22 The Sunday Times February 6, 2022COMMENT
T
his was not how we were meant
to emerge from the pandemic.
In April household energy bills
will rise by a record-breaking
54 per cent. They will be part of a
surge in inflation to a predicted
7.25 per cent in spring and con-
tribute to what the Bank of
England says will be the biggest squeeze
on household incomes since records
began in 1990.
If the inboxes of Tory MPs have until
now been filled with constituents’ outrage
over parties and rule-breaking in Down-
ing Street, they will soon be hit by another
deluge, as the full extent of the cost-of-
living crisis sinks in.
It is not just households that will feel
the pain. Businesses, particularly the
small and medium-sized firms that are the
lifeblood of the economy and our hope for
the future, are suffering as a result of
higher costs, higher wages and rising
taxes. The combination of the pandemic
and Brexit has left many teetering on the
edge, competing for workers made scarce
by a shrinking workforce.
Instead of listening to vainglorious
boasting about the UK having the fastest
growth rate in the G7, people and busi-
nesses are concentrating on the real-
world problems they face. Indeed, if the
Bank’s forecast is right, this country will
end up with weaker growth this year than
several G7 countries, including Italy,
having suffered a much bigger GDP fall
than most in 2020.
The cost-of-living crisis also casts a
shadow over the government’s
levelling-up agenda, on which it has pub-
lished a long and detailed white paper. It is
good that the government has such an
agenda, and Michael Gove is the right per-
son to lead it. But its 2030 targets look a
long way off, and ministers would have
been much wiser to publish it alongside
the Treasury’s autumn spending review.
That way, the big criticism of the white
paper — there is no new money attached
to it — would have been headed off.
It was brought forward because of the
problems at the very top of the govern-
ment, problems now casting a long
shadow over everything it does. Some
Boris Johnson loyalists even have it in for
Rishi Sunak, one of the government’s few
stars, for his failure to endorse the prime
minister’s Jimmy Savile slur against Sir
Keir Starmer — a slur described by John-
son’s long-standing adviser Munira Mirza,when she resigned last week, as “an in-
appropriate and partisan reference to a
horrendous case of child sex abuse”.
Mr Sunak offered some balm to house-
holds facing higher energy bills and other
price increases, in the form of council tax
reductions and a scheme to cut £200 off
energy bills in the autumn, paid for over
the following five years. But he offered
nothing extra to struggling businesses and
conceded that, while his measures would
take the sting out of the price shock, they
would not prevent it. He said it would be
“wrong and dishonest” to pretend we did
not have to adjust to higher prices.
A bit of honesty is a good thing, if rarer
than it should be from the government.
We are paying the price of the lack of an
energy strategy in this country stretching
back over many years. Such a strategy,
built on renewables and new nuclear
power stations, is slowly being put into
place. In the meantime Britain is highly
dependent on imports of gas and oil.
An honest approach is also one in
which the Treasury cannot act as Lady
Bountiful, stepping in with a fiscal bailout
whenever a problem arises. The chancel-
lor is trying to restore the public finances
to health after the huge shock and inter-
ventions of the pandemic. Had he tried to
prevent any energy price pain, or cancel
the tax increases he had already
announced, he would have been back to
square one. His is a conservative
approach to economic management, and
it should be a Conservative one, though
we live in a topsy-turvy world in which
many Tories want extra spending but not
the tax rises to pay for it.
What everybody should be able to
agree on is that the best hope in the short
term is that the inflation surge does not
last too long. Inflation is generally
expected to fall again later this year,
though forecasters have been badly
caught out recently.
The best hope for the longer term is
that we can shake off low growth and stag-
nant productivity, both of which have
been reinforced by Brexit and the pan-
demic. The levelling-up white paper has
ambitions on this; indeed, spreading
growth, higher productivity and prosper-
ity to all regions is an essential part of the
solution. But this is not a new diagnosis,
and far more capable governments than
this one have struggled to solve the prob-
lem. Until somebody can do so, sustained
growth in prosperity will elude us.To fix the cost-of-living crisis,
we need grown-up leaders
Some flats are too small for the owner to
swing a cat. Today our Home section
reports on one that barely has room for
the kitten, let alone the owner. At 75
square feet, the property in east London is
smaller than the average parking space,
but it will shortly go to auction with bids
starting at £50,000.
The cosy starter home has space to
relax (a bed), ample storage (under the
bed), a built-in kitchen (a microwave, also
under the bed) and room to entertain (oneslim guest, if you both stand up next to the
bed). The purchase price includes furni-
ture (a bed).
We all have to start out somewhere,
and we hope whoever moves in will be
happy there. After all, big things can be
achieved in small spaces. Tradition has it
that the ancient Greek Diogenes founded
an entire branch of philosophy while
living in a barrel. It was called cynicism.
Perhaps he came up with it after listening
to the estate agent.No room to swing a kitten
ESTABLISHED 1822Dominic Lawson
corporate level” by some of the firms involved
in the cladding of Grenfell Tower, I can only
welcome Gove’s determination to make sure
that the developers and not the leaseholders
foot the bills for necessary remedial work on
countless other blocks.
It will be fascinating to see how he
attempts to legislate if the construction
industry resists what The Guardian,
approvingly, described as “Michael Gove’s
plan to invite, with menaces, developers to
pledge to cough up £4 billion by March”.
This was the same Guardian that had
(predictably) been among Gove’s most
outraged critics, supporting the industrial
action taken by the teaching unions when as
education secretary he strove to increase
rigour and raise standards. But then, senior
folk at that newspaper have little personal
experience, past or present, of the worst of
such provision in the state-maintained sector.
If anything, they correspond more to the group
Gove had attacked when he was shadow
education secretary in 2007 as “the sharp-
elbowed middle classes” who “colonise” the
best schools. I recall being astounded by those
remarks at the time, not least because the
Conservative Party had long identified with
the “sharp-elbowed middle classes”. As a
member of that social group, I rather resented
his stigmatising of us.
But I came to admire the moral passion of
his mission to help those suffering from the
“soft bigotry of low expectations” — a phrase
Gove used to describe the undemanding
attitude endemic in what he called “the blob”:
the teaching unions and their accomplices in
local authorities.
Probably, he is still hated by the teaching
unions. And, because his decision to campaign
for Brexit was primarily responsible for Boris
Johnson ending his own indecision on the
matter and following suit, he is a marked man
in other ways. But I was struck by an
intervention from the Labour MP for Chester,
Chris Matheson, who told Gove in the
levelling-up debate last week: “I always enjoy
listening to the secretary of state. I wish him
well in the forthcoming leadership election.”
Because what suddenly occurred to me was
that the hyper-articulate Aberdonian would
have made an outstanding leader ... of
Matheson’s party. And, had it been Gove at the
dispatch box over the past week or so against
Johnson, the prime minister would have been
eviscerated, rather than merely wounded.
Instead, he has been required to defend the
indefensible. He’s rather good at that, too.
[email protected]W
e have reached the stage at
which every senior cabinet
minister, when interviewed,
must expect to be asked if they
will run to replace Boris Johnson
as leader of the Conservative
Party. The first to respond
categorically has been Michael
Gove. “Been there, done that, got knocked
back twice, so I am afraid I am not going round
that course again,” he said last week.
That will come as a disappointment to many
within the permanent administration. Despite
the Yes Minister caricature, in the real
Whitehall the best civil servants don’t welcome
malleable ministers. What they want are strong
characters, powerful in cabinet, with clear
aims and a sense of how to achieve them. In a
succession of cabinet posts, beginning at
education, when he brought in as an adviser
the ferociously focused Dominic Cummings,
Gove has embodied that more than anyone.
One civil servant told me that on the office
wall Gove had a chart with a list of his
objectives and the dates by which he wished to
achieve them. He would tick them off
methodically. This official grew almost misty-
eyed when he recalled a meeting Gove had had
in that office with a charity lobbyist waffly in
his presentation. The secretary of state broke
from his customary exaggerated politeness: “I
can mandate, ban, tax or subsidise. Please tell
me: which is it that you are asking me to do?”
Last week, almost occluded by the
mayhem in Downing Street, Gove unveiled the
policies to address the “levelling-up” the PM
claimed as the chief purpose of his
administration. It was intriguing how Gove,
generally hated by the centre-left because of
his instrumental role in Brexit, gained plaudits
from that direction — and was simultaneously
abused by the more traditional supporters of
the Conservative Party.
Thus Jonathan Portes, chief economist at the
cabinet office when Gordon Brown was PM,
tweeted: “So Michael Gove has basically
reinvented Gordon Brown’s approach to
regional inequalities”, adding: “Some are more
or less directly recycled. This is a good thing.”
On the other side, Matthew Lesh of the free-
market Institute of Economic Affairs was far
from impressed: “The white paper contains
hundreds of references to state spending
programmes, but there are fewer than a dozen
references to the regulatory and tax burdens
faced by businesses.”
Actually, the rhetoric used by Gove in his
presentation to the House of Commons goes
back to the Labour Party before its socialismhad been surgically removed by the impact of
Margaret Thatcher. He told MPs his objective
was “to shift wealth and power decisively to
working people”. This was not just an almost
word-for-word lift from the Labour manifesto
of February 1974. It was the phrase that the
Labour industry secretary, Tony Benn, would
repeat to any civil servants who questioned
some of his more extravagant policies: he
would actually carry a copy of the manifesto
and point out these words to them. It is, to say
the least, surprising that a Conservative
cabinet minister would now be echoing Benn
(and a little odd that none of the participants in
the Commons debate noticed that).
But Gove, like Benn, has an almost romantic
attachment to the idea of the working class as
the soul of the nation. He tells friends: “Just as
the working classes saved Britain in the Second
World War, so they did in 2016.” That was the
year of the Brexit referendum, when the
decision to leave the European Union was
carried by a majority of the less well-off, much
to the dismay of the bulk of the university-
educated classes.
Last month, too, Gove unleashed language
described as “quasi-Marxist” in The Daily
Telegraph when responding to the cladding
catastrophe that led to the inferno at Grenfell
Tower. In his latest cabinet position he is
responsible for building regulations, and he
declared his determination to hound those he
termed “rogue landlords” and to outlaw “no-
fault evictions”. This Conservative secretary of
state also declared: “I was not fully aware, until
I took on this responsibility, of how some
within the development industry play fast and
loose with the rules and set up special-purpose
vehicles, shell companies and so on to evade
their responsibilities. They exhibit the
unacceptable face of capitalism.”
Given the financial contributions made over
the years to the Conservative Party by the
property development industry, this is ...
interesting. But, having denounced just over a
year ago what I termed “depravity at aR
easons I’m happy to be old, No 973:
for those growing up pre-internet,
teenage dissatisfaction with one’s
looks was a simple two-step process.
You hated whatever bit of you you
hated — nose, boobs, thighs,
whatever — for a while, and then you
eventually thought, “Ah, well,” and
made your peace with the situation.
Intervention of any kind was a hugely dramatic
step that was hardly ever taken except by very
rich, very old, unhappy-seeming American
women. You’d see their pictures in the papers
and gaze in horror. I did know one girl who had
a nose job, which, as is so often the case, made
her face go from compelling to boring. People
forget how much a really good, memorable
nose can do for a face.
Today nose jobs, breast augmentations and
the like are, if not normal, considered a
reasonable option that nobody is going to be
completely appalled by, even if the person
having them is only barely an adult. The idea of
going under the knife — having a general
anaesthetic and having bits of you carved up
and reconfigured — isn’t presented as
momentous or particularly frightening. On the
contrary, we’re often told how “easy” it is to
“do something” about unsatisfactory aspects of
our appearance.
This is never truer than when we talk about
tweakments. Even the word is adorable, almost
nuzzly, like something you might call a puppy —
“Tweakment! Walkies!” The once-peculiar idea
of having a non-surgical intervention — things
injected into your face — in your lunch break
becomes less and less of a big deal with every
passing year. We are told that everyone has
them and that you’d be a fool not to, because
why look older when you don’t have to? And so
lots of people trot off to have their lines filled in
or ironed out. You can have botulism toxin
jabbed into your face by the dentist, the
manicurist, a random you met on social media
or the bloke who services your car, probably.
There’s lots at play here — the fear of ageing,yes, but also the feeling that if everyone is
having things done, not joining them leaves
you open to the possibility of being a lone,
decrepit, hag-like outlier. It’s really messed up,
which is why, having briefly been a devotee of
both Botox and fillers, I stopped doing
anything weird — and it is weird — to my face
about five years ago. I also have no truck with
the ludicrously simplistic idea that just because
a woman likes something, it is “feminist”. I
might like shooting people in the face with a
gun. I might feel it enhanced my self-esteem
and eased feelings of anxiety, but that wouldn’t
make me a feminist; it would make me a
psychopath. So the idea that tweakments are
empowering and somehow giving the
patriarchy what for — by, um, conforming to
the patriarchy’s idea of what women should
look like, ie permanently desirable — is absurd.
They’re about vanity. It’s fine to be vain —
everyone is vain in one way or another — but
call it by its name.
Still, at least I was a middle-aged woman
when I had the occasional rejuvenating
procedure, carried out by someone who was
very good at their job. But that’s changed too:
now middle-aged women’s daughters have got
in on the act. Whether these young women are
inspired by their mothers’ taut faces is a moot
point — unreal, faintly mad-looking celebrities
and influencers certainly play their part — but it
doesn’t seem wildly out there to imagine that,
just as the child of a parent who is permanentlydieting is unlikely to have an entirely healthy
relationship with food, so the child of a
permanently tweaked mother might infer that
faces need work to remain, or become,
presentable. There isn’t a 30-year-old on this
earth who needs Botox, inasmuch as anyone
needs Botox, but that’s not stopping them. It’s
not stopping teenagers, either.
An investigation by The Times last week
revealed that “black-market Botox” — cut-price
versions that aren’t licensed for use in the UK —
is widely available via social media. It is
administered by people without any medical
background or experience. Botox, which is
prescription-only, is a toxin, and can go wrong
even in the most qualified hands. The cheapo
stuff you can get online, needless to say, can
and does ruin people’s faces. It gets worse:
young women can get hold of these products
easily online, indulge in the full DIY
experience, armed only with a syringe and a
massively airbrushed Instagram picture of
their favourite influencer for inspiration.
This is all utter madness. Just as online
pornography once briefly looked as if it might
result in sexual liberation but instead
traumatised an entire generation of young
women by presenting brutality, coercion and
abuse as normal, so the idea that Botox and its
ilk would liberate older women from the
constraints of ageing has soured hideously. It’s
not that people’s faces have improved; it’s that
now nobody’s face is good enough — not if
they’re 60, not if they’re 30 and not even if
they’re 16.
The older women start looking peculiar,
without fail, because it is difficult to know
when to stop with this stuff and you always
think, wrongly, that another tiny little tweak
can only improve things. The younger women
look like elves, and like no version of 30 you’ve
seen before. The very young women make me
want to cry. We did this to them, by
normalising something that should never have
been the norm, and now it’s too late.
@IndiaKnightIndia Knight
We older women made it seem normal to stick weird things into your face
Teenagers having Botox
make me want to cry
The maestro of levelling-up outstrips the left in his zeal for social justice
They look like elves,
and like no version of
30 you’ve seen beforeI have come to
admire the moral
passion of his missionMichael Gove — the best
leader Labour never had
China shows its true colours
While western leaders stayed away from
the opening ceremony of the Winter
Olympics in Beijing, in protest over
China’s treatment of its Uighur minority
and its clampdown on the democracy
movement and free press in Hong Kong,
Russia’s President Putin was happy to
attend. In return he got a summit with Xi
Jinping, the Chinese president, and as
much support from China as he could rea-
sonably have hoped for.
There was a time when China, in seek-
ing close economic and political relation-
ships with the capitalist West, and indeed
being a huge beneficiary of globalisation,
appeared set on a very different course
from Russia, an economically weakened
pariah state. A golden era of relations with
Britain was proclaimed when David Cam-
eron was prime minister. Now, however,
we are seeing China in its true colours: abullying, repressive and manipulative
state that is no friend of the West; indeed is
its enemy.
The joint statement released after the
meeting between the two leaders, hailing
a “new era” in their relationship, included
Russian support for the so-called One
China principle, in which Taiwan is an
“inalienable” part of China. It also firmly
backed Russia over Ukraine, opposing
“further enlargement of Nato” and calling
on “the North Atlantic alliance to abandon
its ideologised Cold War approaches”.
This is wrong. Russia, by trying to insist
that all parts of the Soviet Union remain
within its sphere of influence, is trying to
recreate the Cold War, and China is sup-
porting Moscow in that endeavour. Maybe
we should welcome the fact that they are
upfront about this. At least we know
where we stand.