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Snafu at Slough House: Bad Actors, by Mick Herron, reviewed

Reviewers who make fancy claims for genre novels tend to sound like needy show-offs or hard-of-thinking dolts. So be it: here’s mine. Anyone who tries to understand modern Britain through its fiction but overlooks Mick Herron’s satirical thrillers merits a punishment posting to the critics’ version of Slough House. That noxious midden of a building opposite the Barbican, its leprous chambers groaning like ‘the internal organs of some giant, diseased beast’, is a sort of landfill site for failed spies. Herron first opened its flaking doors in 2010 with his novel Slow Horses.

Seven books later, his squad of borderline sociopath rejects from polite espionage has risen to the dignity of a luxury cast series on Apple TV+. But the sheer joy of Herron’s bunch of disgraced ‘weirdos and misfits’ comes not just from slyly booby-trapped plots and venom-tipped character drawing. Snappily paced, his comic prose fizzes with an epigrammatic chutzpah, softened by elegiac grace notes.

Meanwhile, magical thinking – or rather plotting – kicks in to ensure that Herron’s whipped underdogs regularly trounce the pedigree chums of privilege and power. If John le Carré’s secret agents played an almost gentlemanly ‘great game’ of Cold War subterfuge, the inmates of Slough House fester amid the debris of a chaotic new world order. Every division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ has melted into a rancorous, treacherous free-for-all of lethal office politics. In Bad Actors, a senior spook recalls the summing-up he added to the post-mortem on another botched op. It read: ‘Don’t use humans.’

Humans, alas, are all Jackson Lamb has on his books. He is the corpulent, flatulent, potty-mouthed ringmaster of the security service’s underperforming ‘slow horses’. Call him Falstaffian if you wish, although his repartee edges closer to Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown’s. In this outing, Lamb must outmanoeuvre Downing Street’s ‘home-grown Napoleon’ of a chief adviser, the ‘charmless bully’ Anthony Sparrow. A trophy ‘superforecaster’ hired by Sparrow has gone awol, while a top Russian spy slips into London as his Kremlin master grows reckless. (‘The closer he gets to the end of his reign, the more blood there’ll be in the gutters.’) Diana Taverner, icily scheming ‘First Desk’ on the respectable side of the spook business, remains Lamb’s go-to frenemy, as a tsunami-like ‘fetish for disruption’ rolls across Westminster and Whitehall. Herron’s capers reflect recent headlines as if in the trick mirrors of a run-down funhouse.

Mordant political takedowns alone would never give the series its legs. Herron, in Wodehouse or Pratchett mode, fashions a self-sustaining comic realm. His slow horses always screw up, but come good. They have a new recruit to torment – the dentist’s daughter Ashley Khan, whom Lamb greets by breaking her arm. (‘She’s still on about that? Bloody snowflake.’) In niftily choreographed fight scenes, the crew battle Sparrow’s thugs in Wimbledon and Dorset, though as ever it’s the line-by-line hits of patter and backchat – part-Noël Coward, part-Joe Orton – that spritz every page. ‘He’s a treasure,’ says Lamb about the tragic incel hacker Roddy Ho, one of his fallen stars: ‘I plan to bury him someday.’ Whereas Herron’s own tarnished stones look good to roll for many episodes to come.

A meditation on exile and the meaning of home

What does home mean? Where your dead are buried, as Zulus believe? Or where you left your heart, as a migrant’s saying goes? In these pages William Atkins melds history, biography and travel into a meditation on exile and the meaning of home. It is a volume for our times, as the author seeks to reveal ‘something about the nature of displacement itself’.

Part One introduces the three 19th-century political exiles who form the spine of the book. Louise Michel (1830-1905), the illegitimate daughter of a maid in Haute-Marne, became an anarchist and Communard, who murdered policemen with her Remington carbine. Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo (1868-1913), the young king of the Zulu nation, took up arms to resist southern Africa’s colonial overlords. The Ukrainian-born socialist revolutionary Lev Shternberg (1861-1927) committed himself to the overthrow of tsarism. All three were packed off to remote islands, each a banished exile similar to a Roman relegatio like Ovid, whom Atkins invokes.

In Part Two, the author, whose previous books include The Immeasurable World, an account of seven desert journeys, fills out the three periods of exile and follows in the footsteps of his rebels. In the French colony of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, 17,000 miles from Paris, Michel studied papaya jaundice and tried to farm silkworms. Dinuzulu departed for the British dependency of St Helena in the South Atlantic, 2,500 miles from home, travelling on a mail ship (as I did: in my case the last one, in 2016). There he and his 13-strong retinue hosted a party for Queen Victoria’s birthday. The St Helena Guardian praised Dinuzulu’s dignity. He wrote home: ‘I am like the fly wrapped round in the spider’s web, though its heart is yet alive.’

Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East, ‘a byword for bleakness and isolation’, lies 28 miles north of Japan in the Sea of Okhotsk. Shternberg went there, 11,000 miles from home. He devoted himself to ethnography and produced a study of the Nivkhi people, known to Chekhov as Gilyak: Anton Pavlovich made Sakhalin famous when he published a book on the penal colony in 1893 (he overlapped with Shternberg, but the pair never met).

Atkins is a character in the story rather than an agent of the material: in effect he becomes the book’s fourth protagonist, weaving his experiences with those of his subjects, making links between him and them (‘during their sea voyages they are freed to occupy a common realm outside space and time’). He is an amiable companion, deploying an engaging conversational tone (‘I have the feeling… ’) and positioning himself as far as he can from the I’ve-Got-a-Big-One tribe of white chumps in remote lands. At a party ‘in the absolute shade characteristic of banyans’ in New Caledonia, he hears a Kanak telling his neighbour: ‘If he [Atkins] doesn’t dance I’ll kill him.’

It is hard to jemmy travelogue into historical material. Even though the author labours at his links with determination and intelligence, the transitions don’t always work. The effort slows the narrative. But Atkins hears echoes of the past in the present – as the rest of us could all the time if we listened.

Michel emerges as the fullest character, because she left more primary material, notably a published memoir. Atkins marshals that and all his sources adroitly. He is an able writer, picking the fertile fact from the heap of negligible things. Michel’s friend Victor Hugo said he had to eat rat pâté during the Commune; Atkins has ‘latex sausage’ on the overnight ferry from Vanino to Sakhalin.

Part Three covers the post-exile periods. A crowd of 20,000 met the 50-year-old Michel and her five cats at Saint-Lazare seven years after she had sailed away. (Streets and schools carry her name today.) She continued living a public life as a radical activist, often from a prison cell. When the 38-year-old Dinuzulu steamed back to Africa after seven years on St Helena, his entourage swollen by progeny and five donkeys, a boundary commission had divided his kingdom into dozens of petty chiefdoms. Home was no longer home, and things went badly for him. As for Shternberg, away for eight years, Engels’s proto-ethnography had influenced him, and when the German read his Sakhalin field reports, he rejoiced that they supported the Marxist theory of social evolution. Shternberg’s Social Organisation of the Gilyak People came out in 1905.

Atkins says he was drawn to his subjects because ‘their lives were shaped by three winds that blow strongly today – nationalism, autocracy and imperialism’. He wrote memorably in The Immeasurable World about the migrant crisis, in that case the Mexican tragedy in Arizona. This new book ends with the assertion that his own nostalgia, evoked by the voyages described, is for ‘a country that no longer exists’ – his own, the sceptred one that for so long welcomed strangers and exiles: the safe harbour.

The problem with Nicola Sturgeon’s latest independence drive

The Scottish government will start refreshing the ‘very positive case’ for exiting the UK, Nicola Sturgeon said this week, in the aftermath of Scotland’s local council elections.

Can we expect anything radical to come out of this series of papers? Will there be a big departure from the last major overhaul of the independence pitch, the 2018 SNP-commissioned Sustainable Growth Commission report? That report advocated an emerging market-style currency arrangement – with Scotland unofficially using pound sterling for a prolonged period after secession – and a decade of austerity to put the new state’s public finances in shape. Perhaps Nicola Sturgeon will now drop this foolishness and push instead for a new Scottish currency on day one of independence, with a commitment to a massive borrowing programme in that new currency?

The other question is whether realism will finally replace wishful thinking. A truthful independence plan would accept the high probability of the new state dealing with a severe financial crisis in the months or even weeks after official secession day. It would reflect on the likely need for a raft of emergency measures, like capital controls to stem the flow of currency out of the economy, or special provisions for state sector employees and their families should the government find it impossible to pay their wages at any time.

Only one in ten Scots think another referendum should be in the Scottish government’s top-three priorities

There will of course be none of this. The new blueprint will most likely be much like the old ones: big on utopianism and short on pragmatism. There will be one difference this time, however, which is that even as the SNP has remained steadfast in its monomania, the world around the party has shifted.

Scotland today is in the grip of three national emergencies: the cost of living crisis, the post-Covid recovery crisis, and the climate emergency. Given this context, the idea that the country will put itself through another traumatic referendum within the next 19 months, and then cut its economy off from its central bank, currency base, treasury and expansive tax base sometime in 2025, seems preposterous.

Take just one of those crises: the post-pandemic recovery. This week Dr Graeme Eunson, chair of the British Medical Association’s Scottish consultants’ committee, described the situation in Scotland’s accident and emergency departments as ‘horrific’, stating that a workforce that was already stretched prior to the pandemic is finding it impossible to catch up.

Examine any part of the health service and you will find it on its knees. The latest Public Health Scotland report on waiting times for key diagnostic tests is frightening. Over 140,000 patients in Scotland are waiting to be seen for eight key diagnostic tests, such as endoscopies and MRI scans. Compared to pre-pandemic levels, the waiting list size is almost 60 per cent higher than the 12-month average prior to Covid.

This is a disease timebomb waiting to explode. It will take years of careful management, without rocking the boat elsewhere, just to get these services back on a stable footing. Yet Nicola Sturgeon insists that sometime in 2025 the key institutions that guarantee funding for Scotland’s NHS will be taken out of the picture and replaced with a central bank that cannot issue currency and a treasury that will be severely hampered in its borrowing capacity.

This is likely to be a decade of crises. The SNP-Green coalition plan to create another self-inflicted crisis via independence can only fairly be described as deranged. And that’s before we even consider the new challenges to western collective security presented by Russian aggression and the SNP-Green threat to the nuclear deterrent, which could destabilise Nato.

Thankfully, there are signs the people of Scotland have more sense than their current government. A new Survation poll, produced for the campaigning organisation Scotland in Union, finds that only 29 per cent of Scots agree with Sturgeon’s position that there should be another referendum before the end of 2023.

Only one in ten Scots think another referendum should be in the Scottish government’s top-three priorities, far behind the NHS (61 per cent), the economy and jobs (48 per cent) and Covid recovery (30 per cent). The same survey asked the question: ‘Should Scotland remain a part of the United Kingdom or leave the United Kingdom?’. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they would vote to remain, while 42 per cent said they would vote to leave.

There is no ambiguity as to what Scotland wants. It’s a pity the Sturgeon administration places its narrow ideological aims above the will and the welfare of the people.

Sadiq and Nicola’s American sojourns

Junkets are like buses: you wait ages for one to come along and then two do at once. For this month, it’s not just London mayor Sadiq Khan on a transatlantic taxpayer-funded jolly: Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon launches her American charm offensive next week too. Good thing that all is going well currently in both parts of the UK then. While both politicians sit for different parties in different assemblies, they both share a similar love of the limelight, with a penchant for selfies, statements and sojourns abroad. And it’s for that reason that both politicians are seeking to go above and beyond their constitutional remits on both their respective trips.

Take Sadiq Khan, the achingly right-on manager of the metropolis. As part of his five-day tour of the US, he is currently out in Los Angeles where yesterday he toured a marijuana farm and retailer. Khan’s visit signals that he will seek to push for legalisation of the class B drug, with the London mayor announced that Sir Keir’s chum Lord Falconer will chair London’s first commission to examine the effectiveness of drug laws in the UK. There is just one slight drawback: the mayor of London does not actually have the power to decriminalise drugs. Instead Khan merely ‘hopes that the findings will influence future government policy.’ Perhaps Khan might want to focus on tackling the crimes he is responsible for, rather than reviewing laws over which he has no jurisdiction?

Nicola Sturgeon meanwhile is very much the queen of deflection, having spent much of her leadership talking about every issue other than those in her remit. Her five-day ‘indy tour’ is set to see her meet with congressional groups to discuss ‘issues of climate, energy security and the war in Ukraine’ and ‘ways to create a greener, fairer and more equitable economy with executives of companies operating across the Atlantic.’ Lucky them. It follows the launch of Scotland’s Global Affairs Framework and a fresh push to spend Scottish taxpayers’ issue on yet another pet project. 

Steerpike can’t help but think however that such conversations in America are unlikely to be fruitful – given that foreign policy is a reserved matter, no matter how much the SNP pretends it isn’t. And while much of Britain’s fiscal fire power remains with Rishi Sunak’s Treasury, the nationalists in Scotland have shown remarkably little interest in playing with the tools already at their disposal, despite having the power to raise or reduce income tax. Nicola can meet as many chief executives as she wants but if the captains of industry really want a ‘greener, fairer and more equitable economy’ they may prefer to deal directly with the stewards of the world’s sixth best economy in London.

Is it too much to hope perhaps that either leader simply focus on the job they were elected to do, rather than gallivanting about on the world stage, pretending to be something they’re not? Mr S won’t hold his breath.

The SNP’s latest ferries farrago

Hurrah! A Scottish Government press release announces, with no small modicum of pride, that it has at last located the mysterious missing documents in the ferries saga. Audit Scotland, the public body which runs the rule over Holyrood’s spending of taxpayers’ money, recently conceded defeat over this matter. It had spent considerable time and effort trying get to the bottom of the SNP’s 2015 decision to buy two ferries from a shipyard owned by a Scottish Government economic advisor — against the advice of its own ferry agency. Seven years on, the initial cost of £97m has ballooned to £250m and neither of the ferries has been completed.

The outstanding questions were: who took the decision to award the contracts — and why? Ministers quickly pointed the finger of blame at former transport minister Derek Mackay, even though they were unable to find the relevant documents to prove it. Lo and behold, said documents have seemingly been located and, according to current transport minister Jenny Gilruth, ‘it shows that the decision was rightly and properly taken by then Transport Minister Derek Mackay’. Well, that’s most fortunate.

The emails suddenly found down the back of the Scottish Government’s digital sofa record that Mackay gave the go-ahead but also that civil servants waited to run the matter by deputy first minister and, at the time, finance minister John Swinney ‘to ensure there are no financial/procurement issues that he might want further reassurance on’. According to the emails, word came back the same afternoon, with another civil servant filling in the others: ‘Just finished my call with DFM. He now understands the background and that Mr McKay [sic] has cleared the proposal. So the way is clear to award.’

So Mackay may have been the minister signing off on the contracts but Swinney, then as now Sturgeon’s right-hand man, also gave the green light.

This purportedly answers the ‘who’ question but not the more pertinent ‘why’ questions. Why did SNP ministers award public ferry contracts to Ferguson Marine shipyard even after it warned them that it would be unable to provide a full-refund guarantee, a standard undertaking in the industry and one of the contractual obligations set forth in the agreements? Why did ministers disregard the advice of Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited, the government-owned ferry corporation, which cautioned against giving Ferguson the contracts? Why did the Scottish Government keep pouring money into Ferguson, both in payments and loans, even after the yard had shown itself unable to deliver on its end of the deal? Why are these ferries still under construction — with islanders told to expect further delays until next year — when Nicola Sturgeon ‘launched’ one of these vessels in 2017?

Mr Steerpike would like to hear the answers to these questions but equally he wouldn’t want them to occlude another, overlooked aspect of this scandal: the ocean-going (or, rather, ocean not-going) incompetence of the Scottish Government. In one of the latterly unearthed emails, a civil servant refers to the need to ‘confirm the absence of banana skins’. Sturgeon’s government steps on banana skins with a frequency the Three Stooges would have considered a bit ham. It’s not so much that ministers ignored official advice, wasted public money and ended up having to take a shipyard into public ownership, it’s that they are so inept they failed to document their ineptness properly.

Devolution was supposed to spotlight the best and brightest of Scottish politics. After 15 years of the SNP, Mr Steerpike is beginning to wonder if it has.

Is the bond bubble about to burst?

First, the good news: US inflation is down. Now the bad news: US inflation isn’t down by as much as a lot of people were expecting. Cue quite a lot of confusion on the markets. First, the S&P 500 plunged by 0.5 per cent, then it rose by 1 per cent, then it was more or less back to where it started the day. The FTSE100 has performed a similar gyration: first erasing its daily gain and then regaining it, to finish nearly 1.5 per cent up on the day.

So, is it positive or negative news that US consumer inflation has fallen from 8.5 per cent in March to 8.3 per cent in April? Today’s news can be used to support fears that the spike in global inflation is not merely transitory. It will have a long tail, even if oil and gas prices – one of the main drivers of inflation over the past year – have now fallen back a little. High inflation has reset expectations in the minds of manufacturers, retailers and employees alike: all feel in the mood for raising their prices to see what they can get away with.

On the other hand, today’s figures have proved right, for now, the economic forecasters who at the beginning of the year predicted that inflation would peak in April. Assuming that next month’s figures show another fall, then it will be easier to argue that the blip in inflation is just a delayed reaction to Covid lockdowns, caused by a rebound in demand and a constriction in supply – and that therefore central banks do not need to react with too much in the way of interest rate hikes.

But then we are in a weird age in which bad economic news often powers markets upwards and good economic news leaves them wilting. What would really please many investors would be if the Fed and other central banks suddenly switched from worrying about inflation to worrying about recession. That would lead to a fall in expectations over interest rates and lead many to hope that the bubble in asset prices of the past decade could be reinflated.

The other factor at play is that sooner or later investors are going to work out that if we end up with high sustained inflation and strongly negative real interest rates, stock markets are not such bad places to be. True, some companies have been hit in recent months as they have faced high raw materials prices, but it is clear from consumer price indices that many are finding it possible to pass at least some of that pain onto consumers. We have already seen this week how money has flowed into tobacco and consumer stocks – not only are they relative safe havens in a storm, they are not bad hedges against inflation.

It is in the bond markets where the misery ought to lie. For three decades the world has experienced a downward trend in interest rates, to the point at which investors seemed happy to lend to governments for many years into the future at next to zero interest. In some cases, they have even lent governments money at interest rates of less than zero. Now, we are going through a significant reset in expectations for interest rates – and it cannot be anything but devastating for fixed-interest bonds.

It is bond markets that have suffered the most today – while shares have weathered the inflation rise well. That might become a theme over the next few months.

Top US pollster: don’t ditch Boris

To the CPS, the think-tank home of Thatcherite free-thinking. On today’s agenda: a sermon from Frank Luntz, the onetime populist Republican sage now reborn as a crusader for cleaner politics. The master of political vocabulary – responsible for such terms as ‘death tax’ and ‘climate change’ – has seen the light and is in the UK to warn of the dangers of the anti-elitist populism he once championed. Luntz told an audience of assembled hacks today that the cost of living crisis is feeding ‘the rejection of democracy as we know it’ with disastrous consequences for the body politic in both Britain and America. 

The Coke-drinking Cassandra argues that a lack of political responsibility is corroding public life and that the elites in Washington and Westminster simply don’t understand the economic pain that many ordinary voters are going through. ‘It is a mistake to assume that the average individual waits for the declaration of a recession when they already think you’re living in,’ according to Luntz. Yet while many on both sides of the Atlantic are quick to link the name of Boris Johnson with that of Donald Trump, he believes his former university chum is far the intellectual superior: ‘Boris has written more books than Trump has read: there is a massive difference between the two, they’re really not the same.’ And Luntz – who went on an Oxford Union debating tour with Johnson in 1986 – was quick to speak in support of his fellow Oxonian, telling journalists that:

If I were a Conservative, I would be very wary about dumping the Prime Minister when he still has undeniable appeal among voters that had not voted Conservative before. There is something impactful about Boris that I don’t see in other Conservatives. That may not show itself in London or in the south but it absolutely shows itself in the Midlands and in the north. And I say this so carefully but it is accurate.

Luntz, though, is not an uncritical Johnson fan, given his fears about Britain’s direction of travel. Responding to last week’s local election results he said that ‘I didn’t see Labour trouncing the Conservatives’ but that ‘these are serious times and require serious leadership, it’s not a matter of toning anything down, it’s a matter of serious solutions and a serious approach. I use that word again and again because it matters that much. He should be who is he: he can’t be anything else other than who he is but there must be a serious component to it.’

For those in Westminster keen to learn more from the Pennsylvanian prophet and his warnings of doom: there is one ray of light among the darkness. Luntz is set to stay for a while in the UK, telling Mr S that, having conducted briefings on political disrepair for congressmen in Washington, he is about to begin doing the same here in London. He said: ‘I’ve not done it yet for MPs, that’s about to start’ adding ‘those who want to get to a successful conclusion have absolutely embraced this, those who want to make a statement rather than a difference, have not.’

Will Boris be signing up to hear his old Oxford mate warn him about the importance of responsibility in public life?

Why are progressives scared of Elon Musk?

Billionaire edgelord Elon Musk has just given progressives another reason to dread his ongoing attempt to buy Twitter. The founder of Tesla and SpaceX has confirmed that, should he succeed in acquiring the social media site, he would rescind the ban on Donald Trump’s account.

Musk told the FT’s Future of the Car conference he would ‘reverse the permaban’ because it was ‘a morally bad decision and foolish in the extreme’. Twitter had managed to ‘amplify (Trump’s voice) among the right’, which was ‘morally wrong and flat-out stupid’. The culprit, Musk said, was the company’s ‘strong left bias’, adding: ‘Twitter needs to be much more even-handed.’

It’s important to remember the grounds on which Trump was banned: two tweets posted on 8 January last year.

‘It’s okay when we do it,’ is the unwritten constitution of progressivism

The first hailed Trump’s voters as ‘great American Patriots’ who would have ‘a GIANT VOICE long into the future’ and would not be ‘disrespected or treated unfairly’. Twitter determined that the words ‘American patriots’ were ‘being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol’. The reference to his voters’ ‘giant voice’ and refusal to be ‘disrespected’ was ‘interpreted as further indication that Trump does not plan to facilitate an ‘orderly transition’’ and that he intended to ‘support, empower, and shield’ supporters who believe the election was stolen from him.

Trump’s second tweet, confirming he would not attend president Biden’s inauguration, was ‘being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate’ and additional indication that there would be no ‘orderly transition’. Twitter added that Trump announcing his non-attendance ‘may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the inauguration would be a ‘safe’ target, as he will not be attending’. Trump’s account was thus suspended ‘due to the risk of further incitement of violence’.

So the red lines, it seems, are potentially inciting violence and suggesting that an election result was arrived at illegitimately. What, then, has changed between January 2021 and today?

Something must have, otherwise how do we explain Twitter’s inaction in the face of a number of verified users, including prominent political figures, tweeting about the Supreme Court in language no less incendiary than Trump’s? After a leaked draft opinion indicating the Supreme Court was on the brink of overturning Roe vs Wade and Planned Parenthood vs Casey, progressives let fly with splenetic, vengeful rhetoric on Twitter.

Daniel Uhlfelder, the Democrats’ candidate for Florida attorney general, tweeted: ‘It’s time for a revolution’. It was a call echoed by Maria Shriver, a journalist and member of the Kennedy clan, who told her two million followers: ‘This is revolution time!’ Lori Lightfoot, the Democrat mayor of Chicago, tweeted: ‘To my friends in the LGBTQ+ community – the Supreme Court is coming for us next. This moment has to be a call to arms.’ She added: ‘We will not surrender our rights without a fight–a fight to victory!’

After a church counselling group had its Wisconsin headquarters set on fire, one verified journalist opined: ‘More of this. May these people never know a moment of peace or safety until they rot in the ground.’ Another posited a ‘real life trolley problem’, asking: ‘If you had the chance to kill Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the two oldest right wing Supreme Court judges, should you do it while Biden can get his nominees to replace them confirmed?’ When former Republican Bill Kristol disavowed mobs turning up outside Supreme Court justices’ homes, a celebrated cartoonist, also verified by Twitter, responded: ‘Fuck this. Go to people’s homes. Go to their places of worship. Make them as uncomfortable as they are trying to make you. This is not the time for civility, this is the time for mass resistance and demonstration.’

It will not surprise you to learn that none of these people have been handed a ban or, as far as I can tell, even a temporary suspension by Twitter. If the rules on inflammatory rhetoric are not applied evenly, there isn’t much hope when it comes to undermining democratic legitimacy. Incoming White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierrer has previously used Twitter to disseminate the false claim that the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was ‘stolen’. The Democrats’ narrow defeat in that race remains a sore point for progressives. The party’s candidate at the time, Stacey Abrams, has never conceded defeat and maintains ‘the game was rigged against the voters of Georgia’. Jean-Pierrer’s account – also verified and with more than half a million followers – seems not to have fallen foul of Twitter’s rules about spreading election disinformation.

‘It’s okay when we do it,’ is the unwritten constitution of progressivism, a standard incompatible with liberal democracy. If the rules apply to one side, they are not rules. They are partisan preferences dressed up as terms and conditions. Once you do away with common standards, you do away with the sense of agreement that underlies them. If there are no neutral spaces in which to debate, a series of self-contained arguments will take place and none of them will enjoy legitimacy.

I remain sceptical of a freedom of expression that depends on the benevolence of a billionaire to endure. But if Elon Musk does end up owning Twitter, he could hurt Silicon Valley authoritarianism by rejecting their intolerant caprices. Progressives who have faith in the strength of their arguments should have nothing to fear.

Can the Tories bounce back before the next election?

When David Cameron was prime minister, the Tories flirted with the idea of a Queen’s Speech with no bills in it at all. The aim was to show that more legislation was not the answer. This idea was quickly abandoned on the grounds that it would make the government look like it was out of ideas. This week’s Queen’s Speech contained 38 bills. Yet little of the proposed legislation will have made a difference to the most significant challenges facing this country by the next election.

The biggest issue for Britain, the cost-of-living squeeze, won’t be solved by legislation: inflation can’t be brought back to its two per cent target by a bill. But even so, the point of all these bills seems unclear. The legislative programme adds up to less than the sum of its parts and that’s because, post-Covid, the government hasn’t yet settled on a new raison d’être.

Levelling up is meant to be the defining purpose of this government, and there is duly a levelling up bill. It contains some sensible measures, including a plan to revive high streets by allowing councils to auction off the leases on shops that have been unoccupied for some time. But this bill won’t be transformative. There is a lack of urgency here. There’s no plan, for instance, to rapidly improve transport links from the most deprived towns to thriving cities nearby.

The alarm for the Tories is that it is hard to see where the good news comes from in the coming months

The Queen’s Speech may not change much, but that’s not to say Westminster itself isn’t in a state of flux. It is a sign of how centralised this country has become that so many in Westminster regard the principal function of local elections as offering a sign as to what might happen at the next general election. And last week’s results have begun to change the assumptions of Tory MPs, particularly southern ones, about what is likely to happen.

Before the local elections, the general operating assumption was that the next election would probably see a Tory majority, albeit one reduced from the party’s 2019 victory. But after last week’s vote, there’s beginning to be a sense that an anti-Tory majority might be more likely.

The Tories lost close to 500 seats in these elections. Conservative campaign headquarters had suggested that 800 losses was par in these contests, but that figure was really about expectation management. Most Tories thought the losses would be between 300 and 400 and were disappointed by the actual result. Their disappointment may well have turned to anger had the news not broken that Keir Starmer is being investigated by Durham police (as Katy Balls discusses elsewhere in this week’s magazine). ‘He has the luck of the devil,’ one Boris Johnson ally said.

Now, losing so many seats in mid-term after 12 years in government is not normally a harbinger of electoral Armageddon. The alarm for the Tories, though, is that it is hard to see where the good news comes from in the coming months. The Bank of England is warning of ten per cent inflation, and predicts the economy will barely grow in the later part of this year. As one member of the government payroll frets: ‘It is this bad before any of the really bad stuff has happened.’

It’s true that voters are not flocking to Starmer: across Britain, the Liberal Democrats gained twice as many councillors as Labour. But the worry for the Tories is that they have to win the next election outright because they don’t have any potential coalition partners. The Liberal Democrats won’t go in with them again, while the DUP’s ‘confidence and supply deal’ with the Tories is one of the reasons they have lost their position as the largest party in Northern Ireland. A sizeable number of southern Tories are worried that their seats are becoming vulnerable to the Liberal Democrats. One Tory with a small majority over the Lib Dems remarks: ‘I’m already written off in the minds of my colleagues.’

In 2019, the Tories could point to the dangers of a Jeremy Corbyn government. Any reservations these voters may have had about Johnson’s politics and style were trumped by their concerns about what a Corbyn government would mean for their finances and the nation’s defences. But Starmer is not alarming in the way that Corbyn was.

Tory MPs in Lib Dem targets think that the best chance of saving their seats is to find another way to make a Labour-led government a frightening prospect. One tells me: ‘I can only see one way to do this – you go really hard on the Union and Scotland.’ The thinking goes that because Labour are unlikely to win a majority on their own they will need the Scottish Nationalists not to oppose their Budgets and the Tories will suggest that they’ll have to offer things – including a second referendum – in exchange for this. One cabinet minister argues this will work because the idea of a strong Nicola Sturgeon pushing around a weak Starmer goes with the grain of how voters think about the two politicians.

The Tories are convinced that this tactic worked for them in 2015. They remember the adverts with Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond’s pocket, and think this helped deliver their surprise majority. This time round, though, Labour have quite some time to prepare their response. They also have the benefit of learning from Miliband’s mistake. He ruled out a formal coalition with the SNP, which allowed the Tories to say he hadn’t ruled out a looser form of cooperation. This time, Labour can say that they will offer the SNP no deals or favours, and that if the Nationalists don’t like that then they can let the Tories back in.

The next election is not likely to be until 2024; the Tories will want to give real incomes as long as possible to start recovering after this bout of inflation. Much can happen in the next two-and-a-half years, but the Tories cannot confidently claim that they are currently on course to win.

Does Macron dream of the Nobel Peace Prize?

Emmanuel Macron has taken it upon himself to tackle the delicate diplomatic situation of the war in Ukraine with fresh vigour following his victory last month. This week he addressed the EU parliament on the question of the future of Europe. France has the rotating presidency of the EU Council until June 30 and Macron therefore is the de facto head of the 27 member nations, a role for which his gargantuan ego is well suited.

The main takeaway from Macron’s address was the question of Ukraine’s application to join the EU. They began the process in February, days after Russia invaded, but any hope that president Volodymyr Zelensky had of his country being fast-tracked was quashed by Macron. ‘We all know perfectly well that the process to allow (Ukraine) to join would take several years indeed, probably several decades,’ he said. However, he did raise the possibility of Ukraine becoming a member of a ‘parallel European community’ in the interim.

This is classic Macron, what he himself admits is his ‘en meme temps’ (at the same time) philosophy. He first used it during the 2017 presidential election when he campaigned on a platform of being ‘neither left or right’. This was reflected in many of his proposed reforms which he promised would simultaneously do one thing as well as another. The cynic – certainly the British cynic – might describe this philosophy as fence sitting. This is an apt characterisation of his diplomatic efforts in trying to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

Macron knows he can’t usurp Boris Johnson as Zelensky’s favourite western leader, so what other role remains open?

This is a role that Macron embraced with relish in February as Russian forces began massing on the Ukrainian border. The French president embarked on a round of shuttle diplomacy, visiting Zelensky in Kyiv and also Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Macron’s willingness to keep engaging with Putin after he had ordered his troops into Ukraine led some, notably Britain’s Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, to suggest that ‘there is a whiff of Munich in the air from some in the West’, a reference to the appeasement of Hitler in the late 1930s.

Macron has argued that trying to bring both sides to the negotiating table, even if it means keeping open communication channels with Putin, ‘is not evidence either of complacency or weakness’.

Nonetheless Macron did break off his diplomatic efforts with Putin last month when it dawned on him that his international grandstanding was having a negative effect on his presidential campaign. Once he had seen off the challenge of Marine Le Pen he resumed his hotline to Moscow.

He and Putin spoke on 3 May, their first conversation since March 29 but their eighth since the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February. Three days before he resumed his dialogue with Putin, Macron had spoken to Zelensky and promised to increase military and humanitarian support. And yet he is still to visit Kyiv since the outbreak of war, unlike Boris Johnson and a growing number of political leaders. The French media find this curious and for the last month the president’s advisors have batted away questions about when Macron might offer his unqualified support to Zelensky in person. On Monday his foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, mocked the idea of his president visiting Kyiv ‘just to say hello to president Zelensky’.

There will be an element of vanity to Macron’s reluctance to head east; he’s the sort of man who likes to blaze a trail, not follow in the footsteps of others, particularly if the footsteps are British. Macron knows he can’t usurp Boris Johnson as Zelensky’s favourite western leader, so what other role remains open?

That of peace-broker. Given Macron’s colossal conceit he may even harbour faint dreams of a trip to Oslo in the not too distant future to pick up a Peace Prize. On Monday he was once again invoking his ‘en meme temps’ approach, warning that the West must not treat Russia the way it did Germany after the First World War. ‘We will have a peace to build tomorrow, let us never forget that,’ Macron said, adding: ‘The end of the discussion and the negotiation will be set by Ukraine and Russia. But it will not be done in denial, nor in exclusion of each other, nor even in humiliation.’

The risk, however, in adopting such a stance against a leader like Putin is that Macron and not Russia will end up humiliated. Perhaps the pertinent historical reference at this moment is not Versailles in 1919, but Munich in 1938. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was far more willing to trust Hitler than Édouard Daladier, the French premier. ‘Today it is the turn of Czechoslovakia,’ Daladier had warned in April 1938. ‘Tomorrow it will be the turn of Poland and Romania. When Germany has obtained the oil and wheat it needs, she will turn on the West.’

Shortly after giving his speech to the EU parliament, Macron embarked on his first overseas trip since his re-election. Perhaps inevitably, this was to Berlin for a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Few French leaders have been as Germanophile as the current resident of the Élysée, an attitude that is shared by many ministers in Macron’s government who, like their president, attended the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA).

Rare are the graduates from this finishing school for French technocrats, also located in Strasbourg, who emerge with anything other than unadulterated love for Germany and, by extension, the European Union. In paying Scholz the first visit of his new term in office, Macron will be hoping, amongst other things, to sweep him up and bring him onside in a unified approach to tackling the problem of Putin.

Chamberlain believed he knew better, just as Macron thinks today he is the sage of the West.

The perils of ‘Bidenflation’

Has inflation peaked in the United States? Today’s update from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the annual rate of inflation has fallen slightly, from 8.5 per cent in March down to 8.3 per cent in April. There are signs of slowdown in the monthly figures, too: prices rose 0.3 per cent between March and April, after rising 1.2 per cent between February and March.

The Democrats will struggle to hail this relatively small dip as any kind of meaningful victory


Still, markets don’t seem particularly encouraged by the news. US stock futures immediately took a dip when the figures landed. Emphasis seems to be on the fact that inflation once again outpaced predictions, with CPI up 0.3 per cent on the month, despite the consensus predicting a rise of 0.2 per cent.

There are still plenty of reasons to fret over rising prices. While a fall in the energy index contributed to the fall in the headline rate – gasoline prices fell by a notable 6.1 per cent last month – other prices continued to rise. Food increased by 0.9 per cent, while the food index rate on the year rose to 9.4 percent: ‘the largest 12-month increase since the period ending April 1981.’

Still, this news will delight President Joe Biden and his party, which is facing huge losses in November’s midterm elections due to what Republican opponents have successfully dubbed ‘Bidenflation’. With price hikes still hovering around a 40-year-high, the Democrats will struggle to hail this relatively small dip as any kind of meaningful victory, nor is there any guarantee today’s figures start a consistent trend. But if they do, it could mean a (slightly) better economic outlook by the time the elections come around.


And what do today’s inflation numbers mean internationally? The US inflation rate has consistently been ahead of the UK rate, though until now both have been steadily going up. Up 7 per cent on the year now, the Bank of England predicted just last week that inflation in the UK will peak in double digits this autumn.

Today’s news out of the States might lead to slightly more optimistic thinking, that the global circumstances causing many of these price hikes are starting to calm, but the driving force of lowering US prices – energy costs – may only just be kicking off on this side of the pond, as the European Union prepares to fully crack down on Russian oil by the end of the year. As Europe’s energy prices all but certainly rise, the knock-on effects will no doubt be felt in the UK too.

In defence of a British bill of rights

Amnesty International and Stonewall are no strangers to criticising the government. This week they’ve been at it again: blasting Dominic Raab’s plans to make adjustments to the Human Rights Act by replacing it with a British Bill of Rights. But they are wrong to attack an approach that most Brits will realise is perfectly sensible.

Raab’s plan, which was set out in the Queen’s Speech yesterday, is simple. Britain will remain in the European Convention on Human Rights when it comes to international matters, but when interpreting domestic laws, it will change its emphasis slightly. Our courts will be required to downplay decisions of the Strasbourg court, which has in the last 30 years or so interpreted the Convention in a remarkably free-wheeling way and correspondingly cramped national governments’ style. Strasbourg’s decisions will be a mere guide to the meaning of the Convention in Britain, with our judiciary ultimately responsible for interpreting it. This is surely a wise approach. and won’t lead to the dire consequences that organisations like Stonewall have warned about.

There is a prospect of a legislative shift in another area too: the balance between free speech and the press when it comes to privacy rights. In practice, Strasbourg has tended to favour the latter over the former, and the UK courts have loyally followed; most recently in the Sussex case, after the Court of Appeal upheld Meghan Markle’s privacy case against the Mail on Sunday. Raab proposes to flip the balance.

Why are organisations like Stonewall – as well as the dozens of others that signed the letter this week – so viscerally opposed to Raab?

So why are the likes of Stonewall – as well as the dozens of others that signed the letter this week – so viscerally opposed to Raab? Apart from a technicality regarding Northern Ireland, which is a special case on account of the Good Friday Agreement, the attack breaks down into three things.

First, that weakening the domestic effect of the Convention would undermine Strasbourg and question its legitimacy. Secondly, that it could cost the UK its position as a ‘global leader on human rights’ and risk making it more like Poland or Hungary; both are said to be ‘drifting towards authoritarianism’. And finally, that it would remove people’s ability to use the courts to confront failures by governments or public bodies to address their concerns: for example, police investigation of violence against women, or Northern Ireland’s failure to legalise abortion.

Look a bit more closely, however, and you might hear the agonised cry of the British progressive elite, scared that its comfortable ascendancy is under serious threat if Raab succeeds in turning over the subject of human rights to the ordinary political process. The European Court of Human Rights is an overwhelmingly liberal and cosmopolitan body. By nature it sees things in abstract and universalistic terms and views its function as gently nudging nation states towards its own enlightened world view. No surprise, then, if parts of the British establishment – who prefer to fight their corner through the courts rather than actually getting down and dirty with voters or politicians – view any transfer of powers over human rights back to Westminster with alarm.

But to most Brits, Raab’s plan comes across as a surprisingly grown-up and nuanced one. Asking all ECHR members to respect a degree of free speech and privacy makes perfect sense. But there is no reason why the boundary between them should not be radically redrawn in Britain, with its tradition of boisterous speech without too much regard to others’ sensibilities. Some countries, such as Germany, have a tradition of resolving political differences through the courts. But Britain is under no obligation to follow suit, or accept the view that the more important an issue of social policy, the more crucial it is to move it away from the ordinary political process and into the hands of judges supposedly protected from popular influence.

If this view is right, then Raab’s plan immediately falls neatly into place. The ECHR judges should take more of a back seat. In the camp of thought that civil rights ought, extreme instances aside, to be seen as largely dependent on national institutions and be interpreted consistently with them, it makes sense that the heavy lifting should fall to national courts when it comes to interpreting them.

Will the European Court of Human Rights swallow this approach? While it’s possible that Strasbourg could undermine the interpretation of the ECHR by Britain’s courts, repeatedly find against Britain and cause us embarrassment, the matter may be more nuanced. For one thing the judges of the Human Rights Court have sensitive political antennae; they might well use a good deal of guile to avoid any such clash. They would find it uncomfortable to be seen telling a democratically elected government that, because of its Bill of Rights, its press was too free for their liking and its victims had too few rights to suppress stories about themselves.

There is also another more veiled, but nevertheless important, point here. Raab has said that the UK intends to remain a party to the Human Rights Convention. Rightly so, for the moment. But this should not be an unconditional commitment: if Strasbourg continues to oppose clearly democratically legitimate UK legislation, calls to give our six months’ notice and denounce the ECHR entirely will make a hasty return. The judges in Strasbourg need to bear this, and the consequences of obstinately continuing to insist that Britain adhere to a one-size-fits-all conception of human rights, in mind. On this point at least, the ball will stay very firmly lodged in Strasbourg’s court.

The real reason for Putin’s intelligence shake-up

It has been reported this week that Vladimir Putin is shifting responsibility for covert operations in Ukraine to a different intelligence agency.

The Fifth Service of the Federal Security Service (FSB) has now reportedly been usurped by ‘military intelligence’ – still widely known by its old acronym of GRU, but actually called the GU, the main directorate of the general staff. Lt Gen. Vladimir Alekseev, first deputy head of the GU, is now expected to take over Russia’s intelligence capabilities in Ukraine.

To some this is evidence of inter-agency conflict and the decline of the FSB inside the Kremlin’s walls. But it is more likely that Putin is simply digging in for a long war.

It’s fair to say that Vladimir Putin isn’t prone to introspection. He certainly doesn’t appear to be willing to acknowledge his own blunders when it comes to the invasion of Ukraine. Nor does he seem to appreciate that shuffling the bridge crew of his personal Titanic is not going to stop his foundering ship from sinking.

The message of Putin’s Victory Day on 9 May speech was, in effect, that the war would go on and that Russians should prepare themselves for more deaths and a lot more economic hardship, because he has no intention of backing down from this brutal and pointless campaign. Reports of an intelligence shake-up must be seen in this context.

Putin doesn’t seem to realise that shuffling the crew of his personal Titanic is not going to stop his foundering ship from sinking

The claim that GRU is taking over comes from the well-respected journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, and is connected to an article on the nationalist Russian TV channel Tsargrad.

There certainly have been claims that the FSB has fallen out of favour lately, with Borogan and Soldatov also reporting that one of the agency’s deputy heads, Sergei Beseda, was under arrest, although he has since been seen back in his office. Certainly his part of the FSB, which handles overseas operations for what is primarily a domestic secret police agency, has not covered itself in glory. It was given a substantial budget to corrupt Ukrainian officials and public figures so that they would change sides on the day of the invasion, apparently to no avail.

Beseda presumably also joined the chorus of Kremlin officials who parroted before the invasion the ahistorical and politically-illiterate assumption that Ukraine is an artificial state and would welcome Russia’s ‘liberators’. But he would not have been alone in this. For years it has been clear that Putin – at least when it comes to geopolitics and especially his personal bête noire of Ukraine – is not interested in honest discussion, just wholehearted support from his underlings.

Maybe Beseda did need to be given a scare. After all, in such a system, the monarch can never be wrong, and if anything fails to go to plan, it must be because he was misinformed or his orders not carried out correctly. But otherwise there is little to suggest that the FSB as a whole is in the doghouse. Claims of a purge of a hundred, even 150 officers, have not been corroborated, and while FSB director Alexander Bortnikov is due to retire sooner than later on grounds of age and ill health, he remains one of Putin’s closest allies.

More to the point: of course the GU is going to come to the fore in the current circumstances. This is war. There is little room for the kind of sneaky subversion and bribe-fuelled influence operations in which the Fifth Service specialises. Politics in Ukraine has been virtually suspended, president Volodymyr Zelensky is for the moment untouchable, and to voice even the faintest support for Moscow in Ukraine is in effect treason.

The GU is broadly divided between what is called the Agentura, ‘the Agency’, which is its regular intelligence arm (think of all those well-groomed and personable ‘military attaches’ in its embassies, before so many of them were expelled) and the hard men of the Spetsnaz special forces. Alekseev is involved with the special forces, who have worked on sabotage, battlefield reconnaissance and ‘wet work’ – a euphemism for assassination (as in ‘wet’ with blood) – since the Soviet era.

This is exactly what the Kremlin needs at the moment, so it is not surprising that the GU and Alekseev are in the ascendant. We can expect more state terrorism, more cyberattacks, and more ‘wetness’ in general in Ukraine. But we can also expect the FSB to be carrying on its attempts to disrupt and undermine not just Ukraine, but the West in general – and the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, to continue spying and recruiting as best it can (considering many of its agents in western countries have been expelled).

Above all, this is a sign of Putin digging in. His dreams of a quick and easy seizure of Ukraine have been dashed, but he is not willing to acknowledge that he may have miscalculated. Instead, he is willing to throw every asset into the war and willing to squander everything Russia has in this vain pursuit.

When will Boris face up to the real challenges facing Britain?

It’s rarely a good sign when, moments after a major set piece event such as yesterday’s Queen’s Speech, the government’s PR machine kicks into overdrive to defend it.

Though Labour’s claims that Boris Johnson isn’t doing enough to support squeezed households were wearyingly predictable, the Tory narrative about turbocharging the economy and slashing EU red tape has quickly fizzled out. And Michael Gove’s surreal media performance this morning won’t do much to allay concerns that Boris’s government is up a creek without a paddle.

Brits are currently facing rising energy bills, inflation is forecast to hit ten per cent and wages are failing to keep up with the increase in prices. But while demands for politicians to ‘do more’ are gathering steam, the government has been achieving the opposite. As one Westminster think tanker pointed out yesterday: ‘the only growth the government is achieving is the growth of the state’.

The Queen’s Speech wasn’t all bad

The Queen’s Speech saw the announcement of 38 new bills. More than 3,000 statutory instruments – also known as secondary legislation – are being introduced each year. A few weeks ago, Conservative MPs were proudly sharing a Twitter card declaring the government was ‘getting on with the job’ because 19 acts had received Royal Assent. But what ‘job’ was it ‘getting on with’ when it introduced the Glue Traps (Offences) Act to ban the use of ‘inhumane’ traps for rodent control?

These laws may be introduced with good intentions, usually to the delight of interested groups and the ambivalence of the wider public. But we now find ourselves in a regulatory rachet, with politicians who define success by the number of new rules they can conjure up to limit ordinary citizens’ room for manoeuvre and expand the reach of the state.

It also leads to muddled thinking. Yesterday saw the introduction of a Bill of Rights to ‘enshrined freedom of speech,’ yet government also pressed ahead with an Online Safety Bill that will censor it. The continued inclusion of ‘legal but harmful’ speech in the latter bill could force Big Tech to clamp down on views that would be acceptable offline. New communications offences could force platforms to remove speech merely on the suspicion that it could cause psychological harm.

The Prime Minister insisted that government would ‘help families up and down the country’ with financial hardships, yet by extending the energy price cap, suppressing competition and picking winners it will commit households to higher energy costs for years to come. To make maters worse, there was no mention yesterday during the stream of announcements of childcare deregulation to help bring down sky-high costs for working parents.

Most disappointingly, references to planning reform concerned themselves with relatively minor and trivial issues rather than representing the ‘radical shakeup’ Boris Johnson had promised. Once again, the government has capitulated to NIMBY interests, giving credence to the idea that while the news cycle is ever-evolving there is one iron law of British politics that will never change: NIMBYs always win. Britain is still building fewer new homes per 100,000 people than comparable countries, a failure that exacerbates the cost of living crisis more than any other.

The Queen’s Speech wasn’t all bad. A Brexit Freedoms Bill will allow for the systematic reviewing and possible repealing of retained EU law. This is a necessary step towards reforming our regulatory environment. Reforms to data protection laws could be transformative. The proposed ban on buy-one-get-one-free deals on ‘junk food’ has been abandoned, though new advertising rules on ‘unhealthy’ foods appear to be going ahead.

Nothing was more welcome than the omission of measures in the Speech to further tilt the balance against employers: these haven’t been properly discussed and are likely to bring unintended consequences for jobs and pay. But the decision was met with fierce opposition from unions and HR professionals. Responding to the absence of an Employment Bill in yesterday’s Speech, the TUC’s Frances O’Grady claimed that ministers had ‘sent a signal that they are happy for rogue employers to ride roughshod over workers’ rights’. Apparently, ‘bad bosses’ will be ‘celebrating’. The reality is rather different: this is good news for businesses that are creating jobs in an uncertain economic climate.

The idea of controlling citizens is as old as government. But the notion of regulating citizens and markets is relatively recent. In Britain, this is done alarmingly effectively through the Equality Act and increase in labour market regulation. The number of Diversity & Inclusion roles surged 71 per cent between 2015 and 2020. According to LinkedIn, we now have twice as many D&I workers per capita as any other country. And the cost is huge, as businesses hire more and more HR workers to keep the wolf from lawyers’ doors.

Cuts in regulatory costs are as important as reductions in taxes, potentially freeing up tens of billions of pounds in resources for more productive use. The trouble is, politicians are being constantly pushed towards paternalism, with vested interests setting some utopian benchmark around the optimal activities of certain groups. But it is not utopian to risk driving up food prices in the name of ‘childhood obesity’, or compel businesses to pay workers more regardless of whether they can afford it. Nor is it moral to regulate the greatest tool for free speech yet created: the internet. Resistance might not be easy, but it is necessary.

Irish state broadcaster: Britain could invade

Relations between London and Dublin aren’t at their best, given the ongoing war of words about the Northern Irish Protocol. But Mr S was still nevertheless surprised to see that RTE – Ireland’s state broadcaster – has today published a comment piece by a leading academic and Guardian contributor which seriously floats the idea of a British invasion. According to Professor Cathal McCall of Queen’s University Belfast, the likely election of a Sinn Féin Taoiseach in the Republic of Ireland means that re-annexation could seriously become UK government policy. This will be achieved either the leadership of Boris Johnson or one of his likely successors.

McCall suggests that if, as the polls indicate, Sinn Féin becomes the largest party in the Irish capital at the next election then two possible trajectories are open to the government in Westminster. One is that the British government respects the ‘democratic decisions taken’; the other is that they do not and the republican victors are derided ‘as terrorists and bandits who are not fit for government.’ And it is here that he goes well off the deep end, painting a lurid picture of the incumbent Tory government as something akin to the worst excesses of the Putin regime. 

Winston Churchill, according to Cathal McCall, is Boris Johnson’s ‘lodestar’

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Winston Churchill, according to McCall, is Boris Johnson’s ‘lodestar’; Churchill only reluctantly relinquished control of Ireland in 1920 and thus, the argument goes, Johnson too might seek to reclaim Ireland for Britain. And if not him then, ‘his replacement – perhaps Michael Gove, Liz Truss, Dominic Raab, Jacob Rees-Mogg or Priti Patel – may have other ideas that do not necessarily take Irish history into account.’ He continues:

Should a Tory with British imperial delusions take charge, the odds shorten on a British reclamation of Ireland in response to Sinn Féin sweeping the electoral boards. Such a Tory Prime Minister, less than wedded to democratic principles, may well eye the size and purpose of the Irish Defence Forces and conclude that reclamation would be a doddle. No Provos roaming around the drumlins of South Armagh and Louth or lying in wait in the bogs of Tyrone and Monaghan to worry about either. No heroic Ukrainian-style resistance likely. And all done in the name of ‘peace and security’.

In this scenario, the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ ends up siding with North Korea, China and Russia to torpedo any UN motion of condemnation, despite the pleas of an ‘Irish government-in-exile’ being ‘holed up’ in New York.  Nato is apparently ambivalent and the EU indifferent. McCall’s justification for all this is that, er, ‘we live in tumultuous political times’ and that while such a course of action may seem ‘unthinkable’ supposedly ‘stranger things have happened.’

RTE makes it clear that the comment piece only reflects its author’s view. But the editorial choice to publish such a sensationalist piece is telling. Steerpike isn’t quite sure how such a scenario is expected to unfold, given the UK’s lack of interest in any kind of re-annexation since Ireland achieved its independence in 1922. How bleakly comic that the author himself works at the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice – named after the American statesman who championed the Good Friday Agreement. 

With academics like these, who needs firebrands?

BlackRock is right to abandon eco-activism

Is this the end of climate activism from pension providers and other institutional investors? BlackRock, which manages $10 trillion in assets, has toned down its enthusiasm for blocking company boards that are not sufficiently committed to a carbon-free future.

In January 2020, BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink shook up the world of investment by writing an annual letter to the CEOs of companies in which he invests, warning them that in future BlackRock would take a more critical view of their climate change policies. He wrote on that occasion:

Last September, when millions of people took to the streets to demand action on climate change, many of them emphasised the significant and lasting impact that it will have on economic growth and prosperity – a risk that markets to date have been slower to reflect. But awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance… These questions are driving a profound reassessment of risk and asset values. And because capital markets pull future risk forward, we will see changes in capital allocation more quickly than we see changes to the climate itself.

It is a timely reminder of what financial institutions are really for: generating returns for their investors

The message seemed to be clear: any company that appeared to be failing to prepare for a low-carbon future faced divestment by the world’s largest investment house. BlackRock would use its financial might to force quicker action on climate change. 

But that is an easier message to write when the oil price is in the doldrums and the share prices of fossil fuel companies are going nowhere. It is harder to sustain when oil and gas prices are surging, and oil companies have been the standout performers in what has otherwise been a pretty dire start to the year for investors. The company has just put out another note with a very different tone, warning its own activist shareholders that it will not be sacrificing investor returns in the name of making a stand against companies which it judges are decarbonising their activities too slowly.

Having supported 47 per cent of environmental and social shareholder proposals in 2021, the company notes that ‘many of the climate-related shareholder proposals coming to a vote in 2022 are more prescriptive or constraining on companies and may not promote long-term shareholder value’. In other words, we are worried that climate change action is going to cost us and our investors. It notes that the invasion of Ukraine has changed the dynamics and that in the short-to-medium term there is going to be an emphasis on reducing dependence on Russian oil and gas, requiring an increase in production for many countries. 

It is a timely reminder of what financial institutions are really for: generating returns for their investors. Sometimes, that objective might happen to coincide with the aims of climate campaigners – but equally, there are times when it will not. BlackRock can see all too well that it is not alone in having vast power to reallocate capital as it sees it – its own clients have collective power, too. And if they are not getting the returns they think they deserve, they will not hesitate to reallocate their own capital to funds that are delivering the goods.

The ingredient that guarantees the flakiest Eccles cakes

When I first made Eccles cakes, I’m not sure I really knew where Eccles was. I certainly didn’t think I’d end up living there a few years later. The only Eccles cakes I’d encountered were at train station coffee kiosks, or at London’s St John restaurant, where they are a permanent fixture on the menu.

Don’t tell my neighbours. In Eccles, the cakes are ubiquitous. They’re such a part of the regional identity that as far back as 1838, a guide to British railways journey stated simply: ‘This place is famous for its cakes.’ My kind of place. And today, whatever the season, Eccles cakes still line the entrances to the local supermarkets.

Eccles is a small town in Greater Manchester, formerly part of the country of Lancashire. Records show that the cakes have been produced in the area since at least 1793 – although, as with most regional specialities, they probably existed for a while before they made it into writing. Most likely they were made to celebrate the feast day of St Mary in Eccles, after whom the parish church was named. The first dedicated Eccles cake bakery opened in 1796 across from St Mary’s. The Real Lancashire Eccles Cake company, which has produced the local delicacies for the past 80 years, is still located a mere five miles away.

Despite its ‘cake’ name, an Eccles cake is closer to a pastry or a bun: a flattened round, containing a mixture of currants, zest and spice, bound together with butter and brown sugar. The filling, when assembled, is the texture of rubble, like a dry mincemeat. But when cooked and slightly warm, it is soft and butterscotchy.

Lots of recipes will make Eccles cakes with shop-bought puff pastry. Now I have absolutely no problem with buying puff, but the distinctive Eccles cake pastry is a different beast and a particularly lovely one. Unlike standard puff, it is traditionally made with a combination of butter and lard. If you’re vegetarian or merely lard-averse, you can replace that with butter, but I rather think that if you’re going to go to the effort of making something like an Eccles cake, where the pastry is such an important feature, you might as well go the whole hog, so to speak.

The lard isn’t just tradition, it’s there for a reason: lard melts at a higher temperature than butter, so it produces a flakier, more tender pastry, while the butter brings flavour and richness. These fats are grated coarsely into the pastry before the whole thing is folded and chilled – like a rudimentary (and far easier) puff pastry. It is easy to handle, and when baked it is robust enough to be picked up and bitten into, but not without showering the eater with crumbs.

The cakes are finished with a coarse sugar and three holes are poked into the top: traditionally to represent the holy trinity; prosaically, to stop the cakes exploding. The shop-bought versions are clean, with no sticky sugar overspill. Ever thing is neatly contained within. Homemade versions display their filling, which splurges out through the slashes in the top and dribbles down the sides to form crinkly skirts of dark caramel. That’s all part of the charm.

Enjoying the Eccles cake in modern times doesn’t come without risk. In 2013, Lancashire Fire and Rescue were forced to issue a warning after receiving three calls in three weeks about blazes being caused by consumers reheating the cakes in their microwaves. The sugar on top had caramelised and caught alight. The Real Lancashire Eccles Cakes company now place the caution on their packaging ‘Do not microwave’.

Of course, it’s right and proper that your Eccles cake is eaten with its traditional accompaniment: a generous slice of strong, crumbly Lancashire cheese.

Makes 9 Bakes 35 mins Takes 20 minutes plus chilling time

For the pastry

– 350g plain flour

– 1 tsp fine salt

– 150g butter

– 75g lard

For the filling and topping

– 75g butter

– 150g light brown sugar

– 200g currants

– 75g candied peel

– 1 tsp mixed spice

– 1 egg white

– 4 tbsp demerara sugar

To make the pastry, sift the flour and salt into a large bowl. Using the coarse side of a grater, grate the butter and then the lard into the mixture, stirring the fat curls in the flour intermittently so that they become coated. Add 150ml of very cold water and begin to mix the pastry using a knife. Stop as soon as the pastry comes together, since the aim is to keep pieces of fat in the mixture.

Lightly flour a surface, then roll your pastry into a rectangle half an inch thick. Fold each side into the centre to meet in the middle, then fold the whole thing again. Turn the pastry 90 degrees, roll to half an inch thick again and fold as before. Repeat this process twice more. Wrap the folded pastry tightly in clingfilm and chill it for an hour.

Heat the butter, currants, mixed peel, spices and sugar in a pan until the butter has melted. Remove from the heat, give it a good stir, then set aside to cool.

Preheat the oven to 200°C and line two baking trays with greaseproof paper. Now roll the chilled pastry to the thickness of a pound coin.

Cut nine 12cm rounds from the pastry. Place a heaped teaspoon of the filling in the centre of the round, then bring the edges of the pastry over the mixture, joining them in the centre and pinching them together to seal. Flip the cake over and gently rock it on the work surface to smooth the join. Place on the baking tray and flatten slightly. Repeat.

Make three slashes on the top of each cake with a sharp knife, then brush with a little egg white and sprinkle with demerara sugar. Bake for 30-35 minutes until puffed and golden brown.

Watch: Michael Gove’s bizarre media round

It was an unconventional start to the day for Michael Gove this morning. The veteran minister appeared on BBC Breakfast to deny whispers within Whitehall of an ’emergency Budget,’ slapping down such talk by using a bizarre array of accents that ranged from American to Harry Enfield’s infamous ‘Scousers’ impersonation. Gove told listeners across the country that:

We are constantly looking at ideas in order to ensure that we relieve the pressure on people who are facing incredibly tough times, but that doesn’t amount to an ‘emergency budget’, which is what some people immediately thought that it did. It is an example of some commentators chasing their own tails and trying to take a statement that is commonsensical, turning it into a major – capital letters – Big News Story, and, in fact, when the Treasury quite rightly say ‘calm down’ then people instead of recognising that they’ve overinflated the story in the first place, then say ‘oh this is clearly a split’.

Such was the performance that even Dan Walker, the BBC Breakfast host who grilled him, was moved to tweet: 

‘I’ve watched our interview back a few times now. Still trying to work out what happened. I hope Mr Gove is OK.’ 

The Secretary of State for Levelling Up has long been regarded as HM Government’s best media performer – but is that still the case? 

Boris Johnson’s spokesman would only tell the lobby today that ‘Michael Gove is an effective cabinet communicator. He uses a variety of means to get the message across.’ Pressed as to whether he uses similar accents in Cabinet meetings, they replied drily ‘not in the ones I’ve been at.’ 

Given his known love of clubbing, perhaps the Surrey MP has had one night out on the town too many.

Merkel is turning into Blair

Angela Merkel left the German chancellery at the end of last year with a bunch of flowers, a standing ovation in the Bundestag, a fist bump from her successor Olaf Scholz, and an approval rating of 68 per cent. Rarely for a national leader, she left office on her own terms, remaining Germany’s most popular politician until the week she stepped down, set to become the country’s elder stateswoman.

Less than three months later, Russia invaded Ukraine – immediately throwing her legacy into doubt. The 21st-century Germany she built is extraordinarily dependent on Russian energy thanks to years of dovish engagement with Vladimir Putin’s regime, placing German business interests firmly above concerns from eastern EU allies. It is proving a disastrous mistake – and one that is still constraining Berlin’s willingness to support Ukraine.

Merkel is starting to look like a Tony Blair figure, lauded in power but whose legacy quickly collapses after leaving office

Merkel herself has said little since leaving office. She maintains she won’t be hitting the after dinner circuit for a while and will instead focus on writing her memoir. But in her one public intervention since leaving the chancellery, she defended her decision to keep Ukraine and Georgia out of Nato in 2008, a decision that went against the wishes of then US President George W. Bush and eastern Nato allies like Estonia. Merkel, along with French President Sarkozy, was reportedly concerned that the two countries weren’t yet stable enough and that quick accession could stoke tensions with Russia. Putin went on to invade Georgia only a few months later. Last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky blamed Merkel for emboldening Putin. ‘I invite Ms Merkel and Mr Sarkozy to visit Bucha and see what the policy of concessions to Russia has led to in the last 14 years,’ he said.

In some ways, Merkel is starting to look like a Tony Blair figure, lauded in power but whose legacy quickly collapses after leaving office. The two post-Cold War politicians represented a meet-in-the-middle brand of third way politics. Both leaders once seemed politically unstoppable. Now, 25 years after his 1997 landslide, the debate over Blair’s legacy remains charged. As Blair continues to give media interviews on everything from higher education policy to Ukraine, Labour party elites argue over whether his endorsement is useful for the current Labour leader Keir Starmer. That’s quite a remarkable turn of events: Blair is the only Labour leader to win a British general election since 1974.

As with Merkel, Blair’s biggest failure was in foreign policy. Many in Britain followed Blair’s lead at the time. Some 54 per cent of Brits surveyed in 2003 thought the decision to go to war in Iraq was right. In 2015, just 37 per cent agreed. Similarly, Merkel’s dovish Russia policy found wide support among the German public before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made the consequences of Merkelist foreign policy so painfully clear.

Polls conducted since the Ukrainian invasion show that most Germans now support a harder line on Russia than at any point in modern history. Surveys regularly find majority support for harder sanctions, heavy weapon deliveries to Ukraine, and independence from Russian energy. Some 83 per cent now consider it important for Germany to become less dependent on China – a strong repudiation of Merkel’s long push to deepen business ties with Beijing. Before the invasion, the public largely opposed sending weapons to Ukraine and was divided on whether Russian military posturing should be met with harder sanctions. A public that once bought into Merkel’s pragmatism, placing business interests at the heart of German foreign policy, is now seeing just how short-sighted that strategy was.  

Having come to power in 2005, Merkel sat across from Blair at many diplomatic summits in the early years of her chancellorship. She was the last major European figure to have shared the political arena with him. She may now be experiencing a similar fate to her fellow centrist leader: as history marches on, her fellow countrymen may become ever more disillusioned with her legacy.

Even the WHO has turned on China’s zero-Covid strategy

Covid infections are finally falling in Shanghai. The city reported just over 2,000 cases on Tuesday, down from over 27,000 at its peak a month ago. Yet instead of regaining their freedom, locals have been hit by tighter lockdown restrictions. Even the World Health Organisation, which typically shies away from criticising China, is urging Beijing to rethink its approach. Its director Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he does not think China’s Covid policy is ‘sustainable considering the behaviour of the virus’. But President Xi Jinping is blocking his ears.

Over the weekend, reports emerged of people in Shanghai being taken into quarantine simply for living in the same building as positive cases. The hashtag ‘One person tests positive, whole block gets quarantined’ went viral on Weibo. In some areas, local authorities have reportedly started a so-called ‘quiet period’ where even delivery drivers are not allowed to drop off food, while others are breaking through doors to get to residents who refuse to budge.


But despite the growing anger in Shanghai – and the criticism from the WHO – China’s Politburo standing committee has doubled down on zero Covid. In a statement last week, it said: ‘Perseverance is victory’:

Meanwhile in Beijing, which is facing its own battle with Omicron, there are growing signs of unease about zero Covid

‘Practice has proved that our prevention and control policy is determined by the nature and purpose of the Party, our prevention and control policies can stand the test of history, and our prevention and control measures are scientific and effective.’

Politics, not science, now appears to be driving the mind-boggling tightening of Shanghai’s restrictions as infections fall. Xi cannot countenance a U-turn and ambitious apparatchiks lower down the rungs are keen to please him. Shanghai’s party secretary Li Qiang had been tipped to become the new Chinese premier this autumn (Xi Jinping’s de facto deputy), but that was before Shanghai’s Covid shambles made headlines around the world. Promotion is out of the question now. Li’s hope is that he might still save his career, only if he follows the Politburo’s instructions to the letter.

After Xi met the Politburo standing committee, the Shanghai party committee under Li Qiang held its own meeting just hours later, resolving to ‘transmit the spirit of the standing committee meeting’. A statement it released shortly afterwards made it clear that Papa Xi’s Covid strategy isn’t going away:

‘Under the firm leadership of the Chinese communist party with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, with the support of the whole country, the whole city must grit our teeth, determine our target, keep pressing on, strike while the iron is hot, and we can definitely claim victory over the great defensive battle for Shanghai’. 

Barely two days later, ordinary citizens who’d never even come in contact with a positive case were being taken into quarantine. 

Even card-carrying members of the CCP are outraged. Professor Tong Zhiwei, a constitutional lawyer at a Shanghai university and a CCP member himself, went viral on Sunday when he published a letter calling for an end to ‘excessive pandemic prevention’ in order to avoid a ‘legal catastrophe’. It was signed by over 20 academics. The professor pointed out that it was illegal and unconstitutional to forcibly move people into quarantine when the country’s highest authorities had not declared a state of emergency. His Weibo account (400,000 followers) and the letter itself have now been censored.

Meanwhile in Beijing, which is facing its own battle with Omicron, there are growing signs of unease about zero Covid. Cases appear to be under control at the moment, but schools and some non-essential shops are already closed. CCP cheerleader Hu Xijin, who was editor of the nationalistic tabloid the Global Times until last year, took to Weibo to question this strategy:

‘I fervently hope that Beijing can be a breakthrough in pandemic control. Zero Covid is very important, but it will only be meaningful if we can afford the costs of zero Covid… If Beijing cannot control Omicron with this method, and the virus continues to spread, then I feel that Beijingers have to accept that cruel reality, and the country must also. We definitely cannot continue to use infinite lockdowns… to maintain the low transmission of Covid.’

Hu’s post was deleted. But the well-connected journalist’s post raises a question: how split is the CCP over Xi’s zero Covid agenda? Last week’s Standing Committee memo felt it necessary to explicitly warn: 

‘We must resolutely struggle against all words and deeds that distort, doubt and deny our epidemic prevention policies’. 

These words are aimed at the growing number of Chinese willing to speak out against zero Covid. But how long can the government continue to silence its critics? The absurdity of the situation has been unwittingly but perfectly summed up by one angry policeman. In a confrontation with residents in Shanghai who were refusing to be quarantined, the hazmat suited copper shouted

‘Stop asking me why. There is no why.’