Later that evening, he tells her: “I’ve done some maths — we can just about afford to buy a gardenless 1.5 bed flat in Catford and have a baby, if we reduce our food budget.” And they’re the lucky ones. And yet, is that all his country has to offer them? Britain’s answer to anyone who isn’t a home-owning pensioner today is, unfortunately, yes. The formerly normal aspiration to settle and start a family is out of reach for swathes of young people. A fundamental compact between conservative principles, and the party that is supposed to represent them, has been broken.

The next leader of the Conservative Party faces an economic emergency with few obvious solutions. Public finances remain in a dire state following an almost continuous stream of crises. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimates that the government has already spent as much as it did during the Financial Crash to support households through the current squeeze on living standards. House prices are a national disgrace, far exceeding historical trends on affordability and requiring decades of saving for average couples to even afford a deposit for a first home. Homeownership among the young has dwindled.

Britain tends to think of itself as an equal partner to countries such as France, the Netherlands and Germany in terms of incomes and living standards. This is a collective fantasy, which hasn’t been true for well over a decade. The reality shouldn’t be shocking, yet it remains so: Britain’s incomes and living standards have fallen far behind what were its peer nations only 15 years ago. “Across European countries, only households in Greece and Cyprus saw a worse performance between 2007 and 2018 than the UK,” found the Resolution Foundation. On its third consecutive Tory prime minister, and about to select its fourth, Britain isn’t working.

Does this seem like the time for a middle of the road party leadership candidate offering more of the same, a contest in which candidates simply take turns to outbid each other with Boomer-pleasing tax cuts? Or does a radical programme with a fresh-faced advocate need to step forward? The Tory party no longer has the theatrics of Brexit or a disruptive global pandemic to distract from these systemic, structural failings. The tide has gone out, the party isn’t wearing any knickers, and nobody is impressed by what there is to see.

Because the reality is that Britain’s national religion is no longer Anglican Christianity. It isn’t even the NHS. It is Pensionerism. Britain is a care home with a navy. And as the Baby Boomer cohort of voters ages, it is vital for the party’s long-term survival, not to mention morally just, for the party to begin mending the structural underpinnings of society that enable people to establish themselves and build families.

Brexit aside, if British conservatism is defined by anything, it is its reverence for community and continuity over radicalism and state interventionism. Asset ownership is vital for the maintenance of these values — increasing the country’s housing stock is a means to a conservative end. People who own houses invest in them for the long run and want them protected. These values express themselves in everything from taking care of a front garden, seeing it as a community as much as a personal asset, to favouring low levels of asset taxation on something “earned”.

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Graduates face a marginal tax rate of at least 50%. They are expected by Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey to exercise restraint when looking for pay rises, even in the face of nearly two decades of pay stagnation. Family homes are completely out of their reach. Ask yourself, how does this look compared to the comfort of homeownership and the 10% growth in the state pension, under the triple-lock policy, that shields pensioners from the same fate? Are we really all in this together?

Yet all attempts to reform this growth-killing inequity end in failure, such is the strength of the homeowner-pensioner lobby. Despite free enterprise fitting hand-in-glove with Conservative ideological orthodoxy, housing remains a market throttled by the state, with severe supply restriction enforced via irreformable planning forcing prices up. This has deleterious effects across swathes of public policy, from living standards, to fertility, to climate change.

Is it any surprise that productivity and post-housing cost income growth doesn’t exist in a market where any wage rises go straight to existing landowners in higher rents and prices, rather than resulting in an increased supply of houses? If increases in productivity don’t raise living standards, where is the incentive to increase productivity? Scaling this huge challenge must be the immediate, urgent priority of the next Conservative leader.

It’s been done before — look back to Margaret Thatcher’s reforming governments. But while Thatcher wielded the sword and cut through the Gordian knot of Britain’s public sector businesses and unions in the Eighties, she did this with the tailwinds of North Sea oil and gas revenues and entering government afresh, not 12 years into Conservative rule.

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Thatcher could even be said to have redistributed — a word we associate solely with the Left of politics — housing towards council housing tenants. She recognised that without homeownership, the facts of life ceased to be conservative. Nobody could imagine a Conservative government today redistributing housing wealth towards the young, regardless that much of it was ‘earned’ through planning restriction and loose monetary policy. It seems unlikely that any of today’s leadership candidates would — or could — wield such a sword as she did.

There is an obvious solution to all these structural problems: growth.

It is encouraging to see Sajid Javid identify growth as one of the key planks of his campaign for leader and for him to state that housing is a supply side issue, but less so to see Jeremy Hunt reflexively spouting a ludicrous unfunded promise to “cut all taxes”. Yet another demand-side reform. But Hunt’s reasoning is tragically logical: the next leader will not win the votes of members by attacking the party’s own base — which has become substantially older in recent years — over the lack of planning reform, the biggest cause of Britain’s anaemic growth record. What is required therefore is a dose of the dryly titled ‘policy entrepreneurialism’.

To win — and win properly, not just squeak into office just to prepare for election defeat in two years’ time — the next leader must shout from the rooftops about growth, while investing in clever innovative policy solutions. Seek softer community buy-in with policies that could encourage development while benefiting residents like Street Votes. Be radical. Call for the permanent abolition of Stamp Duty. The Treasury will fight you, but a universally-hated tax that increases market friction by preventing the elderly moving out of large family homes is a politically feasible housing policy reform. There’s £3.31bn in annual economic growth up for grabs!

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Build more houses, but be smart about it. Building is impossible in Chesham and Amersham? You’re a Conservative government with sky high prices in Labour-dominated, youthful cities! Ignore Chesham and Amersham. Build in the cities with the strongest price signals and if current residents don’t like it, let them vote even more Labour, or move away. Enabling growth in the productive cities will give you tax revenues to spend on public services, or enable you to cut taxes responsibly from their current postwar high.

The UK has some of the highest childcare costs in Europe according to the OECD. The cost of subsidising childcare to a level closer to the European average could bring more women into the labour force, thereby increasing economic growth while solving sex-based social inequality. Isn’t this win-win?

But already in this contest we see Suella Braverman open her candidacy with cheap promises to leave the European Court of Human Rights. This kind of policymaking would neatly follow on from the return of voluntary imperial measurements, and the probably unworkable Rwanda refugee policy. Meanwhile Sajid Javid, Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss have all pledged to lower fuel taxes, an astonishingly regressive proposal that benefits the richest first while ignoring the pressing need for climate action. The party must learn: throwing red meat to the crowd doesn’t put red meat on the table.

Without Brexit to focus on, the Government has lost its sense of purpose. The next leader must be a strategist, cerebral, and yet still a salesman. Someone who recognises that there’s more to winning than winning itself, and declinist managerialism — that a far greater prize is changing peoples’ lives and your country, for the better.

The candidate was Carrie Symonds. Unknown to his advisers, Johnson had become close to her, and around this time, one friendly MP walked in on the pair in “a compromising situation” in his House of Commons office. Undaunted and unembarrassed, Johnson persisted with the idea of making Carrie head of staff, calling in Zac Goldsmith to offer support. Only after a (named) aide threatened to resign did Johnson drop it.

If ever a book invited lazy thinking from journalists, then First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson is it. We know what 76-year-old Ashcroft thinks about a lot of things, so it is easy to assume that the billionaire won’t be a fan of Carrie, who is very much a modern, liberal, green Tory (though they share an interest in animal welfare). The book on David Cameron that appeared under his and Isabel Oakeshott’s name, though very readable, was a piece of score-settling by a man who felt his beneficence to the Party had gone under-appreciated.

He remains something of an outsider so, one might think, this new title is presumably another piece of axe-grinding. Plus, given that many of the juicy bits have already appeared in the newspaper serialisation, why bother with the book itself? And evidently some will object to the imbalance of an idiosyncratic rich man examining the life of a woman half his age. One reviewer became “absolutely furious” at Ashcroft referring to Carrie, then 31, as a “young lady” in the introduction; for her, the narrative never recovered.

There are parts that made me squeamish, and certainly some of the anecdotes from her early years feel slightly invasive, inevitably in a biography of this type. But to disqualify Ashcroft because of an imputed attitude to women is short-sighted. And to say his book is a misogynistic hit job just isn’t good enough.

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The days when he would use his wealth to elevate him above libel laws and ventilate nonsense about David Cameron putting his penis in a dead pig’s mouth, or his wife having an affair with one of her security people, seem to be behind him. (Francis Elliott and I checked the latter rumour when co-writing the first biography of Cameron and established it was untrue, but it was still doing the rounds seven years later and Ashcroft and Oakeshott reported it as gossip.)

And the result of Ashcroft’s, shall we say, maturing as a political biographer should not be ignored.[1.  I helped in an indirect and minor way with research for his book on Jacob Rees-Mogg.] Can anyone seriously claim that the story of a Foreign Secretary trying to sign up his new girlfriend for a job for which she is not qualified is not in the public interest? Or that the story is made up? There are too many sources for the book to be dismissed as a hatchet job. True, many remain unnamed, but that should deter no one. It would be naïve to expect otherwise with so fevered a government still in power. So unless Ashcroft has invented them, which is pretty much inconceivable, there is plenty in this volume that deserves to be taken seriously.

The picture that emerges is of someone with more strong opinions than her husband, but no less unhappiness in early life or, later, determination to achieve her goals. Her commitment to green issues, admirable to my mind, is a constant thread. Ashcroft applauds her bravery in waiving anonymity in the case of sex criminal John Worboys, who drugged her in the back of a taxi, her campaign against his release from prison and her willingness to discuss her 2021 miscarriage. He cites her charm, what fun she can be and ability to get on with influential journalists, which is indispensable in PR.

Her early life, financially comfortable rather than lavish, makes for sad reading. She is distant from her father, a journalist called Matthew Symonds, who had another family. The product of an extra-marital affair, she attended two top private schools in London and was brought up as an only child by her mother, Josephine McAfee. She studied drama at Warwick University, spent time in PR and then, after meeting Zac Goldsmith’s cousin at a party, began working for Zac and subsequently for the Conservative Party. She became a special adviser to John Whittingdale and then Sajid Javid before, at 29, becoming the Tories’ communications director.

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But in Westminster she is not universally liked. We know something of this from Dominic Cummings, never one for deft understatement, but the evidence compiled here goes well beyond any campaign he could have organised. Her shortcomings as a colleague are rehearsed at some length (one colleague on the campaign trail called her “utterly, utterly useless”), as is her lack of interest in policy and her enthusiasm for holidays and smart restaurants. She once described the job of being Tatler’s political editor as her dream job.

There are numerous stories of Carrie being hard to work with and of her desire to get on (no more a crime in a woman than a man, of course). She even has her very own expenses scandal, in which she used the names of junior colleagues when claiming taxis. One source said: “She’s lucky she didn’t end up in more serious trouble… It was misuse of CCHQ funds. She used the names of those just starting out on their careers. That was unforgivable”. Whether the cabs were for her private use, or to meet one of the two married Tory MPs (one was Johnson, the other for some reason remains unnamed) with whom she had a relationship, we may never know.

Normally personality traits in a Prime Minister’s spouse would matter only to the PM, but according to Ashcroft this one seeks to involve herself in areas where she is under-qualified and insert her allies into positions of influence. She appears to have been largely responsible for Allegra Stratton’s ill-fated hiring, for instance. Carrie is also portrayed as remarkably thin-skinned where media criticism is concerned, especially for someone so familiar with the transience of the news trade; the PM apparently spends inordinate amounts of time smoothing her ruffled feathers.

Carrie’s defenders will point to the sacking of John Whittingdale and Henry Newman, two of her supporters, as evidence of her lack of influence. But that seems to have been the result of one of the PM’s knee-jerk responses to criticism, following Lord Frost’s public suggestion that he refresh things by removing the woke crowd. Clearly, there is a body of opinion that disdains the greenery-by-stealth approach that she embodies (and which a braver PM would embrace). Either way, Carrie is scarcely the “private individual who plays no role in Government” that her spokesperson claims.

And there is plenty of evidence that Johnson, who hates confrontation, went to extraordinary lengths to avoid rousing his wife’s temper. He would beg aides to help him keep her happy, at one point asking if someone could be given a job title without actually doing the job, just so it looked as if that person performed that role. Was this another Boris joke? Conceivably, but that can’t excuse everything.

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Those who know Johnson well know him to be an organisational disaster. (I’m told his diplomatic protection team often have to remind him to do up his flies.) The expert in mitigating his chaos used to be his former wife Marina. Carrie, perhaps because she is of a more recent generation than Marina, apparently sees no reason why she should mother her husband. As one of Ashcroft’s sources says: “When the marriage [with Marina] ended, he lost his domestic support, the steadying influence, and he traded that in for a demanding girlfriend and strong disapproval from his children”. Even Prime Ministers are entitled to private lives, but are we really to believe these details have no effect on how the country is run?

Without the research that went into First Lady, we would be guessing — trying to join the dots between Cummings blogs, drip-drip news of Covid parties, flat refurbishments and Johnson’s pinball machine decision-making. What the book lacks, though, is the case for the defence. There are few voices supporting her, beyond that of her former boss John Whittingdale. Carrie refused to cooperate with the book, sticking to the “not a public person” line, when even her much-admired Tatler calls her “the most powerful woman in Britain”. Perhaps if she had engaged, or encouraged friends to engage, she could have neutralised the accusations and conveyed a more favourable impression of herself.

Nevertheless, this book offers an account of where Carrie came from, what she wants, what makes her tick and, most important, the influence she has on our PM.

More ambiguously, last week there were about 6,000 hospital admissions with Covid in South Africa, all of which were presumably Omicron since the variant is now dominant there. That’s well below the July peak of about 15,000 a week, although there’s a lag between infection and hospitalisation.

This sort of news has led to people thinking that it’s much less deadly than Delta. As the Omicron wave looms over Britain, that sort of hope keeps us sane.

But how much can we trust that hope? The Prime Minister has promised to ramp up the booster programme, saying that everybody over 18 would be vaccinated by 31 December – about a million people a day. Can that really be possible? And if it were, would that be enough, or are we going to need something more than the “Plan B” restrictions that are already in place.

First, we need to know if it really is less deadly than the other variants. It’s not as clear-cut as all that. South Africa has only fully vaccinated about a quarter of its population, but it has had three large waves of infection: very probably, by now, most of the population has had the disease. So it’s not possible to directly compare the Omicron wave with the Delta wave: Omicron is working its way through a population with much higher immunity.

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The trouble is, that won’t be true in the UK. When Delta came here, we were already highly vaccinated: almost every adult had had at least one jab. At least some of the reasons why Omicron appears to be less of a threat to South Africans don’t apply here. We’re also a much older population.

Closer to home, Danish data looking at 2,417 cases of Omicron found only 19 people had been admitted to hospital. But again, it’s hard to know what to make of it. The patients involved were mainly young – the median age is about 30. And given an average lag of about a week between infection and hospitalisation, and since about 2,000 of the cases were detected in the last week, it might not be as promising as it sounds on the surface.

The most recent UK Health Security Agency technical briefing similarly finds that “None of the cases is known to have been hospitalised or died”. But their data only goes to 6 December. By 6 December, there had only been 260 cases of Omicron in the country, most of which had been detected in the previous few days. Since then, there have been at least 10 hospitalisations and at least one death linked to the new variant. Things may become clearer in the coming weeks.

It’s perfectly possible that Omicron is less dangerous than Delta to a person with prior immunity. But we can’t be sure yet. And we should also remember that while deadliness — virulence — is important, it’s not as important as transmissibility.

Imagine the following scenario. You have a disease with an R of four — that is, on average, each person with the disease gives it to four more people. And it also has an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 4%, so it kills one person in every 25 that it infects. (These are made-up numbers for illustration.)

You follow that disease through 10 generations. The first person would infect four more; those four would infect a further 16, and so on. By the time you reached the 10th generation, you would have about a million new cases – and adding all the generations together, you’d get a total of 1.4 million cases. Of those 1.4 million, about 56,000 would die.

Imagine that a new variant arrived which was more deadly: which kills 5% of victims. It would be worse. You’d expect about 70,000 deaths, 25% more than before.

But now imagine that a new variant arrived which was more transmissible, by the same margin. Each person infects five people, on average. Suddenly the first one infects five, those five infect 25, those 25 infect 125. By the time you reach the 10th generation, it’s almost 10 million new cases, and about 12 million in total. Even if it still only had an IFR of 4%, it would kill about 480,000 people – nine times as many as the original.

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So even if Omicron is less deadly, if it’s very good at spreading through the population, it could quickly overwhelm the health service just through sheer weight of numbers.

The question, then, is: is it more transmissible? There was much excitement over the weekend, when the case numbers appeared to be slowing there — after zooming up to 19,000 a day, they dropped back to 17,000, and people started to wonder whether it had peaked. But then the South African health service released a new tranche of data on Sunday, with another 37,000 cases — the apparent slowdown appears to have been a reporting backlog.

Even taking that into account, Omicron isn’t doing quite the mad upwards dash that it was in late November. But it’s still escalating, in a presumably fairly immune population. And it seems to be spreading even faster in the UK: Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, told the Science Media Centre that “In South Africa the latest R estimate is about 2.2. For the UK the estimate is 3.7 which is doubling every 2 to 3 days.” The UK HSA technical report suggests (p19) that it spreads around twice as easily as Delta in the UK population. If that’s true, it would easily overwhelm any gains from reduced virulence, even if they’re real.

So what does it all mean? Over the weekend, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine released a model of how Omicron might spread. It included scenarios with different assumptions about how good the new variant is at evading immunity, and about how good the boosters are at building that immunity back up. It also assumed that we’d keep the Plan B advice in place (masks in some public spaces, people working from home if they can, some vaccine-status checking) and that the NHS would administer about 500,000 new booster jabs a day.

The most likely scenario is that the variant is pretty good at evading immunity, but that boosters work pretty well. Under that scenario, the LSHTM model’s projections look fairly bleak: a peak of about 6,000 hospital admissions a day, compared to about 4,000 a day at the January 2021 peak. And they think between about 40,000 and 50,000 people would die of Covid between 1 December and 30 April.

They say in the model that they have assumed Omicron is no less deadly than Delta, given prior immunity. They might be wrong about that, but as I’ve shown, we can’t be sure. It’s certainly very possible that we’ll be looking at another wave of deaths comparable to the first or second one.

Will Johnson’s booster boosterism make much of a difference? I doubt it. It takes at least a week for boosters to have a significant effect on your immunity, and for some people more like two. Even if we started vaccinating a million people a day from tomorrow, the impact of that wouldn’t be felt until around Christmas. We’re not going to start vaccinating a million people tomorrow: we’ve been averaging 400,000 a day recently, fewer than the LSHTM model assumes, and the NHS thinks that we’ll still be boosting well into January and February and we’ll only have offered everyone a jab by the new year. Hopefully it’ll ramp up quickly, but if we’re relying on boosters, then most of the January caseload will be baked in already.

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And here’s the really worrying thing. Sajid Javid, the health secretary, told MPs last night that 200,000 people have been infected by Omicron yesterday alone. This was such a huge claim that people assumed he’d got mixed up: perhaps he meant 200,000 people are infected? Or have been? But apparently not. There were about 50,000 cases reported in the UK on 10 December. The ONS infection survey suggests that we only detect 40% of them: that is, there were really 125,000. On the 10th, 19% of cases were Omicron. That is about 25,000 cases. But cases detected on the 10th were probably infected on the 7th, six days ago. And if it’s doubling every two days, then that 25,000 has had time to become 200,000.

For reference, that’s about the number of daily cases that we had in early January 2021, the peak of the second wave, by which time we’d already been in full lockdown for a month. We are not in lockdown now, and several more doublings are probably already locked in. If Javid is correct, then Omicron had better be much less deadly, or there could be real trouble ahead. We’ll know if he’s right in about three days. 

So should we be talking about restrictions?

The restrictions we put in place for the first and second waves were intended to avoid something far worse. The 16 March 2020 paper by Imperial College London predicted 500,000 deaths if no measures were taken. That was what sent us into lockdown. The actual death toll of 40,000 or so in the first wave was a fraction of what it could have been.

But we are nowhere near where we were early last year. We’re now talking about something that is on the level of a very bad flu season. Full-on March 2020 lockdown is probably an overreaction.

But the LSHTM model thinks that we could prevent about two-thirds of those deaths and hospitalisations by going to full lockdown,[1. It actually only models the most optimistic and most pessimistic scenarios under the various restrictions. But in both of those scenarios, about two-thirds of deaths and hospitalisations are prevented under strictest lockdown, and about a third under the less stringent Stage 2 restrictions. I have assumed that the intermediate scenarios see roughly similar numbers.] and about one-third by introducing, right now, some less strict measures, equivalent to Stage 2 of the “roadmap out of lockdown” from spring: the biggest part of that was probably that only two households or six individuals could meet indoors.

It is a non-trivial intervention that could slow the course of Omicron; it might buy some time for the sped-up booster programme; and it would mean we wouldn’t have to cross our fingers and hope that Omicron is less deadly than Delta. Obviously politicians will be reluctant to ruin another Christmas. But relying on boosters alone is a big risk, especially since no one but Johnson seems to think we can hit the target.

But after an autumn of absolutely pathetic numbers — for a while we were barely jabbing 40,000 a day, first and second doses combined, down from ten times that number and more in the spring and early summer — the programme does appear to have picked up a little. There were hundreds of thousands of booster jabs alone given over the weekend.

The Government has pinned its entire winter strategy on those boosters. Sajid Javid, the health secretary, has said Plan B, will not be introduced because of them. Plan B is a milquetoasty set of minor interventions, including greater use of vaccine passports, and legally requiring masks in some places. They may ask for people to work from home if things get worse. It’s not exactly Protect and Survive.

And we’re not going there. Yet.

But there is a problem, which is that Covid-19 in the UK has become really hard to predict. Last year, whatever you looked at — cases, hospitalisations, deaths — the numbers followed a simple pattern. They started going up slowly, then they went up quicker, then quicker, then quicker. Then the Government imposed a lockdown, and, a little while and a few thousand more dead people later, the numbers crashed back down again.

But this year, the pandemic is no longer doing nice straightforward exponential curves. If you look at hospitalisations over the last six months or so, you’ll see that they started a familiar-looking rise in about June, and they clambered up to about 1,000 a day in late July and then – they just stopped, and went back down a bit. Then they rose again, and back down. Now they’ve started going up again, but … will that carry on? Will the curve fizzle out again? Unlike last year, it’s not easy to tell what will happen next.

Adam Kucharski, a mathematical epidemiologist, explained why winter 2021/22 is trickier to model than 20/21. First, he says, in any epidemic, “When R is near 1, it’s a headache.” R is the number of people that each infected person goes on to infect, on average. So if your initial 100 cases lead to 200 subsidiary cases, then your R is 2. If R is above 1, your epidemic is growing exponentially; if it’s below 1, it’s dying away.

When R is well above 1, it’s fairly easy to predict what will happen: cases will go up, faster and faster, until it runs out of susceptible people or until policies and behaviours change so that R goes below 1 and the epidemic declines again. That’s how it was last year.

But now, thanks to vaccines and natural immunity, the number of susceptible people around is lower — we’re close to herd immunity — so even with essentially no restrictions, R is close to 1. And when it’s close to 1, smaller things can affect the course of the epidemic much more. “It bounces around,” says Kucharski. “Schools reopening, or closing for half term. The vaccine rollout and boosters. If the epidemic is increasing or decreasing, some small change can knock it the other way.”

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One way to think of it is that if your R is 2.5, and, for instance, schools close for half term, then your R might go down to 2.3. It’s the difference between an epidemic that’s spreading quickly, and one that’s spreading not quite so quickly. But if R is 1.1 and you knock it down to 0.9, then it’s the difference between a pandemic that’s growing and one that’s shrinking.

It also means that individual behaviour becomes important. Around our way, it recently became very obvious that lots of schoolchildren (and their parents) were getting the disease. So when ours got the sniffles we were quicker to take them out of school, and more wary of going to shops. Presumably millions of people have behaved in similar ways. It wouldn’t have made much difference last year — the disease was spreading so rapidly — but it could be enough now to change things from an up-arrow to a down-arrow.

There’s a more interesting dynamic at play as well, says Kucharski. Imagine the first two waves of the pandemic as a forest fire in a virgin forest. Once a tree starts burning, it easily spreads to the trees around it, and, left to its own devices, the fire will carry on until the forest has burnt away. An immunologically naive population is the same. “When you have a fully susceptible population,” says Kucharski, “the simple exponential curve models will give you something sensible.”

But we no longer live in a virgin forest. Vaccinations and acquired immunity means that the large bulk of the population is less susceptible to infection. In our analogy, you could imagine that it’s a far sparser forest, with occasional clumps here and there representing groups with lower vaccination uptake. Now, if a tree catches fire, it might not spread to any others. Or it might be in a clump, and spread around that clump quickly, and then burn out. Or a spark might make it from the clump to a nearby clump. It’s much more dependent on luck and randomness.

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“You have a much patchier network for the virus to spread in,” says Kucharski. “A lot more dead ends, and surges in younger groups and places with lower vaccination cover; you get pockets of susceptibility, and you get large outbreaks, but it has to work its way from one pocket to another. When you’ve got lots of these happening in parallel, you have a much bumpier dynamic, more conducive to a bobbling-along plateau than one that has clear growth or decline.”

All of which makes the epidemic much harder to predict. But there’s another layer of difficulty on top of that, which is that you’re not just predicting an epidemic: you’re predicting human behaviour. More specifically, you’re predicting the behaviour of the current government and parliament. There is not an algorithm which says “At 1,500 hospitalisations a day, we re-enter lockdown” or anything.

Other countries do have something like that — in Taiwan, for instance, there are four levels of restrictions, which are imposed on a specified set of conditions. Level 1 is imposed if there are cases imported from overseas that result in “isolated community transmission”; Level 2 is imposed if there are “domestically transmitted cases from unknown sources”, etc. If you could predict the behaviour of the epidemic in Taiwan, you’d have a pretty good basis for predicting the policy response to it.

But not in the UK. Plan B, or any further restrictions, will be imposed if the Government decides to impose them. I think that’s a bad system, and the Taiwanese method of removing the decision as far as possible from political pressure would be better. But that’s the system we have. So as well as predicting what the virus will do, we have to predict how 361 Tory MPs will respond to the virus, and how Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid will respond to them. So predicting whether we’ll end up in a lockdown is hard.

But perhaps there’s a more interesting question, which is: should we act as though we might have to, and start doing something about it now? Should we impose Plan B?

For all the current doom and gloom, we are in a better place than even the most optimistic of the government’s SPI-M-O models projections from early September. And those models now tend to forecast a decline in cases from later this month, even if we don’t impose Plan B. We’re not facing an immediate crisis.

Oliver Johnson, a mathematician at Bristol, says an autumn decline is plausible: “The key thing is it has been so crazy in schools, with 7% or 8% of schoolkids infected at any one time,” he says. “You can’t have that forever: you’ll run out of people. So it’s a case of working out when you’ll run out of people.” The little clumps of forest will burn down eventually.

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By Tom Chivers

The pandemic, though, has been consistently hard to predict and the great failings of the British Covid response have been trying to be too clever, doing things too late, and not thinking about risk-benefit calculations or worst-case scenarios.

This feels very much like one of those situations. It’s true that, probably, if we leave it and do nothing, things won’t get that much worse, and may soon get better. But there’s a non-trivial chance that they will get worse. Given that the costs of imposing Plan B restrictions are minor, why not take simple, low-cost steps now to avoid the unlikely, but plausible and very bad, future shit show.

We have a suite of tools available to us – not just Plan B, but also things like increased rapid testing – that can avoid future disruption. But, also, if we impose them now, we can undo them later easily if they’re unnecessary, or tweak them if they’re not quite right.

For instance, there are concerns that vaccine passports will damage the entertainment industry and have only a small impact on the virus. If that’s true, we can reduce their use once that’s clear.

And we should be able to avoid stringent restrictions being imposed again, and another catastrophic Christmas lockdown. “Given the tools we now have available,” says Kucharski, “it would be completely absurd if we got to that point.”

I agree. We absolutely should not need to consider a Plan C, one in which we shut stuff down, stop people seeing their loved ones, close the pubs, ruin Christmas. And we can make it all but certain that we don’t have to do that if we take small, sensible precautions now. Hopefully enough elderly people will stand in cold car parks to get their boosters; but let’s not rely on it entirely.

In the short term, there’s the next election — which will be won or lost in the former Red Wall. If the Government doesn’t make some progress with the levelling-up agenda it promised new blue voters, it may well face defeat. In the long term, it is facing extinction. Younger voters don’t vote Tory — and show few signs of doing so as they get older. And who can blame them? If you exclude an entire generation from home ownership, then they won’t become Conservatives.

So levelling-up and solving the housing crisis are top priorities — and Gove is now responsible for both, although the latter in particular might be considered a poisoned chalice. A few years back, when his department was called something else, I did a stint as a lowly speechwriter. Every morning I’d walk past a wall of portraits — framed photographs of the men and women who used to do Gove’s job — and the thing that struck me was the turnover, most of them only spending a year or two before the impossible job got to them. In the last five years, four more portraits have been nailed to that wall. Greg Clark (who I worked for), Sajid Javid, James Brokenshire and Robert Jenrick — they’ve all been and gone, while the average house price to earnings ratio has continued to rise and rise.

Gove’s first problem, like that of his doomed predecessors, is that most of the important decisions are made elsewhere — principally Downing Street and the Treasury — and the people making the decisions often haven’t got a clue what they’re doing.

The Treasury, for instance, has just blown the best part of £5 billion on a stamp duty “holiday” that wasn’t needed. They did this because they thought that Covid would crash the property market when, in fact, the exact opposite happened — another win for economics experts! House prices have in fact surged — and not because of the tax break. We could have built a lot of social housing with that sum, and made at least some inroad into a queue of over one million households waiting for a property.

But after eleven years of not solving the housing crisis, I wonder if this Government even understands what it is anyway. Typically, it’s presented as a problem of supply — i.e. we’re not building enough houses. But much more to the point, it’s a crisis of affordability — i.e. house prices and rents are too high. Unless prices fall — or at least stay still long enough for wages to catch up — then building more houses won’t solve the problem.

Same difference, you might think — by building more homes we’ll bring prices down. Except that’s not what the Government wants to happen. More houses, yes — but ministers are too afraid of the Daily Telegraph to actually call for lower prices, which would be disastrous for the electoral core support of the party. And in case you were wondering, we can have one without the other. As long as any extra supply is outstripped by increased demand — especially from professional property investors — then we can continue to build while prices continue to go up. This is how property booms work.

Absurdly, we still view rising house prices as a measure of prosperity, when in reality, it’s a vicious form of inflation that hurts the poorest and sucks value from the productive parts of the economy. It doesn’t even help ordinary homeowners, not unless they’re planning to downsize, and the only winners turn out to be landowners. That’s not just a few lucky farmers, but all those involved in the control of the land supply, including developers, consultants, lawyers and financiers: there’s a huge vested interest in not solving the housing crisis.

When he was Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove famously took on “the blob” — the forces in the education establishment who didn’t want his reforms to succeed, because it suited them.

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But the education blob has got nothing on its housing equivalent. The former was ideological, and almost entirely Left-wing, which makes it easier for a Tory government to challenge. Not so the housing blob — also known as the “the landed interest” — which has infested the Conservative Party for centuries. Being within the party itself, but working against the party’s long-term interests, it is a far more powerful and persistent lobby.

Gove, of all people, should also be wary of “experts” who say that they know best, but who keep getting it wrong — and on this issue they’ve been getting it wrong for years. Thanks to their influence, we’ve had bill after bill bashing away at the planning system as if it were the big obstacle, under the enduring myth that we don’t build enough houses because councils won’t allow them to be built. Yet that theory doesn’t square with the massive backlog of unused planning permissions. We have the building sites, so where are the houses?

It’s as if the bottleneck lies elsewhere, which of course it does. It’s not council planning officers who control the rate at which permitted land is turned into actual houses, but the big developers. Having purchased the land on which they say they want to build, they’d lose money if its value fell. So, they’ve got every incentive to ration supply to local housing markets. Whether you want to call this “land banking” or go in for some fancier explanation doesn’t matter, since it boils down to the same thing.

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But there is a solution. In many other countries, the state supplies the land along with the planning permission. Under this system, a local or national agency would purchase a site, put in the basic infrastructure, and then sell it off as ready-to-build plots to those who intend to live there. Building firms, large and small, would still bid for the construction work, but they’d have no involvement in the buying and selling of the land — and so they’d have no incentive or ability to ration its supply.

We also need action on the demand side. Aspiring homeowners have to compete with buy-to-let landlords, absentee foreign investors and now major financial institutions. Even to people who believe in the free market, this cannot be right. A house should be a home, not an investment product.

If the Chancellor wants to raise some more revenue, then he should whack up taxes on property speculation instead of jobs. And if Rishi Sunak won’t act, then Michael Gove could do so, by using the planning system under his control. For instance, he could make at least 80% of new planning permissions conditional on owner-occupation — and charge fat planning fees on the rest.

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This would require new legislation, but Gove should welcome that. He’s just inherited a planning bill whose main provisions are now dead in the water. Wisely, he’s “paused” these reforms, but before scrapping them all together, he’ll need something better to put in their place.

I’d recommend a radical programme to end land banking by the big developers and to push speculation out of the housing sector. Obviously, this is interfering in the marketplace, biasing the whole system towards aspiring homeowners. But so what? If the Conservative Party has to choose between ideological purity and home ownership, it’s no contest.

Without change we’re heading to a very different future — in which the landlord class further takes over our housing stock and owner-occupation goes into free fall, especially in the larger cities where most of the jobs are. This is the new road to serfdom — and serfs don’t vote Tory.

Child marriage is merely a subset of the wider problem of forced marriage, which is staggering in scale. In 2016, the International Labour Organization found that “15.4 million people were living in a forced marriage to which they had not consented”. 37% of those victims are under the age of 18, and 44% of those children were “forced to marry before the age of 15 years”. “While men and boys,” the report states, “can also be victims of forced marriage,” 88% of victims are female. That figure rises among child victims of forced marriage: 96% were girls.

For me, the subject of forced marriage is personal. When I was living in Kenya, my father arranged for me to marry a man I had never met. His name was Osman Moussa. He was 27. When we were introduced, only six days before the marriage, I found that he was bald, dim and expected me to give him six sons.

Before the nikah ceremony, which would legally wed us, I begged my father to reconsider. I had no interest in the man he had chosen for me and dreaded a lifetime with him. My father insisted and when I continued to resist, he reminded me of my place. In the end, my father married me to Osman when I wasn’t even there — which might have been an issue had my participation been a matter of concern. But the arrangement was a mere transfer of ownership from one man to the next; my presence, let alone my consent, was not required.

Fortunately for me, I was not a child when this happened. I was 22 and had the self-confidence to flee to the Netherlands to escape my future with Osman. What if I had been 15, without the wherewithal or determination to flee?

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But while my story might sound exotic, forced marriages and child marriages do not occur only in far-away countries. They are happening in the West today. This April, Unchained At Last, an organisation fighting child and forced marriages in the United States, released a study that found “nearly 300,000 minors, under the age of 18, were legally married in the US between 2000 and 2018”. The victims’ religious and ethnic backgrounds varied, but the vast majority were girls. Some were as young as 10.

In the United Kingdom, the situation is hardly any better. Here, child marriage is “thriving”; according to official data, between 2008 and 2017 more than 2,740 minors were married in England and Wales — a disturbing figure which doesn’t include minors wed in traditional ceremonies or taken abroad for the ceremony. Karma Nirvana, a British charity, recently reported “it had seen a 150% increase in teenagers calling about forced marriage since lockdowns began on March 23”. They expect that figure to rise now that the UK has removed most of its Covid-19 restrictions and gatherings are allowed to take place.

It’s encouraging, then, that UK introduced a bill this year that would close the child marriage loophole, which allows 16 and 17-year-olds to marry, with their parents’ permission. Health Secretary Sajid Javid, for what it’s worth, has committed his support, stating that “child marriage is child abuse”. Meanwhile, several states in the US are also fighting to end this practice within their borders; eleven states introduced legislation this year that would ban all marriages for those under 18. (New York and Rhode Island have already succeeded.)

All this has caused me to reflect on my own experiences and the countless stories I’ve heard from women and girls who have come to my Foundation seeking to escape or prevent a forced marriage. But at the heart of each of their tragic stories lies a simple question: what constitutes a marriage?

These days, in much of the Western world, it is a legal union of two human beings in pursuit of love, companionship and personal fulfilment. It is an agreement into which both parties willingly enter and from which they may leave if the relationship breaks down. The word “marriage” conjures up ideas of romance, love, desire, but also of partnership, posterity and security.

But for those legally locked in marriages they didn’t want, the word has a very different meaning. Fraidy Reiss, the founder of Unchained At Last, was forced into a marriage in 1995 when she was 19 years old. It quickly turned abusive. She came from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and eventually escaped her abuser, which led her family to shun her. When I asked her about it, she told me: “The day I was forced into my so-called marriage to a stranger, I lost all sexual, reproductive and financial rights. My family handed me over to the stranger for a lifetime of rape, forced motherhood and domestic servitude. What part of that sounds like a ‘marriage’?”

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Naila Amin was forced into a marriage with her 28-year-old cousin when she was just 15-years-old. Her parents brought her from New York to Pakistan for the ceremony and left her there. With the help of the US State Department, she was able to escape about five months later.

“I can only explain my marriage as a gun to my head,” she told me. “I literally had no choice but to be married or die as a result. I was a prisoner in my own body. Even though it belonged to me, it wasn’t mine.”

My friend Yasmine Mohammed escaped a forced marriage to an al-Qaeda terrorist in Canada. I recently asked her on my podcast how she viewed her relationship. Did it really constitute a marriage?

“Absolutely not. The reason is because I don’t constitute a human being, so I am a thing. I am a possession that is owned by my family and I am given to him for him to now own.”

Humans beings — often young girls — treated as property. Individuals unable to leave a situation on their own accord. These descriptions call to mind another institution which also dates back to ancient times: slavery. From antiquity onwards, countless civilisations have been built upon slavery. And it still exists in many forms today, including in these so-called marriages.

Because when an adult man — whether he is in his 20s or 50s — marries an 11-year-old girl, she inevitably gains all the essential attributes of a slave: she has no real power to leave — unless she accepts total destitution, permanent ostracism, or even honour violence. She is subject to the arbitrariness and capriciousness of an authority with absolute power over her life: her husband. And she is profoundly vulnerable to physical, sexual or emotional abuse.

Behind these forced marriages lie any number of dark motives. Girls may be trafficked, perhaps after false employment promises made to families living in dire poverty, perhaps after being kidnapped. Sometimes, a girl is married to satisfy a debt. Sometimes, a girl is married to solidify a certain tribal alliance. Sometimes, a girl is married to protect a family’s honour.

Sometimes, a girl is forced to marry the man who raped her because no one else will marry such a “tainted” girl. I’ve seen first-hand how families pressure women and girls into marriage. There are many possible motives, but the manipulation — and the absence of true consent — is a constant.

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In cases of forced marriage, particularly where honour plays a cultural role, extreme coercion can be brought to bear to ensure compliance by one or both parties. It is true that men can also be the victims of honour violence (particularly as it pertains to sexual minorities), but in general women are the more common victims: they’re generally seen as embodying the sexual honour of their tribe and community through their perceived sexual purity. Hence the need to marry them off quickly and quietly.

“Marriage” is, of course, a misnomer for these horrific situations. For a marriage to be an ethical union between two free parties, both persons have to make the decision without duress and through the use of reason. Preventing the formation of such marriages, like ending slavery, is an imperative of decency and humanity.

Yet, this year, headlines like “Victory Against Child Marriage in New York State” contrast starkly with others, like this: “Some NC lawmakers let child marriage ban stall because they or someone they know married as minors”. In North Carolina, children as young as 14 (the legal age to marry in North Carolina if a girl is pregnant) are being forced into “marriages”.

Last month, Judy Wiegand came forward to testify for a ban of child marriages in North Carolina, recounting her own experiences of marrying in northern NC in 1996, at the age of 15. Her husband turned 18 soon after they wed and became her “guardian”. As a minor, she was not able to “go to medical appointments by herself, she needed [her husband’s] permission to be on birth control, which he denied, and she couldn’t sign for utilities, rent an apartment or get a driver’s license without his approval”.

Yesterday, the NC House considered the “SB 35” bill, which would raise the age of marriage to sixteen, with no more than a four years age difference allowed for those marrying at sixteen or seventeen. The bill passed unanimously — but despite these efforts towards progress, this bill remains inadequate. Sixteen and seventeen-year-olds are still minors and also need protection, as illustrated by Judy Wiegand’s experiences above.

Indeed, it’s striking that the North Carolina House passed over their own brightline bill, HB 41, which would raise the age of marriage to 18 years old, no exceptions, to instead let the focus sit on the watered down SB 35. We would not ignore a brightline bill if it were a slavery ban that was stalling in North Carolina — or any of the other 44 states where child marriage is still legal.

So perhaps what’s needed here is a shift in terminology. To reflect what’s truly happening when a family offers up their 12-year-old daughter to a 27-year-old distant cousin — and to stop people turning a blind eye for fear of being culturally insensitive — we need to call child marriages what they are: slavery.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. True, the Government had had a pretty torrid time of it over the weekend thanks both to Matt Hancock and to Boris Johnson’s failure to sack him straight away. But the canny appointment of Sajid Javid was supposed to have steadied the ship, indeed set it sailing full speed ahead for 19 July when a swathe of Coronavirus restrictions now look certain to be lifted.

Even better, the Government could point to some seriously good news from Sunderland, where Nissan, in defiance of all the Brexit-hating doomsters and gloomsters, is committing to building a gigafactory and launching a new model at its plant there.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the fence, the knives were being sharpened for the supposedly useless Sir Keir Starmer, with mounting excitement that the ongoing beef between him and his salt-of-the-earth deputy, Angela Rayner, might produce a leadership challenge. And then there was Labour’s hard Left, some of whose social media stars were salivating at the prospect of another Hartlepool-style humiliation providing them with yet more proof that the party they love (or at least started loving in 2015) has supposedly lost “the working class” by dumping the socialist policies that won it two stunning moral victories at the general elections of 2017 and 2019.

No one can say for sure why things didn’t play out the way the way the pundits and, for what they’re worth, the betting markets, thought they would. But these are my best guesses.

First up, Labour had an exceptional candidate — a woman who is not just hyper-local and highly personable but who, because of her sister, who was murdered back in 2016 when serving as MP for Batley and Spen, could claim a profound emotional connection to the place that must have swayed some voters (and not just previous Labour voters) her way.

Second, Labour’s ground campaign, turbo-charged by the MP newly appointed by Starmer to be its National Campaign Coordinator, Shabana Mahmood, did a bang-up job of identifying and getting out the vote.

Third, the Conservatives can’t have been helped by the Hancock shenanigans. But, probably more importantly, their ground campaign was apparently a bit of a dog’s breakfast – a reminder that, in a close race, having boots on the ground can sometimes make the difference. It’s all too easily forgotten that, while the Tories may have grown their vote in the “red wall”, they haven’t necessarily grown their grassroots membership there.

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Fourth, the intervention and non-intervention of other candidates didn’t make the kind of difference that many had forecast. Much was made of both the prospects and the appalling antics of that inveterate publicity-seeker George Galloway, who back in 2012 managed to bag himself a by-election victory in the Labour seat of Bradford West by using the same divisive tactics. Clearly, those tactics still have considerable traction: he won over a fifth of the vote. But they may also have driven others to turn to Leadbeater in disgust.

It is also entirely possible that, by standing, Galloway siphoned off some the votes which the Conservatives hoped (perhaps even assumed) would go to them as a result of the decision by the Heavy Woollen District Independents not to stand. Meanwhile, the lack of a Green Party candidate may well have seen a few of the nearly 700 people who voted for it in 2017 and 2019 plump for Labour. Which way, incidentally, the nearly 2,500 voters who supported the Lib Dems in 2019 went, who knows?

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The same goes, perhaps, for what all this means. Strictly speaking, the line being briefed by the Tories to anyone who’ll listen – “This is not a Labour win. It’s a Labour hold” – is obviously accurate. But – partly due to Labour’s excellent expectations management – that’s not at all how it feels.

Nor is how it will sound to the majority of people who are sensible enough not to pay too much attention to politics. All they will hear is that Keir Starmer won a close race, giving him some breathing space and a chance to put things right.

Whether he can – whether Batley and Spen can be a turning point and not just a turn up for the books – remains to be seen. As the ancient Greek historian, Polybius, very wisely observed, “Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories.”

You could, of course, join the army of the state you were born in — the state which had given you an education, safety, sanctuary and freedom of religious worship, and whose armies aimed to expand those rights to others. Or you could choose to fight for the opposition and fight against people of your own age, from your own country, and to deny the rights you enjoyed to strangers in faraway lands. Either way, once the hostilities were over — or even before that, if you fancied — everyone from both sides could return back to their hometowns and call it quits.

For years we suffered the consequences of this curious historical anomaly. It started in the more complex battlefields of the Balkan in the 1990s, when western states like Britain and France weren’t so sure of what they were dealing with. Then people who had gone to fight with the mujahideen would come back, tell people in their home countries of what they had done and help to heroise and metastasise their growing ideological movement. It was a relatively novel movement, and there was not much that western governments could do.

During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the western nations came to learn the difficulties involved in dealing with this very modern problem. The Americans set up one option — Guantanamo Bay — which faltered from the start, not just because of bad PR but from the inadequacies of any justice system to deal with such people. How could you treat with members of an army who were not in uniform, representing non-state actors or states that didn’t formally exist?

As the Guantanamo trials dragged through their first and into their second decade the lawyers and human rights campaigners stressed the inhumanity of keeping people awaiting trial for so many years. But their own answers were always pat and inadequate, boiling down to “Why not just put them in front of a jury like any other criminal?”

The answers were many, but they all centred on issues of collecting evidence, putting such evidence in front of a jury and ensuring a fair trial. The difficulty of prosecuting people for fighting on a foreign battlefield were not a demonstration of western inhumanity. They were evidence — if anything — of an excess of that humanity, a desire to extend a principle even to its utmost extent. But what nobody wanted (other than supporters of the fighters themselves) was for hundreds or even thousands of people to be put through trials which failed and saw dangerous people back on the streets of their home country.

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In these circumstances it is a striking failure of our political and legal systems that the case of Shamima Begum should ever have arisen. True there is one complicating factor, which is that she was 15 when she left the UK and headed to join the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria. But that aside the case is in many ways very straightforward. Ms Begum — like hundreds of other young Muslims from the UK — heard the call of the “Caliphate” and in 2015 she went to join it.

Like many others the precise details of what she did there are opaque and different rumours and accounts circulate. By her own account she was merely a nice ISIS housewife; by the recollections of others she was involved in the darkest aspects of a group unparalleled in its depravity this century, helping to stitch suicide vests and more. Of course she and her lawyers present her as a victim, in the process once again demeaning the real victims of ISIS — the Yazidis, the Christians, the “wrong type of Muslims” and anyone else who failed to sign up to their fanatical sect.

This is all part of a very familiar pattern. Among the Westerners who went to join ISIS a great many come back saying that they didn’t really see anything, that they didn’t know what they were signing up to and that in any case they were the ones who suffered most.

All of this is impossible for any fair-minded person to believe. Even at the age of 15 nobody could have mistaken ISIS for a Butlin’s Holiday camp; nobody can believe that recruits were not involved in the day-to-day barbarism of the group. And nobody can have very much sympathy for people who knowingly went to join a head-hacking movement only to be disappointed to discover that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Begum did not help herself when she first spoke to media who had tracked her down after the Caliphate’s collapse. In an interview with The Times correspondent who found her in a refugee camp in northern Syria she said that she had not been much bothered by seeing a decapitated body because she knew that the person must have been “an enemy of Islam”.

The British public does not warm to such talk, strangely enough, but soon Begum had lawyers and PR support and they clearly realised that she needed to work on her public image. Begum may have personally renounced her British citizenship the moment she went to join the Islamic State, but these people argued that she was a British citizen whether Britain liked it or not, and that she should return.

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In the period since The Times interview Begum and her supporters have been working on her public image. Not only has she started to say nice things about Britain, but she made sure that kitsch little touches entered the fray. For instance she had a cushion carefully scattered behind her which just happened to have the Union Jack flag on it.

By this point she had reason to be worried, since the-then Home Secretary Sajid Javid had revoked her British citizenship. Begum and her lawyers vowed to reverse this decision, and now indeed it seems she may be successful — for yesterday the Court of Appeal announced that in its opinion Begum had been denied a fair hearing in this matter because she could not make her case from the refugee camp she is in. The court’s judgement means that Begum may now be allowed to return to the UK to fight the Government’s decision to remove her citizenship.

Let me, then, make a prediction: if Begum steps foot back in Britain she will never again have to leave it. Once here it will not matter whether she wins her appeal or loses it, for even if she loses she will have appeal after appeal and these will be able to drag on until the end of her days.

Even if there is an order to remove her it will not be acted upon; her lawyers and the considerable lobby of people who like to argue on the grounds of human rights will make every possible argument in her defence. If Britain even thinks of keeping her citizenship revoked then it will have to send her somewhere, and every country in the world will be presented as too barbaric or inconvenient for Ms Begum to reside there. And so we will be stuck with her, and one of the strangest and most unjusts aspects of modern warfare will repeat itself.

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The attraction of war was always the same. Men and women of violence could take what they wanted by force. If they were successful, then there was nothing in the world that they could not have.

But the most basic restraining mechanism on war throughout time has always been that the consequences of losing are so catastrophic. For if you lost then you could lose everything: your home, your loved ones, your life.

And that is why the case of people like Begum is so unsatisfactory. She and her cohorts waged war against this country and our allies; they lost, and by the most fundamental laws of justice and war they should have lost everything.

And yet they didn’t. They waged war and lost and countries like Britain still contemplated returning them to the status quo ante. So it isn’t just that you can sign up for the home or away team. You can sign up for the away team and if they lose you can demand to be treated with all the same rights and respect as though you were playing for the home team all the way along.

That is why the case of Begum rankles. It is not just against this or that article or law; it howls out against one of the most fundamental rules of human justice: the rule that the most terrible actions should have the most terrible consequences.

It’s a great pleasure to be here at the World Economic Forum annual meeting — better known as Davos. This year the theme is “Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World.” Last year it was “Globalisation 4.0: Shaping a Global Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Honestly, where do they get this rubbish?

Do they just write buzzwords on bits of paper and pick them out at random? Or is there a special machine, like a National Lottery draw? A random balls generator would certainly seem to be involved. What does this Davos-speak achieve? What does it change?

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What’s not in this speech

I’ll admit that’s a question that could be asked of a lot of ministerial speeches too. In fact, most of them. Normally, a speech from a Chancellor of the Exchequer at Davos would go something like this:

To start with, some awkward bonhomie, with obligatory unfunny joke. Then I’d big up the British economy — as if blather from a politician is the basis on which people like you make investment decisions.

Next, there’d be a policy section. By law, this has to be introduced with the words: “building on strong foundations.” But it wouldn’t be anything you hadn’t heard before. And, of course, that’s the idea.

The message of every ministerial speech since the British people voted for Brexit is that nothing’s really changed. But it has. Because in 2016 and 2019 people didn’t vote to keep everything the same. They voted for change.

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Things must change

The reason for that is right here at this resort. The global elites. From business, politics, academia and the media. We’re all here to talk about the world’s problems as if they were nothing to do with us. As if the policy disasters of the 21st century weren’t of our doing. As if the electoral backlash that we failed to see coming is all the fault of the voters.

Their failure to listen to us…

…to hear what we have to say about their ignorance…

…to take lectures about their privilege from a tenured intelligentsia…

…to be moved by the advertising of woke corporations…

…to accept their lot as indebted consumers…

…or as outsourced workers….

…or as hollowed-out communities.

We make high-minded speeches about an international rules-based framework, but what too many of our people actually experience is a system rigged against their interests.

*

From their perspective, this place feels like it’s a million miles away. And they’re right. In almost every respect, it’s another world — socially, economically, culturally. But not electorally. Democracy is what keeps this Elysium tethered to planet Earth. We can’t float away.

The voices that we silence in the boardroom, the lecture hall, the TV studio — make themselves heard at the ballot box. That’s a verdict that we can’t ignore. Or overturn. Or bypass.

So, no, I’m not here to plead for corporate favour. To tell you that nothing has changed. Things will change. Things must change. And if I do have a feel-good message, it’s that, in Britain, things can change.

The state of the global economy

If I could change the title of this year’s Davos, I couldn’t do better than something that Sir David Attenborough said last week: “The moment of crisis has come.”

At the start of a new decade we have to look back at the last decade and realise that we can’t go on this way. Not in the environmental sphere. And not in the economic sphere either. It may be ten years since the last recession.

And capitalism is still standing. But I’m not going to stand before you today and pretend that all is well with the global economy. Something is badly wrong and it lies at the heart of our troubles.

Consider the following fact: in August of last year, the global money markets had 17 trillion dollars invested in negative yield bonds.

17 trillion dollars.

In bits of paper guaranteed to make you a loss. Now I used to be a banker. I understand that managed money needs to go somewhere and that, at times, a very low but reliable yield might be the best option compared to a high risk investment.

But ladies and gentlemen, these are not normal times. The conventional economics that we grew up with doesn’t work any more. We’ve now had a decade of ultra-low interest rates. But without runaway inflation.

Suggested reading

Is the British jobs miracle fake news?

By Peter Franklin

In some countries, we’ve also had a decade of job creation. In the UK, employment levels didn’t just recover after the recession — they’ve risen to new heights. Again, without the inflationary pressure that conventional economics would lead us to predict.

However, growth has been slow. Wages flat. And poor productivity a continuing drag on prosperity.

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In the first decade of the 21st century, economists spoke of a “Great Moderation” — an end to the boom and bust cycles of the 20th century. We all know where that ended up: With the worst crash since the Second World War.

The Left proclaimed the end of capitalism. The Right worried that QE would unleash inflation. Both sides were wrong. The story of the second decade of the 21st century is the Great Zombification. A global economy that staggers on, but doesn’t respond to stimulus.

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I think we need to question the stimulus itself. Low interest rates encourage lazy, unproductive investment. Companies borrowing to buy back their shares…

…or to buy out the competition…

…or corner a market…

…or inflate an asset bubble…

These things engineer rewards for a lucky few. But they don’t build prosperity.

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Why low interest rates poison the economy

By Peter Franklin

Low interest rates have a deadening effect on the banking sector too. When rates are low, margins are low, and banks err on the side of caution. Genuinely innovative businesses are starved of funds, while essentially bankrupt firms are kept on life support — for fear of recording a loss.

Capital is left tied up in all the wrong places. Killing growth. Killing productivity. Killing opportunity.

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Who’s to blame? Let’s start with governments. They are the world’s biggest debtors — and people who owe money pay the lowest interest rates they can get away with.

But they’ve been getting away with for more than a decade now. The market keeps lending money to the state at rock-bottom prices. And that’s because it’s got nothing better to do with it. If there were enough productive uses for the world’s cash, interest rates would return to normal. But clearly, there’s a shortage.

Reforming the private sector

The key question is why. I believe it’s about the wrong incentives. We’ve made life too difficult for the inventors and entrepreneurs, and too easy for the hangers-on.

Public sector waste is an obvious problem, but there’s a parasitic load in the private sector too. The tax avoiders, the polluters, the speculators and the rentiers. All the industries that profit from the productive economy without contributing to it.

I’m reminded of what Peter Thiel said about Silicon Valley — which is that most of the venture capital that he invests goes not into product development, but to “landlords, to commercial real estate.”

It’s time to unrig the system. Public sector reform is not enough. We have to change the incentives in the private sector too.

Take the tax system, for instance. Taxing work more heavily than the unearned profits of land ownership cannot be right. And all the more so when those profits disappear abroad. Britain must and will remain a country open to talented people from around the world.

If you wish to live and work here, supplying the skills and knowledge that our economy needs, then you are very welcome. Indeed, we’ve already acted to extend the welcome offered to overseas students. However, if all you want to do is use our green and pleasant land as a piggy bank then you will pay handsomely for the privilege.

The hard truth is that much of what we call “foreign direct investment” in the UK is foreign direct speculation. And the same applies to billions of pounds of domestic investment too. A flow of capital that drives up the cost of buying or renting a home (or workplace) is the sort of investment we can do without.

Therefore we will act unilaterally on this matter, reforming the tax treatment of land and property, to support home ownership and productive enterprise.

The international order

On other issues, however, the effort to rebalance economic incentives must be international. For instance on the issue of tax avoidance, I would say this to our friends in the European Union:

Britain will not become an offshore tax haven. We will work with you to ensure that wealthy individuals and corporations pay their fair share of taxes. And, yes, that does include the tech titans of Silicon Valley. Of course, the EU will need to deal with its own tax havens.

We will also cooperate with our international partners to uphold the polluter pays principle. Earlier this month, Ursula van der Leyen, President of the European Commission, set out some ground rules for a trade agreement with the UK.

“No tariffs, no quotas, no dumping,” was her key phrase. I’m in full agreement with that.

Dumping, as you know, is when one country takes advantage of lower standards to export products at an unfair advantage. For instance, a country that continues to fuel its economy on coal — especially the filthiest kind of brown coal — would be guilty of environmental dumping. As we strive to achieve net zero emissions by 2050s we need a level playing field from Beijing to Berlin and beyond.

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The EU's soul-destroying rhetoric

By Giles Fraser

Open versus closed

Given the global scale of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, some form of rules-based international order is necessary. But it’s not inevitable though. If it’s skewed against some of the participants, it will be resisted.

Rule-makers must understand the difference between rules and their impact. Equally applied does not mean equally felt. For instance, within the EU, the UK was subject to the same rules as everyone else on free movement, but it should have been obvious that the practical effect would not be the same.

An English-speaking country with an open labour market and a non-contributory social security system was always going to be affected differently to most other EU states.

It was the refusal to take this into account that more than anything led to Brexit. As we build new frameworks, we should remember the role that flexibility plays in sound construction.

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This applies as much to relationships within nations as it does between them. A country as a whole may sign up to the same set of rules, but the impact on different communities will not be the same.

Attitudes to global integration have come to define a new “open-versus-closed” spectrum within our politics. In many countries, it has become more important than Left versus Right. It’s why we’ve got a Conservative MP in Leigh and a Labour MP in Canterbury. The trouble is that the terminology of open-versus-closed, as used by one side only, is utterly self-serving.

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The deeper meaning of Open and Closed

By Peter Franklin

Working class communities are in fact more open to the disruption caused by globalisation than the professional elites secure within their regulatory barriers.

The so-called knowledge class may be more open to the idea of internationalism, but in practice their lives are lived within environments which are carefully controlled, if not closed altogether. For instance, here we are in Davos surrounded by a state-of-the-art security fence and a no-fly-zone. Where better to extol the virtues of a borderless world?

Unrigging our own rules

It’s not only the international order that needs reform. British politics is also skewed by rules of our own making. These include the Treasury rules on public investment.

Though meant to be objective these skew funding towards certain parts of the country because they are deemed to be more productive — and thus provide a greater return. It’s a catch-22 that ensures that other parts of the country don’t get the investment in research, skills and infrastructure that would make them more productive. 

This too must change — and it will.

I’ve already ordered a comprehensive re-write. We will also go much further in transferring power from the centre to our cities and towns far beyond our capital. The people of this country did not vote to take back control from Brussels only see it stuck in Whitehall.

And I promise it won’t be.

Conclusion

Ladies and gentlemen, there are two equal and opposite errors made about capitalism. On the Left, it’s that the system is a flimsy construction, about to collapse under the weight of its contradictions. On the Right, it’s that the market is a force of nature, a fundamental property of the universe that only the over-mighty state can interfere with.

Neither is true. Given the chance, people will trade freely with one another. However it is government that gives them that chance. Capitalism relies on a framework of law and justice.

Right now, however, the rules aren’t fair — if indeed they work at all. We must either change them — or have them changed for us.

Thank you for listening.

ENDS

But it is the BBC, rather than the politicians, which has come under most pressure. An unlikely array of opponents have lined up to criticise the lamentable programme, including George Osborne’s Evening Standard and the Daily Mail. And the main subject of contention has been not the dire production standards, but the selection of guests. Members of the public were brought on during the debate to ask questions of the candidates, and two of them have now been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Most striking is Abdullah Patel, an imam who asked the candidates about ‘Islamophobia’ and demanded that they agree on the importance of words. It was an obvious attack on Boris Johnson and his almost unanimously misrepresented comments in his Telegraph column last year about Muslim women who wear the burka.

I say unanimously misrepresented because it has been forgotten in the intervening period that the article was a defence of people’s right to wear whatever religious garments they want. Furthermore, this mild criticism of the appearance of a burka has everywhere been turned into ‘an attack on Muslim women’, as though all Muslim women wear the garment. It’s a deliberate and dishonest misreading of the column.

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The reason people peddle lies about Farage

By Douglas Murray

In any case, it transpires that he imam who asked the question has a somewhat chequered set of views himself. As the media have revealed in recent days, Imam Abdullah Patel is not what you might call a philo-Semite. In fact, he seems to have rather unpleasant views about Jews and Israel in particular.

On rape, too, he seems to have not entirely enlightened views. As he inventively put it in one Tweet, “it takes 2 to tango”. He was suggesting that if a woman is alone with a man, then rape should not come as a great surprise to her. Which tells us far more about the Imam’s views than it tells us about other women or men.

Questions have been asked, and not answered, about how somebody who holds such views could have been selected and passed screening by the BBC to then be asking a question (which was itself highly loaded and sectarian) of the men vying to be next UK prime minister.

The other questionable guest is one Aman Thakar. Mr Thakar, it turns out, is a Labour party apparatchik. That might explain why he asked a question which pushed the five contenders to commit to a national election. Mr Thakar – who is a solicitor by profession – has also been subject to scrutiny following his appearance, and, before it was taken down, his social media history combed through.

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The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

To the delight of a certain number of people, one of his Tweets from earlier this year read “Hitler’s abuse of the term nationalism is, to me a nationalist, the most harmful part of his legacy”. This has been pounced on by those who would like to take down Mr Thakar and the BBC as well as anybody who is close to the current, rather morally compromised, Labour party.

It is harder to work out exactly what Mr Thakar meant by his Tweet, since his account no longer exists. But it is not quite honest to portray him as having sparked a ‘Nazi storm’ or anything else that should cause him to be suspended from his job, as he has now been. The law firm, Leigh Day, for whom he worked says that it is conducting an internal investigation into the Tweet. For no fee I think I can save them the time. The Tweet would appear to be a sarcastic response to comments made by the American commentator and activist Candace Owens which were themselves dishonestly reported.

In February, off-the-cuff comments by Owens at an event were dishonestly used to portray her as in some way pro-Hitler. People such as Aman Thakar leapt on the bandwagon and attempted to ruin the reputation of Candace Owens by falsely claiming that she – a black, female Republican – is actually a Nazi. And now it is Mr Thakar’s turn, in kind, to be dishonestly represented in the press as a Nazi, and to have his career destroyed in turn.

There are many attitudes one might take towards all this. Not least among them is to simply say ‘Oh, how the wheel becomes it’ and move on. One political side can chalk up its own dishonestly acquired set of corpses and the other can pile up theirs.

Except that in the days since the BBC debate, and the backlash to it, two things have begun to disturb me.

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Teen Vogue's idiotic hypocrisy

By Douglas Murray

The first concerns Imam Patel. It seems to me that the larger failing is not the imam’s nor even the BBC’s for having him on (wise though it may have been to have vetted his views in advance). The imam is a member of the public and should be as free to question politicians as anyone.

The disgrace was that, in answering, Sajid Javid advocated a policy (having a Conservative party ‘investigation’ into ‘Islamophobia’) which he does not believe in. And the Home Secretary was in turn able to persuade all four other contenders to agree to the same policy – even though most if not all of them were or are also opposed to implementing it.

In other words, the weak link that has been shown here is the politicians, and perhaps the political class as a whole, which finds it exceptionally hard to hold onto any principles at all in public. In that respect, you might argue that the BBC show did do what it was supposed to, and successfully exposed the candidates.

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Can we reform our rancid political debate?

By Douglas Murray

The other qualm, which is linked to this – and which has been absent from the coverage – is that there is something slightly disturbing about all the background searches and potential career annihilation of all those who have (politically and religiously slanted though they certainly were) merely asked questions of politicians.

It has become clear in our politics in recent years that – fine though some people in politics undoubtedly are – we seem to be paying the price for making politics so unattractive. Why would anybody with a life, a history or any desire to enhance their standing in this world, want to go into politics?

Hot on the heels of this thought comes another. What happens when those who question their representatives are put through the same fine-toothed comb, and on occasions disingenuous, wringer? What effect will this have. Who will bother to engage with politicians and in our politics?

That’s what bothered me most about the BBC show. If the whole political arena is so dangerous an environment for public and politicians – for questioners and answerers – alike, then what kind of democracy will we have at the end of that process?

I’ve had a go at dissecting the Labour soul before, so it seems only fair to apply the same scalpel to the Tory id. Why am I (and millions of you) Conservative? We could argue that it’s important to control inflation and public spending on the one hand, while maximising personal liberty on the other. Those priorities map to Britain’s Conservative Party, more or less, and so they determine our vote.

That wouldn’t be a lie, but neither is it the (whole) truth. The truth is more about disposition: Toryishness feeds an addiction to something I want. Every movement has a defining politico-psychological sin. What is the Conservatives’?

Conservatism isn’t ideological, no matter how many actors-pretending-to-be-teachers crawl on to Liverpool podiums, heave themselves on to their hind legs, and squawk about neo-liberal wars on the poor. I’m a Tory for anti-ideological reasons: I will vote for whichever candidate and party is best placed to defeat socialism. Is that an addiction? I don’t think so. Conservatives shouldn’t – mustn’t – abandon the war against socialism.

Further reading

The political centre is not where liberals think it is

By Peter Franklin

Tory history is long and punctuated with reforms that hit the country like a meteor from the heavens, both in the scale of their impact and because they’re so unexpected (Conservatives? Reforming?). Think about Peel and Catholic emancipation, or Peel again, and the Corn Laws. Think about Thatcher, whose (hugely subsidised) right-to-buy policy was among the single largest transfers of wealth from the middle to the working classes. But this isn’t an addiction (as the post-Thatcher party proves only too well).

Modern Conservatism also inherits Disraeli’s paternalism. There’s a reason every generation of every party’s leadership – Left and Right – lays claim to Disraeli’s One Nation mantle, and not only because he worried about the impact of industrialisation on ‘community fabric’, making him one of Britain’s earliest SJWs. And not only because the coalition of working- and middle-class interests Disraeli fashioned has been the Tories’ most powerful ‘secret’ weapon in that ongoing war against the utopians.

No. One Nation is potent because to adopt it as a guiding principle is to reject the sectarianism on display from Labour since Blair was banished by Brown. You can govern in the interests of Britain or you can govern as the plaything of McCluskey and Stop The War. You most certainly cannot do both.

But the Tory mission is at risk, and for a reason that transcends specific policies. We’ll get to a solution for this in a moment, because it’s linked to our defining sin. What is Conservatism, stripped of all that history? Conservatism as disposition, not as a manifesto commitment. It is a sense of loss.

By the same author

The economic rationalists don't get the immigration debate

By Ben Cobley

When I get on the 26 bus to traverse the Hackney Road, and no one else is thinking in English: I feel loss. When I have to interrupt a conversation in Turkish conducted on the shopkeeper’s mobile phone, a shopkeeper who neither speaks to me nor makes eye contact while I buy the cats their tuna fish: I feel loss. When I read about the diminished size of our military, or when I shrivel to my minimal physical volume in a tube carriage stuffed beyond capacity: I feel loss.

Such a sense is uniquely Tory, I think, and as alien to George Osborne as it is to Jonathan Portes, which is why urban liberals, of whichever party, dismiss such sentiment as ‘nativism’. They’re wrong, calamitously so for liberalism – the feeling that we’ve lost something good which we once took for granted – is nothing to do with dislike of individuals. I don’t want to return to the 1950s, however much I yearn for more civilized public transport; but I would like back something of the ‘common sense of belonging’, an attribute of cultures that are more homogeneous than Britain in 2018.

A heightened sense of loss has its uses. It blocks reckless reform (“What if this new paradise you seek to build, comrade, what if it’s not worth the crushed bones and smashed dreams, and ultimately leaves us, you know, less happy?”)

But the near-tangible air of loss which colours the Tory soul has toxic electoral consequences: the sense that we’re looking backwards to a Britain which has gone prevents the party from speaking to the people, and being heard by those people – the Britons whose families arrived here in the waves of immigration since the Second World War – whose support is required to protect the anti-socialist mission into the future.

I say: “I regret the loss of homogeneity in the town where I live.” A black neighbour might hear: “You wish my family hadn’t moved here.” I say: “One Nation is my guiding political principle.” A colleague whose grandmother was born in the Indian subcontinent might hear: “That’s just cover for nativist prejudice, mate, turning a blind eye to institutional injustice.” This is a problem for Conservatism that won’t go away without positive action.

By the same author

Can social democracy survive?

By Matthew Goodwin

So take some. The party that had the first Jewish leader, the first female Prime Minister, the second female Prime Minister: such a party knows how effective the right leader can be in changing perceptions of our movement. So the next Tory leader, and the next British Prime Minister, should have a non-white ethnic heritage.

I’m not talking about tokenism, still less about positive discrimination, which remains discriminatory, unfair and wrong, whatever adjective is applied to it. No Tory association would select candidates as talentless as Dawn Butler and Diane Abbot, for example, still less put them in the shadow cabinet.

Choosing a non-white leader would be a tactical response to the problem of the anti-Tory cultural hegemony. Conservatives used to ‘own’ institutions; now we are those same institutions’ top political target. Too many Corbynite lecturers and BBC dramatists and Church of England vicars whisper in the ears of their audiences that Tories are backward-looking, nativist, illiberal towards people who don’t look like modern Britain. I don’t believe this to be true. But it is the narrative reality.

Politics is downstream from culture. The culture has it that Tories have a problem with newer Britons. Our addiction to nostalgia makes this caricature hard to shake off. This is translating into a political headache which increases the probability of the worst and most socialist administration the country would ever have seen.

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Why does the Left hate gay Tories?

By Graeme Archer

So defy nostalgia, and elect a leader who makes that defiance clear. Change the political narrative about Conservatives and modern Britain, and not only would Corbyn’s rancid pack of sectarian haters be crushed; some of the ‘upstream’ damage in our institutions to the long-term health of the centre-Right would be unwound.

As I write, news is breaking that Shaun Bailey has been selected by London Tories as our candidate against Sadiq Kahn. That won’t be an easy fight, but the election just got interesting, and a large part of Khan’s campaign strategy – the narrative he would tell about his Tory opponent – just vanished into thin air. (The attacks on Bailey from Labour will be disgusting – the odious Emma Dent Coad MP already referred to him as a “token ghetto boy”, a phrase racist enough for all but a Corbynite to be expelled from public life. The Left’s hatred of black Tories, like its hatred of gay Tories, is instructive.)

Now imagine what Sajid Javid could do to Jeremy Corbyn in a general election. Colour-blind meritocratic Tory instincts about candidate selection have led to a parliamentary talent pool that could destroy Labour’s inimical narrative about our party with a glance. We will not be defined by our sense of loss. Look at the sky; the air is fizzing: one of those rare Tory meteors may be about to hit the earth.