Russia, Ukraine and the forgotten exiles of the 1920s

At the end of 1920, a mass exodus of Russians from their homeland after the Russian civil war created a humanitarian catastrophe. ‘Never in the history of Europe has a political cataclysm torn such huge numbers of people from their mother country and their homes’ remarked émigré journalist Ariadna Tyrkova Willams. In the West there were widespread concerns about how European nations would cope with the massive new influx of refugees.

Today, a century later, the war in Ukraine has prompted an equivalent number of politically disaffected Russians to leave their country – in barely half that time.

History seems to be repeating itself. And the great exodus of Russians in 1920 holds many parallels for the exiles of today – both from Russia and Ukraine – who will be facing the similar trauma of leaving their country behind.

Those who could manage to get out in the first days of the Bolshevik revolution were mainly members of the aristocracy. But in the autumn of 1920, as the last remnants of General Wrangel’s White, anti-Bolshevik forces were driven south, a vast wave of desperate and dispossessed civilians fled the country as well. These people left with little more than a few hastily packed bags and their last few tradeable possessions. They could be seen desperately begging and bartering for safe passage out of the southern ports of Odessa, Novorossisk, Sevastopol and Yalta – by any means available.

A thrown together fleet of old tsarist ships, merchantmen and French and British warships took the remnants of the defeated White Russian army and thousands of these civilian refugees across the Black Sea to Constantinople. For a while it became a Russian city, overcrowded with Russian refugees in transit to the European capitals of Berlin, Paris, Prague, Rome and London.

At the time it seemed like an invasion: 65,000 Russian refugees settled in Berlin and as many as 35,000 in Paris by 1926 – rising to 43,000 by 1930. But most Russians seeking refuge from the new and brutal Bolshevik order believed that their life in exile would only be temporary. Even as they had scrambled on board the boats for Constantinople they grieved at the thought of abandoning their Russian homeland forever and could not stop talking about how soon they might return.

As Ukrainian and Russian refugees may find now, life in exile proved harsh. Many were depressingly impoverished. And over time their hopes faded that the Soviet Empire would collapse as they succumbed to ‘that deep unutterable woe/which none save exiles feel’, as poet William Aytoun once wrote.

Meanwhile, one of the worst aspects of the Russian emigration of 1920–21 was the catastrophic loss to Russia of the best and brightest of the old pre-revolutionary Russian elite –­­ writers, philosophers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, professors and professional classes who had formed the bedrock of the old intelligentsia. In 2022, we can see this happening again, with the departure from Russia of many talented professionals and political dissidents opposed to Putin’s war in Ukraine. Many young men are fleeing, fearful of being conscripted into the army; others dread being trapped behind the new Iron Curtain that is now rapidly shutting off Russia from Western Europe and with it the opportunities for cultural, intellectual and political exchange.

This haemorrhaging of the best and brightest of young intellectual Russians could have serious repercussions. Business professionals, academics, scientists, doctors are now leaving Russia. And the loss of IT specialists in particular will be sorely felt in the country. The arrival of this latter group is rapidly turning Yerevan in Armenia into a Russian technical-hub-in-exile. One might hope that many of these highly skilled new Russian exiles will fare far better than their compatriots in the 1920s forced to wait tables and wash dishes in Paris. It seems unlikely that they will succumb to the kind of despair experienced by writer Ivan Bunin’s wife, Vera, who wrote with dread in 1920: ‘I never thought that I would have to drag out my life as an émigré’. But she did, as did so many of her fellow Russians who never saw their homeland again. Today’s emigres at least can stay in touch with home, thanks to the internet, where, in contrast, the people of the diaspora of the 1920s-30s, thanks to stringent Stalinist censorship, were starved of news of family and friends back home.

In contrast to the more proactive and positive Russians leaving now as a result of the war in Ukraine, the Russians forced out by the revolution who formed a community in Paris between the wars were worn down by unmendable and often petty, political divisions – a hangover from the tsarist days – but also by poverty and the reduced circumstances in which they found themselves. Although the French people had initially offered them a refuge with some compassion, feelings changed with the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the economic downturn in France. Resentment toward the large Russian community in Paris grew; there were accusations that they were stealing the jobs of French nationals and had become a drain on state welfare funds. With a serious economic crisis looming in Europe, this poses a warning for today. Might attitudes begin to change toward Russian refugees, as well as to the millions of Ukrainians who have flooded into Europe?

In the 1920s the Russian emigration was described as Zarubezhnaya Rossiya ­ – ‘Russia Abroad’ – by those who lived it, a concept that many clung to to signify the temporary nature of their separation from the homeland. But as the older generation died, their children slowly but surely assimilated, learned French and lost that desperate romantic longing to go back.

According to the UN as many as 2.1 million Ukrainians have returned to their country since fleeing the war. This allure of the homeland was familiar to Russian exiles in the past. For some Russians in Paris, the despair of exile became so profound that a few took the risk of returning to the Stalinist Soviet Union. But the Russia they had once known was of course now irretrievably changed. One of the most notable, and tragic, returnees was the gifted poet, Marina Tsvetaeva. A difficult personality, she had become increasingly isolated in Paris, where she had settled in 1925, finding it impossible to survive financially. Against her better judgment she was persuaded to return in 1939, in the hope that her poetry would be better appreciated in her homeland only to find herself cold-shouldered by the conformist Soviet literary establishment. During the war she was resettled in a writers’ colony in Central Asia. Here, rejected, financially desperate and broken, she hanged herself in August 1941.

We can only hope that the exiles of today avoid a similarly dark fate. While western countries have opened up their homes to fleeing Ukrainians they should remember that the process of assimilation and recovery will take far longer. The tragic stories of Russia’s 1920s exiles show how difficult that will be.

What if the Ukraine war is never won?

In late March, roughly a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an unnamed Nato official told NBC News that the conflict was turning into a meat grinder for both sides. ‘If we’re not in a stalemate, we are rapidly approaching one,’ the Nato official said at the time. ‘The reality is that neither side has a superiority over the other.’

Sure enough, a month and a half later, the Pentagon’s top intelligence official testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘stalemate’ is exactly what is occurring. ‘The Russians aren’t winning, and the Ukrainians aren’t winning, and we’re at a bit of a stalemate here,’ Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said on May 10.

That assessment continues to hold two weeks later, as the battlefield in Ukraine’s Donbas region comes to resemble a bloody seesaw. The Russians spend a day acquiring one kilometre of ground, only for the Ukrainians to counterattack shortly thereafter. Maps dividing which party controls what territory often look identical by the week — if there are changes, it takes a microscope to spot them.

Now in its fourth month, the war is a slog on both sides. According to a recent British defence ministry intelligence assessment, the Russians have lost as many soldiers in Ukraine over the last three months as the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan in nine years — about 15,000 personnel.

While we don’t know how many soldiers Ukraine has lost in the fighting, we can say with certainty that Russia’s bombardment has left the country in ruins. Mariupol, once a city of nearly half a million people, is a pile of debris and ash. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest metropolis, around 25 per cent of the buildings have been destroyed. The Ukrainian government is calculating an astounding $600 billion in infrastructure damage so far. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says as many as 100 Ukrainian troops could be dying in combat every day. At the time of writing, Ukrainian forces holed up in Severodonetsk, a mid-sized Donbas city of 100,000, are vastly outgunned by Russian artillery lobbing explosives at an unlimited list of targets.

A painful stalemate like this can, over time, pressure the combatants into exploring peace talks. But the key phrase there is ‘over time’. The three months of war have taken an unquestionable toll on Ukraine’s civilian population (as many as 20,000 civilians may have died in Russia’s siege of Mariupol), but there remains a euphoric feeling among the Ukrainian people that military victory over the Russian occupiers is still a possibility.

There is now deep resentment, if not hatred, across Ukraine’s eastern regions (even amidst Russian-speaking Ukrainians) of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. This resentment adds fuel to the Ukrainian political elite’s more uncompromising position about what is and isn’t acceptable vis-a-vis a peace settlement.

While Zelensky recognises that the war will only end ‘through diplomacy’, he is on record opposing any territorial concessions to Moscow in order to end it. Indeed, hours after Zelensky made a reference to diplomacy, his chief negotiator rejected the notion that ceding territory was an option and even questioned whether handing over the Donbas to Putin would be enough of an incentive for the Russian president to call his troops back. There is a strong feeling within the Ukrainian government that territorial concessions will simply whet Putin’s appetite for land. It’s a hypothesis that pundits in the West, the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum especially, have used to support their argument that nothing short of a full victory for Kyiv is appropriate.

That argument is popular inside the Washington Beltway, feeding the narrative of a morality play, where the good and righteous David slays the evil and bloodthirsty Goliath. In the context of Ukraine’s war, however, Goliath still has a lot of firepower at his disposal, is willing to use that firepower recklessly, and is as convinced of its ability to succeed as Ukraine is convinced of its ability to resist.

Putin could have used his Victory Day speech earlier this month to throw out a diplomatic olive branch. The fact that he didn’t do so speaks volumes, not only about his stubbornness and the insularity of his inner-circle, but also about his mindset — losing, or even the appearance of losing, is unacceptable and won’t be tolerated. By making the invasion the cornerstone of his two-decade legacy as Russia’s leader, Putin has cornered himself like a crazed cat, where clawing his way out is the only thing standing in the way of being caught. And the more insistent Kyiv is about a military victory, the more desperate Putin will be to fight as hard as he can to avoid a defeat.

Wars end in one of two ways: one side overpowers the other, or the battlefield becomes so fruitless and costly that the combatants decide to sit down and end it through a negotiation. Alternatively, you could have a frozen conflict, where the parties learn to live with the facts on the ground even as they stonewall each other (think Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Nagorno-Karabakh and the Donbas between 2014 and February 2022).

Ukraine’s story is still unwritten. But as the war settles into a familiar pattern and both sides continue to treat diplomacy as a chore best left to some later date, the frozen conflict route is looking like the best of bad options.

What the Tiananmen Square massacre teaches us about Xi’s China

As millions of Brits celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, others will be gathering outside the Chinese Embassy in London to mark a different event: the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Beijing has done its best to wipe this day from the history books, but it’s vital we don’t forget an event that has foreshadowed the direction the Chinese Communist Party has taken in the years since.

33 years ago on the streets of China’s capital, we saw the true nature of the Chinese regime as it turned its guns and tanks on thousands of peaceful protesters.

‘They were shooting, people were running, and people tried to rescue others,’ said Jan Wong, a veteran Canadian journalist who was in Tiananmen Square on the day of the massacre. ‘They brought out bodies on bicycle seats and pedicabs. They just ran into gunfire’.

Wong saw the infamous ‘Tank Man’ scene – when a single protester faced down the Chinese army – unfold in front of her: ‘The army had been running people over, and I had watched the tanks. Then my husband pointed to this man standing in front of a tank…I saw this whole dance between ‘Tank Man’ and the tank. He tried to stop the tank like a soccer goalie. Then he climbed onto the tank, tried to talk, then climbed down again, then he melted into the crowd’.

If Tiananmen taught us anything, it’s that authoritarian leaders can never be trusted. In a year in which China’s President Xi looks set to extend his reign once more, it’s a lesson worth remembering.

Throughout the early 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, China appeared to be opening up. Despite the bloodshed in 1989, the subsequent two decades heralded an era of relative liberalisation. Of course the Chinese Communist Party remained repressive; dissidents continued to be locked up during this period. But Beijing allowed some space for independent media and bloggers to operate.

Some years ago, I met some Chinese human rights lawyers in a restaurant in Beijing and heard of their work defending religious freedom, labour rights and land rights. They knew where the red lines were; they knew they were under surveillance, but within certain limits they could work freely.

Over the past decade those freedoms have evaporated. Around the time of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the Chinese Communist Party began to feel threatened, and started to crack down. That fear grew in light of the world’s ‘colour’ revolutions and the Arab Spring, so that when Xi Jinping was chosen as China’s new leader in 2012 the regime was poised to severely step up its repression.

What we have seen since has amounted to a series of subtle, slow-motion repeats of the 4 June massacre: genocide of the Uyghurs, the dismantling of freedoms in Hong Kong, the worst persecution of Christians since the Cultural Revolution, forced organ harvesting, increased atrocities in Tibet and growing sabre-rattling against Taiwan. Even those outside China’s borders aren’t safe: Beijing has adopted an aggressive attitude towards those who dare criticise it, wherever they might be in the world.

We should have learned 33 years ago that a regime that turns its guns and tanks on its own people is at its very heart a brutal, inhumane and rotten tyranny that is an enemy of human liberty. For many years and with grave naivety we thought China could change.

The past decade of Xi Jinping’s rule has provided us with a stark reminder that the regime that starved tens of millions during the Great Leap Forward, killed millions in the Cultural Revolution and murdered at least 10,000 in 1989 is the same regime that has incarcerated at least a million Uyghurs and persecutes and represses million of other people across China.

Today in China, very few under the age of 30 have any memory of the tragic events of 1989, and the regime, through its sophisticated censorship and propaganda, has done its best to ensure that will remain the case.

Even in Hong Kong, which only a few years ago enjoyed relative freedom, the regime seeks to erase memories too. Until two years ago, Hong Kong was the only place in China where June 4 could be commemorated. Now all vigils, church services and other memorials are banned and statues have been torn down. That makes our commemorations in Britain of the dreadful events of June 4 1989 all the more vital.

Are we heading for a Platinum Jubilee recession?

Occasionally I despair of my own profession. Even economists should be able to enjoy a long weekend. Yet some of us are stuck debunking commentary on the economic impact of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations – much of which justifies the old tag of the ‘dismal science’.

The long Jubilee weekend will indeed mean that economic activity, as usually assessed, is lower than it would otherwise have been. The output and income lost due to the temporary shutdown of most businesses will only partially be offset by increased spending in other areas, or recouped later.

We have, of course, been here before. The monthly measure of UK gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 2.2 per cent in June 2002 (during the Golden Jubilee celebrations), and by 1.7 per cent in June 2012 (the Diamond Jubilee).

A similar fall of around 2 per cent in June this year would be equivalent to a hit of around £4 billion. This could also be enough to ensure that UK GDP contracts in the second quarter as a whole (from April to June), encouraging more talk of a ‘recession’.

But does this really make any sense? Good economics should be about people’s happiness, as well as pounds and pence. It is hard to put a monetary value on the boost to wellbeing, or community spirit. Nonetheless, I suspect most people would say the celebrations are worth a brief dip in GDP.

Needless to say, not everyone will get into the Jubilee spirit. The usual halfwits are already out in force on social media, comparing the bunting in Regent Street to ‘Nazi Germany’, or suggesting that street parties are a tacit celebration of slavery (yes, really!).

But the sceptics are also free to take time off to do their own thing – even if that is just to moan about the Monarchy. They seem to enjoy that too, which is fine by me. There are also some more conventional economic reasons why this Jubilee is more likely to pass the test of a cost-benefit analysis.

The UK is only just emerging from one huge crisis – the pandemic – and is in the midst of another – over the cost of living. The benefits from the lift to morale could therefore be greater now. The retail, hospitality and events sectors could also all do with an extra boost.

On the costs side, some people and companies will earn less, and tax revenues may fall. But the household sector as a whole (not everyone, obviously) has built up a significant amount of savings during the pandemic, which will help to tide people over.

The argument that the Jubilee disruption makes a ‘recession’ more likely does not stack up, either. This partly depends on what you mean by ‘recession’. In the US it would be defined as ‘a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months’. The temporary hit from a long weekend break would not meet this criterion.

In the UK it is more common to talk in terms of two successive quarterly falls in GDP. Here, the Jubilee celebrations might drag down one quarter, but actually make it more likely that the economy records positive growth in the next. This is what happened in both 2002 and 2012 (albeit helped, in the latter case, by the boost from hosting the Olympics).

But in any event, this is surely the wrong way to think about what is happening in the real world. If ‘recession’ has any meaning it has to be something bad, where people are harmed in some way, such as losing their jobs, or being forced to cut back on spending. Taking time off for a jolly street party hardly counts.

Every country has national festivals from time to time – in fact, usually more often than we do. If another country, say, France, celebrated a major event with flags and bunting, and this happened to cause a temporary fall in GDP, would we really say they were worse off as a result? I don’t think so.

So enjoy the Jubilee festivities – and please be kind to any economists that you bump into!

When will companies end their embarrassing Pride hypocrisy?

June is Pride Month, the annual exercise in rainbow-washing, and if you listen very carefully you may even hear gay rights mentioned. You might be familiar with Pride Month from past years. On 31 May, the bank is offering you a fixed rate with a four per cent APRC; on 1 June, it wants you to know that, on the off chance you’re non-binary, your mortgage-lender thinks that’s valid.

The most obvious way for a corporation to signal its commitment to inclusivity is to emblazon its corporate branding with the Pride flag, but this is increasingly fraught with difficulty. Because, you see, the Pride flag is no longer inclusive. It’s a gay symbol, after all, and gay men and lesbians rank just below white people and non-graduates in The Current Ideology’s hierarchy of villainy.

Some brands get around this by using the Progress Pride flag instead and, speaking of banks, HSBC has gone down this route. Alas, progress is a fast-moving thing and while the Progress flag boasts additional stripes in blue, pink and white (trans pride) and brown and black (‘people of colour’), it isn’t as progressive as the Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride flag, which adds a purple ring on a yellow background. Of course, this in itself is a symbol of oppression because it fails to incorporate the flags for polysexuals (those attracted to many genders) and polygenders (those who are many genders). If HSBC can’t get simple stuff like this right, how am I supposed to trust them with my reward current account?

These vexillological questions are particularly vexing at present because Pride Month coincides with the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. This poses a problem for the conscientious progressive because it is very important to spend the next few days complaining about a surfeit of Union Jacks and how their ubiquity is literally the Nuremberg Rallies all over again. These progressives are not keen on the national standard — they are educated, after all — and declaim those weirdos who actually like their country as ‘flag shaggers’. There is not, as far as I’m aware, a pride flag for people who like to shag flags but give it time.

While signalling that investing your identity in the UK flag is cringe, progressives must also signal that investing your identity in the Pride flag is awesome and anyone who objects is cringe. It must be exhausting to be these people. Particularly if any of them happen to live in Nelson, Lancashire, where the town hall is flying not the Union Jack but the Palestinian flag this weekend. We need a definitive guide on flag etiquette. LGBTQ flag: good. Palestinian flag: good. LGBTQ Palestinian flag: I wouldn’t try it in Gaza.

The woke flag-shaggers get very protective of rainbow-washing corporations. It’s a welcome sign of progress, you know. Only a contrarian would object, you bigot. Okay, then. A question: what percentage of companies rebranding in Pride colours this month did so when it was still commercially risky? It’s nice that Exxon Mobil has the Progress Pride flag in its Twitter header, but you know what would’ve been nicer? If the oil giant hadn’t been so slow in introducing robust protections for gay and lesbian employees. Only in 2015, after President Obama made such protections a prerequisite of getting US government contracts, did frequent US government contractor Exxon change its policy.

Hoisting the Pride Flag has as much to do with sincere solidarity as McDonald’s adding salads to its menu has to do with genuine concern about obesity. It is about selling a product under a new brand. Speaking of the Golden Arches, here’s what their Pride Month press release has to say:

‘At McDonald’s, we’re proud to celebrate, support and uplift our LGBTQ+ communities throughout the year. After all, our values hinge on inclusion and integrity, meaning we open our doors to everyone and we do the right thing.’

Doing the right thing apparently includes licensing a McDonald’s franchise in Saudi Arabia, where the penalty for homosexual acts ranges from flogging to beheading. I’ll be honest, I’m not lovin’ it.

I suppose all this Pride rebranding just reflects the power of the pronoun pound, but it would better if corporations were honest about their intentions. The performative progressivism is embarrassing, especially since it seems oblivious to the fact that the internet exists. Your LGBTQetc customers can see when you rainbow-up your corporate logos in gay-friendly markets and studiously avoid any mention of Pride in countries where it might lose you customers or get on the wrong side of the government. (Yes, I’m talking about you BMW UK vs BMW Middle East, Starbucks vs Starbucks Indonesia, and LinkedIn vs LinkedIn India.)

One side effect of the gender wars is that the forced marriage of sexuality (lesbian, gay, bisexual) to identity (transgender et al) is finally breaking up. There is no unified ‘LGBT community’ and as this necessary coming apart progresses, it will become more difficult for woke capitalism to appeal to all sides. They had it good for a while there, but corporations are going to get less and less return from pandering with a flag that alienates more people with every gaudy stripe added. I would like to suggest a new strategy: stop reducing your customers and your employees to their sexual orientation or their ‘gender identity’, as though that was the be all and end all and the decisive factor in choosing a coffee, a car or a workplace. Don’t worry about our flag or who we shag. Just sell us your wares and don’t discriminate against us. We ask nothing more.

Boris booed at Queen’s celebrations

Tory plotters have been keen to stress that any plans to oust Boris Johnson as Prime Minister are strictly on hold during the Platinum Jubilee weekend. But that doesn’t mean Johnson’s political woes are going away.

The great and the good were at St Paul’s Cathedral for the Queen’s Jubilee Thanksgiving service this morning. While the Monarch herself was unable to attend, Priti Patel, in a bright pink dress and hat, Keir Starmer, in his usual blue lounge suit, and Sadiq Khan, in tow with his wife, were among those in attendance.

The event, though, was not exactly the smooth operation that organisers had hoped for. Five Royal Air Force soldiers, who were rigidly standing by as guests walked into the service, collapsed in the cathedral’s grounds. One was sprawled on the stairs as the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss arrived, and, to gasps from those watching on, another fell onto the concrete as the Lord Mayor’s procession went in to the service. Ouch.

The Prime Minister didn’t have the easiest time either. The thousands-strong crowd, which had been giving an approving cheer to every other attendee, turned when Boris and Carrie Johnson arrived. Loud boos rang through St Pauls’s grounds. Supporters of Boris Johnson gave been keen to stress that there were also cheers.

Given the pro-monarchy audience are more likely to be conservative supporters than those assembled at, say, an extinction rebellion protest, it made for awkward viewing.

When the service finished, guests were invited into Guildhall, London’s town hall, for a drinks reception. Cameras lingered on the Prime Minister as he was seen clutching a cold gin and tonic. Much needed, Mr S reckons.

The witch trial of Amber Heard

For the first few weeks of watching Johnny Depp and Amber Heard attempt to turn each other into twelve cans of cat food, it felt like some silly if savage sideshow. But as the defamation trial dragged on, it became obvious there was something unusually grotesque about this case; as with a boxing match, turning the spotlight on the audience revealed even more ugliness than that which was taking place in the arena.

Samuel Butler wrote about his friend Thomas Carlyle: ‘It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.’ Both Heard and Depp would appear to be nightmares to be married to – but there was a very real imbalance in the abuse aimed at each of them. As we have seen from the casualties of the culture wars, women who speak out are far more likely to be savaged and shunned than men for saying the same thing.
I’m by no means a shivering snowflake seeking a safe space, but the reek of misogyny surrounding this case was revolting; Team Johnny, Depp’s fans were labelled, as though this harrowing tale of marital violence was some soft-ball sport. And it wasn’t just men doling out the denigration – there were a whole set of Depp groupies who, like the ever-present Bully’s Best Friend, may be lacking in brawn and brain but will be there cheering twice as hard from the sidelines to make up for it. What does it say about women who metaphorically throw their knickers at a man who called the mother of his children ‘an extortionist French c***’ in a message to Elton John?

Equally icky were the texts between Depp and his mate Paul Bettany (‘Darling’) during which the former suggested ‘Let’s drown her before we burn her!!! will f*** her burnt corpse afterward to make sure she’s dead’ and the latter agreed ‘My thoughts entirely. Let’s be certain before we pronounce her a witch.’

Females who are fine with this kind of gynophobia are the type of half-wits who drool over podcasts picking over the gory details of the violent deaths of women or who write love letters to serial sex killers. They’re the sort of dunces who unconsciously believe that if they ally themselves with violent men, that violence will pass them by and fasten onto some other woman. As for the male section of the geek chorus baying for Heard’s blood, theirs was a decidedly ‘incel’ vibe – men who have far less sex than they’d like delighting in the demonisation of a beautiful woman of the kind they’d never stand a chance with. The prejudices of the jury aligned with a legal system which – according to a 2019 report by the crime and justice specialists Crest Advisory – inflicts harsher punishment on women than on men, with only 15 per cent of women sentenced to prison committing serious offences compared with 27 per cent of men, and which, as the Victims Commissioner Dame Vera Baird said in 2020, has ‘decriminalised’ rape. All this while police harass women for daring to tell the truth about biological sex.

That tired old straw man, that ‘men are domestic violence victims too’, was dragged out yet again. Two women a week are killed by partners and ex-partners. According to the latest figures from the Office For National Statistics, these make up 44 per cent of female murder victims compared with 6 per cent of male murder victims. Hatred makes strange bedfellows and while those who rail against Amber Heard think of themselves as proudly unwoke, wokeness has given misogyny a new energy, with the now familiar sign of screeching young masked men threatening uppity women – ‘TERFS’ – with violence, sexual or otherwise. We’ve been told to mistrust White Women’s Tears and White Women’s Fragility and Pretty Privilege; that a woman who reports a rapist can be contributing to Carceral Feminism.

This was a vicious case of hurt pride pursued by a pathetic Peter Pan who grew up to be Captain Hook – a pantomime grotesque, pushing sixty and still dreaming of rock stardom. A man accustomed to looking into the mirror of women’s eyes and seeing his beautiful young self reflected back met a woman who refused to be complicit in his self-deception – and millions of fellow self-deceiving also-rans felt his self-inflicted pain. Many men rejected by a pretty woman, and many women rejected by a man for a prettier woman, found their feeding frenzy in the smorgasbord of spite that has sparked the immolation of Amber Heard. Maybe it’s true that Gentleman Johnny was ‘only joking’ when he chuckled about burning and raping his wife – but this was truly a witch-trial and, if they could burn Amber Heard, I have no doubt that the monstrous mob who idolise this sad excuse for a man would do so. The true shame in this sorry tale – no matter what a show the principal players made of themselves – is theirs.

Parly passholders splash £10k a week on booze

After the lean years of Covid, there were fears for the future of the parliamentary bars in Westminster. Would they ever return to their former greatness as the social hubs of SW1? Fortunately, the removal of all restrictions from the end of January and the resumption of full-time service has prompted a roaring trade in the half-a-dozen fleshpots of parliament.

For in the first eight weeks of normalcy, the Commons cash-registers recorded an impressive £82,000 worth of sales between February to March to 2022. More than £10,000 a week was made flogging everything from pints of the ultra-popular guest ale and Guinness – which boasted £8,376 and £6,582 worth of respective sales – down to 17 champagne cocktails eight Kir Royales and two Camparis.

Indeed trade, if anything, has been a little too roaring perhaps: parliamentary gradees have written to MPs to tell them to stop letting inebriated staff from kipping overnight in their offices to sleep off a hangover. But for those concerned about drinking on the estate, it seems that Commons managers have now stumbled on a solution: price increases.

Following a hike in bar costs in April, sales slumped at watering holes in the Palace of Westminster, down to just over £16,000 for the entire month. Only 153 different types of alcohol were sold although an improvement in the weather coincided with a changing taste in beverages as sales in Pimms and Rose became popular once more.

Perhaps the parliamentary barmen ought to adopt a new slogan over their bars: are you drinking what we’re drinking?

Never explain, never complain: The power of Her Majesty’s silence

The Queen’s Christmas message in 2002 was unusual. She explained, briefly, her approach to her role. One could even say that she ‘opened up’:

‘Each day is a new beginning, I know that the only way to live my life is to try to do what is right, to take the long view, to give of my best in all that the day brings, and to put my trust in God.’

Her Majesty has spoken countless times subsequently. Her collective speeches have included many hundreds of thousands of words. In which, paradoxically, she has said very little. If asked to quote our monarch of seventy years, many of us would immediately jump in with two words: ‘Annus Horribilis’. And then struggle horribly.

I asked a colleague renowned for his encyclopaedic knowledge of speeches. He remembered  ‘Grief is the price we pay for love’, her beautiful, stoical observation on the passing of Prince Philip.  He also recollected her promise made on her 21st birthday in 1947: ‘I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.’

It would be safe to say that amongst the tea towels, key rings and tea-sets on sale in this Platinum Jubilee year, we are unlikely to find a book entitled ‘The Queen’s 21 most inspiring speeches’.  Or even her 21 most memorable quotations.

This is, of course, not something that has happened by chance.  Our monarch made an early and eminently sensible decision to lead by example. To retain the mystique of the monarchy. To be seen but not heard. To never explain, never complain. In the early stages of the broadcasting age, this showed considerable vision. In the context of social media it has become essential.

Her willingness to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune means the greatest celebrity of our age is also the most respected. She has not only understood that actions speak louder than words, ironically a maxim first articulated by that master orator Abraham Lincoln, but she adhered to it throughout.

How unfortunate for her then that almost every crisis to embroil her monarchy under her watch has been fuelled by her family failing to heed her example. Her husband’s foot was, notoriously, never far from his mouth. Her eldest son and heir has been teased for his conversations with plants, ridiculed for his desire to be reincarnated as a tampon and lambasted for ‘whatever ‘in love’ means’, his timeless gift to best men the world over.

And then came Harry. Calling his Asian army colleague a ‘Paki’ was probably the nadir of his single days. Originally he stumbled into faux pas. Now he prepares them carefully. He has described the First Amendment as ‘bonkers’, his father’s parenting as not making sense and his life of neglect. He has announced that ‘I like to think we were able to speak truths’, even when these truths seem a little delusional. In April we discovered that he popped home to see a grandmother who tells him things ‘she hides from others’.  He also wanted to ensure she was receiving the right protection’. 

Harry rolls out words, and with them, yet another layer of the Royal family’s aura and dignity is peeled away. As he boasted of his special relationship with the Queen, she remained silent.

We are subsumed by rhetoric. Never before have so many had the technological platform to address us in our own homes. As public speakers, it becomes increasingly difficult to be memorable for the right reasons. Speeches are stripped for soundbites. Gaffes go viral. Some, like President Zelensky, still manage to shine. Many more flounder. A rare few have taken the opposite route by understanding that the best way to make their point within this maelstrom of noise, is not to add to it.  

When she does speak, the Queen’s points are made with the opposite of a flourish. They represent an attitude and an approach rather than any attempt at rhetorical flair. Which, in essence, is her greatness. An ability to treat the two imposters with unruffled calm. 

In seventy years on the throne, she has only given four formal addresses to the nation. Each time, we listened. Ronan Keating of Boyzone sang ‘you say it best when you say nothing at all’.  As a piece of communications advice for modern royalty, it is unmatched in its good sense. If any member of the family can vouch for that, it’s Harry’s Uncle Andrew.

How are five million Brits without work?

Last week, I came across a figure so staggering that I was convinced it was wrong: 5.3 million Brits (almost the population of Scotland) are on out-of-work benefits. How could this be, with ministers so regularly boasting that unemployment stands at a 40-year low? How could it be, when a national shortage of workers has been declared – and the aviation industry has been begging the government to relax immigration rules, saying that we’re out of workers?

I’ve spent this week looking into it, with the help of my brilliant colleagues in The Spectator data team, and look at this in my Daily Telegraph column today. What is an “out-of-work” benefit, and why is the total more that twice the official unemployment count? How big a factor is Brexit? Is the lack of workers a lockdown-related glitch that will resolve itself, or is it starting to look (a lot) more serious?

The whole picture is still being formed, but here are some pieces of the puzzle.

Brexit can’t be blamed for the worker shortage – immigrants now make up a record 19 per cent of the UK workforce. Even I had assumed that Brexit had hit our supply of migrant labour: that certainly seems to the consensus amongst employers. Steve Heapy, chief executive of holiday firm Jet2, said this week that ‘Brexit has taken hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people out of the employment market and that undoubtedly is having an impact. You hear this quite a lot: during the fog of lockdown there were reports of EU nationals going home and not coming back. But ONS data points to an unbroken momentum of immigration (defined as foreign-born) rising from 7 per cent of the workforce when Blair came to power to 19 per cent now. A record high as a proportion, and also in absolute numbers. The inflow is now back to the old days. So no, Brexit did not take ‘hundreds of thousands, if not millions’ of out the labour market. As we shall see, lockdowns did.

The DWP’s hidden total of those on out-of-work benefits.

We are told (a lot) about official unemployment, but we’re not told about the (many) other forms of out-of-work benefits. The below chart uses DWP methods and counts: 5.33 million. That’s about one in nine Brits. Some 1.7 million are on long-term sick and on what was once called incapacity benefit. This figue is extraordinary. Are we really saying there are 1.7 million people so sick that they are incapable of any work?That’s higher than the population of Estonia. Might these people have been written off too hastily, without more thought as to whether – with some more support and imagination – there might be some role in our economy for them?

The DWP does not publish the 5.33 million total, which is perhaps why this horrific figure is absent from our debate. But you can work it out from the DWP StatXplore data labyrinth. It’s not an easy process and there’s a six-month lag on the figures, so the below – recently published – takes us to November 2021. It will have fallen since, but not by much.

The UK labour force has kept shrinking after the lockdowns. The below from the ONS shows the proportion of over-16s who are not in work or looking for it. Before lockdown, years of Tory refrom lifted this figure to a record high: lockdowns reversed a decade of progress. Alarmingly, there is little sign of a boundback. As Capital Economics has pointed out: ‘the participation rate (the share of the working age population that is in or looking for work) is still, if anything, trending down. It is now at its lowest level since 2011.’ That’s what ought to ring alarm bells.

And meanwhile, an unprecedented number of vacancies. When Labour kept five million on out-of-work benefits, there had been an economic crash. The Tories are have managed to hit this jobless high during the largest worker shortage in recorded history.

Early retirement ­– often cited as a post-lockdown factor – is a pretty small part of the UK story as the below chart shows. Yellow is retired, red is long-term sick. Again, from Capital Economics: ‘The rise in inactivity in the UK over the past few months primarily reflects a rise in the number of long-term sick. The latter could reflect long Covid, though it is unclear why that would be affecting the UK more than other countries.’ Quite. So why are so many Brits signing off work sick? A subject that needs far more investigation.

The ‘lazy Brit’ myth was dealt with in the last deacde. Record employment was achieved with the same people, but a better system. With the right kind of help, incentives and work-coaching you can absolutely solve this problem – and tackle poverty. The blame lies with the system, not the users. Under the Cameron reforms the incomes of the poorest rose far faster than that of the richest, as work replaced welfare. That’s the opportunity now.

Welfare reform is about saving lives, not money. Behind all too many of these statistics will talents going to waste, communities wrecked by joblessness and children growing up in workless households. Beveridge had it right when he referred to the ‘giant evil’ of idleness. Studies show that unemployment leads to physical and mental health risks and that the longer you go without a job the harder it is to find one. This waste of human talent is what David Cameron dedicated his welfare reforms to reducing. And it’s something that, if left undressed, will be one of the most pernicious, scarring side-effects of lockdown. I presented a Channel 4 documentary about this in 2014 and it’s odd to see the same problems emerge under the guys who promised to solve them last time. They can be solved again, but only if the government acts. And does far more than it’s doing now.

A scheme has been launched to get half a million people off benefits by June, but this measure is flawed as it affects outflow – the problem is the overall (net) figure, that’s what should be targeted. And DWP systems struggle to keep count of how many people are on benefits: a sign that the system is being overwhelmed. The focus so far has been on those who say they are looking for work. But as the 2013 reforms found, it’s also necessary to look at those categorised as too sick to work. Is this always a fair categorisation? Might this be writing people off when they still have much to offer? Might it be better to assess them for what work they can do? Politically, this is difficult. But welfare reform is about saving lives, not saving money.

Thérèse Coffey has been pushing in Cabinet to bring back conditionality on welfare, to tighten the regulations. She deserves her colleagues’ support. The Tories used to own this agenda, having got it right before lockdown. Hundreds of thousands of people are now falling through the welfare net simply from lack of attention. To let welfare surge during a recession is bad. But to keep millions on benefits in the middle of the biggest worker shortage the economy has ever known is rather perverse – and politically indefensible. Especially when we have so much literature showing the damage that worklessness inflicts.

Moving from welfare to minimum-wage work works out as an extra £6,000 on average: so this, surely, is an effective tool to fight the cost-of-living crisis (as well as getting the economy growing). With the UK having one of the highest minimum wages in the world and more vacancies than ever, there might never be a better time to revive the welfare reform agenda.

PS. The DWP StatExplore database does provide a tally for all on out-of-work benefits as a share of total in regions (and sub-regions) of the UK. With the caveats presented above (it’s data from November 2021, and about a third are long-term sick) here is how the national picture looks. Click on a region to dive deeper.

The Queen is one Brit Macron can warm to

He may not have much respect for the ‘Clown’, but when it comes to the Queen Emmanuel Macron is as smitten as his compatriots.

With political relations between France and Britain at their coldest for decades, and Macron reportedly regarding Prime Minister Boris Johnson as more suitable for the circus, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee has provided the French president with an opportunity to warm up his rhetoric.

In a video address to Her Majesty published on Thursday, Macron praised the constancy of the Queen’s Francophilia throughout her 70 years on the throne. ‘Times have changed, Europe has evolved, our continent is again experiencing war,’ said Macron. ‘Through these transformations, your devotion to our alliance and to our friendship has remained, and has helped build the trust that brought freedom and prosperity to our continent.’

There were clues in the two-minute homage that perhaps the president wants his second term in office to bring better relations between Britain and France. ‘You are the golden thread that binds our two countries,’ he told the Queen. ‘The proof of the unwavering friendship between our nations.’

There were historical references: a mention of Charles de Gaulle, and the courage and determination of the wartime generation, the Queen’s generation, who ‘fought for the freedom we now enjoy’.

Macron ended his address in French, a language the Queen speaks, declaring that the Jubilee is an occasion to ‘celebrate the sincere and deep friendship that unites our two countries, and your devotion to it. Your Majesty, it is my privilege to extend to you, on behalf of the French people, my heartfelt congratulations’.

There was an accompanying gift, a seven-year-old grey gelding of the ceremonial French Republican Guard which was delivered to Windsor Castle on Wednesday. The present will be appreciated by the Queen. According to one French news broadcaster on Wednesday evening, over the decades she has made several private visits to France in her capacity as a racing aficionado, either attending races or casting an eye over horses that might have enhanced her stable.

The coverage of the Jubilee has been extensive in France, in the print and broadcast media, and Thursday’s celebrations were screened live on France2, one of the main free-to-view channels. The British Ambassador, Menna Rawlings, appeared on television to give her thoughts on why the French have so much warmth for the Monarch.

For some, it’s because they know the Queen’s affection for France is deep-seated; her visit in 1948 aged 22, with her new husband in tow, was her first time she had been outside the United Kingdom. Between 1957 and 2014 she made five State visits, each one generating huge crowds of well-wishers.

For others the Queen’s immutability is what they admire. When she came to the throne the president was Vincent Auriol, the first of the Fourth Republic. Macron is the eighth of the Fifth Republic, and the youngest she has known. In fact, when the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee Macron was a foetus. Probably just as well the president didn’t mention that in his address.

Boris looks doomed, but can he escape the inevitable?

Is Boris Johnson’s government about to fall apart? Twice since World War Two, Tory governments have broken up after a prolonged period of rule. They have died not because of a single crisis, but slowly expired due to sheer exhaustion, disunity, and lack of purpose or ideas. Now Boris’s regime, after another lengthy Tory period in power, looks as though it may be heading towards a similar exit. But can it avoid its fate?

The parallels between today’s events and those of 1963 and 1992-7 are inescapable. In all three cases we have a tired team of Tories bereft of ideas simply running out of steam. In all three we have a derided Prime Minister becoming the butt of media jibes and popular dislike. In all three we have a slew of petty scandals, trivial in themselves but collectively fatal.

The bad news for Boris is that even if he can avoid – or survive – a vote of confidence among Tory MPs, he has a fight on his hands to convince Brits that he deserves to hold on to the keys of No. 10.

If he fails, he will follow in the footsteps of Harold Macmillan. In October 1959, the Tories stormed to their third election victory in a row with a 100-seat majority dwarfing even Boris Johnson’s thumping 80 seat triumph in 2019. Under their progressive One Nation leader – dubbed ‘Supermac’ – the Tories had recovered from the debacle of the 1956 Suez crisis which had forced his predecessor Anthony Eden to resign in disgrace. Eden’s offences included lying to Parliament to cover up his covert collusion with France and Israel in invading Egypt. A rather more serious matter, it may be thought, than lying to Parliament about boozing in Downing Street.

Within two years Suez was history, the economy was booming, and ‘Supermac’ was able to boast to voters – with complacent justification – ‘You’ve never had it so good’. The Tories were wafted back into power under the cheery slogan ‘Life is good – don’t let Labour ruin it’. Then, just like in 2020, it all started to go horribly wrong.

In 1958, before the election, Macmillan’s entire Treasury team – chancellor Peter Thorneycroft and junior ministers Enoch Powell and Nigel Birch – resigned en masse in protest at Macmillan’s wild spending (another foretaste of current Tory worries) which, they claimed, was only fuelling inflation. The unflappable Mac airily dismissed the resignations as ‘a little local difficulty’. But the dry rot had set in for his government even as the votes for his election victory were being counted.

In 1962, seeking to rejuvenate his regime, Macmillan sacked seven ministers (a third of his Cabinet) in a brutal reshuffle that critics likened to Hitler’s murderous ‘Night of Long Knives’ purge. The following year the key cornerstone of his government’s economic and foreign plans – entry to the Common Market, forerunner of the EU – collapsed when France’s president de Gaulle contemptuously rejected Britain’s application to join. ‘All our policies,’ Macmillan lamented in his diary, ‘…lie in ruins’.

According to Shakespeare, troubles ‘come not as single spies but in battalions’, and it was the unmasking of a whole troupe of British Soviet spies in the early 1960s that really put the skids under a Mac who had suddenly stopped looking super. Master spy Kim Philby defected to Russia after his treachery was revealed; a gay Admiralty clerk called John Vassall was blackmailed by the KGB into betraying naval secrets; a long-term mole named George Blake was sprung from jail where he was serving a 42 year sentence, and smuggled behind the Iron Curtain. Britain’s security services at the height of the Cold War looked – and were – not just leaky but lethally incompetent.

Groggy from this series of scandals, Macmillan began to be mocked on TV satire shows like ‘That Was The Week That Was’ and ‘Beyond The Fringe’ as deference to his hitherto respected ruling caste fell apart. The elegant Edwardian in No. 10 was portrayed as a fossilised fuddy duddy, out of touch and out of time. It was then that the death blow of the Profumo affair kicked in.

Macmillan’s war minister, John Profumo, was found to be consorting with a good time girl, Christine Keeler, who was also enjoying the attentions of the Soviet military attaché Eugene Ivanov. In a world that had barely escaped atomic annihilation the previous year in the Cuban missiles crisis, this was a nuclear scandal to end all others. Profumo, who had lied to the Commons in denying the affair, honourably quit and spent the rest of his life atoning by doing good works for charity. But by then the damage was done. It was, as a vengeful Nigel Birch told Macmillan, quoting Robert Browning: ‘Never glad confident morning again’ for him or his government.

Within months, Macmillan reluctantly resigned, like Eden, on grounds of ill health after his enlarged prostate gland was misdiagnosed as cancer. As he did so, rival candidates for the succession publicly fought like ferrets in a sack at a chaotic Blackpool Tory party conference. From his hospital bed, Macmillan loftily ignored them and smoothed his foreign secretary, fellow Old Etonian Lord Home, into No. 10 in his place.

It did no good for the fourteenth Earl Home to renounce his title so he could sit in the Commons as plain Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Labour’s new democratically elected leader Harold Wilson successfully painted the new PM as a feudal relic, out of place in an egalitarian Britain ‘forged in the white heat of the technological revolution’. After a year in office, Sir Alec lost the 1964 election and ‘thirteen years of Tory misrule’ were over.

In 1990, just as in 1963 and today, a sea of troubles threatened to swamp the Tory ship after a similarly long time in office. The 1980s had been the uninterrupted Thatcher decade. The combative Iron Lady, a very different sort of Tory from the emollient, languid Macmillan, was running out of road. Despite trouncing Labour in three successive elections, winning the Falklands War, defying the IRA, taming the unions, giving tenants the right to buy their own homes and a stake in capitalism, and helping to bring down Soviet Communism, she had finally begun to grate on the nation’s collective nerves.

Thatcher’s increasingly strident tones, her espousal of the electorally toxic poll tax, and her resistance to the EU’s steady and stealthy encroachment on British sovereignty fuelled plots. The Europhile wet wing of the Tory party, who had never really been reconciled to having a woman bossing them about anyway, were out to get her. Finding a challenger in lion-maned Michael Heseltine, and an unlikely assassin in the sheepish shape of Sir Geoffrey Howe, the plotters struck. Thatcher was out.

But it was not quite the end for the Tories. Flinching from the charismatic Hezza, they chose as PM John Major: a much-mocked grey man of zero charisma and Pooterish manners, hoping for a quiet life after the storms and stresses of Thatcherism. Instead they got wars in the Gulf and Yugoslavia, and a debilitating guerilla conflict at home as Thatcherite MPs resisted more EU encroachment. Above all, they got Black Wednesday.

Having unexpectedly seen off Labour in the 1992 election, Major embarked on a doomed attempt to board the EU express by tying the pound to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, a forerunner of the Euro. An economic disaster ensued, losing billions to speculators on the eponymous Wednesday, pricing people out of their homes, and depriving the Tories of their reputation for fiscal competence. After Major abandoned his attempt to join the ERM he was as vulnerable as Macmillan following De Gaulle’s ‘Non’.

Popular hatred of the Tories curdled into complete contempt when a parade of the party’s MPs were embroiled in a series of absurd sexual scandals that made them despised figures of fun. After Labour acquired a glamorous new leader in Tony Blair, the landslide electoral defeat that swept the Tories away in 1997 was impossible to prevent.

Is there anything that the Tories can do to stop the rot? Or are they doomed to face a similar fate to Major’s party? Changing their colourful leader for a less controversial figure as they did in 1963 and 1990 and are contemplating doing again today could recoup some lost support, but is unlikely to avert a final reckoning, especially if the next two years see us engulfed by an economic tsunami.

When a rueful Jim Callaghan was defeated by a triumphant Thatcher in 1979, he said: ‘There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. Then it does not matter what you say or what you do’. Today’s Tories should not be too surprised if they are drowned in the next such sea change. Boris has a fight on his hands if he is to avoid a fate that is increasingly looking inevitable.

What makes the EU think it can run an army?

The German political economist Benjamin Braun recently made an astute observation about the editorial position of a German newspaper – in fact, it is an observation about the German policy consensus in general. “Eurobond? Never, it’ll kill us all. Eurobomb? Bring it on.”

Incomprehensibly, the EU is now discussing yet another field of political integration: a defence union. But the big task it set itself 20 years ago remains (to put it politely) incomplete. Amongst other things agreed in the recent two-day EU summit was the need to press ahead with defence strategic procurement and coordinating capability. There is a ‘Strategic Compass’ plan for an ‘EU Rapid Deployment Capacity of up to 5,000 troops’ and much more besides.

All this while the EU’s flagship scheme – monetary and economic union – remains dysfunctional and plagued by ever-widening imbalances. Integration of banking has been going in the reverse direction. The European banking supervision system is up and running, but the dispute-resolution regime is a joke. The debate on deposit insurance is stuck. And the impetus for a capital markets union is lost. This is not just a flaw, but a first-order policy failure.

Rather than fix this, the European Union is discussing a security and defence union – another opportunity for these attention-deficit, hyperactive disorder-afflicted policy makers to pretend that they are pro-European. If you can’t do a proper economic union, you should stop right there, and fix the problem. Otherwise you end up with a dysfunctional economic union, an ineffective foreign policy regime and – to top it all – an army that can’t fight.

The future success of the EU will depend primarily on boring economic matters like innovation and the capital markets union. The EU will require a eurobond: a real one, not a ‘recovery fund’ that is ultimately backstopped by national governments. The purpose of a real eurobond is to stabilise a currently-unstable monetary union, not to bankroll reform in member states.

Storms lie ahead. Power structures in global banking are about to be upended by a slew of fintech innovations: this requires banking reforms and a capital markets union for Europe to participate fully. That (and climate change) is what the EU needs to focus on. And for that to happen, it needs treaty change.

But this is not going to happen. The discussions are all about issues like who gets to do what in Brussels. The Russia sanctions are turning into a political disaster. You can’t blame veto-wielding member states, or the lack of quality majority voting. The problem lies in the fact that countries like Germany are allowed to pursue national economic strategies at the expense of the union.

So the European Union is now entering a twilight zone of reverse integration – coupled with a sense that it is still moving forward because it’s talking about new projects.

Is Emma Raducanu a one-hit wonder?

If there is one thing that could salvage this year’s Wimbledon it would be a decent showing by the tournament’s undoubted star attraction: Emma Raducanu. Engulfed in a controversy of its own making since it banned Russians and Belarussians players in response to the war in Ukraine, and facing the loss of rankings points as a result, Wimbledon 2022 is desperately in need of a feel-good story and some positive publicity. The public will be similarly demanding. The US Open Champion may be expected to bear an especially heavy burden in her second Wimbledon appearance. But is it realistic, or fair, to expect her to shoulder it?

Raducanu has won just nine and lost 12 of her tour matches since Flushing Meadows and was most recently well beaten in the French Open by the Belarussian world number 47 Aliaksandra Sasnovich (Raducanu is ranked 12th). Various theories have been advanced to explain her apparent protracted ‘after the Lord Mayor’s show’ slump. The player herself believes she may now have ‘a target on her back’ with her dramatically elevated status helping motivate opponents who a year ago might have mistaken her for a ball girl. Others point to a natural preference in her game for the hard and true surface of the US Open’s Flushing Meadows as opposed to the fickleness of the brick dust of European venues like Roland Garros. Some say she’s been ‘overwhelmed’ by sudden fame; others reference her injury niggles.

Much has also been made of her high turnover of coaches. Raducanu’s father apparently believes coaches have one specific area of expertise which should be quarried, until the deficiency has been addressed, after which they should be replaced with a coach with a different specialty. The thinking, it seems, is that piece by piece this is the way to assemble the perfect tennis player. Yet this rather complicated and unorthodox approach has provoked some high-level criticism: commentator John McEnroe has declared himself baffled by it.

All of this may be valid, but there is an alternative answer to the Emma Raducanu conundrum, which is simply that it is unfair to expect her to repeat her greatest success, at least not yet, and that, all things considered, she is doing fine. In the hyper competitive world of professional tennis, for a still developing player who just a year ago was ranked 364th and was playing in front of a few hundred at the Connaught Club in Chingford, her progress has been remarkable.

Indeed, to calculate Raducanu’s true level, there is an argument for subtracting the US Open from the equation altogether. Raducanu’s victory was phenomenal, with the phenomenon in question being perhaps the rare but thrilling, and slightly surreal, spectacle of the come-from-nowhere victory, from which little can be deduced about the victor’s true strength, or likely career outcome.

Consider potentially analogous cases: in 1978 unseeded Chris O’Neil won the Australian Open but failed to get beyond a quarter final thereafter. Or in other sports: in 1986, 150-to-1 outsider Joe Johnson won the Snooker World Championship, but rarely featured in the latter stages again. He went on to have a respectable career, reaching one more World Championship final and winning a few lesser events. Keith Deller won darts’ World Championship as a qualifier in 1983 but failed to qualify the following year and apart from the odd flourish here and there saw his career fizzle out. In team sports there is the classic example of Leicester City, who won the English Premier League in what still seems like something of a dream sequence season back in 2016. They have done reasonably well since then, but a repeat of that unique achievement seems highly unlikely.

The common denominator in all these cases is that talented individuals, liberated by ultra-low expectations, can occasionally defy the laws of sporting gravity by maintaining an elevated level of performance for a protracted period. By doing so they somehow create a momentum that changes the atmosphere, making their opponents quake, and engendering a sort of film-like inevitability to what had once seemed a hugely improbable outcome.

It could even be that sport itself creates these periodic micro-miracles as a form of self-preservation. Sport is about stories after all, and if the stories become too predictable – the same old small coterie of stars winning every time, as has been the case with women’s tennis in recent years, the public loses interest.

Emma Raducanu will light up Centre Court for sure, but she probably won’t win Wimbledon. She may do reasonably well, or she may crash out in the first round. She may end her career with a vault full of trophies, or finish with just the one. She may be at the very start of her journey to a place in the game’s firmament, or she may have already peaked. It is simply too early to tell.

So, let’s remember: how Wimbledon’s organisers resolve their predicament is their prerogative. Raducanu is only 19 and the tournament’s mess is not her responsibility to clear up. And let’s lighten her load by not expecting her to redeem what might be irredeemable by repeating what might be unrepeatable.

The art of the State Banquet

The French epicure Jean-Anthelm Brillat-Savarin, writing in the early decades of the nineteenth century, remarked, ‘Read the historians, from Herodotus down to our own day, and you will see that there has never been a great event, not even excepting conspiracies, which was not conceived, worked out, and organized over a meal.’ And indeed it is true that State Banquets are amongst the most important opportunities for discussion and diplomacy.

Her Majesty The Queen has over the past 70 years received well over 100 inward State Visits. She has undertaken over 260 official visits overseas including nearly 100 outward State Visits, making her the most travelled monarch in history.

As TRH The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall say in their joint foreword toThe Platinum Jubilee Cookbook, ‘On all Royal Visits, food plays an important part, presenting opportunities to enjoy a taste of the host nation’s culinary heritage, while also offering a chance to share the best of British cuisine’. And that culinary aspect to the Royal Family’s work often finds its greatest expression in State Banquets.

Preparations begin over a year in advance. Typically held at Buckingham Palace or sometimes Windsor Castle, the room features a horseshoe-shaped table seating up to 170 guests and takes between three and five days to set. George IV’s Grand Service is unpacked for the occasion – the 4,000 pieces for dining and display are all silver-gilt, in the King’s attempt to rival the gilded collections of Napoleon I. Napkins are folded in a Dutch bonnet and each place setting is 45 centimetres from the next.

The procession of dishes at a State Banquet is time-honoured: a starter (often fish), followed by a meat-based main course with accompaniments, then dessert, followed but fresh fruit and petites fours. The starter was once typically preceded by a soup course but in more recent years it has often been dispensed with. The legendary French chef Auguste Escoffier would be turning in his grave: he considered soup to be the ‘agent provocateur of a good dinner’.

The menus may be written in French but The Queen has used the occasions to champion British produce. Thus the State Banquet for President Trump in 2019 featured steamed halibut with watercress mousse, asparagus spears, and chervil sauce to start, a main of new season Windsor lamb (served with ‘Pommes Elizabeth’) and a port sauce, before finishing with a strawberry sable with lemon verbena cream. To drink, the guests were offered Windsor Great Park 2014 English sparkling wine (which has its roots in Windsor Castle’s own ancient vineyard, planted in the 12th century in the reign of Henry II), and Churchill’s 1985 Vintage Port – though of course the teetotal President stuck to soft drinks. When it comes to flying the flag for British food and drink, Her Majesty is as meticulous in her approach as in the other parts of her work.

The guests at State Banquets are of course dominated by the visiting country’s delegation and their opposite numbers from within government. But one of the glorious eccentricities of these occasions is the eclecticism of the guest list: Royal family relations, hereditary aristocracy, luminaries and celebrities from both the UK and the visiting country, and of course spouses. The peculiarities of the Order of Precedence leads to rather surprising seating plans. At the 2016 State Visit of the Colombian President the Foreign Secretary was placed halfway down the room (sat next to the wife of the Colombian Ambassador) because space at the top table needed to be found for The Viscount Hood and The Duchess of Norfolk.

On overseas trips the excitement of the hosts when receiving a State Visit from The Queen is palpable. Our Ambassador in Brazil, Sir John Russell, reported back to London the scene at the presidential reception for The Queen in Rio in 1968: ‘Spurs and a lit cigar came in very handy and I realised that in a previous incarnation I must have been a police horse’. In Sao Paolo meanwhile, the heaving crowds were such that the poor Sir John ‘lost two buttons and a CMG.’ The State Banquet is often the focus for such excitement.

Another former Ambassador, Sir Anthony Brenton, recalled that during the first ever State visit by the Queen to Russia they had to fly in a planeload of dinner jackets for the Russian elite attending. When George H.W. Bush, who loved to entertain, hosted the Queen in May 1991, he went to great lengths to impress: the dessert featured marzipan cobblestones topped with a ten-inch, dark chocolate carriage filled with mousse. The Queen, who is known to love chocolate, presumably came away reassured that the special relationship was in robust health.

State Banquets have likewise been a regular feature of Jubilees. For Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, fifty foreign kings and princes, along with the governing heads of Britain’s overseas colonies and dominions, attended a feast at Buckingham Palace. Queen Victoria recorded the event in her diary: ‘Had a large family dinner.’ For George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935 there was similarly an evening banquet for foreign royalty. The regal spread began with ‘Aguillettes de Caneton Reine Mary’ and finished with ‘Soufflés glacés Roi George V’.

The dining will, for this Jubilee, have a different, more inclusive, feel. There will be no royal banquet; rather the focus will be on an equally venerable British tradition – the street party. With their roots in the ‘peace teas’ held for children at the end of the First World War, street parties have been an established way of celebrating royal weddings and Jubilees for over a century. This year these community gatherings are being encouraged as part of a ‘Big Jubilee Lunch’. Eight and a half million people took part a decade ago for the Diamond Jubilee and the organisers hope to top the number this year. The festivities won’t be limited to the UK: more than 600 Big Jubilee Lunches are planned in more than 70 countries across the Commonwealth and around the world. And, following a nationwide competition, there is a new dish to act as a centrepiece of the food spread: the Platinum Pudding, which will take its place alongside Victoria Sponge, Cherries Jubilee, and Coronation Chicken in the pantheon of royal foods. It has all the makings of a right royal feast. Bunting at the ready.

Why your summer pudding needs a splash of elderflower

Is there a sight more pleasing, more cheering, than the vermillion dome of a summer pudding? Its vibrant colour cannot fail to raise a smile, even on dreary June days, suggestive as it is of all that is best about the British summer when it plays ball: gluts of sweet, juicy fruit, that sweet-sour tightrope that our summer crops walk so deftly, long lunches in the garden, and sticky fingers.

Each time I make a summer pudding, I am convinced it won’t hold. That, after a day of soaking, the flimsy bread frame will give way, spilling forth its berry contents all over the plate. Each time I turn out the pudding, I am freshly delighted and surprised; triumphant, as if it is my structural skill rather than berry juices that is to be congratulated. It is a pudding which defies gravity and sense, and rewards faith. Its simplicity is the key to its success: plain, slightly staling white bread (brioche seems altogether too rich, too sweet to suit a dish like this, and for goodness sake, don’t bother making your own), showcasing the best of summer fruits. On the one hand, it is elegant in its simplicity; on the other, it seems distinctly British to name soggy, stale bread stuffed with fruit after an entire season. I love it.

When it comes to the fruit, raspberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants are to my mind the non-negotiables, but they can be supplemented with cherries, blueberries, even tayberries, loganberries, and strawberries – although I rather love chef and pudding king Jeremy Lee’s addition of gooseberries. A splash of elderflower cordial gives the pud an even fresher, floral, summery note. Like all the best puddings, it should be served with the thickest double cream you can find.

Summer pudding

Makes: Serve 6

Takes: 45 minutes, plus overnight soaking

Bakes: No time at all

750g mixed summer berries (raspberries, blackcurrants, blackcurrants)

2 tablespoons elderflower cordial

2 tablespoons caster sugar

1 loaf, sliced white bread

Butter, for greasing

1. Place the berries, caster sugar and elderflower cordial in a pan, and simmer gently until the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and leave the berries to stand for 30 minutes.
2. Grease a 1 litre pudding basin with butter: this will help the pudding release to serve.
3. Cut a disc from a slice of bread about the size of the base of the pudding basin. Dip this into the liquid that sits on top of the berries, making sure it is fully coated with the juices, and place in the base of the basin.
4. Remove the crusts from the bread, and cut it into segments which will fit neatly around the inside of the pudding basin. Soak each in turn in the berry juices, and place in the basin you have lined the entire bowl.
5. Spoon the stewed berries and any remaining juices into the lined basin, and top with a lid of bread (you may need two slices of bread, trimmed, to make this lid; that’s ok).
6. Place the basin on a plate, as some of the juices are likely to spill out. Place a saucer that will fit inside the mouth of the basin on top of the bread lid, and weight down with food tins, or a large bag of rice, and leave in the fridge overnight.
7. Remove the weights and saucer, and turn the pudding out onto a serving plate (it may need a little bit of wiggling, but should slip free without issue). Serve with thick cream.

Queens on screen: a cinematic guide

When Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth I of Scotland) began her reign on 6 February 1952 (after the premature death of her father George VI) the British Empire was still very much in existence, with more than 70 overseas territories, despite the independence of India/Pakistan (‘The Jewel in The Crown’) in 1947.

But, in the words of Harold Macmillan, there was soon an inevitable ‘Wind of Change,’ as the UK relinquished its colonies and embraced the woolly concept of The Commonwealth of Nations (formerly The British Commonwealth).

Aside from the United Kingdom, the Queen is Head of State in 14 other nations – although, as recent Royal tours of the Caribbean have demonstrated, this may well decrease in the not-too-distant future.

There have been many depictions of female monarchs in the movies and television, with Victoria, Catherine the Great, Anne Boleyn and her daughter Elizabeth I especially popular subjects.

Here’s my choice of the best motion pictures about queens as sole rulers, as opposed to queen-consorts.

The Queen (2006) Netflix, Amazon Prime

Very much the precursor to writer Peter Morgan’s Netflix series The Crown, The Queen examines the reaction of the senior Royals in the days following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.

Helen Mirren plays the monarch, winning kudos for her depiction of a woman constrained by tradition, duty and a life being constantly deferred to.

Morgan manipulates the viewer throughout the picture, notably in a scene where the Queen admires the stag that her husband Philip (James Cromwell) had been obsessively pursuing over their stay in Balmoral, an obvious allusion to the relationship between Diana at the press.

A well-acted, but ultimately hollow picture, as the absence of Diana herself in the movie inevitably makes viewers speculate whether she was worth all the undignified keening evidenced at the time, which effectively forced the Windsors to play along with the popular mood of hysterical grief.

The film features the second (after 2003’s The Deal and before The Special Relationship in 2010) of Michael Sheen’s portrayals of Tony Blair for Morgan.

Alex Jennings plays a more sympathetic than may be expected Prince Charles, whilst Sylvia Syms is conversely a selfish, booze-tippling Queen Mother.

Mirren has also played Elizabeth’s ancestor Queen Charlotte (of Mecklenburg-Strelitz before her marriage into the British Royal Family) in The Madness of King George (1994), Elizabeth I (2005 Ch4 mini-series) and Catherine the Great (2019 Sky Atlantic mini-series).

Morgan is now taking on Russian oligarchs in his timely new play Patriots.

Farewell, My Queen (2012)

Benoît Jacquot’s (Diary of a Chambermaid) film adds a sapphic dimension to the life of Marie Antoinette, as we follow her life at Versailles when the Revolution erupts in 1789.

The queen (Diane Kruger) is pursuing a romantic relationship with Gabrielle de Polastron, duchesse de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen).

After the storming of the Bastille, Antoinette decides to spirit her lover away to safety, using her commoner reader Sidonie (Léa Seydoux) as a disposable lookalike to fool the revolutionaries.

Queen Victoria’s apparent refusal to believe that lesbianism existed (she was wrongly attributed as saying ‘women do not do such things’) is a myth, born from a misreading of the passing of Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885.

Victoria & Abdul (2017) Amazon Rent/Buy

Speaking of Queen Victoria, I tend to feel that Edward, Prince of Wales gets the short end of the stick in depictions of his mother’s reign, especially in Stephen Frears’ Victoria & Abdul.

The fun-loving heir to the throne had a lot to put up with, his mother often evidencing a very Hanoverian streak of manic behaviour, blaming Edward (Eddie Izzard) for the premature death of his father/her husband, pious killjoy Prince Albert.

After her dalliance with a Scots gillie (Billy Connolly) in Mrs Brown (1997, where the Prince of Wales is similarly blackguarded) a much older monarch becomes maternally enchanted by her Indian ‘Munshi’ (attendant/teacher/clerk) Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal – Death on the Nile).

Her courtiers and heir become jealous of the new favourite, but Victoria stands by him even when it is revealed that he is suffering from the clap and had allegedly sold some of the jewellery she gifted him.

Judi Dench played the monarch in both Mrs Brown and V&A, also Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love (1998) and a critically acclaimed Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra at the National in 1986, with Tony Hopkins as the tarnished Triumvir.

Cleopatra (1963) Disney+, Amazon Rent/Buy

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s (Sleuth) epic is best known for what happened offscreen rather than the movie itself, as Richard Burton (Mark Antony) and Elizabeth Taylor (Cleopatra) began their scandalous affair when shooting the picture.

Cleopatra is epic in its length, as well the subject-matter, with the restored cut running over four hours.

It’s an enjoyable watch for a wet Sunday afternoon, with unintended hilarity: Taylor occasionally resembles a Beverly Hills hostess rather than the descendant of Alexander’s chief lieutenant Ptolemy.

Rex Harrison (Caesar) looks sceptically on, grateful that he doesn’t have to wear the dinky mini skirt that Burton sports.

Although after donning similar garb in The Robe (1953) and Alexander the Great (1956), the actor should have been used to it.

In one memorable scene, Cleopatra enters Rome in no little state – Marcus Antonius comments to Caesar on the spectacle (somewhat nonsensically):

‘Nothing like this has come into Rome since Romulus and Remus!’

Not quite the Mark Antony of ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ fame then.

The film features three cast members later to find fame in long-running TV comedies: George Cole (Minder), Richard O’Sullivan (Man about the House/Robin’s Nest) and Carroll O’Connor (All in the Family/Archie Bunkers’ Place)

La Reine Margot (1994)

Patrice Chéreau’s (Intimacy) blood-soaked recounting of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and its consequences is not a film for the faint-hearted.

The picture uses Alexandre Dumas’ 1845 novel as source material, but anyone expecting a Three Musketeers-style romp will be sorely disappointed.

For a more mature audience, it’s a great film, with wonderful performances and a real evocation of the tumultuous years of the French Wars of Religion.

Particular praise should go to Isabelle Adjani as the apparently incestuous but essentially kind-hearted Margot of Valois, Daniel Auteuil as the future Bourbon King Henry IV, Virna Lisi as the scheming Catherine de’ Medici and Jean-Hugues Anglade as her unhinged son Charles IX.

Vincent Perez stars as Margot’s true love, the Huguenot chevalier La Môle.

Elizabeth (1998) Amazon Rent/Buy

Michael Hirst (Vikings/The Tudors) wrote the screenplay for Shekhar Kapur’s biopic of The Virgin Queen and his 2007 sequel (STARZPLAY).

The film plays extremely fast and loose with the facts, with parts that may appear jarring to viewers in 2022.

Most notably Vincent Cassell’s mincing, cross-dressing would-be suitor Francis, Duke of Anjou. There is no evidence to suggest that he was, so the assumption must be that Hirst wrote the character as comedy relief.

Elizabeth featured the final film appearance of John Gielgud, who played Pope Pius V.

Kapur cast including a mixture of film veterans (Richard Attenborough, Fanny Ardent etc) and new faces/quirky choices including Eric Cantona, Kathy Burke, Daniel Craig, hoofer Wayne Sleep, Emily Mortimer, and the Allen (Lily/Alfie) siblings.

Upcoming STARZPLAY series Becoming Elizabeth follows the early years of the future monarch; German actress Alicia Gräfin (Countess) von Rittberg (Fury) stars; no problem assuming the hauteur of royalty, one would imagine.

The Favourite (2018) Amazon Rent/Buy

Olivia Colman plays the last Stuart monarch, whose largesse is fought over by established favourite Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) and her impoverished newcomer cousin Abigail Masham (Emma Stone).

Yorgos Lanthimos’ (The Killing of a Sacred Deer) film holds the viewers’ attention, but since all the characters exhibit varying degrees of unpleasantness, there is no-one to really root for. A likely reflection of the Stuart court at the time.

Queen Anne’s ill-health, frequent painful pregnancies, and inability to provide an heir no doubt accounted for her behavioural problems; in Michael Caton-Jones’ underrated Rob Roy (1995), the cynical Earl of Montrose (John Hurt) comments:

‘Our poor queen cannot find the time to die in peace. I fear she may pass over and leave the matter unresolved. Would that she had seen a child of hers live to comfort the kingdom.’

Lady Jane (1986) Amazon Rent/Buy

Theatre director Trevor Nunn brought the tragic story of Lady Jane Grey ‘The Nine Days’ Queen’ to the screen in 1986.

To avoid his Catholic half-sister (Mary Jane Lapotaire) becoming Queen, the dying teenage King Edward VI nominates his staunchly Protestant cousin sixteen-year-old Jane (Helena Bonham-Carter) to take on the throne on his death.

This was at the urging of chief minister John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland (John Wood) who had earlier engineered the marriage of Jane to his eighteen-year-old son Lord Guildford Dudley (Cary Elwes).

Although proclaimed Queen by the Privy Council, Jane’s support soon ebbs away, and after just nine days as monarch she is deposed and imprisoned in The Tower of London when Mary takes power.

Initially inclined to spare the lives of the couple, Mary has them both executed when Jane’s father Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk (Patrick Stewart) raises an unsuccessful rebellion to save her.

A sad story and one that is well-acted, but Nunn’s obvious lack of facility with the craft of movie-making undermines the material.

Boudica (2003) full movie available to watch on YouTube

ITV haven’t had much luck with period dramas set in pre-Victorian times.

In the same year as Ray Winstone’s Gorblimey Henry VIII, the broadcaster transmitted Boudica, a bargain-basement attempt to cash in on the success of Gladiator (2000).

Alex Kingston (Moll Flanders/Dr Who) plays the titular queen, who after being flogged by the occupying Romans is forced to watch the rape of her daughters before being turfed out of her Norfolk-based kingdom. Understandably Boudica prefers not to forgive and forget, launching a savage campaign against the decadent invaders.

Watch out for early screen appearances from Emily Blunt and Dominic Cooper.

Contrary to urban legend, the monarch is not buried beneath Platform 10 at London’s King’s Cross station.

Or is she? As a wag once said: ‘did she die waiting for the train to Royston?’

Season 5 of The Crown debuts this November (TBC).

Tories pay tribute to our Queen

The economy may be tanking and Boris in peril but MPs were grateful this week for a four day respite to mark the Queen’s platinum jubilee. Many chose to flee Westminster for home pastures elsewhere: Brandon Lewis got to press the flesh at Hillsborough Castle while his backbench colleague Laura Farris snapped pics in Newbury with a Churchill impersonator. But a fair few decided to remain in London to pay tribute to our long-suffering monarch at the Trooping of the Colour on Horseguard’s Parade. Somehow Mr S blagged a ticket – they let anyone in these days – and enjoyed the chance to see our elected Tory masters pay tribute to our unelected ones.

The Boris bashers were out in force among the Tories, with Wimbledon’s Stephen Hammond – formerly of the ‘whipless 21’ – impressing with a rather spiffing morning suit. Aspiring grandee Sir Charles Walker mingled with youthful upstart Elliot Colburn as a beaming Sir Graham Brady looked on, sporting a smile as wide as the parade ground. Enjoying the calm before the storm, perhaps? A somewhat bedraggled Sir Bill Cash meanwhile managed to (just) survive the heaving throngs clutching a Union Jack with new boy Louie French enjoying the chance to mingle with nearby colleagues including Shailesh Vara, Andrew Rosindell and Flick Drummond. There were one or two rogues in attendance too: former Health Secretary Matt Hancock arrived sans Gina but avec lounge suit while the suspended Rob Roberts must have enjoyed his placement behind government whip Alan Mak.

Will they be all smiling when it comes to this time next week? For their future sakes, Mr S hopes they don’t make a right royal mess of it.

Macron vs the deep state

French diplomats are on strike today. But will anyone notice?

Not to be immodest, I am especially well qualified to comment on French diplomacy. Some time ago, between gigs in Washington DC, I was employed as a consultant by the French embassy there. The embassy is a modern building in Georgetown, conveniently near all the best restaurants, although the food at the embassy itself was both fabulous and cheaper than McDonalds. The wine list was, obviously, exceptional.

I was not allowed to see deeply into the embassy’s most sensitive operations (there was a mysterious wing that seemed to be entirely occupied by spooks) but must admit that in the scientific service where I worked as an astonishingly well-paid editor, there was very little sign of stress. The only discernible excitement was on Tuesdays, when there was a scramble by my colleagues to get in their orders for wine and unpasteurised cheese, flown into Dulles airport weekly in sealed diplomatic containers on an Armée de l’Air Airbus. On Friday morning, we all assembled on the loading dock as the containers were emptied, to pick up our shopping.

So the life of a French diplomat is rather peachy. Anyone might think that with the housing allowances, generous pay, immunity from ever being sacked and talent for deflecting blame onto others, it’s not a bad job.

But that’s an opinion not shared by the diplomats, who are enraged that President Macron sees them as a ‘deep state’ sabotaging his will. He wants to strip them of their privileges and open foreign service positions to all.

Perhaps the President has a point. French diplomacy is not especially decisive in world affairs, and its failures are dramatic. France’s embassy in Canberra failed to notice when Australia prepared to throw in its lot with the Americans and British in the new Aukus partnership, ditching the French. Macron was infuriated. French diplomacy has contributed to embarrassing failures in the Sahel, Venezuela and Egypt and has dragged modern-era Anglo-French relations to an unprecedented low. A frustrated Macron has subsequently developed his own line in diplomacy, without much apparent recourse to his smug, bloated diplomatic service.

One senior diplomat has admitted that French diplomacy service has achieved almost nothing since the 2015 Cop climate agreement in Paris, even though it has is the world’s third-largest diplomatic network, with some 1,800 diplomats and 13,500 more at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris.

Few doubt that the brigade of diplomats could be ruthlessly cut. It seems to have passed unnoticed in the hallowed corridors of foreign relations that the entire notion of embassies, with their grand buildings, elaborate protocols and pompous, self-regarding functionaries, dates from the days before it became possible for governments to communicate by Zoom and email.

The French diplomatic service is hardly unique. The British embassy in Paris employs 300 people. The question that Macron has dared to ask is: what do they all do? Once upon a time it was said that diplomats were sent abroad to lie for their countries. Today, more frequently, they tweet.

According to some, the strike comes at a bad time for Macron, with France holding the EU presidency until the end of June. It’s extremely hard to imagine that anyone will notice, to be frank. Macron has sought to play a leading role in the bloc’s response to the attempted invasion of Ukraine and is looking for fresh impetus to his new presidential mandate. His success is thus far undetectable but he’s hardly needed diplomats to achieve nothing. He’s just picked up the phone and called Putin himself.

Half a dozen diplomats that Reuters spoke to said Macron’s reform was merely the culmination of years of malaise that have seen staffing fall some 20 per cent since 2007 and repeated budget cuts just as the demands on the service have supposedly increased. Conditions have worsened during the pandemic, diplomats claimed, as if they have been singularly affected.

Macron’s appointment of the career diplomat Catherine Colonna as foreign minister was supposedly an effort to appease the diplomatic corps. It’s not working. Colonna, the former ambassador to the UK, was not an especially popular figure in London where she tweeted aggressively against Brexit and infuriated Whitehall, although she did establish close relations with Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister. She’s now foreign minister and it’s been made clear that she must do exactly as she’s told.

The exemplar of French diplomacy is the recently retired ambassador to Washington, Gérard Araud, who has rushed to defend his colleagues, warning of an ‘Americanisation’ of French diplomacy that would give Macron greater discretion to choose ambassadors on a personal whim from all ranks of French public life.

‘Diplomats will serve as ambassadors to Burundi’, he said. ‘Rome or London will be reserved for friends’.

But the president can already name anybody he wants as an ambassador. Araud was parachuted into Washington by former president François Hollande. His diplomacy was marked mainly by his addiction to Twitter, where he promiscuously blocked criticism of his constant undiplomatic remarks aimed at his hosts.

On the night of the election of Donald Trump as president, Araud tweeted: ‘It is the end of an era, the era of neoliberalism. We don’t yet know what will succeed it.’ He inserted himself into the 2017 French presidential election campaign, he would not work for Marine Le Pen, even if she were democratically elected. Before leaving his post in Washington, Araud described the city as being full of provincial early-bird dinners wearing sad, baggy suits.

Was it really necessary for French taxpayers to install Arnaud and his husband in the grand ambassador’s vast residence in Northwest Washington to know this? If this is the standard of diplomacy practiced by France, Macron will do well to bring it to heel.

Where’s our world cup?

There was that frenetic drama of the last day of the Premier League just a fortnight ago – City down, Liverpool in, City up, Liverpool out! Then we had Real Madrid further chipping away at Liverpool’s quadruple ambitions, leaving them with a mere double, closely followed by Nottingham Forest clinging on against Huddersfield to finally get back into the Premier League. Then on Wednesday night Ukraine caused delight everywhere in the world except Scotland and Moscow to set up a play off this Sunday against Wales for the last available World Cup slot.

But after that…nothing. Some people, to misquote Kenneth Wolstenholme, aren’t on the pitch – it’s all over.

Just when we should be settling down for a glorious summer of the very best sporting event that there is, a football World Cup, we aren’t. After that Wales-Ukraine game there will be no meaningful football matches until the league resumes in August.

Last summer’s glorious, colourful Euros brought the nation together like nothing else in recent times – who can forget the surge of pride when that lad put a firework up his backside in Leicester Square, for example. It kicked off a year ago next Saturday.

Italy beat Turkey 3-0 in the opener. I was so excited that I insisted on formally celebrating the moment with a pre-match nod to both countries’ culinary cultures by having a doner kebab with an Aperol spritz. I had a wallchart taped above the TV. I even had Panini stickers and album to get started on like I was nine years old.

And it didn’t let me down. The proper big football tournaments never do, particularly World Cups. Even the poorest ones – South Africa, 2010, USA 1994 – are still brilliant.

But this year, instead of a glorious summer, the World Cup will be on at Christmas.

Christmas, for goodness sake.

It’s now 12 years since the scandalous decision to award successive host duties in 2018 and 2022 to those twin paragons of human rights, Russia and Qatar. And it’s an indication of just how rotten both selections were that even Putin’s subsequent war crimes in Ukraine don’t unequivocally make the case for Russia as the worst decision of the two.

Because Qatar getting it stunk from the outset and has just got worse since: rancid corrupt bidding allegations, the deaths of dozens of immigrant labourers building the stadia, the concerns over the rights of gay fans, women supporters and those just partial to a beer at the match never properly addressed.

But for the armchair fan the biggest consequence of choosing Qatar – flagged repeatedly but ignored by those well-fed FIFA delegates until it was too late – were those summer temperatures of up to 50 degrees centigrade. It was always going to be too hot to play in June and July.

And so only after Sepp Blatter and his stooges had backed Qatar did we end up with this temporal shift in the axis of the football universe – a winter instead of summer World Cup.

We armchairs have had to deal with some challenging timings before: remember the weekday morning fixtures that the timezones threw up in the Japan and South Korea co-hosted 2002 tournament, for example. But those lager breakfasts now seem like small beer next to a World Cup in December.

Most fans will at some point have had a wedding or similar that clashed with a must-see match – which can result in ‘doing a Likely Lads’, as it’s known: trying to avoid knowing the score before watching as-live later. But this year this could happen to almost everyone: millions will have to choose between doing what they’re expected to do – going to their children’s carol concert, their office bash or some old friends’ drinks party – and mean-spiritedly staying in to watch a tasty football clash instead. We are inevitably going to make the invidious decision of whether to miss key games or have ourselves cast as Scrooges by family, friends and colleagues. Absurdly I just had to check I hadn’t booked our early-bird family Nutcracker tickets on the same night as the Final. And it finishes just two days before my wedding anniversary. That really would have been tricky.

There’ll be four and a half weeks of this stuff to negotiate come 21 November: 64 matches that could all clash with something festive and obligatory.

It’s terrible news for the High Street too: with the economy all over the place we could really use one of those every-other-summer En-ger-land mini booms driven by a rush to spend on beer, barbecues, replica kits. Shifting this demand to December isn’t going to balance the books as people tend to spend money fairly freely on booze and food then regardless.

And 2022 is already disorienting enough already: here we are in a four-day weekend when all your biorhythms will be telling you there shouldn’t be one – there’s no turkey or lamb leg to roast, just perhaps a street party to avoid if you can. It’s all disorientingly odd. The last thing we need is more change.

Finally, Christmas itself doesn’t deserve this. After Covid-compromised festivities in 2021 and – unless you lived or worked in Downing Street – a Covid-cancelled Christmas 2020, this should be our first stab this decade at a normal December. Instead, for football fans at least, it’s going to be the most abnormal yet.

Of course, it’s two or three years too late for anything to be done to change this. They had three months’ notice to arrange to move a single game recently – belatedly punishing Putin by moving that Champions League final from St Petersburg to Paris and look what a shambles that ended in. No, the ridiculous and infuriating Christmas World Cup is set in stone now.

And yet despite all this resentment and regret, deep down I know that once it starts, I and in all likelihood the vast majority of other armchairs, will soon be completely caught up.

We’ll be guiltily huddled around meant-to-be-off TVs surreptitiously watching Colombia-France at that drinks party, in the back pew at the carols watching Senegal-Brazil on our silenced phones. And we’ll be loving it.