December 2023 – January 2024, Issue 43 The Critic

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A M E R RY C H R IST M A S A N D A H A P P Y N E W Y E A R T O A L L OU R R E A DE R S

Christmas books special December 2023 – January 2024 Issue 43 | £7.10 thecritic.co.uk

SILENT NIGHT Palestine” marches to the streets of Britain and the world. Those who protested were not put off by unabashed demands for Israel’s elimination or that organisers included Muhammad Kathem Sawalha — whose history as a senior Hamas commander has, interestingly, proved no bar to gaining British citizenship. Neither has weeks of coverage of bombed-out Gazan homes softened the views of Israel’s supporters who see it as a necessary price to demolish the nest of pitiless terrorism. Such demonstrations show that we have, rightly, not forgotten the Palestinian people — displaced and rendered stateless for decades — nor the plight of Jews worldwide, attacked, abused and threatened, forced to post security guards outside every school and synagogue. But other conflicts and injustices, as or more terrible, command far less attention. Gaza is sometimes called an “open-air concentration camp”. Whatever we think of that, there are more than a million Muslims detained in literal concentration camps in Xinjiang, subjected to forced labour, re-education, the removal of their children, and mandatory sterilisation. In the most systematic act of ethnic cleansing in recent history, the birth rate in Uyghurmajority regions collapsed by more than 60 per cent in only three years. But there is no BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement targeting China. Chinese students are not asked to defend their government’s conduct. Muslims do not march for their Chinese brethren, Labour councillors do not resign over Britain’s China policy and the new Foreign Secretary’s history of opening doors for Beijing suggests his conscience is unstirred. You can add to this list of the butchered, displaced and discriminatedagainst Kurds, Syrians, Yemenis, Sahrawis, Indians and Rohingya.

But one religious minority subjected to some of the worst treatment, with 360 million facing persecution, receives even less attention in the West. With one in seven of its adherents endangered, Christianity is one of the most oppressed

religions in the world. While Middle Eastern Jews have a homeland to flee to, carved out from the former Ottoman Empire, the place intended to be the Christian Arab homeland, the Republic of Lebanon, is now a failed state, dominated by Islamist groups such as Hezbollah. Since 2012, Christians have shrunk from 40 per cent

to 32 per cent of Lebanon’s population, with many fleeing for the West. The other enclave of Christians in the Middle East, Armenia, faces continual hostility from its more powerful neighbour Azerbaijan, which recently struck a devastating blow in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabkh, displacing thousands of Armenian Christians.

Christians have been forced to flee historic homelands in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Holy Land itself. From making up 13 per cent of the region’s population i the early twentieth century, they now comprise only 5 per cent. The world is poorer for the displacement from their homelands of those with Syriac, Coptic and Chaldean cultures — indigenous peoples whose presence long preceded Arab conquest of their lands — to an uncertain life seeking refuge in the secular West. This is a civilisational loss. Yet in the face of this global agony, the West this Christmas stands silent. Where are the sanctions, weapons and cultural solidarity for the millions of Christians facing existential threat? The war against Christianity is furiously waged by Marxist atheists in China, by Hindu nationalists in India, and even, piquantly, by Jewish bigots in Israel. But its worst perpetrators, who are unleashing a wave of violence across Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, are Muslim extremists. The collective meekness of the West in the face of this

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With 360 million facing persecution, Christianity is one of the world’s most oppressed religions cultural “other” has no doubt blunted concern for Christians for this reason. But the larger problem is that Christian suffering does not comfortably fit into our present political narratives. Palestine appeals to the Left for obvious reasons. Palestinians are non-white (by their curiously racist definitions) stateless victims, part of the global “subaltern”, unpolluted by power. By contrast, Christians deserve no such sympathy, for theirs is the religion of the West, of imperialism and oppression. Their victimhood is invisible to the progressive worldview, even though by the Left’s definition they are also mostly non-white. The indifference of the Right, which claims to uphold Christian “heritage” and oppose Islamism, is, by contrast, apparently inexplicable. But as they treat politics as an essentially secular project, even

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November brought vast “Free

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assumption that we are all on the same dual-carriageway to Western secular modernity. Far more has been done on this front by Western religious leaders than by all the West’s armies and drones. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s leading Muslim cleric, is a salutary example of an Islamic leader promoting a third way between secularism and sectarianism. A fierce critic of the US occupation, he has spent the past 20 years seeking to restrain violence between Sunnis and Shias, and met with Pope Francis, releasing a statement in which he called for the protection of Iraqi Christians and their rights. Interreligious dialogue is a more powerful force than a secular human rights agenda without cultural precedent.

In the Middle East, of course, among national populists, Christianity plays the same role as for the Left — a religion for white people, a cipher for Western Civilisation. Israel attracts support as a right-wing Western-style liberal democracy menaced by Islamist terrorism. With religion reduced to “Judeo-Christian” cultural heritage however, Christianity can therefore be reduced to mere symbolism, used in domestic playfights, but without making any real demands on policy makers. Least of all overseas.

Concern for Christians runs subtly and implicitly counter to both leftist globalism and rightist nationalism. It belongs instead to an increasingly forgotten civilisational politics that was both realist and idealist; one that was last operative in the Cold War fight against Soviet Russia’s “evil empire” and has dwindled since the catastrophic follies of the War on Terror. Rediscovering civilisational politics and establishing solidarity with Christians worldwide is not a matter of crusading interventionism (a lesson thoroughly learned after Afghanistan and Iraq). Rather, it involves all that liberal multiculturalism lacks; real dialogue and engagement with other cultures and religions without the patronising

democracy and secularism are substantially opposed. In many Muslim countries there are more restrictions on Islamic expression, of thought as of dress, than in the West. The vital task of building a tolerant and humane Islamic politics has been entirely neglected by most in the West. Yet, it is a process in which Christian leaders and thinkers have a profound role to play. For it is secular modernity that has been backed by bombs, dictatorship, invasion and occupation, intensifying the tragedy of Middle Eastern politics. “End of history” liberalism, two bloody decades on, has proved a cul-de-sac. It is a sorry reflection that, despite its cruelties, prejudices and hierarchies, the Ottoman Empire was a more hospitable place for religious minorities than the modern nation states Western leaders carved out from it. The great strengths of the liberal tradition have become unmoored from religion and traditional culture, to their mutual cost. Ultimately, what the West does, or neglects to do, elsewhere is just a reflection of what it is at home. Christianity is not simply a religion for — or of — the West. But the West’s utter indifference to Christianity is a dismal present which offers no cheer for this year, or for many yet to come. O

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Contents BOOKS

COLUMNS Letters

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Helen Joyce Happy to be a heretic

George Woudhuysen: Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint by Peter Sarris 58

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Law Yuan Yi Zhu: On international law

Samuel Rubinstein: What Was Shakespeare Really Like? by Sir Stanley Wells 61

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Woman about Town Lisa Hilton: Brought to book

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Nova’s diary Dave lords it

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Serious business Ned: “Reputational risk” is rot

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Everyday Lies Theodore Dalrymple: No choice

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Sounding Board Marcus Walker: The baddies who don’t know they are ... 32 Arty Types D.J. Taylor on The Committee of the Edwin Savage Society 39

Economics Tim Congdon: Boom and bust redux 44 My Woke World Titania McGrath: Saving Gaza with a Queer intifada 51 Romeo Coates Wanted: dead or alive?

Adam Dant on … The Political Year

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FEATURES Whitehall in the thick of it David Scullion recalls the Civil Service’s determination to do nothing the government asks of it 14 There is still no pandemic plan Benjamin Lewis says the Covid inquiry is not asking the right questions 17 Planning to fail Johnny Leavesley asks why we are opposed to new housing when the population is rapidly growing

Christopher Bray: The Secret Life of John Le Carré by Adam Sisman; Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare

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Kenya’s history rewritten David Elstein argues that Mau Mau death figures based on incorrect reasoning are now accepted as fact

John Adamson: Oxfordshire: Oxford and the South-East by Simon Bradley, Nikolaus Pevsner and Jennifer Sherwood 66 22

Patrick Mercer: Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-40 by Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman; Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966-1975 by Huw Bennett 68

Sweden’s failed liberal project Håkan Boström on why a country once hailed as a model of moderation now faces gun violence and bombings 28

Nina Power: The Two-Parent Privilege by Melissa S. Kearney

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A radical right-wing trio Gavin Mortimer compares three up-and-coming French politicians

James Orr: Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? by Daniel Chandler

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France’s philosopher king Laurent Lemasson reflects on Michel Houellebecq’s critiques of sexual liberation and his dissolute lifestyle 36

Robert Hutton: The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson by Nadine Dorries 73

The humanity of Horace Llewelyn Morgan hymns the timeless work of the great Latin poet 42

Christopher Montgomery: The Right to Rule: Thirteen Years, Five Prime Ministers and the Implosion of the Tories by Ben Riley-Smith; Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation by Danny Kruger; The Case for the Centre Right edited by David Gauke; The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life by Theresa May 74

How to deface a national treasure David Butterfield laments the wrecking of Cambridge’s historic cityscape 45

Inaya Folarin Iman: The Psychosis of Whiteness: Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World by Kehinde Andrews 76

How does anything ever get built? Robert Adam asks how we can solve the housing shortage when faced with the huge increase in building regulations 49

Victoria Smith: Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties by Sarah Ditum 78

Burning effigies for the Man Esmé Partridge believes the 1973 film The Wicker Man is an ironic masterpiece exposing the paradox of paganism 40

Helen Barrett: The Crystal Palace Subway

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Daniel Johnson: The best non-fiction books of the year 79 John Self: The year’s best fiction

STUDIO 20

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Sebastian Milbank: Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy by Robin Waterfield; The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic by Jean-Manuel Roubineau 64

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THE SECRET AUTHOR 58

The bad old days ...

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THE CRITICS

Eating In Felipe Fernández-Armesto avoids festive horror by feasting on Christmas Eve 98

MUSIC Norman Lebrecht Bruckner: Anton ... and on

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OPERA Robert Thicknesse The geopolitical prescience of Handel 87

POP Sarah Ditum Retro Rodrigo is primo

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ART Michael Prodger Behind the scenes at the museums

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CA RTO O N B Y RO B M URR AY; CR I TIC FOX B Y JA SO N FO R D/HE A RT

THEATRE Anne McElvoy When Irish eyes aren’t smiling

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CINEMA Robert Hutton Napoleon sold short

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TELEVISION Adam LeBor Taking on ISIS and Eichmann

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RADIO Michael Henderson Spare me the Great Canadian Warbler 94

ARCHITECTURE

Deluxe Christopher Pincher enjoys a magical meal in an enchanted glen 100 Drink Henry Jeffreys on the subtle harmony of multi-variety wines 102 Turf Account Stephen Pollard believes “affordability checks” will be the death of racing 103 Style Hannah Betts goes casually glam

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Hot House Claudia Savage-Gore wishes it was Christmas Past already

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IN PRAISE OF

Charles Saumarez Smith Weekends à la mode

Country Notes Patrick Galbraith says shooting more ducks will save the natural world 100

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The Pan Book of Horror Stories: top-drawer gore by Neil Armstrong

TABLE TALK

THIS SPORTING LIFE

Eating Out Lisa Hilton enjoys a visit to Britain’s original gastro-pub

Patrick Kidd: Sport’s spoilsports Nick Timothy: Backing horses Boris Starling: Team players

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Happy to be a heretic

Helen Joyce

easy to understand,” Christopher Hitchens once proclaimed. “Whatever is popular is wrong.” That lofty dismissal of common taste wasn’t his own — it was first said by Oscar Wilde in 1883 to art students during a lecture extolling aestheticism, or art for art’s sake. “Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art,” Wilde claimed. Despite the pleasure Hitchens frequently took in verbal combat, he wasn’t endorsing contrarianism uncritically. As a conclusion Wilde’s statement was “questionable”, he said; “but as a mindset, it’s not bad”. This is a nice distinction between contrarianism as a principle and contrarianism as an attitude. The former risks degenerating into a niche form of tribalism. The latter can develop into something much more interesting: principled dissent. The most obvious pitfall of contrarianism is that, just like following the crowd, it outsources your judgement to others, albeit in rejection rather than acceptance. It’s also impractical. It’s all very well to dismiss what is popular when you have the time and expertise to judge well for yourself. But nobody knows enough about everything for that. Borrowing some opinions is inevitable. Even though Amazon reviews can be manipulated and suggestions from Spotify and Netflix can be bizarre, if you want to read, listen to or watch something, plumping for what’s popular at least avoids the duds. What’s useful about being contrarian isn’t that it makes you right; it’s that it makes you different. How valuable that is depends not on you, or even on the topic, but on the group you’re in. The more conformist the group, the more valuable the contrarian.

◉◉◉ The less agreeable you are, the less it will bother you to dissent from your group’s orthodoxy

In mainstream media outlets,it’s hard to do anything except keep your head down and follow the editorial line. But the rare contrarians who hang in there improve the quality of reporting and writing across the newsroom. They pitch the stories that other journalists miss. And by asking inconvenient questions in editorial meetings, they force leader-writers to do more than setting up straw men to knock down. Outside the artificial confines of a business exercise, are contrarians born or made? They’re surely more common among people who score low on ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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agreeability, one of the “big five” character traits psychologists use to describe human behaviour. Agreeable people are more sociable and work better in teams. They are keener on pleasing others, on being liked and fitting in, and on resolving rather than prolonging confrontation. Women are on average more agreeable than men, and more harshly punished for being disagreeable. (These facts are doubtless connected.) The less agreeable you are, the less it will bother you to dissent from your group’s orthodoxy — independently of whether that orthodoxy is true or wise. On campus right now, disagreeable people are surely overrepresented among those who take pro-Israel or anti-Labour positions. In the run-up to the Brexit referendum, they were overrepresented among Leavers. When events and public opinion are fast-moving and heated, dissent can be treated as tantamount to heresy. This is most likely when the clergy — Westminster, Whitehall, academia and the mainstream press — and the masses hold very different views. What constitutes a heresy therefore varies over time. Among the current ones is immigration, which most Britons want reduced — a desire rarely expressed in polite society. Scepticism regarding Covid lockdowns and vaccines is less common, but still far more so in the population at large than you would think from watching the BBC or reading the Guardian.

◉◉◉ And then there’s my own heresy, usually known as “gender-critical feminism”, though I prefer sex-realism: that humans come in two immutable sexes. Most people know it to be true — except for those in Westminster and Whitehall; campuses and newsrooms; HR departments and boardrooms. That makes it the quintessential heresy: so obvious that most people don’t even question it, but very risky to state. From within the clergy, it may seem that what happens when a former right-thinker commits heresy is that they join the ranks of the great unwashed. That’s true, but they also join a new tribe: that of the heretics. Its members talk to each other on podcasts marketed as “heterodox”; in conferences about free speech and social events for freethinkers; in upstart publications and channels that

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PORTR AI T B Y VA NES SA DELL

“The contrarian dogma is simple and

CLU /G ETTY IM AGES

cover topics ignored by the legacy media. Once you’re in that tribe, committing your second heresy is easier. You’re now exposed to people and ideas you were previously deaf to. The price is lower, too: you can’t be cast out again. And after the life-changing experience of deciding, whether rightly or wrongly, that received wisdom is wide of the mark on at least one topic, it’s less of a stretch to think this may be the case for other topics as well. Even if you manage to avoid becoming tribally contrarian, another pitfall awaits: a new, micro kind of conformism. Once the headrush of your first heresy fades and the love-bombing from those who committed it before you has ended, you’ll notice that many did so for reasons that differ from yours. People who espouse sex-realism, for example, come from the widest imaginable range of intellectual positions. Some are social conservatives, who value traditional gender roles; others are radical feminists who want those roles abolished. Some are evangelical Christians who see the two sexes as important because they are God-given; others venerate evolution as life’s organising principle, and the origin not just of the two sexes but of their significance. The materialism common to both Marxism and most strands of conservatism means that on this point the far ends of the political spectrum meet.

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who do it again. But the tribal urge remains even among cast-outs. And just as suffering can encourage desire for revenge rather than compassion, being silenced can inspire a desire to occupy the pulpit rather than embrace pluralism. Being cast out is an experience people tend to bond over. If they discover their differences only after that happens, it can feel like betrayal. But the difficulty goes deeper than hurt feelings, or even disagreements about tactics and strategy. The desired end-points of different groups may differ. And it’s genuinely hard to accept that people who espouse worldviews very different from yours may do so sincerely, rather than nefariously. Left-wing feminists, for example, are often suspicious of social conservatives who oppose trans ideology, whom they suspect of a hidden agenda to return women to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. The Christians among them, they fear, see an opportunity to recriminalise abortion as part of a wider attack on bodily autonomy. Social conservatives, for their part, think feminism opened the door to trans ideology by denying psychological sex differences, and that at least some of the gender roles feminists reject result from those differences, rather than being arbitrary and oppressive.

◉◉◉ It may seem impossible to get such a disparate bunch to come together for long enough to work together on a single issue. The only way to do so, it seems to me, is to reject both tribal contrarianism and micro-conformity; to lean into difference and embrace dissent within dissent. That means interrogating yourself about what you really think and doing your best to articulate it, not once, but again and again. There’s deeper understanding in that diversity: as the great nineteenth-century champion of free speech, John Stuart Mill, wrote, arguing with contrary viewpoints helps you understand your own position better. More fundamentally, speaking from your deepest convictions is so freeing that it’s addictive. I didn’t pay the price of dissent only to stay silent and conform again. O

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Letters

the dark forces of German National Socialism overwhelmed the fledgling nation.”

Through the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which divvied up that part of the world into two totalitarian spheres, Nazi Germany was in play well before its troops raced across Estonia in 1941 to lay siege to Leningrad. Indeed, alluding to Nazi Germany’s dark forces misses out on the none-too-fun period that preceded, when Soviet Russia invaded the Baltic republics, and set the NKVD to work to destroy civil society. Come Operation Barbarossa a lot of surviving Balts consequently welcomed the Nazi troops heartily, only to end up on the losing side and the endurance of 40 years of Soviet rule. And this is to say nothing of the fate of the Jewish populace, often at enthusiastically-collaborating “liberated” hands. Han Henny their acts, while corruption in Hungary, as assessed by Transparency International, has become the worst in Europe. Dreher asserts that Hungarian elections are free and fair. The OSCE report on the 2022 general election complains about the lack of a political level playing field, listing numerous examples of unfairness. Many conservative critics are yet more unhappy about the increasingly close relations with Russian and China, the lack of support for Ukraine (including Orbán’s description of Volodymyr Zelensky as an “opponent”), his resistance to Sweden and Finland’s accession to NATO, his attempts to prevent or delay sanctions against Russia and his “pride” in recently meeting with Vladimir Putin as the latter sought to crush the Ukrainian state. Some champion of liberal freedoms! Gerald Frost

epsom, surrey BETWEEN TWO EVILS Robin Aitken’s article (BRITAIN’S FORGOTTEN BATTLE FOR THE BALTIC, ONLINE)

sheds light on what is mostly unknown history outside Estonia. But it does have a glaring omission when it summarises: A Christmas Miracle

“The state which emerged then enjoyed 20 years of sovereign existence until 1940, when

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rotterdam, the netherlands SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL What happened, some might ask, to the drunken naked cyclist, who featured in Andrew Gimson’s kindly article on the bohemian ways of the Conservative Research Department (SCHOOL FOR FUTURE TORY STARS, NOVEMBER)? His nocturnal exploits did not impair the high quality of his work. His girlfriends never seemed much bothered by his antics, and he settled down after marrying one of them. He is now a wealthy man, dispensing advice on public affairs in return for the hefty sums available to those who enjoy access to senior figures in the government. A successful future looked out of the question for one of his contemporaries who seemed to sleep with a different man every night, and could hardly type a useful word the following morning. Yet he has progressed in academic life and has published a well-received book. The CRD was rather good at turning all kinds of frogs into princes. Alistair Lexden (consultant director, conservative research department 2004-10) house of lords

CA RTO ON S B Y W ILB UR DAW B A RN & TI M B ALES

TAINTED HERO Political heroes are difficult to find these days. This may be one reason why Rod Dreher, along with members of the American Alt Right, has taken to eulogising Viktor Orbán (GUARDIAN OF LIBERAL FREEDOMS, NOVEMBER) along with the Hungarian prime minister’s success in halting economic migrants and his pro-family economic policies, both of which do indeed deserve respect. However, Dreher’s view that many criticisms made of Orbán are the result of liberal bias overlooks the fact that many of the most telling criticisms come from conservatives. In their judgment, Orbán’s policies have brought about a system of crony capitalism in which loyalty to Fidesz, the party he founded as a young anti-communist, has led to the emergence of a new elite similar in important respects to the old communist nomenklatura. The consequence has been to limit economic competition and entrepreneurship while hampering the growth of civil society and a civic-minded middle class. Critical media outlets have been stifled whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself. Dreher acknowledges the widespread corruption, but suggests that this is only to be expected in eastern and central Europe. He overlooks the progress made by some of Hungary’s neighbours in cleaning up

Write to The Critic by email at [email protected] including your address and telephone number

YUAN YI ZHU ON LAW

International law: the basics When can states use lethal force against other nations — and with what weapons?

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nternational law tends to be poorly understood, even among lawyers. But it retains an aura among laymen which frequently leads to its invocation as a form of higher law, though often in a severely mangled form. Recent events such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have made the problem even more acute, so that it may be useful to provide here a short primer of some of its salient features. First and foremost, international law does not exist ex nihilo; it is (with vanishingly few exceptions, the so-called peremptory norms, which no country can reject) the result of the consent of states. A few years ago, many newspapers reported breathlessly that nuclear weapons had been banned for the first time under international law. The treaty in question was a valid instrument of international law signed by almost 100 countries; yet as every nuclear power refused to sign it, its practical effects were nil. This did not stop one of the NGOs behind the treaty from being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

P O R T R A I T B Y VA N E S S A D E L L ;

Turning to the most infamous of all international crimes, to most people, genocide (whose prohibition is a peremptory norm) simply means the killing of a large number of civilians. But genocide is not simply about the number of dead people, nor does international law actually require killing to take place. As the Genocide Convention defines it, genocide consists of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Destruction can consist of killing, but also of certain types of serious systemic mistreatment such as mass sterilisation and the forcible transfer of children out of the

targeted group. The group has belief, illegal, provided that Often to be one of the four enumerthey are killed as an incidental ated ones, so that mass killing dismissed effect of legitimate attacks of, say, political opponents is against military objectives as airy-fairy not genocide unless they also and that the attack is nonsense, happen to constitute one of proportionate, another international the enumerated groups. oft-misunderstood principle. law is actually “In whole or in part” has In the context of ihl, provoked many gruesome proportionality merely means a supremely debates as to what level of that the damage done to pragmatic killing or of harm is required civilians in an attack cannot branch of before something qualifies as be excessive in relation to the legal science genocide. Recent judgments anticipated military advansuggest that it depends not tage of the attack. It does not only on the overall number of victims, but mean that both sides to a conflict should also their relation to the overall size of the incur similar levels of casualties, a morally targeted group. And genocide requires bankrupt idea, much in vogue recently. genocidal intent, which separates genocide Such compromises abound within ihl. from “mere” atrocities against civilians. Combatants who surrender cannot be attacked and their surrender has to be accepted, but (apart from persons Turning to what are popularly parachuting from an aircraft in distress) known as the laws of war, more accurately there is no requirement to offer opponents and somewhat euphemistically known as an opportunity to surrender before killing international humanitarian law. The them, for to do so would make much of product of compromises between modern warfare impossible. operational military requirements and the prescripts of humanity, international humanitarian law (ihl) exists not to stop Often, weapons are banned by wars, but to keep warfare within certain international law not because they are too parameters once it breaks out. lethal, but because they are not lethal A separate branch of international law enough. The first weapon specifically deals with the circumstances under which banned in the modern era was the military force can be lawfully employed expanding, or so-called “dum-dum” bullet, against other nations — essentially never which expands on impact instead of outside of self-defence or of UN-authorpenetrating the target. It was less lethal ised operations. But ihl has to be than conventional bullets, but its use was nevertheless forbidden by treaty because observed whether the underlying conflict conventional bullets killed more quickly is legal or not; to decree otherwise would and caused fewer agonising injuries. mean that wagers of illegal wars are bound More recently, the Convention on by fewer rules of conduct. Certain Conventional Weapons banned Because it is merely meant to limit the laser weapons whose aim is to cause baleful effects of armed conflict, ihl’s permanent blindness and weapons requirements may often seem producing shrapnel which cannot be irrational, at least until its underlydetected by X-ray; but lasers which kill ing logic is explained. For instance, outright and shrapnel-based weapons under the principle of distinction, whose fragments can be X-rayed in the attacks cannot deliberately target victim’s body remain perfectly legal. civilians, which combatants are This may all appear crude to some; but required to wear uniforms so the it reflects the reality of international law. other side knows who can be Often dismissed as airy-fairy nonsense, lawfully targeted. international law is actually a supremely But the killing of civilians pragmatic branch of legal science. O is not, contrary to popular

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Woman About Town

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LISA HILTON

acceptable? Have smartphones entirely dissolved the barrier between public and private? When did subjecting others to strident inanity become a right?

he BBC recently repeated a documentary series I made some time ago, which provided a lovely opportunity to hear from members of the history community. One lady emailed under the suggestive subject line “inappropriate handling”. She continued:

W

fundamentally altered the way we interact with the written word is the question posited in David Samuels’s brilliant article “The Chained Reader”, which I set for

I’m just watching your mini-series To Kill a King and I cannot believe you pawing King Charles 1’s book in the library. Surely the librarian (and everyone else who has seen this) was appalled seeing your mishandling of such a historic book and leaving your greasy prints all over the pages, no doubt which will cause damage … Why on earth they allowed you access to the book when you surely could have used a copy is mind-boggling. You should have known better.

I immediately wrote back to the concerned viewer, explaining carefully that a facsimile had in fact been substituted for the original text for the close-ups, and hoping this information would allow her to enjoy the rest of the show. Then I regretted not asking her whether she was such a complete cretin that she didn’t understand that telly is not real. Did she think that we waltzed into the Rare Books Room of the British Library with a film crew and began randomly seizing priceless volumes from the stacks? Moreover, why does she think it is acceptable to write to perfect strangers without so much as a “Dear” or a “Yours faithfully”?

my students as a reading assignment. Samuels’s thesis is that “humanistic” reading, the unique relationship of sovereign imaginative authority between the individual and the page is being challenged by the relentless colonisation of our inner lives by digital platforms. None of the class finished the article, as they explained ingenuously that at 30 pages it was unfeasibly long. One student had posted it onto a spoken word app which he said allowed him to “save time” as he could get AI to summarize its salient points. I asked whether this didn’t perhaps prove Samuels’s point. They looked at me pityingly before making the unassailable argument that the writer was born in 1967. I devoted the rest of the lesson to telling these wannabe writers about their financial future. According to the latest survey from the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society and the University of Glasgow, the median wage for authors has declined by 33 per cent since 2018 and is now £7,000 per year. That took the smiles off their smug little digital faces.

*** The train has left the station So now I’ve become that person who tuts about bad manners. An early train to Milano provided three hours’ worth of huffing, between the child playing a noisy video game opposite me, everyone else in the carriage making pointless Zoom calls or watching Insta videos, the woman who changed her baby’s nappy on the seat across the aisle and the announcement repeated every twenty minutes in three languages as to the procedure for making a complaint on the company app, followed by a similarly intrusive request to consider other passengers’ need for quiet. Impossible to work or read; but when did this become ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

•••

hether technology has also

The age of miracles Majority illiteracy might have an upside. Back home in Venice (decaying, perpetually misunderstood, so much more my speed), a glorious evening hosted by Venice in Peril at the Scuola dei Carmini celebrated the restoration of the Miracles of the Carmelite Madonna panel series by Antonio Zanchi. Following a Monteverdi recital by disquietingly brilliant countertenor Alex Simpson, the audience repaired to

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I LLUSTRATI ONS B Y JOHN M ONTGOMERY

Brought to book

NOVA’S DIARY “Jingle Bells!” Rishi is singing. “Starmer smells! Corbyn ran away!” We are putting up decorations to get ready for Christmas in a place called Chequers. It is a house in the country like the one we have in Yorkshire, only not as nice. The swimming pool is a lot chillier for a start. But Akshata says we have to make the most of it, because we probably won’t be here next year. She also tells the girls they aren’t to mention that to Rishi. “Is it going to be a surprise for Daddy?” “You know, I think it might be.” It has been a busy few weeks. At the start of November, Rishi came out of his study looking very excited. “I’m Red Meat Rishi!” he told Akshata. “I’m all about cutting taxes and giving the party what it wants.” “But darling,” Akshata replied, “we don’t eat red meat.” “We don’t cut taxes HLWKHU,WōVDƓJXUHRIVSHHFKŐ “I think it needs more work.” Rishi looked sad and went back inside. He came out again a few days later looking very pleased. “I’m a centrist now,” he announced. “I’m going to strengthen my team by bringing back a big beast Tory who knows how to win elections.” “I thought you weren’t speaking to Boris.” It turned out he meant someone called Lord Dave, who used to be Rishi’s boss several prime ministers ago. Lord Dave has been giving Rishi lots of useful advice, like “Shut the door on your way out” and “A little more milk in my coffee next time”. “In the 2010 election,” Lord Dave told Rishi, “our big advantage was the country had a useless government full RISHRSOHƓJKWLQJDPRQJWKHPVHOYHVDQGWKHHFRQRP\ had tanked.” Rishi looked quite optimistic at that point, but Lord Dave said this was all less useful if you were the prime minister. “Well, how did you win in 2015?” Rishi asked. “Can you blame the Lib Dems for everything?” “Not really.” “Promise a strong and stable government?” “Tricky.” “OK. Is there anything you think would be a really stupid idea? Promise a referendum on it. Can’t fail. Now, be a good chap and pop downstairs for some more biscuits.” O

O the Tiepolo-frescoed salone to survey the miracles. Designed as visual aids to faith, the paintings transpose everyday disasters into the sublime by portraying their protagonists as everyday Venetian folk — the crowd surrounding the maiden rescued from a well could have been picked from any vaporetto stop today. Might the ascendancy of the emoji be the dawn of a new Renaissance?

•••

Going, going, gondola A wedding breakfast on the island of Torcello marked the end of an era. After mass at San Giorgio Maggiore, guests zoomed across the lagoon for a golden autumnal celebration in the garden of Locanda Cipriani, which has been one of the nicest places in the world to have lunch since 1934, and which has just been acquired by the Belmond group. Perhaps the sale might improve the notoriously bad manners of the waiters, but I hope they leave the surrealist artichoke walk by the basilica alone. Rumours are circulating that the whole island — current population: 14 — is to be developed as a resort. Exactly what Venice needs.

There are now more beds for tourists in this city than there are for residents. In the lead up to the festival of Salute at the end of the month, protests are planned to publicise the seemingly relentless drain of resources away from Venetians and the potentially devastating return (yet again), of the hated cruise ships. Venice’s fate hardly feels like a priority on the international agenda at present, but once gone, its loss will be irrecoverable. O ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

As told to Robert Hutton

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SERIOUS BUSINESS

“Reputational risk” is rot Business is obsessed by this pseudoscientific nonsense

T

DA N I E L L E A L / W PA P O O L / G E T T Y I M A G E S

he recent publication

of the independent legal review into NatWest’s ill-starred attempt to debank Nigel Farage gives me the excuse to offer what I trust will be the very final words on this curious affair. When you cut through the thousands of hysterical column inches ranting about corporate “thought police” and shadowy “north London elites”, this is a story about reputations. And, with the benefit of a little hindsight, the clear lesson is that reputation is a much more resilient commodity than is generally appreciated. Our tale begins with the now infamous reputational risk committee of Coutts, NatWest’s private bank where the great provocateur was a customer. Thanks to Farage’s freedom of information request, we gained a remarkable window into the machinations of this hitherto obscure body. We hear its members fret about their customer’s links with Russia, and whether his gamey opinions aligned with the bank’s “purpose and values”. Someone in the committee unwisely calls him a “disingenuous grifter” — and then someone else even more unwisely minutes this odd expression for posterity. There’s an awkward moment when it is pointed out that Farage treats staff “professionally and with courtesy”. You can imagine the committee members struggling to reconcile this Jekyll and Hyde figure — the Mosleyesque monster and the urbane chap tipping his Homburg to the blushing clerks.

By the end of this 40-page document, I was starting to feel sorry for the decent compliance people of Coutts, who had been given the impossible task of quantifying the risk posed by a person who is the embodiment of a black swan event. Nigel Farage is not a man who can ever be slotted neatly into a nine-box risk matrix. Crucially, however, there is no evidence in the committee minutes that anyone

protest at the “wokery” of asked the simple question: their bank managers. “So what?” Imagine the The truth is that worst happens and, say, the “reputational crises” rarely old rogue gets prosecuted have an impact on the for hate crimes and does a bottom line. When midnight flit to Moscow. In Volkswagen was caught that moment, would anyone rigging diesel emission really care where he had a data, customers continued little home loan? pouring into their showYet, not just in banking, but everywhere in business rooms. Despite the oceans life, there is a growing of media outrage, I suspect solipsistic obsession with most motorists regarded this thing called “reputaVW’s infraction as the Alison Rose of NatWest corporate equivalent of tional risk”. On one of my being caught doing 25 in a boards which operates in a My advice to slightly fruity sector, I was fellow business 20mph zone. Similarly, Elon Musk’s recently asked to approve a folk is simple. “pedo guy” outburst against new risk appetite frameFire your the British caver who work, which itemised how rescued the Thai kids many consecutive days of whining PR trapped in a flooded cavern bad headlines we would be men. Trust me, failed to deter Rishi Sunak willing to accept in scenariyou will never from inviting the Tesla chief os of varying implausibility. There was no use be more happy to his toe-curling AI “bro-fest”. protesting the whole thing was nonsensical and none of it actually mattered. There is now a whole branch of Aah, some of you may be asking, pseudoscience fuelling this kind of but what about poor old Gerald Ratner? In half-baked analysis and our leaders of 1991 his jewellery empire collapsed after a tomorrow are being indoctrinated too. single badly-judged joke at a speech to the Oxford University, for example, has a Institute of Directors. Centre for Corporate Reputation, so MBA What people forget is that Gerald never students can “explore how organisations said all his products were “crap” and, in manage reputation, status, celebrity, context, his remarks were witty and legitimacy, stigma and trust”. self-deprecating. “We do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve So, let’s go back to our own you drinks on, all for £4.95,” he said. business school case study. What has been “People say: ‘How can you sell this for such the ultimate impact of the Farage affair? a low price?’ I say: ‘Because it’s total crap.’” While we cannot overlook the defenestraSo why was there such a backlash? tion of Alison Rose (above), the NatWest Looking back, there was more than a whiff chief executive, already the bank is back to of anti-Semitism. It is hard to imagine business as usual. The “independent” Ratner would have suffered the same report published last month hosed down torment if he had sported garish knitwear, the embers of any remaining outrage with grown a beard and changed his name to bland legalese and equivocal conclusions. Branson. So, my advice to fellow business More importantly, on the day the report folk is simple. Free yourselves from the came out the bank published third-quarter reputational risk committees and fire your results showing a year-on-year increase in whining PR men. Trust me, you will never customer deposits of £2.4 billion. This be more happy — or more prosperous. O rather implies that vanishingly few customers ever closed their accounts in — ned

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B l a c k S ta r t a short story by the British industrialist

Andrew Cook Britain is in the grips of an energy crisis.The political failure to plan for our future energy supply has plunged the country into freezing darkness. Can the retired director of a near-derelict power station save the nation from chaos and disorder? Black Start is a short story by the leading British industrialist Sir Andrew Cook CBE. It serves as a warning about the dangers of a short-sighted energy policy and the loss of expert engineering knowledge.

Available now and all good bookshops ISBN 978-0-9934077-4-1

WHITEHALL IN THE THICK OF IT care what people write about them, consider what impact it has on your life when the Grand Ayatollah of Iran or Kim Jong Un denounces the West. You’re probably in the right ballpark. When the minister asks why this kind of thing goes ahead, the reaction is borderline hostile. “Of course, secretary of state, if you really think queer civil servants of colour shouldn’t have their mental health improved by free balloon-modelling classes, then we will look at removing that provision.” The best case scenario for a minister is that they really will cancel the class until you’re reshuffled out of the job. A more likely outcome is that they’ll invent some long-winded process to look into it, which will report back to you in the year 3000. “We could have reported back sooner but the Government’s desire to reduce civil service staffing to pre-Covid levels is having a real impact on bandwidth.” To an official, “no” is only ever a temporary setback.

The Civil Service’s utter determination not to do anything ministers ask of it makes the Government’s work tricky By David Scullion n the thousands of corridors, stairwells, and lifts of Whitehall there are posters urging people to “bring your whole self to work”. This is quite funny considering you can pass hundreds of empty desks on your way to your office (a Government Property Agency survey revealed that 98 per cent of civil servants work from home at least some of the time). The notices are sadly not the legacy of Jacob Rees-Mogg, who once left passive-aggressive notes on absent terminals asking people where they were. As far as I can guess (because it’s never spelt out) the poster is intended to encourage gay civil servants not to tone down their gayness when they’re in the office, or an invitation for black officials to be “street” whilst in a conference call with the Secretary of State. Professionalism is probably a legacy of white colonialism or something. Whitehall is too big to worry about what’s happening outside of it or what impact it has on the country. Whitehall is their country. Whenever you see articles in the Daily Mail about a civil service workshop on intersectionality, or read a news story in the Telegraph about the top brass of DoSAc going on a fact-finding mission to the Seychelles, don’t assume that anyone has lost their job or suffered embarrassment, other than the poor government minister who has nominal oversight of the department. To appreciate how much the bureaucrats in rainbow-lanyards

Officials take their lead from Malcolm Tucker in the BBC’s sitcom ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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BB C

The idea that the civil service is the real opposition is not just a joke from Yes Minister. Every single day is a battle with officials to get the most basic things done. They’ve internalised the command from Malcolm Tucker in the BBC sitcom The Thick of It: “When the Opposition are here, you tell them nothing except where the toilets are, but you lie about that.” I knew a Spad (special adviser) who waited a whole year to get a security pass to her department, a process that should take a day or two. In the interim she queued up for at least fifteen minutes every morning to get a temporary 24-hour pass, which means over the course of a year she spent the best part of a week stuck in reception. But it’s hard to know where the hostility to Conservatives ends and the chronic dysfunction begins. One new Spad was given the department’s version of the village idiot to help him settle in. He couldn’t access emails for a week and fought for months to gain access to his minister’s diary. He described the induction process as “mildly better than being kicked in the shins”. Other departments are more subtle. Some Spads are given their own secretaries from the moment they arrive but are then flooded with long “submissions” or “subs” (the advice or requests for approval that go into the secretary of state’s red box for sign-off). This is a tactic by officials who hope to slip contentious things past you to be approved by the unsuspecting minister. Spads are the gatekeepers, so if they don’t read subs properly then they just go to the minister without any “political” input (For political read “people who actually care if you lose your job”). The minister doesn’t have time to do their box with a finetooth comb and will assume you have. (Remember the Red Box is their homework. They’re likely to be reading this stuff long af-

With the nights drawing in

ter their spouse has dozed off in front of The Crown). So the civil servants make them really really long — filling them with verbose prose and pointless statistics — and then stick the thing they don’t want you to see in the last page of the appendix. You really have to read every last word they send you. If you’re lucky enough to have multiple Spads in your department, they will “Spad-hop”. Anything you’ve rejected, they’ll just send to your colleague in a week’s time, or when you’re on holiday. One department’s Spads once asked for all subs to be no longer than two pages, thus handing mandarins the perfect getout-clause to omit anything they didn’t want their minister to see: “I’m so sorry we didn’t mention the data breach/deadly virus/terrorist attack. It’s so hard when we have to cram everything into so few pages”.

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One question our famously impartial civil servants sometimes ask when they don’t want to do something is “Is it political?” This is absurd. Everything in Government is political and senior civil servants are some of the canniest political operators in the country. Even asking “Is it party political?” makes little sense, since Government Policy is also the policy of the party in power and the whole department helps to rebut opposition attacks at the Secretary of State’s regular Commons question time. It took me a long time to realise the correct answer is always “No”. Although it would have been wonderful to say “Yes” and exclude them from the whole process. A solution to all of this is to cut numbers until there’s no time for extracurricular activities. It is said Gordon Brown devoted so much time to plotting against Blairites because as Chancellor he was left twiddling his thumbs after New Labour made the Bank of England independent in 1998. Maybe there are so many problems because they have so little to do? If the British Raj could be ruled by 1,000 civil servants without computers, I absolutely refuse to believe we need 1,500 to run the Food Standards Agency — no matter how many Institute for Government (IFG) reports suggest otherwise. The full UK civil service headcount of 519,000 is 147,000 more than the population of Iceland (and about the same size as the city of Manchester). The IFG are relieved that Rishi Sunak has stopped Boris Johnson’s attempts to reduce the number of officials and point out that there are more bureaucrats required anyway because there’s more admin to do after Brexit. Of course, a bloated public sector is not just a British problem, but it’s not a problem every country shares. Twenty per cent of people work in the public sector in Britain, compared to just two per cent in Singapore, a country that also has to do its own admin because it’s not inside the EU. During his battle with the European Central Bank, Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, described how at one point he sidelined the entire Treasury and worked for days on proposals for debt restructuring in his top floor office with just a handful of advisers. One can only dream. O

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Why is there still no pandemic plan? The Covid inquiry could help improve our response to the next crisis, but is not asking the right questions, argues Benjamin Lewis

ILLUST R ATI ON B Y CH RI STI AN DEL LA DOVA

‘‘

that at this stage the nhs was providing “statistics”, a term I will use very lightly, via fax machine. A robust plan would have had reams of data arriving. I don’t just mean how many infections, or deaths. I mean who and where, and when, and what they did two days prior. The very early parts of a track and trace system, in fact. Several states in East Asia managed just this. Why? They had found themselves without a nail in their horse’s shoe during sars and learned from it. Data is king. Cummings did the next best thing. He plotted what little data he had, and extrapolated. He found an exponential curve of death and was rightly spooked. A plan would have then considered how to analyse it with more detailed data. We have not yet got to modelling; all was doomed even before then. The other issue was that without a proper, prearranged workflow everything becomes reactive. Cummings drew his graph in desperation, not to head something off. This is, of course, ammunition for those who argue the first lockdown was too late. That is likely something that will — because of poor data collection in those early days — always remain a known unknown. What do you do when your data is poor and you need to predict the future? You ask the statisticians to produce a model.

or want of a nail, the shoe was

lost,” the proverb begins. “For want of a plan, the pandemic was lost” should be where Lady Hallett’s Covid inquiry turns its gaze. Deeply enjoyable to the media though it is, with its spectacle of repeated “gotcha” moments as each official, spad or minister is questioned about obscure points long forgotten is not an effective route to finding out what went wrong in 2020. To do that, the inquiry is going to need to look further back and do a root cause analysis. Before we enter into that, we should consider just why this is key. The lack of a proper plan for a pandemic is the distal cause of so many related harms that followed. What this tells us is instructive about the failings of the modern administrative state; and also an instructive criticism into how modern inquiries work. On the way, it happens to expose some failures of the academy, too. I assumed, partially because I knew it had been “rehearsed”, that in early 2020 a rigorous pandemic plan existed. This also seemed quite reasonable: the sars virus wasn’t that long ago, and Ebola was sporadically flaring up in Africa. Depending on who you ask, we now know that there either was no plan; or that the plan was so hyper-focused on pandemic influenza (sars being something that clearly happened to other people); or that it was more of an aspiration than a plan. The inquiry may yet work out which of these options is correct. Either way, if there was a plan it failed to survive contact with the enemy.

you do this even when your data is good — and you can test the predictions properly. I used to do magnetohydrodynamical simulations of star formation which, strictly speaking, are not statistical models. We did, however, run tens of them (unlike Covid-19 modelling, mine took about nine months to run). And we did something very important: we rejected any model where the results were physically unreasonable. My observational colleagues had produced terabytes of data on what star-forming regions were like, so we were able to be quite efficient at rejecting outputs. Notice I say “terabytes” of data. Not a fax machine. This is where the use of models went fundamentally wrong. As others

dominic cummings has his failings, but he cannot be faulted for drawing a fateful graph on a whiteboard in early 2020, by which point it is now obvious that the lack of a well-designed plan was causing issues. Namely, that there was no stream of high quality, detailed and reliable data from the nhs to Number 10 — or indeed, to anywhere. A side point in the inquiry last week was when someone (it may have been Cummings) noted ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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so, no plan, scary graphs and the experts have changed sides in a panic. Human nature means that now the decisionmakers will overreact. We see this in programming. Someone finds a nasty bug in a released code, and the next thing you know there’s a panic on the mailing list to get a fix out. It usually pays, in my experience, not to rush, lest one replace defect A with defects B, C, and D. In March 2020, Boris Johnson and those around him did not have the luxury of not rushing. Bereft of a proper pre-made strategy and thus bereft of good data, all they had was apocalyptic models and Cummings’s not truly incorrect extrapolation. I pick on that extrapolation not to criticise per se, but because it demonstrates the mess so succinctly. So, an extraordinarily severe lockdown was imposed, which cannot have been based on any actual evidence or data, which did not exist. Someone pulled out of the ether the idea that it would be reviewed in three weeks. The Prime Minister mumbled something about squashing Sombreros. Flattening the curve, which he was referring to, was an established epidemiological idea. sage had just, having been spooked, totally resiled from it. Nails, it’s all about nails to keep the shoes on. The statistical models were mostly rubbish. They did not cause the lockdown. They did not help with keeping decision-makers grounded, but the real cause was a total information asymmetry, and no plan.

’ve seen what afflicted sage happen in the world of software development. One often finds teams who are adamant that their subsystem is doing what it should, and it’s only in the face of overwhelming evidence that they switch sides, usually totally, to the reverse. Rarely though, are they totally wrong. sage was hesitant-to-downright-against stringent lockdowns because of the perceived negative effects they have. Here the lack of a plan bubbles up, again. That the expert committee needed to revise its views is not wrong in itself; what is wrong is a total reversal, almost in an instant. A robust plan would have always considered the possibility of needing a stringent lockdown. Then, those negative effects would have been properly explored by academics for years beforehand. We can’t fully blame the academy for being blind to the concept of lockdowns; just about everyone else was, too. This, though, is why good planning for emergencies is key. And this is one of the questions Lady Hallett’s Covid inquiry should be asking, but isn’t: why did no one’s “plans” — and equally no one’s research — in-

eventually, things calmed down. Now we turn to Wales for a moment. The Welsh ministers initially copied England — one baffling difference relating to physical exercise aside. When it became possible on even the weak, partial, metrics available to ease restrictions, they decided to “play it safe” and impose this strange “stay local” rule. Unenforceably vague, and grounded in not a sliver of evidence, it was the first hint that the feedback loop was broken. A good inquiry would take a laser-like view of this small episode, since a lot of information is hidden within it. Sadly, it doesn’t involve any interesting gotchas, and it may require people to admit to dropping the ball, again. We see this in programming, too. I have been guilty of it: bitten by a bug, there is an instinct to over-defend against it and others. So, one finds code littered with assertions and other error traps, often in pointless places. The proper thing to do in that scenario is to use analysis tools. ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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CA RTO O N B Y MA R K WOO D; ADR IA N DEN NIS /A FP V IA GET TY I MAG ES

clude a lockdown before March 2020? What underlies this failure to predict? Modern inquiries are uniquely unsuited to answer such a question because it requires asking people to admit to something they will be blamed for, at least in the “Yes, we dropped the ball” sense. But that omission needs teasing out. If lockdowns had always been on the cards, the pressure to produce a proper plan would have been so much greater. Importantly, research into how to use them effectively and proportionately would also have occurred in advance.

have written, the models themselves left rather a lot to be desired. One in particular is, shall we say, not code I ever want to see again. But, things were doomed anyway due to the lack of high quality datagathering; not just to start things off, but to keep re-adjusting too. This is a continual process — and requires a well-made plan for how it all fits together. Instead, everyone in positions of influence was doubly spooked. There was Cummings’s exponential graph, and a model from Imperial College London all but predicting the end of the world, and one fax machine of actual data. The public health experts, meanwhile, had been for several weeks saying that either lockdowns don’t work, or that they are unnecessary. Probably in the face of these two scary things, sage had their much commented-on volte-face.

The public health equivalent of that is to feed data from the coalface into the models, but also to analyse it in its own right. That way we would avoid over-reacting in the name of “playing it safe”, and instead do things measure by measure. This, of course, didn’t happen. Cummings and those around him should have predicted this, and begun to build the structures required for nuanced measures later in 2020, and into 2021. That failure is why, when things got vexing in the autumn, the approach was simply “slam all the restrictions back on”. And why, when it was realised that the wheels were starting to fall off society and the economy, increasingly finessed exceptions were carved out. These were clearly never driven by an iota of data. Funerals are always the example cited here. Cummings did so himself. But he, and all the others, miss the real sin. Some illict funeral gatherings still went on. Those are data points and should have been mined. Ditto for clandestinely open pubs, or random gatherings on the beach. Or even schools. These could all have been treated as pilot projects for analysis, but this was not done in any systematic way — if at all. A proper plan would have involved doing as since the emergency started to unfold in January, well in advance of needing to do it for real. Instead we got spooked policy makers with useless models and experts who, having changed sides, refused to countenance switching back. A sort of anti-correcting groupthink. This causes harm. Now, we don’t have a three-week lockdown to make a plan and work it out; we have a never-ending lockdown and no clear exit path. Worse, the first lockdown “worked”, and became the only reliable data point in existence. Luckily vaccines were quickly developed, which ultimately ended the mess. As far as I can divine, no attempt was ever made to produce the high quality data needed to carefully impose minimal restrictions.

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the parlous lack of data also worked against determining the negative effects of the lockdown. Again, a proper plan would have had provisions for gathering this data, too. If you are going to incarcerate the whole population, you should start systematically measuring the effect of it. To prevent this happening again, Lady Hallett’s Covid inquiry will need to go back to the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis. That, too, was a plan-free mess: I remember seeing the pyres from my bedroom window. The relevant government departments must have learned all those years ago what “no plan” and “no data” looks like — black smoke, an acrid smell and disinfectant troughs everywhere. For some reason they chose not to make one all the same. To do so will require calling a generation of civil servants and asking them why they dropped the ball. It may require a bit of blame, too. If Lady Hallett wants our response to the next pandemic to improve upon its failures during the last one, she should turn all her energies to finding out why the UK’s pandemic rider had no horse, let alone shoes and nails. O

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Britain’s population is rapidly growing but the authorities seem implacably opposed to building new houses

WE ARE PLANNING TO FAIL

and intrinsic dullness this inevitably means that the civil service runs the role, for good or ill, and the machine plods along without radical change, silting itself up with the accretions of bureaucratic priorities. Unsurprisingly this, atop an underfunded and complex planning system, means the number of consents filtering through the system is inadequate to the country’s needs. With our population almost entirely through immigration growing so rapidly — typically a quarter of a million net a year in the last decade and over 600,000 net in 2022 — where are they going to live? We are not building Johnny Leavesley enough hotels, let alone houses. I knew one of those recent past ministers quite well. As we o one should believe that this smoked cigars on a country walk, he explained the frustrations country is corrupt in any serious way. of his job. One was that the national planning inspectorate, Despite decades of networking and which deals with appeals from local authorities, reported its friendships it has been shown to me work-in-progress to him only once a quarter. I told him to press how uninfluential I am. Not that I atfor a weekly summary and to try to link their pay to turnover. He tempted to flex. was moved on to another position before I could discover When one of our planning applicawhether this advice was heeded. tions was called in for adjudication by the secretary of state I was My scheme’s only fault was to propose houses in breach of a assiduous in not contacting any of the departmental ministers, numbers cap recommended by the Neighbourhood Plan (NP). even though I have known Michael Gove since he was a cub reWhen we applied in 2019 these nimby charters did porter on The Times and I was an even younger not have the same weighting in planning terms politico. For a year I did not attend any ConservaStreet and that they do now. Originally envisaged as tools for tive party events nor donate in any way. It was Sunak both influencing density, design and amenities, there is probably wise, I thought, not to allow the generoshave rare now no Neighbourhood Plan in the country which ity of my presence and money to seem conflicted. qualities for actually calls for more housing. Political support does not affect planning deciA useful reform that would not need anything sions — unless in this case it did, perhaps because Tories - they more difficult to deliver than the tweaking of minno one likes me? are likeable, isterial guidance could be to reduce the weighting The scheme was rejected by the housing minisintelligent, given by planning inspectors to NP numbers — ter on behalf of the Govester, who might have had not to abolish this concern, just reduce its emphacompetent no knowledge of it. It is unlikely that the junior sis. That would help deliver more houses. minister had much influence or care either, the Anyway, after an inexplicable delay of a year in the Departdecision having the imprint of civil service cowardice. She lost ment of Levelling Up and more money burnt away in costs than her job in the last reshuffle which, I could have thought possible, this scheme, in an area of acute although it brought a smile to my housing shortage, will have to wait years before we can reapply. prejudiced face, I doubt had anyNot that I am surprised. We may not be a corrupt country, but thing to do with me. we are administratively inefficient.