assembly and the leader of his parliamentary LREM party. All lost their seats.

Sunday’s legislative results are a full-frontal humiliation for Macron personally, ideologically, politically and institutionally. Held in opprobrium, his globalist liberal ideas have been rejected and his Jupiterian political style and hyper-vertical management of France’s institutions scorned. Macron has run France constitutionally into a wall. The French regime will turn from being hyper-presidential to something far more parliamentary. But will the Fifth Republic’s institutions – designed by Charles de Gaulle to produce large governing majorities – hold, or will France be taken back to an unappreciated Fourth Republic split between three political groupings, unable to form stable governments and condemned to political immobilism?

Macron is crushed between radical left and right, despite proclaiming in 2017 that France under his beneficent management would eliminate extremes. Parliamentary majority aside, the president will be particularly concerned by the three opposition groups having over 60 seats each (RN 89, Republicans 61, La France Insoumise 72). This unlocks the constitutional holy grail of being able to demand a censure motion, to request the Constitutional Council arbitrate on the legality of parliamentary bills and pose weekly parliamentary questions to the government. And for the largest political grouping, constitutional custom traditionally hands it the presidency of the all-powerful Finance Commission, which other than overseeing the nation’s purse strings can also request any financial document, including individual tax returns for companies and individuals. There is every possibility of it going to the far left Nupes. That would send tremors through those demonised multinationals such as Total Energies or the big tech giants, not to mention France’s richest individuals.

Given there is little prospect of Macron dissolving parliament for fear of something worse, how can Macron govern? Some cite the example of Mitterrand’s prime minister Michel Rocard who, in 1988, was also short of a majority. He resorted to what one advisor and fixer called ‘governing in stereo’ – making deals with left then right to get legislation through. But Rocard was only 14 seats short; a mere bagatelle compared to Macron’s deficit of 44. Worse still for Macron, Mitterrand’s premier had the constitutional option of multiple guillotine motions to pass legislation without a vote, a nicety that has been seriously curtailed since 2009. Macron’s future will depend on how wily and creative he can be. But some see him as a lame duck president, should he even get to the end of his presidential mandate.

Emmanuel Macron’s worries do not stop at home. The coming week will see meetings of the G7, the EU Council and Nato, where Macron was hoping to push his agenda of avoiding Russian humiliation, arguing for more EU integration and greater EU defence. Regardless of his domestic travails, it would be surprising to find a contrite Macron. But in the international arena he is seriously wounded. 

Given Macron’s reputation for lesson-giving many leaders will welcome his plight. A sullen European Commission – despondent at the mauling given to their ever deeper integration champion – will be all the more depressed at the sight of so many Eurosceptic députés in the French National Assembly. Many of those new parliamentarians have been vociferously opposed to Macron and Brussels’ unrelenting attempts to overturn the people’s Brexit vote. And many EU states, not least in Italy, Brussels and Germany, may feel a warm glow at the French president haggling with opponents to build working majorities, as they have done over the years. Meanwhile in Eastern Europe some leaders will have smelt blood and may take this opportunity to push back on Macron and Brussels inspired EU greater harmonisation.

So the picture is bleak for the youngest president in the history of the Fifth Republic, in whom so much hope was placed in 2017. His hyper-presidency may come to resemble more and more the weak and largely ceremonial role of the Third Republic, of whom the great Georges Clemenceau said: ‘There are two organs that are useless: the prostate and the president of the republic’.