Prince Charles is playing with fire

Charles is a prince on a perilous path. It’s a well-trodden one that is proving more problematic the closer he gets to having a crown placed on his head. He has opinions, who doesn’t. He wants to share them, like the rest of us. His decades long predicament is that he occupies a privileged position which should limit his ability to hold forth.

His once private – and not denied – belief that the government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is ‘appalling’ is not the consensus view. A man teetering on the edge of inheriting a unifying role as Head of the Nation has entered a divisive debate very firmly on the side of Boris Johnson’s opponents. One day those occupying the roles of Prime Minister and Home Secretary will be devising immigration policy as members of His Majesty’s Government.

The prince’s officials insist he remains politically neutral and matters of policy are decisions for government. Their challenge, which they’ll have been acutely aware of even as they fashioned this defence, is that in this instance the Prince of Wales hasn’t been neutral. And while the final shape of a policy might be for a government to decide, Charles has form when it comes to trying to influence what ends up on the statute book.

As a young man, back in 1970, one of the first topics to provoke him was the fate of Atlantic salmon, an issue exercising him long before declining fish stocks became an emotive topic. Countless government ministers have been recipients of ‘black spider’ memos, so called because of his distinctive handwriting style.

This weighty correspondence, a very limited selection of which was released under the Freedom of Information legislation, has in the past covered topics as varied as the lack of resources for the armed forces, the benefits of complementary medicine and the need for affordable homes. In an exchange of letters with Lord Irvine about the Human Rights Act the prince scrawled the word ‘rubbish’ on a reply he received from the then Lord Chancellor.

He’s not just expressed himself in words. During the 1999 Chinese state visit he showed his support for the Dalai Lama and his distaste for the Chinese regime by boycotting one of the state banquets and making sure the reason for his absence was briefed to a newspaper. Mark Bolland, his former senior aide, described Charles as a ‘dissident’ working against the ‘prevailing political consensus’.

Given such a lengthy track record, it’s not surprising those around him have devoted considerable energy to framing how the heir to the throne will behave when he inherits what Diana called the ‘top job’. According to the narrative of his friends and supporters, being Prince of Wales affords him considerable latitude and he knows it’ll disappear the moment he fulfils his destiny.

In the few interviews where he’s reflected on how he’ll behave as king, Charles has accepted he’ll be much more circumscribed and insisted he wasn’t ‘that stupid’ not to realise he won’t be able to speak out in the same way when sovereign. He’s painted a picture of an existence at Buckingham Palace where he will use his ‘convening power’ to bring the right people together to address weighty matters, like the environment.

It’s a future in which he could deliver a King’s Speech containing policies he doesn’t approve of and give royal assent to laws he doesn’t support. It’s one where he can consult, advise and warn the government in private, while smiling, waving and unveiling plaques in public. As monarch, most of his utterances will be delivered on the advice of ministers. This is the fate awaiting someone who’s declared ‘speaking out is in my blood’.

The monarchical straitjacket – which has never irked the Queen – delights those who believe Charles could one day provoke a constitutional crisis. Such concern is heightened by the fact his criticism of asylum policy has emerged in the wake of the successful Platinum Jubilee celebrations and while the transition from mother to eldest son is at full throttle.

The risk is of an opinionated prince morphing into a meddlesome king.

Boris’s rewilding obsession could backfire

Does Boris Johnson have the faintest idea what he and his government are trying to achieve anymore? I ask because of the Prime Minister’s ‘grow for Britain’ strategy which has been leaked to the Daily Telegraph. The strategy, due to be launched on Monday, apparently demands that farmers grow more fruit and vegetables to make us less reliant on imported food, especially in the face of the Ukraine crisis – which has created the headache of how to continue production and exports from one of Europe’s most agricultural nations.

To this end, the grow for Britain strategy will, it is said, commit to ‘changes to planning rules to make it easier to convert land into farms’. There may be a few marginal areas in national parks and sites of special scientific interest which farmers would like to plough up but are prevented from doing so by environmental, rather than planning, rules. But I wasn’t aware of any great tracts of land in Britain that farmers are trying to turn into farmland but are thwarted by planning rules. It is rather more common for land to pass in the other direction, with landowners trying to turn farmland into housing estates because of the huge profits on offer.

But leave that aside, why is the government suddenly launching an agricultural policy which pulls in exactly the opposite direction as the one it announced just five months ago? Defra’s Landscape Recovery Programme, unveiled in January, seeks to take 300,000 hectares of farmland (an area the size of Shropshire) out of production and ‘rewild’ it in the name of boosting biodiversity and trying to mop up carbon emissions.

The government has also announced that it wants 7,000 hectares of new woodland to be planted per year by the end of this parliament – although it is not clear whether this is in addition to the 300,000 hectares of land to be rewilded or included within it.

It also ought to be noted that the government’s net zero policy is also taking large tracts of farmland out of production in the name of turning them into solar farms. Current proposals for solar energy could take a further 62,000 hectares out of production. While this land could still be used for grazing, much of the farmland under threat is prime arable land.

At the time of the Landscape Recovery Programme, environmental secretary George Eustice dismissed warnings from the NFU and others that the rewilding scheme would make Britain more dependent on food imports. Britain’s self-sufficiency in food has already plunged from over 75 per cent in the early 1980s to 60 per cent now.

It is perfectly possible, of course, that the Prime Minister and his colleagues have changed their minds in reaction to the Ukraine war and the soaring price of food due to that and other reasons. Maybe they do now accept that their rewilding plans were ill-conceived. But if so, then they will have to withdraw them. What the government cannot possibly do is to sustain two contradictory policies at the same time: one encouraging farmers to rewild their land and another trying to persuade farmers to turn wild land back into farmland. So, which is it to be: rewilding and green energy – or food security?

Is Britain heading for a summer of discontent?

With workers across the economy looking set to go on strike during the next few months there is talk of a ‘summer of discontent’. The inspiration for this trope is the infamous 1978-9 ‘winter of discontent’, when despite the urgings of Labour ministers to show pay restraint, poorly paid public sector workers left rubbish piling up in the streets and, legend has it, the dead unburied. When the strikers returned to work the government’s effort to keep wages down was in tatters, along with its perceived authority to govern.

There have been many mooted summers of discontent over the years, but none has ever rivalled the original. They have all – appropriately enough given the vagaries of the British weather – ended up as damp squibs. Maybe this one will be different. Britons are now experiencing unprecedented price inflation, which comes on top of a consistent squeeze on their living standards due to the impact of the 2008 financial crisis which then got worse thanks to Covid, which has in turn left employees more alienated and discontented than ever. After a decades-long period of apparent industrial quietude it looks like many workers are finally not going to take it anymore.

The impending rail strike at the end of the June is set to kick off the summer of discontent and is likely to shut down the network for three days. It is significantly a purely defensive dispute in a sector which, like so many others, has seen pay squeezed and working conditions deteriorate: the union’s main demand is for a wage increase that meets the recent rise in inflation.

Despite this, Conservatives are sticking to the well-worn Thatcherite approach which sees in every strike the chance to tell voters that Labour is in hock to irresponsible and powerful ‘union barons’ whose interests they would always put before those of the country. At the latest PMQs the Prime Minister therefore described it as a ‘reckless and wanton strike’ and demanded Keir Starmer condemn it. The Conservative party chair Oliver Dowden reinforced that message saying Labour would always ‘back hardline unions over hard pressed travellers’.

Yet, this rhetoric has long been at variance with reality thanks to Thatcher’s own changes to industrial relations law and the demise of heavily unionised industries. In 1979 just over half of workers were members of a trade union: today it is less than one quarter. Public revulsion at the ease with which P&O sacked its employees and replaced them showed that the days when many thought union leaders had more power than the prime minister are long gone. Indeed, a plurality of Britons have for some time seen unions as playing a positive role in Britain today.

Despite Johnson’s urgings Starmer’s position is to neither support nor condemn the rail strike. His spokesperson is saying that ‘Nobody wants to see industrial action that is disruptive.’ That is the usual position for a Labour leader in Opposition – apart from Jeremy Corbyn who saw in each and every dispute a hammer blow against capitalism. Even ‘Red Ed’ Milband was afraid of alienating voters by supporting striking unions. Even so, despite Starmer’s caution, others in his shadow cabinet have expressed some qualified support for the union’s case. Most significantly, Wes Streeting, widely seen as the most right-wing member of Starmer’s front bench, said that if he was a rail worker he would have voted for a strike.

Streeting’s comments might merely suggest his has ambitions to become the next Labour leader and is giving a wink to the party’s union wing. But they could indicate a more profound shift in politics, one in which Labour is less afraid to be seen as being the workers’ friend.

As an insightful and timely new book by Phil Tinline shows, one of the fears that fuelled Thatcherism was that of unbounded trade union power, a fear seemingly exemplified by the winter of discontent. The public sector strikes of 1978-9 certainly revealed Labour’s incapacity to govern. It was widely regarded as indicating the collapse of the post-war consensus and the need for another – and it delivered the May 1979 election to Margaret Thatcher. Whether the mooted ‘summer of discontent’ plays a similar role in seeing off not just Boris Johnson’s beleaguered premiership but also the end of the Thatcher consensus which cast unions as the ‘enemy within’ only time will tell. History never quite repeats itself. But in calling for wage restraint and so for workers to take yet another real cut in pay, Boris Johnson is certainly doing a good job auditioning for the part of Labour prime Minister James Callaghan who made a similar plea as autumn turned to winter in 1978. This plea fell on profoundly and, for him fatally, deaf ears.

Britain’s ivory ban is needlessly draconian

The world’s most draconian ban on the trade in ivory came into force in the UK this month. It does not increase the legal protections already enjoyed by all living elephants, but rather extends these protections to elephants that have been dead for decades.

Trade in ivory and most ivory products from elephants killed after 1947 was already illegal; now all trade in ivory except that covered by five narrow exemptions is banned and subject to a maximum penalty of a £250,000 fine or five years’ imprisonment­­ – even if the tusks were last attached to a living elephant centuries ago. The supporters of the ban argue that it stops rogue dealers passing off more recent ivory as antique items – but such behaviour already was illegal and subject to substantial criminal sanction.

England has had a long association with ivory; it was a renowned centre for ivory carving in the Middle Ages. Some of the British Museum’s ivory pieces date to the 12th century; the houses of the Victorian and Edward British middle classes were rammed with ivory in the shape of everything from hairbrushes, combs and vanity boxes via Japanese netsuke and Oriental carvings to billiard balls, hunting trophies and pianos. Whilst pianos will certainly be exempt from the ban and mediaeval carvings – unless they are distinctly lacklustre iterations – will almost certainly be, selling what were once ubiquitous artefacts furnishing bourgeois homes is now a crime with potential penalties not dissimilar to those for trading Class B drugs. The difference is that there is plenty of support for decriminalising cannabis. The same cannot be said for countenancing an overturn of the ivory ban. The most banal and bourgeois ivory trinket is now more subversive than the herbal stimulants whose unpoliced stench has become one of central London’s most ubiquitous smells.

The new ban was legislated for in 2018 in the wake of the previous year’s general election. During that election, it became a Corbynista campaigning point and another thing to pillory Theresa May for that the Conservatives hadn’t reaffirmed a previous commitment to banning ivory. To make amends, the Tories then passed the toughest ban possible. The fact that it has taken four years to implement the legislation shows that the measure is not as straightforward as its cheerleaders like to suggest.

Objects containing ivory that can still be bought and sold are narrowly defined: pre-1975 musical instruments containing less than 20 per cent ivory (basically pianos); pre-1947 items containing less than 10 per cent ivory (for example, a silver teapot with an ivory knob or pre-1947 inlaid furniture); pre-1918 portrait miniatures, an artform where England was preeminent and which were ubiquitously painted on ivory; purchases by approved museums; and pre-1918 material of ‘outstandingly high artistic, cultural or historical value’ as assessed by an expert committee.

To lawfully sell anything under these exemptions, the item must be registered. This is fairly straightforward for the first four categories but a much more complex process for the pre-1918 objects of outstandingly high artistic, cultural or historical value. It is too early to say how the committee assessing these applications will apply the rule – but ‘outstanding’ is a high bar. Early English carvings will certainly be safe, as very likely will the most accomplished netsuke such as those eulogised by arthouse potter Edmund de Waal in his bestselling family history The Hare with Amber Eyes. It will be interesting to see how much else will pass muster – clearly the vast majority of the ivory accoutrements which our nineteenth and indeed twentieth century forebears treasured is now beyond the pale. Furthermore, any solid ivory carving – however important it may be artistically or historically – made after 1918 will be banned.

The appetite for buying these trinkets clearly does still exist. In recent months the UK’s second and third tier auction houses such as Roseberys in Norwood in south London, have been flooded with ivory items presumably from vendors preempting the ban. Most are oriental knick knacks but also Edwardian opera glasses, thermometers, auctioneers’ gavels and similar accretions. The vast majority of these objects have found willing buyers – even though these buyers must have been aware that the monetary value of their newly acquired flotsam would wholly evaporate shortly after purchase, as they could not be sold again. If the buyers were intending to take them abroad to sell them there, they will have had to have done so before the ban came into force on 6 June as it additionally outlaws the export of ivory with the intention of selling it.

Trading in objects made from the tusks of long dead animals that will never be revived is a harmless activity; no moral opprobrium should be attached to it. The new measures seem to imply that ivory only becomes untainted when it is important art, but not when it is everyday bric-a-brac. My ten-year-old son starts his weekdays by using a mid-twentieth century ivory shoe horn, now snapped in various places through his not so gentle ministrations, to put on his regulation footwear. Is there really anything wrong with me providing him with this admittedly wholly unnecessary equipment? I firmly don’t believe that elephants should be killed now to produce such items, but I can’t see how intentionally destroying these items produced by earlier generations, as some suggest we should, does any good. An elephant of an earlier generation should probably not have sacrificed its life in the service of making shoe horns and assorted trivia – but destroying these items now will not undo that sacrifice.

Anyone who has entered the ivory emporiums of Hong Kong, usually not far from the shops selling dried sharks’ fin and other sinful objects, will realise that there clearly is plenty of illicit contemporary ivory about and that it is being used to produce – at least to western tastes – truly hideous carvings of Buddhas, Chinese emperors and prancing horses of zero artistic value. But it was already illegal to sell this kind of stuff in the UK, notwithstanding the fact that few would want to own it.

In an attempt to shore up support for Boris Johnson among the Tory backbenches, the government seems thankfully to have abandoned its plans to ban the fur trade, foie gras and the importation of hunting trophies. There was no mention of these plans in this year’s Queen’s Speech. Is it too much to hope that the ivory ban will be the last virtue signalling measure in the name of animal rights by this Conservative government?

China is becoming a hermit kingdom

There is an unprecedented experiment under way in China as it reshapes its economy to accommodate its zero-Covid strategy. There are two elements to the policy. The more visible one is the harsh lockdowns, enacted most recently in Shanghai – where for the past two months 25 million people were confined to their homes or forced into quarantine holding centres. Though restrictions were officially eased last week, already 2.7 million residents are back under lockdown and confined to their homes following an outbreak in the city. Anyone who catches Covid faces quarantine or hospital.

The second element of China’s zero-Covid policy is the continued closure of its borders. This has been less noticed until now. Yet the slow but steady reopening of some of the most cautious major economies, such as Australia and Japan, along with the reopening of borders in the US, Canada, India and Europe with minimal bureaucracy, means China’s border policy is now a global outlier. It has also attracted international criticism: Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organisation, said recently that China’s zero-Covid policy is ‘not sustainable’, sparking a furious backlash from Beijing.

Despite rapidly declining Covid rates, China shows few signs of changing its closed-border policy. Last month, Beijing announced that it will no longer host the 2023 Asian Cup football tournament next summer, suggesting the policy will remain in place for some time yet.

As the 20th Party Congress in October approaches, Xi Jinping will want to ensure there are no obstacles to him obtaining a third term. Zero-Covid is personally associated with him. He can’t change tack now. Fixes such as Chinese-made mRNA vaccines that would provide better protection than the current local jabs, and a rollout that would cover the millions of unvaccinated older people, are still some way off.

But even these measures would not solve the problem. After all, countries with high vaccination rates still can’t guarantee zero-Covid – and China’s leaders are sticking to the official line that the virus must be entirely eliminated. As the country’s health chief, Ma Xiaowei, recently declared: ‘We’re a long way off being able to relax.’

Much of China’s domestic economy is suffering as a result. Year-on-year retail sales dropped by more than 11 per cent in April, a major deterioration from the 3.5 per cent fall in March. A Bloomberg paper last month said that China’s economic growth might fall behind the US’s for the first time since 1976.

A recent top-level meeting demonstrates why the continued closure of China’s borders could be a long-term problem. Last month the Politburo discussed its National Talent Development Plan, which aims to attract ‘the world’s outstanding talents’ including ‘leaders in key scientific fields’.

In the past decade, some of the obstacles that might have been expected to put off such talent from coming to China, such as restraints on academic freedom, have proved less burdensome than anticipated. Well-equipped labs, huge research budgets and attractive salaries, as well as an innovative environment for research in non-political areas, have brought many western-trained scientists to China.

But the lack of mobility now threatens this aspiration because it fundamentally deters international talent in science and business. Leading academics can’t visit China for a few days to supervise a collaborative lab project in medicine or genetics without nearly a month of quarantine first. Before Covid, entrepreneurs interested in investing in Chinese technology would fly over from California for a meeting. Not anymore.

Other CCP measures suggest nervousness about outside connections. It was recently announced that party members or cadres with significant overseas assets will be blocked from promotion. This is partly a move to avoid officials being hit by sanctions, but it will also mean that the most internationalised elements of China’s leadership elite will be the most likely to suffer. Already China’s zero-Covid era is taking its toll on the middle classes.

Meanwhile, the effects of China’s lockdown will continue to batter the global economy. Tesla has halted production in Shanghai because it can’t get hold of essential parts. There’s also a concern that when shipping is finally allowed out of the city, it may cause a flood of goods that further fuels worldwide inflation. The effects of the zero-Covid policy are unpredictable, but it’s certain that they will shape not only China but the world economy for months, perhaps years, to come.

Putin is no Peter the Great

Putin has a penchant for history, but only insofar it flatters him and his views. Last year, he gifted the world a 5,000 essay that essentially pre-justified his invasion of Ukraine with amateurish fantasy history, and now he is comparing himself with Tsar Peter the Great. It is not a comparison that fits or flatters.

Peter the Great is one of the, well, greats of the Russian historical pantheon. He ruled from the late 17^th to the early 18^th century, and in that time became the first tsar to travel in Europe, built a new capital at St Petersburg, and was both founder of the Russian navy and victor, on points, of the 20-year Great Northern War against the Swedish Empire, leaving Russia a dominant Baltic power.

Speaking on Thursday on the 350^th anniversary of Peter’s birth, Putin said that Peter did not take anything from the Swedes – although he acquired territories along the Baltic coast and much of Karelia – but simply ‘returned’ to Russia what had been its own.

Smugly he added, ‘apparently, it is also our lot to return’ what is Russia’s.

Inevitably, this has caused much furore, including the usual overheated twitter claims that he was threatening to retake Estonia or the like. Rather, this is classic Putin in two ways.

First of all, this is the trollmaster-general in his pomp. Putin enjoys using his more outré rhetoric both to misdirect and to intimidate. With his armies bogged down in Ukraine, he can pose no meaningful threat in the north. However, knowing that the West has limited military resources – and, more to the point, that western politicians have limited political bandwidth – it would suit him very well to convince Nato to concentrate on this front rather than Ukraine.

Secondly, it is clear that Putin regards his rightful place as being in that pantheon of Russian state-building heroes. He has repeatedly drawn parallels between himself and not just Peter but also such figures as Peter Stolypin (the tsarist prime minister whose ruthless modernisation campaign was the regime’s last real chance for survival), tsar Nicholas I, the ‘gendarme of Europe’ and Yuri Andropov, the KGB spymaster-turned-General Secretary. In that context, this is just another of his attempts to write his own epitaph.

Digging beyond the superficialities, though, is this really the role-model Putin should be claiming?

Like Putin, Peter wanted to build Russian military power, and not only reformed his army but built his navy, just as Putin spent 20 years modernising his military. In the process, though he began the Russian state’s slide into insolvency and ensured it would be fighting wars not just to its north-west but also to the south, against the Ottomans.

Peter in effect forced the unruly Russian aristocracy into state service. However, the tsar’s control was never as complete as he might imagine, and his successors would periodically have to buy off or suppress them.

Peter’s reforms were also much less lasting than might be assumed, beyond St Petersburg. He was a fighting tsar, who reformed only what was needed to support his wars. He failed to address the fundamentals of the economy or of society, seeming to believe – wrongly – that forcing the nobility to shave off their beards and adopt European styles of dress would change how they thought.

Yet while it is tempting to make cheap shots comparing the 5’7” Putin with the 6’8” Peter, the tsar was genuinely a larger-than-life figure, who led from the front (unlike Putin), immersed himself in the detail of his plans (unlike Putin), and whose concrete legacy was the glory of St Petersburg (not the ruins of Mariupol).

Even in capricious arrogance, Peter puts Putin in the shade. Putin may have indulged himself by humiliating his foreign intelligence chief on camera, but when he was teaching himself dentistry, Peter forced his courtiers to let him practice on them.

When I was writing my Short History of Russia, Peter got the best part of a whole chapter to himself. Putin got just a half. A coda for the later edition, after his invasion of Ukraine, concluded ‘Putin really should not have trifled with History. History always wins.’

FT’s Treasury ‘scoop’ shredded by FT readers

Has the Financial Times just been sold another pup? Its economics editor Chris Giles (who predicted that the Brexit vote would lead to recession) has written what could be a Labour Party press release today. He reports as fact a claim by the NIESR, a left-leaning economics think tank, that Rishi Sunak could have saved £11 billion had he taken their advice and taken out insurance against rising interest rates.

A startling claim, interesting hypothetical and worthy of a report. It might fall down upon further scrutiny: could the Treasury really ordered the Bank of England to force commercial banks to swap reserves for gilts? Would this not have been a massive gamble that could easily have lost money? But the FT, in its excitement, decided to write up the NIESR’s what-if as an expose – as if the money has actually been lost and they were revealing this to the world. This rather weird, highly hypothetical study was made into a splash.

Failure to insure leads to theoretical, rather than actual, losses, but the FT forgot this in its excitement. Nor is there any note of scepticism. By paragraph three, Giles is in full spin mode, talking as if the lost money was real. 

‘The loss to taxpayers is greater than the amount Conservatives have accused former Labour chancellor and prime minister Gordon Brown of costing the UK between 2003 and 2010, when he sold some of the nation’s gold reserves at rock bottom prices.’

Of course Brown personally ordered the sale of the gold, a disastrous foray into asset management. And the ‘blunder’ to which the FT refers is a decision not taken. 

Furthermore, plenty of the proposals laid out by the NIESR would interfere with Bank of England’s independence, so why lay the blame on Sunak’s door? A newspaper like the FT is supposed to know where such decisions are taken: why muddy the water and take its readers for fools? As one said: “This article is very difficult to read as it mixes up the Treasury’s position and the BOE’s position.” Others asked had the insurance scheme gone ahead, who would have taken the other side of that bet?

And let’s not forget that when The Spectator devoted a cover story on the risk if inflation it was trashed by… the FT. We were accused of “stoking panic in a bid to revive an austerity doctrine that economists widely view to be far more harmful than helpful.” What would they have said had the Treasury overruled the Bank of England to insure against an inflation risk the the FT thought laughably implausible?

Yet now the FT makes out as if Sunak is guilty of an imbecilic “blunder” and “economists” have called him out. Many of those who can afford the hefty FT subscription were quick to protest against being spun in this way. Plenty of traders are painfully aware that almost no one expected the inflation rise (in fact Rishi Sunak was one of the people pointing out the inflationary risks last year). So why present this a scandal?

Here are a choice of FT readers’ comments: 

• Am highly amused by the idea that the NIESR is not partisan? When did this happen? Yesterday evening? Also amused that our Chancellor should become a hedge fund manager all at the same time.The NIESR is looked upon in Westminster as a long time ally of the Labour Party. Has the FT not noticed this?
• This article could do with a sprinkling of Martin Wolf. No analysis of whether the NIESR proposals are practically viable or what the other implications of their suggestions would be (re. central bank independence, gilt mkt constraints, impact on commercial banks, policy implications of central banks and treasuries trading in the way suggested, are there any precedents etc.).
• This is a painfully political article from a paper that pretty clearly just has it in for the Tories.
• Struggle to follow this article, the Treasury is supposed to contradict BoE’s (independent?) money printing and mess up the market by hedging against rate rises? Who would take the other side of the trade? The BoE?
• I find this a strange story. If the Treasury had taken out insurance, this would’ve resulted in a large transfer from insurance companies to the UK government. Indeed, the insurance companies would have probably become insolvent. Like AIG, they would then have required a bailout – from the Treasury?
• The BoE’s QE has very significantly reduced the effective maturity of the uk’s debt; and therefore increased its sensitivity to interest rate rises. That effect dwarfs this article’s contemplated interest rate swap. But maybe blaming the [Bank of England] governor isn’t so much fun (and anyway QE has other effects).
• This is an appallingly misleading headline and article. Plenty to criticise the government for, but this isn’t one. Article should read: interest rates go up, cost of interest payments has risen. Who was the government supposed to sell this amount of fixed coupon debt to, other than itself?!
• I’d expect better of the FT – clickbait headline and lacking any decent explanation/analysis.

What are the odds on this being reflected in the FT’s letters page? Mr S won’t be holding his breath…

UPDATE

Giles has taken to Twitter to say “I make absolutely no apology for writing a complicated story in a newsy way – that is good journalism.” FT readers seem to have expected scrutiny and scepticism applied to claims reported: the bigger the claim, surely, the greater the need for scrutiny? If you can’t turn to the FT to sort out spin from substance, where do you go?

Why Biden’s inflation plan will fail

It sounded impressive at the time. On the last day of May, a whole ten days ago, president Biden laid out a three-part plan for bringing inflation back under control. It consisted of making sure the Federal Reserve was allowed to do whatever it took to control prices, releasing oil and gas reserves to try to bring down the soaring costs of energy, and fixing supply chains to try to make industry and retailing more competitive. ‘I have made tackling inflation my top economic priority,’ he announced grandly. To listen to the rhetoric from the White House, you might think that this was an issue that could be fixed with a few tweaks to public policy, after which the President could happily go back to taxing and spending on an unprecedented scale. The problem would be solved.

Except, er, whoops, not quite. Today we learned that inflation in the United States is not falling as it was meant to be, but still climbing. It went up to 8.6 per cent, compared to 8.3 per cent a month ago. The stock market started falling heavily on the news, on expectations that the Fed will have to keep raising interest rates to choke that off, and will have to do so faster and more aggressively than anyone yet realises. Anyone who imagined that inflation would simply be transitory and would soon be back under control again will have been bitterly disappointed.

In reality, Biden, along with other political leaders around the world, not least our own Boris Johnson, has made two critical mistakes. The first is that he has failed to acknowledge the government’s own role in creating inflation in the first place. By closing down the economy for over a year, restricting production, and then printing money like crazy to pay for it all, it created the conditions for rapidly escalating prices. In particular, Biden embarked on a huge spreading spree immediately after taking office, convinced by a small coterie of ultra-Keynesian economists that deficits didn’t matter and that a bigger state was automatically better for the economy. Next, Biden, again like Johnson, refuses to acknowledge that this process will be painful. To bring supply and demand back into balance, people will have to work harder and consume a bit less. The government most of all will have to step back and stop spending money it doesn’t have. Until Biden is willing to own up to that and level with the voters, it doesn’t matter how many plans he comes up with. They will all keep failing – and prices will keep rising.

The Capitol riot hearings are farcically partisan

Let’s get the boringly obvious out of the way. What happened in Washington on 6 January, 2021 was bad. Very bad. America, the world’s most powerful democracy, looked a horrible mess. Rioting is always wrong. Rioting on Capitol Hill on the day when power is meant to be peaceably transferred is anti-democratic and anti-conservative. Even if you believe the presidential election of 2020 election was rigged, as many ardent Trump supporters do, it is never acceptable to smash up federal property. To target America’s most important building is especially egregious. It doesn’t matter how angry you are.

Obvious point two: from the election in November to January, Donald Trump behaved irresponsibly, dangerously and stupidly. Never mind if he sincerely believed a second term was stolen from him. In 1960, Richard Nixon had very good reasons to think that ballot-stuffing in Chicago meant he lost ever so narrowly to John F. Kennedy. Nixon contemplated fighting the result. But in the end he decided to do what was best for his country: sucked up the defeat and came back to win in 1968. Democracy is often unfair. The fact that Donald Trump refused to do the same, the fact that he and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani cultivated often stark raving mad conspiracy theories as to how his opponents defrauded the nation, turned an ugly election into a democratic crisis.

But crisis is opportunity, and the widespread antipathy towards what happened that day presented America’s political class with a chance to try to restore the authority of the US Constitution over elections, to re-establish that, pace Trump, not everything is about winning and losing. The integrity of the system matters and so on.

Instead, America’s politicians, in their infinite folly, have decided to do the opposite. The January 6th Committee Hearings are farcically partisan. It is part of a highly political campaign by the Democrats to pour further scorn on the Republican party. Committees are meant to investigate; to establish what has gone wrong and find a way to do what’s right. But the Republicans and the Democrats could not agree on who should run the committee. And so the Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi vetoed minority leader Kevin McCarthy’s proposed members in favour of her own favoured Republicans. The result is that Liz Cheney is the Committee’s vice chairwoman. On 7 January, 2021, Liz Cheney tweeted the following:

Now, you may well think Cheney is entirely right. But doesn’t such a firm opinion, publicly expressed, make Cheney a less than ideal candidate to evaluate what happened on 6th January? 

Look too at the Democratic members of the Committee. Instead of picking sensible and even-handed Democrats – there are such things – Pelosi brought in some of the most rabidly anti-Trump representatives possible. Adam Schiff, who played such a prominent part in the great waste of time that was the Trump-Russia inquiry, as well as Trump’s first impeachment. Jamie Raskin has arguably even longer form when it comes to bias. He led Trump’s second impeachment and also protested against Trump’s victory in Florida.

So what should have been a painful issue of 6 January^. – at one level, simply finding out how a rabble of protestors managed to break into such a heavily policed complex; on another, establishing exactly who and what led them to do so – the Democrats turned the 6th January Committee into yet another tedious trial of Trump. Into another clear attempt to banish him from the political stage altogether and prevent a drubbing in the mid-terms in November. As the New York Times put it: 

‘House Democrats plan to use a landmark set of investigative hearings beginning this week to try to refocus voters’ attention on 6 January, aiming to tie Republicans directly to an unprecedented plot to undermine democracy itself.’

President Joe Biden, for his part, has said that 6th January was ‘about white supremacy, in my opinion’. Is there evidence for that? Or does evidence not matter anymore?

Where will Boris get his ideas from?

Has Boris Johnson run out of ideas? It’s not an unreasonable question at the end of a week in which more than 40 per cent of his MPs said they didn’t want him leading them any more. Still less unreasonable when his big reveal policies have been getting on with something that David Cameron signed off on in 2015 but that hasn’t yet happened; and a ‘once in a generation’ transformation of the NHS which seems to amount to some middle managers going on a course.

The right to buy announcement will merely implement an old policy, while the mortgage review alongside it may help a few first time buyers. The NHS Messenger Review does cover an important issue regarding the quality of leadership in the health service, pointing to the ‘institutional inadequacy in the way that leadership and management is trained, developed and valued’. That inadequacy has clearly been a factor in some of the number of large-scale scandals in the health service over the past few years, but also in the way many whistleblowers are treated, as well as the issue of bullying in certain trusts. Messenger identified the way in which managers tend to ‘look upwards to furnish the needs of the hierarchy rather than downwards to the needs of the service user’.

Oddly, though, you will find precious little acknowledgement of one of the factors the review, led by General Sir Gordon Messenger and Dame Linda Pollard, identified which was political pressure. Either way, the review, which seems sensible enough, isn’t the radical shake up of the NHS that it was trailed as. It’s not even particularly new given there has been a series of reviews on the questions of culture and leadership in the health service in recent years.

Once again, the Conservatives seem to have been looking back to the 1980s for some kind of inspiration: it was in 1983 that the Griffiths Review recommended genuinely radical changes to the way the health service was managed. It was a necessary overhaul but not necessarily implemented in the way its author Roy Griffiths, at the time the deputy chairman and managing director of Sainsbury’s, had intended.

And of course times have changed rather since Griffiths, so there is a need to look at how the health service works. It’s just that this government isn’t prepared to do that. It is unlikely that Johnson’s Blackpool speech on housing is going to rank among one of the seminal moments of his premiership, neither are health service figures going to be talking about Messenger in 40 years’ time in the way they still refer back to Griffiths.

Why the paucity of new ideas and reliance on reheating old ones? James explains the bind Johnson finds himself in here: he doesn’t have the authority or the money to go for things that will make a real difference.

Next week, the Prime Minister will trundle to Doncaster for a conference held by the Northern Research Group of Conservative MPs. They are just one of many pressure groups in the party who have plenty of their own ideas to push the weakened Johnson into accepting. Some of those ideas are very sensible, others will annoy Tory colleagues in other parts of the country no end. But a limping and uninspired Johnson can’t dismiss them out of hand because he needs these MPs to support him. It means he will end up with a real muddle of policies in the run-up to the next election which are characterised by the ability of certain ginger groups to shout loudest, not by his own vision for Britain. And while in the short term that’s all he can hope for, in the long term it will likely make it even harder for him to persuade voters to back him again at the next election.

Soaring fuel prices could be lethal for Boris Johnson

As if Boris Johnson was not in enough political trouble already, the latest surge in oil prices is threatening to overwhelm the government. This week, petrol prices in some filling stations have crossed the symbolic threshold of £2 per litre. This would be a problem for any government, but, for a Conservative administration which owes its last election victory to the votes of relatively low-paid manual workers, it is an existential threat. 

People who rely on their cars to get to work face being priced out of the workplace. Decades of sky-high property prices – and high moving costs thanks especially to stamp duty – have changed the pattern of living and working. There are large numbers of voters who must drive long distances to reach their place of work. If you are a teacher, nurse, carer or factory worker, you have no option of working from home. Moreover, outside London, public transport is often of little use – and it is going to be deeply affected everywhere by strikes over the next few weeks. High petrol prices are a bomb which has landed right in the heart of the former Red Wall.

But there is another aspect of this crisis which is especially harmful to Boris Johnson. During the Brexit referendum he promised that one of the benefits of leaving the EU would be the ability of Britain to drop the 5p VAT on domestic heating bills. Not only has he refused to keep this promise – and at a time when keeping it would have been especially helpful to households – but he is failing to follow the example of many EU countries which have introduced emergency cuts in road fuel duties, beyond the 5p cut in the spring statement. Germany has cut duty by €0.3 per litre, France cut it by €0.18 in April and has extended that cut over the summer. Poland, too, has cut duty. 

It is very easy to look and say: we left the EU partly so that we could reduce energy bills, and yet there are EU countries slashing fuel duties while we do not. As for the 5p cut in the spring statement, that has already been more than cancelled out by the rise in the VAT receipts. Given that VAT receipts are proportional to the price of petrol, charged at 20 per cent, the government is scooping in far more extra revenue than it lost through the 5p reduction. A 50p per litre rise in the underlying price of fuel generates an extra 10p in VAT receipts. Worse, the government can be said to be clobbering motorists by levying a tax on a tax – given that VAT is levied on fuel duty.

There is an alternative case which says that road fuel duties are not especially high in Britain. When it comes to fuel prices, the UK occupies a mid-table position among European countries – and most of the countries with cheaper fuel are Eastern European ones where earnings are a lot less. Moreover, fuel duty has not risen in a decade. The government is paying the political price for failing to raise duty when oil prices were very low between 2014 and 2017. It could have raised duty then and motorists would hardly have noticed – they would still have enjoyed falling prices. That would have allowed the leeway to cut duty much more firmly now.

But trying to tell motorists they are enjoying relatively cheap fuel is not going to wash. What should frighten the government is how much further oil prices could rise. For all the havoc caused by high energy bills, the price per barrel of crude oil has yet to reach its 2008 and 2011 peaks.

A gentleman’s guide to Father’s Day drinks

Whether it’s Santa or the Sith Lord Vader, if there’s a patriarch knocking about in your family, he’s sure to appreciate some pampering this Father’s Day. But there’s no need to fuss, since most daddios are at their best if they’re left alone with a drink.

So why not earmark a quiet corner for him on the 19th and make sure he has something special to sip on? Here are some suggestions that’ll make his day.

Bourbon

This month’s removal of a punitive US-UK tariff on American whiskey trade should see a glorious return for this smashing spirit, and there are few finer than the whiskies coming from the Heaven Hill Distillery (https://heavenhilldistillery.com/#5) in Kentucky. The family-owned distillery opened its doors in 1935 and amongst its many distinctions, is that it’s the only heritage distiller to produce every style of American whiskey. From Mellow Corn to the Larceny wheated Straight Bourbon and one of our favourites, the stunning Rittenhouse Rye, a whiskey for the assertive, no-nonsense fathers out there. For the all-rounder, we often opt for the Elijah Craig, an indispensable addition to any discerning drinks cabinet, it has all the quintessential complexity and quality of Kentucky Straight Bourbon.

Beer

If Dad has forgotten to take his meds, then how about serving up a crisp German Pils. The extraordinary world of choice and craft can be a bit of a head scratcher and sometimes the old man simply wants a decent, summer sipper with character. Pils and lager style beers have had a bad rap in recent years, but only because so many brands have made cheap examples – when brewed correctly, the style is sublime. Krombacher proves this point emphatically. Family and privately owned for centuries, Krombacher is one of few locations in the world lucky enough to brew with a natural water source. Discovered 300 years ago, the Felsquellwasser – meaning rock spring water – is amazingly soft and therefore ideal for brewing lager, as are the beer’s classic German hops (Hallertau and Siegel) and it’s cultivated yeast strain.

Mezcal

But if you really want to get Dad thinking, then how about a true discovery in The Lost Explorer Mezcal. Maestro Mezcalero Don Fortino Ramos has been mastering the art of distilling mezcal from more than 40 years and his daughter, Xitlali, works closely by his side now, preparing to one day become the family’s second generation mezcalera. At the heart of The Lost Explorer Mezcal are agaves that grow on ancestral Miztec land in Valles Centrales, Oaxaca for more than seven years. After the agaves are hand harvested, they’re baked in stone lined pits, then the juices are crushed out and left to ferment with wild yeast, before being distilled. Of the over the more than 50 varieties of agave that could be cultivated, the trio of Lost Explorers utilise the Espadín, Tobalá and Salmiana, and each will bring something different to the final distillate. We’ve opted for the Tobalá, with its drier quality and touch of tobacco and wood, that converts to a sweeter chocolate with a hint of lemon citrus. Incredibly complex and flavoursome, Mezcal is one of the last, true artisan spirits.

Boris has to deliver change without the authority he needs

Boris Johnson needs to be bold: business-as-usual will not save his premiership. But, as I said in the Times yesterday, never has it been more difficult for him to get anything significant done.

The first reason is that Johnson must operate knowing that another confidence vote is a near certainty. The rebels need only 32 more votes to oust him and so Johnson must tread carefully. He can’t afford to lose the support of any more MPs. This acts as a check on radicalism.

The second is that when a system thinks a PM might not be around that much longer, everything slows down. As one of those in the engine room of government laments: ‘When it starts to rain, the snails and the slugs come out. When there’s talk of defenestration, the system becomes gummed up.’ If officials think he may not be around in a year, they’ll be tempted to slow down ideas they don’t much care for in the hope they will be forgotten with a new leader in No. 10.

Under pressure, Downing Street is having to rush out policies before they are totally ready. Take the housing announcements Johnson made yesterday. The verdict of one Tory Whitehall veteran is that they are ‘in the right direction, but not fully thought through’.

The right-to-buy for housing association tenants could have benefits. But it is telling that the policy is unfunded. This is always the sign of something being announced prematurely. No. 10 is adamant that the money for it will come out of existing government budgets. But whose? Michael Gove’s? In which case, where will the cuts to his levelling up and housing budget fall?

The situation is made worse because the government is pumping out ideas in scattergun fashion. One minister at the sharp end complains that what is coming out of the centre ‘is not cohesive or coherent’. They say their small department simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to process it all and that the emphasis on eye-catching initiatives makes ‘it feel like the last days of Theresa May’.

When the Prime Minister tries to rally government departments, they tend to respond by going through the motions but little more, convinced that No. 10 has a short attention span. One long-serving Whitehall hand observes that the ‘view from several cabinet ministers is that the prime minister moves on to the next thing quite quickly, so don’t give him too much’.

In a year’s time, or less, Johnson will almost certainly have to face another confidence vote. By then, he will need to be able to show Tory MPs that things have improved, that changes are happening. But he will have to deliver those changes without the authority that he had back in December 2019.

Starmer has spotted Boris’s big weakness

Boris Johnson’s relaunch speech this week contained something for everyone: a clear-sighted policy on Ukraine, the bizarre idea that stoking up housing demand is the way to overcome a shortage of housing supply and a take on the economy that one might charitably describe as a Keynesian-Thatcherite synthesis.

But the most telling line came in a section about energy policy, when the Prime Minister claimed to be ‘building a new nuclear reactor every year rather than one every ten years’. Not to be planning to do so, but actually to be doing so right now, in real time as it were. In Johnson’s mind, the preliminary expression of an intention to do something complicated, time-consuming and difficult clearly means it is being done.

This would appear to explain an awful lot about his administration. For instance, when you want to stop civil servants working from home you just get Jacob Rees-Mogg to leave a note telling them to do so and this constitutes effective action. 

Or when you wish to deter Channel-hopping migrants, you get Priti Patel to make a speech saying they will be sent to Rwanda. 

Or when you want to demonstrate some action on ‘levelling-up’ you get Michael Gove to say the House of Lords might be transferred to the north of England. 

Or when you want to assuage the DUP, you say the Northern Ireland protocol is going to be changed or dumped. 

Or indeed when voters are getting prickly about the next wave of loopy diversity coordinator recruitment in the NHS, you get Sajid Javid to say he’s against it.

And then you can use the present tense to kid yourselves that effective action is being taken on all these things.

In the meantime, an increasingly weary Conservative electorate is noticing the growing chasm between intention and delivery. Home Office civil servants are aghast about the Rwanda policy, even before it has lead to the transfer of a single irregular migrant. The anti-Brexit House of Lords is gearing up to thwart whatever version of Northern Ireland protocol reform eventually gets unveiled in draft legislation next week. Civil servants are simply ignoring Rees-Mogg’s injunction to come back to Whitehall. Peers have loftily told Gove to mind his own business about where the Lords sits. And is there a person alive who has any faith that the creeping infestation of highly-paid ID politics types across the NHS – and, indeed, the rest of the public realm – will be brought to a halt by a lone harrumph from Javid?

Throw into the mix impending rail strikes and a feeble response to taming rampant inflation – despite sustaining the pretence that the Bank of England is seriously commanded to hold it to two per cent – and one is not a million miles away from the ‘imaginary divisions’ mindset which tends to afflict leaders with strong personalities when things cease going well.

The new backroom team in Downing Street is reported to believe that the key to political recovery for Johnson is for his administration to be seen to be doing at least one Conservative thing each week. This follows a year in which the PM appeared to have turned into a climate warrior, much to the disgust of the wider Tory tribe. 

Patel’s Rwanda plan was apparently singled out for early praise, having landed well with Conservative-leaning voters. Yet a demonstrable inability to deliver beneficial change – whether due to a lack of statecraft, insufficient concentration span or a deficit of sheer willpower – in the face of determined opposition from dug-in vested interests is just as corrosive for a government’s reputation as not even trying to do so.

Johnson has been compared to many supposedly right-wing historical figures by the more hysterical among his left-wing detractors, including Genghis Khan and Atilla the Hun. He has insisted that, in fact, he is more like a ‘Brexity Heseltine’.

One figure he should try at all costs to avoid being likened to is Edward Heath, a man who could hardly have been more different on the issue of European political integration. The trouble is that the Brexiteer and the arch-integrationist appear to be in grave danger of meeting around the back of the political bike sheds when it comes to the metric of effectiveness in office.

In early 1974, while plagued with an oil crisis, rising inflation and a wave of strikes, Heath called an election on the basis of ‘who governs Britain?’ only for the electorate to decide that if he needed to ask the question then clearly it couldn’t be him.

Plodding Labour leader Keir Starmer appears to be latching on to this as Johnson’s key weakness, going through a painful inventory of Tory under-achievement in PMQs this week. Johnson won himself some more time in this week’s confidence vote. But if he has not become far more adept at implementation by this time next year then he is going to get dumped. He will fully deserve such a fate.

The death of Russian diplomacy

‘It’s like being part of a cult,’ explains one student of Russia’s elite diplomatic academy. ‘They expect us to learn about diplomacy and the international order like nothing has changed, but everything has.’ Since it was founded by Joseph Stalin in 1944, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations has been a training ground for Russian ambassadors, Kremlin advisors and KGB spies. Now, though, discontent is stirring among the students.

In the weeks following the invasion of Ukraine, Russia passed a series of laws that made discrediting the armed forces an offence, punishable with fines and even jail time. While these future civil servants were always expected to ingest an official version of history and current affairs, the crackdown has made critical perspectives of government policy entirely unacceptable in the classroom.

‘They make it clear that nothing good will happen to you if you disagree,’ one young student warns. ‘We had a session where we discussed Ukraine and sanctions. My friend and I couldn’t say a word because everyone else was in favour of the war, talking about how to spoil western plans. They say we should stop supplying gas to Europe, then we’ll see how their opinion changes.’ She once dreamed of becoming an ambassador but has since decided to leave the country as soon as she graduates. ‘I can’t work for these crazy people’.

But many do naturally sympathise with their country’s position. Some even went so far as to buy ‘Z’ branded t-shirts and hats, wearing them around campus, to show their support for the invasion. ‘By virtue of my education it is clear to me what exactly Nato wants from Ukraine, and why our country could not allow such a turn of events,’ one student told me.

Few of Putin’s inner circle seem to have known he was planning an invasion until it was announced in late February. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and diplomatic spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, both regular speakers at MGIMO (as the university is more commonly known), had spent months insisting that no such action would be taken. Lavrov seemed genuinely frustrated during a meeting with his British counterpart, Liz Truss, in which she repeatedly warned against an assault. For many Russians, it was proof that the West was deaf to their country’s concerns about Nato expansion and intent on lecturing them regardless.

Now though, the establishment has been forced to catch up with reality, and Moscow’s top diplomat has been sent out to contort himself over conflict. ‘We have not invaded Ukraine,’ Lavrov claimed in March, weeks after the tanks had started rolling. Even if they don’t find that argument particularly convincing, current and aspiring officials either have to get behind it or risk severe consequences for speaking out.

So far, only one has. Boris Bondarev, an envoy with Russia’s mission to the UN in Geneva, made global headlines when he resigned in protest last month. ‘Today, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not about diplomacy. It is all about warmongering, lies and hatred,’ he wrote, arguing Lavrov himself has gone from respected elder statesman to conspiracy-loving crank virtually overnight.

Even those who want to stick with the foreign service are finding it more difficult. With dozens of envoys sent home in tit-for-tat expulsions from EU nations, slashing the number of available international postings, those who have been studying European languages for years are more likely to be writing reports in a back office in Moscow than enjoying a coveted role in Rome or Paris.

Likewise, there is seemingly little space for diplomacy in Russia’s current playbook. In Ukraine, as the fighting edges towards a grinding stalemate, the chances of a negotiated settlement look increasingly slim. What deal, Kyiv’s politicians ask, could ever be done with a country that can’t be trusted to honour its commitments?

Many of MGIMO’s lecturers are veterans of the Soviet diplomatic service, seemingly unconcerned about the prospect of the country once again being cut off from much of the world. For their students, though, a generation that grew up in a period of relative liberal openness, the change is less likely to be welcomed. Many are used to holidaying abroad and more western lifestyles. With Instagram banned, designer shops pulling out and restricted access to European visas, they face the consequences of Putin’s war far more than their teachers.

That generational divide has also caused some explosive disagreements. One class at the diplomatic academy apparently descended into furore after a faculty member referred to Ukrainians as ‘hohols’, a slur popularised since the start of the war. She is said to have denied it was racist when confronted by students, claiming her partner is of Ukrainian descent. The row, however, is a testament to the fact that even those planning careers at the heart of the Russian state aren’t entirely prepared to accept the full extent of its vitriol.

Outside of the country, observers have pinned their hopes on the next generation of Moscow’s leaders. However, as one disillusioned diplomatic trainee puts it: ‘Nobody expects our relationships with the West to get better in our lifetimes. If you want a job in foreign relations, you should probably start learning Chinese.’

Abolish the railways!

As the country is held hostage once again by the rail unions, it’s time for the nation to ask itself: does it need trains at all? The last time anyone dared ask this question was 60 years ago when Dr Richard Beeching boldly closed more than 2,000 stations and 5,000 miles of track. The time has come to finish the job and shut down the rest of Britain’s viciously expensive, underperforming and fundamentally inefficient rail network. The economic reasons for doing so are irrefutable, no matter how the railroad anoraks might sputter.

Originally private, then nationalised, then privatised again, then morphed into an odd hybrid in which tax subsidies are higher than ever, British railways are hideously expensive, uncomfortable and unreliable. On the continent, it’s little better.

Why does it cost more to take the train to the airport than to fly to Spain? And five times longer to get there on a train, than on a jet? Why is it cheaper to drive from London to Bristol than to take the train? Why are trains so often cancelled, late or stuck? Why do they insist on passengers travelling from where they are not, to where they don’t want to be?

The worship of trains has a sentimental side. The train has become part of our national mythology, like the BBC and NHS. I remember going to King’s Cross to visit my grandmother in Yorkshire, and a station shed stinking of sulphur, and porters, and a breakfast with thick rashers of bacon in a dining car with white tablecloths, as smuts of coal dashed against the window.

There’s a tradition in all parties to shove increasing quantities of cash into the infinite maw of the railways. Beeching today is reviled when he should be revered. The railways occupy Britain’s costliest and least effective transport corridors. They were mostly built in the 19th century and were a marvel of their time, a symbol and enabler of economic and social revolution. Today, these corridors are strikingly inefficient. They don’t lubricate mobility, they obstruct it. The railway network does not survive the most basic interrogation. 

The admired TGV in France born during the 1980s with the Paris-Lyon line has inspired many new lines including the insanely expensive HS2. In France, the real costs and benefits of these lines have never been published because they would show the high-speed trains manage to cover an unimpressive 4 per cent of passenger/kilometres travelled. SNCF is drowning in debt and regional train services are as bad or worse than they are in Britain.

The calculus for HS2 is equally brutal, as is its environmental footprint. The railways are not reliably moving us, but they are reliably fleecing us. Quieter, cheaper, driverless hence strike-immune, rubber-tired electric vehicles could move thousands more people at a lower cost from and to more destinations. If one of these vehicles were to break down, the entire network would not grind to a standstill behind it.

Merely using buses, a single reserved lane in the Hudson Tunnel delivers more workers into New York City each day than Waterloo Station into London. An aerial view of Waterloo, indeed the entire rail network, shows rail corridors that are basically empty as adjacent roads are saturated. Trains take a long time to speed up and slow down. If they’re not kept far apart they risk running into each other.

The technology is now available to repurpose the obsolete railways into a new transport system that’s fit for purpose and economically competitive. Artificial intelligence and driverless technology can be used to transfer rail corridors into corridors for autonomous electric vehicles. Tests of autonomous pods are underway in Dubai, Singapore and China. They’re to be used in Paris during the 2024 Olympics. The Japanese are experimenting in Tokyo. Here’s Britain’s chance to lead the world again, as we did with railways. So far, there’s little evidence of that. Investing billions in trains when their replacement is imminent is like investing in the horse-buggy industry as Henry Ford prepared to invent the automobile factory.

Perhaps there are arguments for saving a few train lines, where they are manifestly profitable or essential. Otherwise, the worship of the railways is like prayer to a dead religion. Train lines should be ripped up as quickly as possible.

BBC apologises for Antony Gormley Brexit blunder

It looked like another case of bad Brexit news: one of Britain’s most famous artists was giving up his passport as a result of Britain’s departure from the EU. That, at least, was how the BBC reported the story about the ‘Angel of the North’ artist Sir Antony Gormley. On BBC One’s main news bulletin over the Jubilee weekend, the BBC reported that:

‘Sir Anthony said he was giving up his British passport because of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union.’

But there was a problem: it wasn’t true. Gormley isn’t giving up his British nationality. And while, as a dual national, he is applying for a German passport, he is keeping hold of his British passport, despite the claims made by the BBC.

Now, the BBC has apologised for its mistake:

‘We reported that the acclaimed British sculptor Sir Antony Gormley is to become a German citizen. We said he was giving up his British passport because of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union and that he had described the move as embarrassing and had plans for new sculptures that would reflect his view. In fact Sir Antony Gormley is not giving up his British nationality and has asked us to make clear the circumstances behind his application for a German passport.’

Oh dear.

Ben & Jerry’s is wrong about Britain’s ‘racist’ Rwanda plan

Why is an ice cream brand lecturing Britain on the morality of its immigration policy? Ben and Jerry’s, otherwise known for flogging overpriced junk food, has weighed in on the government’s new policy of sending mostly single men dodging Britain’s border control to Rwanda. The plan is ‘cruel and morally bankrupt’, ‘racist and abhorrent’, according to the ice cream company, which says sending people ‘to a country they’ve never been to, and have no connection with’ could ‘put people’s lives at risk’.

Setting aside the source of these allegations, let’s evaluate these statements. Despite being depicted by some as a rainy hellhole, Britain remains an attractive country where a large segment of the world’s population desperately wants to live. It is so attractive that some people leaving Afghanistan will travel through Iran, Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, and France for a chance to climb into a small boat and make the dangerous journey across the Channel. Some 10,000 people have undertaken this journey in the first five months of this year.

Once they arrive in Britain, it can be difficult for the government to deport those who have no right to be here. Between the wide network of lawyers, and charities who foul up the system by exhausting every possible spurious grounds for appeal, and the hard-left activists who, when all else fails block planes and vans, deportations are at a record low even as the numbers arriving soar.

The core problem is that the various laws and conventions that govern the treatment of refugees were not designed for a world where travel is cheap and easy, where there are such big disparities in income between nations, and where the bar for seeking asylum lowers year by year. Outside of the West, there is a vast population which would desperately like to be inside, and in a large enough group there will be enough people with sufficient risk appetite to try it.

Even those in favour of relatively liberal immigration policies should oppose this state of affairs. High levels of irregular migration undermines support for legitimate and legal flows through the accurate impression that Britain can’t control its borders.

It is not ‘racist’ for the people who currently live in Britain – no matter their ethnicity – to demand a say over who their new countrymen are. A country is not a shopping mall interchangeable with one in any other city in the world. It has a distinct social and political character, one that inevitably changes with immigration at scale. Controlling this process means controlling the borders. Similarly, British taxpayers are already fiscally subsidising non-European migrants even when we demand they jump through the hoops set out by the Home Office and immigration regime. They have a vested interest in making sure the composition of migration works for them and not just for the new arrivals.

It’s not even necessarily the case that the plan works against the interest of migrants. Limiting the demand for their services reduces the ability of people smugglers to extort those who could already have settled in any number of safe countries. Far from putting ‘lives at risk’, preventing dangerous Channel crossings would keep them safe. 

And, of course, for Rwanda, the scheme is a win-win; Kigali, its capital, will reap the rich economic rewards of taking in the asylum seekers we are constantly told are ‘innovators, entrepreneurs, taxpayers’. And the British government will even pay them to do it. If you believe in these arguments, the programme must surely rank among the most generous development aid schemes ever devised.

But whatever else it is, it is clearly a massively controversial and highly political topic. Which makes it all the more startling that Ben and Jerry’s – which, again, exists to sell ice cream – has made strong views on British immigration policy a major part of its online presence. 

The tricky business of music biopics

Along with films about real life authors, poets, comedians and artists, biographies of musicians are notoriously difficult to translate successfully to the cinema screen. Why?

Writing and painting aren’t inherently cinematic; live music has more visual potential (hence the greater number of motion pictures). But the challenges of lip-synching and the existence in most cases of plenty of original concert footage raise the stakes for any actor prepared to take on such a role. There’s a real danger of performances falling into pastiche and mimicry.

Directors face an even greater predicament when music rights are refused, as was the case with the recent Stardust (2021) where actor/musician Johnny Flynn had to come up with songs in the style of David Bowie. A challenge for any actor, one which unfortunately laid heavy on Flynn’s narrow shoulders.

Likewise, Anthony Hopkins’s Surviving Picasso (1996) boasted none of Pablo’s paintings and the same year’s Basquiat also featured no actual (as opposed to ersatz) works by the artist.

When movies are given the official sanction of the subject (Rocketman) or surviving band members (Bohemian Rhapsody), the viewer can expect a certain amount of whitewashing. In Rhapsody’s case, by the bucketful.

In contrast, 2019’s Mötley Crüe biopic The Dirt (Netflix) was approved by the band but went out of its way to catalogue their debaucheries.

Early reviews of Baz Luhrmann’s (Moulin Rouge) upcoming Elvis have been mostly positive, with critics tending to prefer Craig Butler’s depiction of The King’s return in his 68 Comeback Special to that of his earlier years. Tom Hanks, equipped with a prosthetic nose, fat suit and Dutch-inflected accent has come in for a fair amount of criticism for his take on Presley’s grifting manager ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, which bears a certain physical resemblance to Orson Welles’ corpulent Police Captain Hank Quinlan in A Touch of Evil (1958).

Disney+’s Pistol about the Sex Pistols has received mixed reviews; famously John Lydon (née Rotten) went to court to prevent the use of Sex Pistol tunes in Danny Boyle’s adaptation of guitarist Steve Jones’ 2016 memoir Lonely Boy.

Fans of music biopics can also catch Wu-Tang: An American Saga, which, like Pistol, sits rather incongruously on Disney+.

Here are ten movies where you may (or may not) echo the newly resurgent Abba in saying ‘Thank You For The Music’.

Finding Graceland (1998)

Clearly drawing inspiration from Jonathan Demme’s Melvin & Howard (1980) – but with less effect, Finding Graceland sees an ageing bum claiming to be Elvis (Harvey Keitel) hitch a ride with young Byron Gruman (Jonathon Schaech) on a road trip to Memphis.

Keitel does surprisingly well when he eventually performs as ‘E’, belting out Suspicious Minds like a pro, but he was never going to win any lookalike competitions.

Is he really Elvis? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.

Amadeus (1984)

Hugely enjoyable as Miloš Forman’s Academy Award-winning adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 stage play Amadeus is, the viewer should not mistake the movie for historical truth, although the story follows the basic outline of Mozart’s later life in Vienna.

For one thing, bad guy Salieri (F Murray Abraham) was far from a mediocrity, as a cursory listen to his 1775 Sinfonia in D Major “Il Giorno onomastico” will attest.

Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) such a vulgar brat? To an extent, but since his domineering father Leopold treated the child prodigy as something of a performing monkey, carting him round the royal courts of Europe, it’s probably not that surprising he would rebel when older.

The film is a near-perfect marriage of plot and Mozart’s music, flowing seamlessly throughout its 161-minute duration, which rarely drags.

2017’s mystery drama Interlude in Prague was companion piece of sorts, with a younger Wolfgang (Aneurin Barnard – Peaky Blinders) unwittingly involved in skulduggery in the titular city (where Amadeus was filmed).

If you enjoy motion pictures about classical composers, you may wish to delve into Ken Russell’s extensive but divisive oeuvre (Song of Summer, The Music Lovers, Lisztomania, Mahler etc) or try Richard Burton’s mammoth mini-series on the undeniably talented but remarkably unpleasant Wagner.

For a less exhausting experience check out Hugh Grant as Frédéric Chopin in Sondheim collaborator James Lapine’s Impromptu (1991).

Respect (2021) Amazon Prime, Rent/Buy

Despite a strong performance from American Idol star Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin and a bonza supporting cast (including Forest Whitaker, Mary J. Blige, Marlon Wayans, and Marc Maron), stage director Liesl Tommy’s biopic proved a dud at the box office.

The movie follows Franklin’s career, troubled personal life, and other struggles, culminating in her 1972 Amazing Grace live gospel album, itself the subject of a critically acclaimed concert film (2018).

Released in the same year as Respect, Cynthia Erivo starred as Franklin in the equally underwhelming National Geographic four-part series Genius: Aretha.

Miles Ahead (2015), Amazon Rent/Buy

Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda) directed himself as Miles Davies in this quirky biopic which posits the idea of a 1970s in recovery/semi-addicted Davis teaming up with journalist Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor) to retrieve a stolen tape of his most recent work.

You may be old enough to recall that this was the same premise for Paul McCartney’s disastrous Give My Regards to Broad Street (1986).

But don’t worry, although no classic, Cheadle’s Miles Ahead is a much better picture.

The Doors (1991), Amazon Rent Only

Oliver Stone’s movie divided the surviving Doors, with keyboard player Ray Manzarek and drummer John Densmore against the movie and guitarist Robby Krieger marginally more positive, commenting in 1994: ‘Some of it was overblown, but a lot of the stuff was very well done, I thought.’

All three agreed that singer Jim Morrison wasn’t quite the drunken, offensive, and pretentious sociopath depicted in the picture, although they admitted he had his moments.

Krieger said: ‘(Morrison) was the clown that always blows it at the worst possible moment. He doesn’t mean to do it, that’s just the way he is, or was. It would’ve been a lot better if he didn’t have that part of him, but on the other hand, that was part of what drove him.’

On the plus side, the film looks great, and Val Kilmer is superb as Morrison aka The Lizard King aka Mr Mojo Risin’.

Sid & Nancy (1986) – full movie free to watch on YouTube, Amazon Rent/Buy

With Sid & Nancy and the following year’s Prick Up Your Ears, Gary Oldman provided two of the best performances of his acting career.

Although Sid’s life was seedy and his squalid death pathetic, Oldman and Cox have enough sense to leven the tragic tale of Vicious and fellow heroin addict Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb – Shameless USA) with humour.

Cox made some odd casting choices in Sid’s bandmates – in particular Scouser Andrew Schofield (GBH) as Johnny Rotten (as was) and the rotund Perry Benson (Benidorm) as bony drummer Paul Cook.

Predictably, Lydon didn’t care for the film. When asked if the movie got anything right, he replied ‘Maybe the name Sid.’

The Runaways (2010), Sundance Now, Amazon Rent/Buy

An early attempt by Kristen Stewart to break away from the abysmal Twilight franchise straitjacket, the actress plays Joan Jett (of ‘I Love Rock ‘N Roll’ fame) in her early days as a member of all-female rock band the Runaways.

Dakota Fanning plays bandmate Cherie Currie, with Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough as her identical twin Marie. Michael Shannon takes the role of unsavoury Svengali-figure Kim Fowley. The picture won favourable reviews but bombed at the box office.

Joan Jett was recently in the news when she pushed back at rocker Ted Nugent for his criticism of her inclusion in Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists (‘If Joan Jett is on the list of Top 100 Guitar players, then I’m Caitlyn Jenner’s boy toy,’ he said).

Jett took Nugent down with the response: ‘He has to be in that body, so that’s punishment enough. He plays tough guy, but this is the guy who sh*t his pants—literally—so he didn’t have to go in the Army.’ No love lost there then.

Nowhere Boy (2009) Freevee, FilmRise Amazon Rent/Buy

Sam Taylor-Wood’s directorial debut explores the teenage years of the young John Lennon, played by her now husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass).

And very good he is as well, making the chippy scouser likeable enough for the viewer to stick with the picture, which has a low-key charm.

Pistol’s Thomas Sangster is Paul McCartney in the film; which prompted his real-life counterpart to say: ‘You know what I’m slightly peeved about? My character, my actor, is shorter than John! And I don’t like that. I’m the same size as John, please. Put John in a trench or put me in platforms!’

Bird (1988), Amazon Rent/Buy

Clint Eastwood directed his lengthy labour of love biopic about jazz saxophonist Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker (Forest Whitaker) to critical praise but (unsurprisingly) poor box office returns. Whitaker’s breakthrough role saw him win the Best Actor award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival and Eastwood take the Golden Globe for Best Director.

The embellished story of Bird’s near decapitation by cymbal became a recurring leitmotif in Whiplash (2014).

As you may well know, Clint Eastwood is a huge jazz buff and no mean pianist, composing the scores to films including his own Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Changeling, Hereafter, J. Edgar, and the original piano sequences for In the Line of Fire.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), Netflix

Viola Davis (Fences) stars as the titular ‘Ma’ Rainey (born Gertrude Pridgett, 1886-1939), famed ‘Mother of the Blues’, and proto-lesbian feminist standard-bearer.

Adapted from August Wilson’s 1982 play (he also wrote Fences), the action takes place over a fraught evening’s recording session, where tensions simmer between the domineering Rainey and some of her all-male band, especially cocksure trumpeter Levee Green (the late Chadwick Boseman).

Ma Rainey was Boseman’s final film appearance; he also starred with Davis in Get on Up (2014), another music biopic, in which he played ‘Godfather of Soul’ James Brown.

The picture earned rave notices (97 per cent approval on Rotten Tomatoes), with Davis and Boseman singled out for praise, introducing Rainey’s music to a whole new generation of listeners.

And finally…for those who prefer movie biopics with a hefty dose of humour, the sequel to 1984’s This Is Spinal Tap has recently been announced, reuniting director Marti DeBergi (Rob Reiner) with David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest).

Fans of Tap classics Stonehenge, Sex Farm, Smell the Glove, Hell Hole, Christmas with the Devil, B*tch School, Big Bottom and Lick My Love Pump get ready for a rockin’ good time.

In 2024, that is, when the movie will be released.

What are the true ingredients of a Bakewell tart?

Northerners take their puddings seriously: Eccles cakes from Manchester, sticky toffee pudding from Cartmel, and Bakewell tart from Derbyshire. These hyper local puddings have been adopted by sweet tooths all over the country, but woe betide anyone who tries to mess with their traditions. In this, Bakewell tart provides its own challenges: the locals call it a pudding, and many will argue that it should have a puff pastry base rather than the shortcrust that it tends to have elsewhere, and even feature custard rather than frangipane. And we also have to contend with another variety – those made famous by Mr Kipling, which use a cherry jam, and decorate with a thick layer of fondant icing and a glace cherry.

Bakewell’s origin story contains the two most important aspects of any origin story: a kitchen accident, and an extremely spurious factual basis. The legend goes that in 1860, a waitress in one of the town’s pubs, The White Horse, failed to follow her mistress’s instructions and, rather than making a strawberry jam tart, ended up with what we now call a Bakewell pudding. But history begs to differ, with claims to the tart predating the poor waitress’s mishap by a couple of decades as far afield as Scotland and Boston, Massachusetts, not to mention the fact that the supposed proprietress of the White Horse never actually existed. The earliest recipes call for puff pastry and candied peel, neither of which now form a part of that which we happily call a Bakewell tart.

But no matter: the search for authenticity is usually a tricky and fruitless one. As enjoyable as a good origin story is, the true joy of a pudding is in the eating – and often in the ways the recipe has adapted and changed in the hands of those who made it across the years. In all but Bakewell itself, shortcrust has become the pastry of choice, and the candied fruit has peeled away. Here, I’ve courted popularity, and braved the wrath of Derbyshire, and gone for the most recognisable elements of the Bakewell: a decent layer of raspberry jam delivers just enough sharpness against the unapologetic sweetness of the frangipane, and the shortest of barely sweet pastry cases gives the pudding a necessary bite.

Bakewell tart

Makes: 1 9 inch tart (serves 8)

Takes: 30 minutes plus chilling

Bakes: 40 minutes

For the pastry

250g plain flour

125g unsalted butter

1 tablespoon caster sugar

1 teaspoon fine salt

125ml water

For the frangipane

100g unsalted butter, softened

100g light brown sugar

100g ground almonds

1 egg

1 teaspoon almond essence or 1 tablespoon amaretto

1 tablespoon self-raising flour

5 tablespoons seeded raspberry jam

2 tablespoons Flaked almonds

1. First make your pastry. Combine the butter, flour, salt and sugar in a food processor or between your fingertips until the mixture is like breadcrumbs. Beat in the water using a wooden spoon until the dough is smooth. Flatten into a disc and wrap in clingfilm, before refrigerating for 2 hours.
2. Roll the chilled pastry into a circle about half a centimetre thick, roll this up onto your rolling pin, and gently lay into a 9 inch tart tin. Chill for half an hour.
3. Preheat the oven to 200°C. Trim the overhang pastry, prick the base with a fork, line with baking paper and weigh the pastry down using rice or sugar or baking beans. Bake for 15 minutes, remove the pastry weights and baking paper, and bake for a final 5 minutes.
4. Reduce the oven to 180°C. For the frangipane, beat the butter and sugar together until fluffy and noticeably lighter in colour. Add the egg followed by the almonds, self-raising flour and almond essence or amaretto.
5. Spread the jam into the base of the tart and gently smooth across the pastry which will still be fragile as it is still warm. Spoon the frangipane onto the tart, level it, and return to the oven for 20 minutes. Carefully sprinkle the flaked almonds over the baked frangipane and bake for a final five minutes.