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Can the Tories bounce back before the next election?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Macron dream of the Nobel Peace Prize?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The perils of ‘Bidenflation’

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

In defence of a British bill of rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real reason for Putin’s intelligence shake-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Queen’s Speech wasn’t all bad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Irish state broadcaster: Britain could invade

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

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

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

Screenshot_2022-05-11_at_13.53.31.png

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

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

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

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

With academics like these, who needs firebrands?

BlackRock is right to abandon eco-activism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ingredient that guarantees the flakiest Eccles cakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Makes 9 Bakes 35 mins Takes 20 minutes plus chilling time

For the pastry

– 350g plain flour

– 1 tsp fine salt

– 150g butter

– 75g lard

For the filling and topping

– 75g butter

– 150g light brown sugar

– 200g currants

– 75g candied peel

– 1 tsp mixed spice

– 1 egg white

– 4 tbsp demerara sugar

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch: Michael Gove’s bizarre media round

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merkel is turning into Blair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the Marxist Tariq Ali gets wrong about Winston Churchill

Tariq Ali, the Marxist writer and activist, believes that a ‘Churchill cult’ is ‘drowning all serious debate’ about the wartime leader, and that ‘an alternative was badly needed’. He has therefore written a book that parrots every earlier revisionist slur about Churchill – war criminal, evil imperialist, mass murderer, pro-fascist – from detractors such as Caroline Elkins, Priya Gopal, Richard Gott, David Irving, Madrushee Mukerji, Clive Ponting, Richard Toye and Geoffrey Wheatcroft. If there were indeed a Churchill cult, it has done a singularly bad job of drowning out criticism of its hero.

There’s a general rule in biography, as in journalism, that knocking copy ought to be better researched than ordinary writing, but it is not one that Ali observes. He makes so many basic factual errors that Churchill’s reputation emerges unscathed from this onslaught.

The book claims that Churchill ‘had been little more than a clever politician engaged in career building’ before he became prime minister in 1940. Not so. He had already helped create the welfare state, readied the Royal Navy for the Great War and warned the world about the rise of the Nazis, among many other significant achievements. Explaining Churchill’s supposed unpopularity during the second world war, Ali claims it was because ‘the men fleeing Dunkirk knew how unprepared and badly armed they were’. Yet Churchill had been demanding higher defence spending throughout his wilderness years.

Ali further claims that in 1943, a Gallup Poll ‘revealed that only one third of the population expressed satisfaction with the war cabinet, i.e. Churchill’. Yet Churchill was not the war cabinet, and Gallup actually recorded Churchill’s personal popularity remaining above 80 per cent throughout his wartime premiership – dipping briefly for a single month to 78 per cent – and on three occasions reaching 93 per cent. The statement that the Conservatives lost the 1945 election due to ‘anti-Churchill feeling’ is similarly wrong. The Tories would have done much worse if he had not been their leader. They lost because the electorate, while admiring Churchill personally, wanted the welfare state, nationalisation and the ‘New Jerusalem’ offered by Clement Attlee (whose name is consistently misspelt in this book).

Ali makes so many basic factual errors that Churchill’s reputation emerges unscathed from this onslaught

Ali believes that General Kitchener was in command and responsible for Britain’s early defeats in the Boer War in 1899, even though Kitchener did not set foot in South Africa until January 1900, three months after the war broke out. He claims that Churchill sent troops against the miners at Tonypandy, when in fact he stopped the troops who were on the way there, leaving the police to engage the miners with rolled-up mackintoshes. He describes Churchill’s wartime ministry as ‘the Tory gang running the country’, whereas in fact Labour and the Liberals were included in Churchill’s coalition from the start. He also puts Enoch Powell in Churchill’s postwar cabinet, whereas he was not even a minister in the government.

Churchill is accused of being ‘exhilarated’ by the destruction of German cities. In fact he saw it as a ghastly necessity, and rhetorically asked: ‘Are we beasts?’ It’s further stated that Churchill did not admire the Pashtun tribesmen’s ‘fierceness on the North-West Frontier’, proving that Ali cannot have read The Story of the Malakand Field Force, which is full of examples of just that. Not reading books is something of a speciality of Ali’s. He claims that in my biography of Churchill, I ‘execute sleight of hand’ by not directly quoting Churchill’s statements of admiration for Mussolini, whereas I do on five occasions.

Ali argues that Churchill was ‘an advocate of Franco’s triumph in Spain’ and that his ‘support for the general was never in doubt’ because, ‘blinded by class and imperial prejudices, Churchill fully backed European fascism against its enemies on the left’. In fact Churchill advocated strict non-intervention during the Spanish civil war, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that a Franco victory would lead to ‘the same kind of brutal suppressions as are practised in the totalitarian states’, and in December 1938 told Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary: ‘Our interests are plainly served by a Franco defeat.’

The quality of Ali’s research is so execrable that he even cites the fictional TV series Peaky Blinders as a source for the (untrue) claim that Churchill ordered Special Branch to murder Sinn Feiners in Britain in the 1920s. Sinn Fein is, of course, deified in this book, whereas Evelyn Baring, the governor of Kenya in the 1950s, ‘would have easily slotted in as a Third Reich bureaucrat’. When Ali is not being gratuitously insulting, the seriousness of his argument may be judged by his remark: ‘Jomo Kenyatta became the official leader, had lots of children (like Boris Johnson) and was feted by the Queen.’

If someone is going to make the accusation that ‘Churchill was fully aware of, and supported, crimes being committed’ against Mau Mau guerrillas, they must back it up with documentary evidence; but Ali has merely surmised this (again, wrongly). He states that Churchill believed that the native peoples of the British Empire ‘must be oppressed to such an extent that the force used, the terror employed, the exploitation permanently embedded in the colonial situation, comes to appear normal to them’. This is an utterly warped view of the way that Churchill genuinely viewed the Empire, which was as an honourable institution, driven partly by noblesse oblige, which brought to many millions a happier, safer and more prosperous life through being part of the British family of peoples and races.

That aspiration was what actuated imperialists such as Churchill, Curzon, Cromer and Kitchener, as well as millions of decent Britons who would not otherwise have devoted their working lives to the Empire as doctors, missionaries, tea planters, magistrates and soldiers. To write off generations of Britons, often of strong Christian faith and high morals, as bloodstained exploiters and murderers is simply Marxist propaganda. Few, if any of them, would recognise as true Ali’s statement that in the Kenya in the 1950s ‘Africans were regarded as talking beasts who could not think like Europeans’.

In the Kenya section, Ali has swallowed the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins’s writings on the Mau Mau uprising, whose mortality figures were wildly out because of the way she used census data. But then Ali unquestioningly endorses the worst accusations of every Churchill detractor. Of one, Clive Ponting, who leaked military secrets while at the MoD during the Falklands war, he writes: ‘His fine mind was a loss to the English civil service.’

Ali’s accusation that the toppling of the supposedly ‘popular, liberal and democratic’ Iranian premier Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 was done primarily by the CIA and MI6 has been exploded by the recent work of the Oxford historian Dr Ray Takeyh and others. They have pointed out that Mosaddegh was appointed by royal decree and crushed dissent despotically; and although western intelligence agencies certainly supported his ousting, it was actually a powerful coalition of Iranian clerics, generals and merchants who disposed of a petulant would-be dictator who was ruining the country and was neither popular nor liberal nor democratic.

‘The intentions of western imperialism were certainly genocidal from the very beginning of the process,’ Ali states, arguing that there was ‘no crime too nasty’ for Churchill to support. Yet although the Amritsar massacre is mentioned, Ali fails to note that Churchill denounced it in the House of Commons, calling it ‘an extraordinary event, a monstrous event’ and asserting that ‘frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopaeia’. Ali’s remarks about the Bengal famine, the Greek civil war, the Combined Bomber Offensive and so on are consequently as predictable as they are under-researched and misleading. Over Iraq in the 1920s he fails to distinguish between the use of poison gas and non-lethal tear gas. Nor are his historical errors confined to Churchill. Napoleon is presented as having opposed the abolition of slavery, whereas it was one of the first things he decreed on returning from Elba in 1815.

Some of the imagery of this book is curiously scatological. Britain, which along with Australia is described as a ‘testicle-state’ of America, is apparently ‘destined to live in the capacious posterior of the White House’. In a long rant about Churchill’s Zionism and what he calls ‘settler racism’ and ‘Zionist war crimes’, Ali states that the Jews’ ‘long-denied crimes and atrocity’ against the Palestinians in 1948 is today ‘the common sense of Jewish Israel from top to bottom’. ‘There is no such thing as the historical right of Jews to Palestine,’ he explains, since Zionism is simply European colonisation, the result of Theodore Herzl’s ‘fanaticism’. There is nine pages more of this stuff in which Churchill isn’t even mentioned, but where Brooklyn Jews are described as ‘the most vicious, diehard representatives’ of American Jewish culture.

Ali believes that the spray-painting of Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square ‘is one of the mildest criticisms of Churchill that can be made’. I would suggest a much milder one is to write a book so full of factual inaccuracies that its bile and evident malice fail to persuade. Here endeth the lesson of a high priest of the Churchill cult.

Dilyn disrupts Downing Street (again)

After the pomp and circumstance of yesterday’s Queen’s Speech, Tory MPs were on their best behaviour last night as they trooped into Downing Street to attend evening drinks with the Prime Minister. Boris Johnson has instituted a series of these receptions in recent months, as part of a belated effort to ‘love bomb’ his restless backbenchers. Such invites are part of a broader strategy to make Conservative MPs feel more involved in government strategy, with Andrew Griffith and Steve Barclay both being given key Downing Street posts to try to reflect the priorities of their colleagues in the parliamentary party.

Around 200 MPs rocked up last night, for what one loyalist described as a ‘very enjoyable’ occasion. No Red Wall MPs were spotted dancing – unlike the Tories’ ‘away day’ dinner at the Westminster Park Plaza hotel in March. The evening was enlivened, however, when Boris Johnson tried to address the troops in the No. 10 garden – home of wine and cheese soirées and rose garden press conferences. For Dilyn the dog, the wayward whelp of Westminster, immediately began barking and yapping as the poor PM tried to speak. One backbencher said that ‘the dog was a great source of entertainment and got very excited when he went up to speak.’

A dissident heckler, perhaps? Another attendee remarked to Mr S that ‘Perhaps two years in No. 10 has given Dilyn Labour sympathies’ as the ‘out of control’ dog tore around the guests. It’s not the first time of course that the Johnson family pet has caused Boris problems – he’s previously been accused of damaging antiques at Chequers while a press report that he was about to leave No. 10 caused a minor storm in the middle of Covid.

Given all the other dramas in his life, perhaps the PM should have just stuck with poor old Larry the cat…

Is Britney Spears OK?

In a society obsessed with labels, we are surrounded by amateur psychologists at every turn. Low attention span? ADHD! Social awkwardness? You’re probably on the spectrum. Had an argument with your partner? Maybe he’s a gaslighting narcissist. You’d be lucky to have a mid-afternoon drink without whispers that you’re an alcoholic. The West’s obsession with diagnosing disorders reveals a need to blame someone, or something, for our actions.

And yet I can’t help but wonder whether we’re watching someone showing real signs of psychological distress and choosing to ignore it. Just look at Britney Spears. Her latest Instagram selfie shows her totally starkers, save for a small pulsating love heart emoji over her bits and pieces. ‘Britney Spears posted a full-frontal nude on Instagram – good for her’, purred the Independent.

It’s not just nudity (which there is a lot of). One video shows the 40-year old standing, hands awkwardly in pockets, reciting swearwords. Another has her pretending to be dead, handcuffed and covered in blood.

This behaviour, excused by her fans as ‘reclaiming her autonomy’, isn’t normal

This behaviour, excused by her fans as ‘reclaiming her autonomy’, isn’t normal. It seems like the moral obligation to check whether people are OK simply disappears when their actions match the accepted narrative. The Free Britney Brigade campaigned to overturn her conservatorship – a legal constraint brought in by her father – which saw her personal, economic, and contractual decision-making powers handed over to others. It was a story of liberation.

But where is the Britney Brigade now her behaviour is becoming ever more erratic? Instead of concern, they claim outrage at suggestions that she might be anything other than fine.

Few seemed to care about the 13 years of the conservatorship until the final months. Maybe one or two friends raised an eyebrow and condemned her family’s actions, but it wasn’t until over a decade later that the #FreeBritney movement gained momentum. Enter grandstanding celebrities, who realised they could reap the rewards of ‘saving’ Britney. (Probably the same celebrities that have told 23 different media outlets that they plan on adopting a Ukrainian.) The truth is, now that Britney has been ‘saved’ – now that she has ‘spoken her truth’ and ‘gained autonomy’ – the Britney Brigade has moved on to something else. Their involvement no longer gives them gratification. It’s a label, I know, but isn’t there something of the hero complex in all this?

Britney’s undoing began years before her breakdown, which resulted in that infamous shaved head and the loss of custody of her two young children. Like other girls in the music industry, she was turned into a neat little product the second she walked into a recording studio. At 16 years old, her entire appeal was built on the image of a doe-eyed virgin with a sexy, southern accent. In hindsight, things would only get worse. The years that followed saw two failed marriages, drug and alcohol abuse, rehab stints and some of the most invasive paparazzi incidents the world has ever seen. Videos of a perinatal Britney with her young children, crying while running for shelter from swarms of photographers show what she was up against. And I feel ashamed to admit it, but I lapped it up too.

The conservatorship was agreed on soon after her public breakdown, and the next 13 years saw her day-to-day life, and the huge economic advantage that it brought to those around her, controlled in minute detail. Shake your moneymaker and shut up, she seems to have been told. Since those legal constraints were lifted, it’s emerged that Britney wasn’t able to do even the basics without permission: from ordering new clothes with her own considerable wealth to allegedly being drugged by her family. Britney Spears suffered years of trauma that most of us couldn’t imagine (and yes, this is real trauma) but to say that her current behaviour is normal seems wrong. Her outbursts aren’t quirky or sweet, they’re unsettling.

This conclusion isn’t an attack on a woman who is clearly suffering. It’s a recognition of what she endured for years. Yet worried fans who question whether Britney is anything other than compos mentis face a social media pile-on by her so-called supporters.

Her childhood was stolen from her and, like so many others caught in a similar situation, it seems as though she’s been trapped in perpetual adolescence. From her bizarre dance routines to her excessive use of emojis on every cryptic Instagram caption, her behaviour points to a lack of emotional development. I’m no therapist, and I know I’m falling into the same trap as those who bandy around pseudo-psychological terms and cod-Freudian pronouncements. But it really shouldn’t be wrong to ask: is Britney OK?

In defence of Liz Truss’s retro economics

One of the many curious things about Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is that she has the capacity to drive some people around the twist. There are the Trussites, hovering over her Instagram posts in political adoration, and then there are others who consider her a menace who is about to be made Prime Minister in a sinister conspiracy by Brexiteers.

At least she is willing to challenge the groupthink of the Bank of England and the Treasury, both of which are full of clever people who have manifestly failed to manage the inflationary shock currently knocking us all off our perches. At the weekend, it was reported that Ms Truss believes that the debts run up by the government during Covid ‘should be hived off into a separate pool and paid off more slowly, as Britain did with its war debts’.

This attracted the attention of the economics editor of the Financial Times, Chris Giles (who in fairness is usually happy to challenge the Treasury). ‘Sometimes I despair, if Liz Truss thinks that increasing the longevity of a portion of the UK debt makes it cheaper/disappear, we are in serious trouble.’

In fact, what Liz Truss is suggesting is perfectly respectable, as anyone with a passing knowledge of financial history would be able to tell you. And if it didn’t make the national debt disappear, it would certainly make it cheaper and more manageable.

As part of the wholesale reform of British institutions after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, there was also a financial revolution. This began with the importing of so-called ‘Dutch finance’, in other words a Stock Exchange and a Central Bank, with the founding of the Bank of England in 1694.

The financial revolution progressively put the national debt on a more trustworthy footing. The hotch-potch of lotteries, short term loans and annuities, which the Crown relied upon to borrow, was progressively replaced with bonds, or gilts, with the interest to be paid by tax, ring-fenced by parliament for specific purposes. Investors were delighted. In 1751, the Consolidate Loan Fund and National Debt Redemption Act created a new innovation. Not only did this consolidate all borrowing into one fund, but it also created a new type of bond, consols, which was effectively perpetual.

In other words, the Bank of England could issue £100 nominal on behalf of the Treasury, paying interest of say 3 per cent or £3. These amounts were fixed. And the brilliance of consols was twofold. First, economic growth and inflation made the cost of funding them effectively cheaper over time, relative to the size of the economy. And second, paying them back or redeeming them was entirely at the discretion of the government.

This process is explained in a handy paper called I Owe You, A Churchillian Solution to the National Debt by Eamonn Butler and Gabriel Stein for the Adam Smith Institute (indeed it was this paper specifically which caught Liz Truss’s attention). But you can read about it in dozens of economic history books, notably The Cash Nexus by Niall Ferguson.

Consols were the ideal instrument for funding emergencies such as wars or pandemics. They explain why the British state was able to cope with debts of over 250 per cent of GDP after the Napoleonic wars, the first and the second world war (more than twice the current level of 95.5 per cent). It was the British financial system, raising money at low rates of interest, which prevailed over Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler, not simply force of arms.

In 2015, George Osborne took the questionable decision to stop issuing consols and to pay the remaining issues back, thereby bringing the shutters down on the consol market. This should be reversed. States don’t take out insurance policies to fund crises, they are too big. Instead, they should insure themselves through perpetual or long term bonds, spreading the cost of one-in-a-hundred years events over decades. Far from being shouldered with the cost of today’s spending, future generations benefit from wars, emergencies, disasters and pandemics being successfully resolved and the subsequent economic growth that success brings. The costs to later citizens are trivial relative to the gains; winning wars and weathering pandemics makes them better off than they otherwise would be.

It is the failure to treat Covid and the consequent costs as a one-off which is Rishi Sunak’s founding error. Instead of doing that, he has embarked on a crazy dash to balance the budget within five years and reduce the national debt to a modest 80 per cent by raising taxes to the highest level for 70 years. No attempt has been made to differentiate emergency Covid spending from the other, more frivolous demands of the Prime Minister. We really don’t need to worry about the public finances nor be subjected to the current levels of taxation, as long as we are sensible, controlling and accounting for spending properly and keeping some historical perspective.

Meghan Markle’s presidential run appears inevitable

Meghan Markle has starred in a Netflix show and married into the Royal Family, but has she got her eyes on even loftier ambitions? Since quitting the UK and moving to the United States, the Duchess of Sussex has involved herself in various soft-political campaigns. She’s asked Congress to legislate paid family leave. She has also placed herself in the company of the Obamas and the Bidens. Is this all serving as a prelude to a presidential bid for the Democratic nomination? 

If so, Joe Biden’s sister appears to have given the game away. While Meghan has kept schtum about her political aspirations, Valerie Biden Owens has suggested president Markle might not be such a far-fetched prospect. In an interview with Good Morning Britain, Owens suggested that ‘of course’ the Duchess of Sussex would be a viable candidate for president one day. 

‘It’s wonderful to have women in politics,’ she added: ‘The more women we have the better our democratic system will work. We welcome her to come in and join the Democratic party.’ 

How would Meghan handle the negative publicity that would inevitably follow any bid she makes for the top job?

Is Owens just freelancing here? That seems unlikely: Biden’s sister is a seasoned political operator who played a key role in her brother’s successful 2020 presidential campaign. She also worked with him on his Senate campaigns and his 2008 presidential bid, which saw him bow out and grant his support to Obama in exchange for the vice-presidency. Everything that she says or does publicly, especially to a journalist during a sit-down broadcast interview, is likely to have been carefully considered. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that this interview might be seen as a formal overture to Meghan from the Democratic party establishment. The message is simple: ‘Do you want to lend us your celebrity if we’re defeated by the Republicans at the next election?’

Many Democrats in America are currently resigned to the likelihood of Biden being a one-term head of state. The prospects of his defeat at the hands of a resurgent Trump, or similar populist Republican in 2024, are quite high. It’s also fairly likely that Biden, who will be 82 at the end of his first term, might decide he is unable to continue as president, given the perpetual rumours of incipient senility that surround him. 

Should he step down, Kamala Harris would at least have to be offered the chance to run as president. But a growing number of Democrats are likely to resist the coronation of a hapless and gaffe-prone vice-president who hardly comes across as a strong candidate. 

Under such a scenario, the appeal of a starry, glamorous figure willing to stand for the nomination come 2028 becomes clear. Owens is not alone in thinking that the Duchess would have an excellent chance of winning the nomination, and perhaps even the presidency.

President Meghan. The words will send a chill down the spine of those like me who are sceptical of Markle’s ladder climbing. The bland press release-led initiatives detailing her and Prince Harry’s Archewell foundation are a worrying indication of the missives a Meghan-led White House would fire out. Do we really want Meghan leading the Free World? 

And how would Meghan handle the negative publicity that would inevitably follow any bid she makes for the top job in American politics? If she runs for public office, the media will feel licensed to pursue avenues that have previously been considered off limits, such as her first husband Trevor Engelson, who has kept a remarkably low profile since their divorce in 2013. The controversy and news stories that will inevitably emerge could make the tales involving previous presidential candidates look mild by comparison.

Still, if she does decide to go for it, Meghan can draw comfort from one particular precedent. When Donald Trump ran for president, he was by far the best-known and most controversial candidate the Republican party had ever put forward. Should Meghan become the Democratic version of Trump – a high-profile, divisive figure with enormous newsworthiness, for good or ill – then only a fool would bet against her (and her cavaliere servente Prince Harry) taking up residence in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue before the decade is out.

In praise of British strawberries

Ask a foreigner to name the fruit that above all others epitomises their image of Britain, and it will surely be the strawberry. It is less a fruit than an icon. Redolent of royalty: not just for its role jam sandwiching together a Victoria Sponge but for its colour too, as patriotically red as the tunics of The Queen’s Guards. To eat bowls of strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. To partake of a punnet on a park picnic. These things are as quintessentially British as tea and queuing.

What is it that is so evocative about strawberries? They are of course synonymous with summer, and they have about them something of the match tea, of outdoor eating and of holidays. There is nostalgia too: growing up without strawberry jam sandwiches was surely no childhood at all. They feel like a very egalitarian fruit: while a few posh kids might grow up with a taste for blueberries and loganberries, everyone knows what a strawberry tastes like. The timing of their arrival adds to the anticipation: the appearance of home-grown strawberries on shelves heralds the proper start of the British fruit season after so many months of cold and wet and dreaded kiwis.

Even setting aside the food miles, I find there is something particularly deplorable about getting a non-British strawberry, when the home-grown ones are so superior. Wait until May for the early season British fruit, grown under cover. They will often get better as the season goes on and they have had time enough to soak up the sun. Thanks largely to the breeding of new cultivars by the East Malling Research centre in Kent – the epicentre of strawberry production – the traditional six-week UK strawberry season is now far longer, so we can gorge with abandon throughout the summer: on Symphony and Sweet Eve, on Sallybright and Judibell, or – as the special bank holiday weekend approaches – on Jubilee (first released in 2002 for HM’s Golden Jubilee) or on any of the other 30-odd varieties grown in this country.

Do not be scared of using them in savoury dishes too; they work very well paired with feta and thyme

The horticulturalist George M. Darrow was the world’s foremost authority on strawberries (a life well lived). He notes in his 447-page magnum opus on the strawberry that cultivation of the fruit began in Europe in the 1300s. The French were enthusiasts, though the plant was considered more ornamental for its flowers than useful for its fruit. King Charles V had his gardener plant no less than 1,200 strawberry plants in the royal gardens of the Louvre in Paris. But the species looked different back then – more akin to the teeny wild strawberries which continue to grow in English hedgerows and woodlands. It was not until the Virginia strawberry was brought to England from across the pond and cross bred with a larger South American variety that the strawberry that we are accustomed to today was born. The first such ‘modern’ strawberry arrived on the English – and European – market in 1821. As Jane Grisgon tells, it was a sensation, with the grower awarded a silver cup by the Royal Horticultural Society. The notable strawberry successes thereafter read as a reassuringly, gloriously English roll-call: ‘the next major strawberry was Downton…And so it went on. The culmination came in 1891 with Scarlet Queen and 1892 with Royal Sovereign.’

How to eat them? Strawberries are perfect with pastry, such as in these simple little tartlets. For a teatime option, try this strawberry and Earl Grey roulade, a twist on a Swiss roll. For pudding, it is hard to better this strawberry trifle. You will often see recipes suggesting you marinate your strawbs in balsamic vinegar to bring out the flavour. It does work so long as you use best-quality aged balsamic. A little pile thus prepared goes perfectly with a vanilla panacotta or with ice cream.

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Strawberry tartlets

Do not be scared of using them in savoury dishes too; they work very well paired with feta and thyme in this tart. And they can be used to great effect in vinaigrettes where they provide a little acidity in place of vinegar. Simply blend strawberries together with half olive oil and half flavourless oil, add seasoning and a little sugar, and serve drizzled atop sliced avocado for a Prue Leith classic.

And of course eat them, in great quantity, with cream. A poll earlier this month saw strawberries and cream voted by almost three quarters of Brits as the ‘most iconic British flavour’, comfortably ahead of rhubarb and custard in second place. The classic pairing is often attributed to Cardinal Wolsey, who indulged frequently on the combo as he lorded it up in Hampton Court Palace. Strawberries and cream was served at the very first Wimbledon tournament in 1877. And chefs have sought their own twists on the dream pairing: Escoffier provides a number of variations on the combination in his Le Guide Culinair, including a recipe for Strawberries Romanov where the fruit is marinated in curaçao and served with Chantilly cream. For a British take, try this recipe where the strawberries are infused with Pimms and then flambéed.

Strawberries have long been associated in literature with temptation and fittingly so, for who can resist them? They are a universal crowd pleaser – not for nothing is the strawberry the only fruit to sit amongst such greats as vanilla and chocolate at the top table of classic ice creams. To make your own, follow Nigella’s recipe for homemade strawberry ice cream: as she says, it is the taste of blue skies.

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Dried strawberries are a particular treat

If you have any that are past their best, try this quick pickle with mint and pink peppercorns, or oven-dry them to create gummy fruits you can use in salads or eat as a snack. And their use in libations is not limited to a flavouring in Pimms: they can be the main event too, such as in this homemade strawberry gin or in this frozen strawberry daiquiri. And chef Asimakis Chaniotis advises that strawberries areincredible macerated in Cognac”. Try serving the macerated fruit with ice cream and, as Asimakis says, after three days macerating the liquor is a treat to sip.

Strawberries are a national treasure. Opining on the fruit, the seventeenth century physician Dr. William Butler declared ‘Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did’. Never was a truer word spoken.

The coastal boltholes that rival Cornwall

May Day is behind us, the summer season approaching, and already the tensions between second homeowners and locals in Cornish seaside towns have been gleefully reported by the tabloid press. Visit Cornwall is considering a register of second homes while councils are proposing a tax on empty properties. House prices have gone up by an average of 28 per cent across Cornwall since the pandemic began, according to the Land Registry, so is it time to look elsewhere for a coastal bolt hole?

The British coastline is at least 1,200km long so there are some great alternatives, although the perennial favourites can get just as ‘overrun’ as the likes of St Ives. According to Rightmove the most searched-for seaside towns this month are big-hitters like Bournemouth, Southampton, Eastbourne, Worthing and Brighton, but perhaps you fancy somewhere a little more off the beaten track?

Pembrokeshire has proved a popular alternative to Cornwall, sharing the same craggy coastline dotted with fishing villages and pristine beaches but with fewer crowds and lower prices. The average price in Pembrokeshire is £230,640, according to Hamptons using Land Registry figures, a third lower than Cornwall’s £341,590. Newport, Tenby and Narberth are three of the priciest locations in Pembrokeshire, but for even greater value look to the Fishguard and Pembroke areas.

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Marloes Sands, Pembrokeshire

Pembroke Dock sits near the mouth of the Cleddau river – the tidal creeks and salt marshes are heaven to explore by boat or kayak – and the average price is £163,870, but this four-bedroom architect designed house is for sale at £550,000 through Fine & Country. Holiday home buyers should know that, as of April 2022, they will need to pay double the rate of council tax on a secondary property in Pembrokeshire – on top of the extra Land Transaction Tax, the Welsh equivalent of stamp duty.

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Pembroke offers relative coastal value (Fine & Country)

North Norfolk can be as blissfully crowd-free as West Wales – take a kayak out to the Scolt Head barrier island from Burnham Overy Staithe or roam the salt marshes around Cley-next-the-Sea and Blakeney. In Heacham, a beach village famed for its lavender near Sandringham, this four-bedroom stone cottage is £650,000.

A lack of properties for sale has been pushing up prices in the most fashionable coastal villages – and those around the market town of Holt – where delis selling crab pate and artisan sourdough have begun to proliferate but look inland or east of Cromer to see your money go further.

Close to Great Yarmouth, Gorleston-on-Sea is tipped for potential price growth by local estate agent, William H Brown. With its vast sweeping sandy beach it’s also handy for the further watery pursuits of the Norfolk Broads, but the average price is only £211,570 (Hamptons).

Boating types also love the Isle of Wight, a much under-rated 23-mile-wide natural playground of bays, promenades and clifftop walks. Charmingly slow paced and full of great local food producers, the island is also broadly affordable – the average property price is £296,197, according to Rightmove. But you can pay much more for something special or super views, and this five-bedroom manor house at £895,000 is located in Cowes, the focus of the sailing scene and the newly revamped North House whose restaurant is being run by Robert Thompson, the youngest British chef to receive a Michelin star.

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The needles, Isle of Wight (iStock)

Some of Devon’s coastal hot spots – especially Salcombe and Dartmouth – are as highly priced as their Cornish counterparts, but Tom Bedford of Savills’ Exeter office tips Exmouth as one to watch, with its two miles of golden sand and the Exe estuary a twitchers’ paradise. ‘It’s going up in value, much investment is going into improving the seafront and a trainline into Exeter [it can be three hours to London].’ According to Rightmove, the average price was £322,501 over the last year, and this deceptively large four-bedroom townhouse comes with a home office, ideal for that summer of flexible working.

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A four-bedroom townhouse in Exmouth

Another one to watch is the East Sussex town of Hastings and its next-door neighbour, St Leonards-on-Sea. Over the last 10 years prices have gone up by 79 and 89 per cent respectively, two of the heftiest increases amongst Sussex coastal towns, according to Hamptons. Average prices still hover around £300,000 in both – is there still room to grow? Eastbourne’s £325,140 and Brighton’s £481,370 would suggest so.

Increasingly the choice for bohemian south Londoners, these two traditional towns are now full of great eateries, craft beer shops and even concept stores. Apartments in the faded Regency townhouses overlooking the seafront are being smartened up by AirBnB investors or second-home owners. In Hastings you can find a whole seven-bedroom townhouse for £670,000, or a five-bedroom 19th-century property overlooking the English Channel for £1m.

Is Boris Johnson planning an emergency Budget?

Boris Johnson is running out of time to produce things the Tories can show the voters at the next election. The theme of his Queen’s Speech – if there was one – was an attempt to fix that. That next election campaign was countered by Keir Starmer in the chamber this afternoon. The main focus was on the cost-of-living crisis and how much worse things are going to get.

Funnily enough, Starmer didn’t mention the members of the government who’d broken Covid rules

The Labour leader repeatedly accused this government of not being ‘up to the challenge’, with the Tories producing only a ‘thin address bereft of ideas or purpose, without a guiding principle or a roadmap for delivery’. Funnily enough, he didn’t mention the members of the government who’d broken Covid rules and couldn’t be trusted. Starmer instead described the Tories as ‘out of touch’ and ‘tired’, attacking Rishi Sunak on this front as much as Johnson.

The narrative that Sunak in particular has tried to construct is that the government simply doesn’t have control over many of the drivers of the cost-of-living crisis, like supply chain issues or global pressures such as the war in Ukraine and China’s zero-Covid policies. Starmer tried to counter this today by claiming that there were warning signs long ago that were ignored. He said:

This government’s failure to grow the economy over a decade, combined with its inertia in the face of spiralling bills, means we are staring down the barrel of something we haven’t seen in decades. A stagflation crisis. It is a truly shocking legacy for this government. It should humble those on the benches opposite who have ignored the red lights on the our economy, even whilst wages were frozen over a decade, and whose complacency is best summed up by a Prime Minister whose response to this crisis was to make fun of those worrying about inflation.

Johnson was no longer keen to make fun of anyone worrying about inflation when he responded. Instead, he managed to set hares running with a line that ‘the Chancellor and I will be saying more about this in the days to come’, suggesting that there might be an emergency Budget in the offing. The Treasury has since clarified that there won’t be one, so it isn’t clear what is planned on the cost of living or indeed whether Sunak signed off on what Johnson said.

A great deal could change in both parties before the next general election, or even before the end of this year. But what does seem certain is that Boris Johnson and his Chancellor are going to continue on different political pages. That will be an issue for the rest of the time that these two men are in office. Perhaps one will be hoping the other isn’t around for much longer.