The Sunday Times - UK (2022-02-13

24 The Sunday Times February 13, 2022

COMMENT

O

laf Scholz’s increasingly farcical

contortions over Nord Stream 2

are a warning to other western

leaders about energy depend-

ency on President Putin. As ten-

sions over the military standoff

on Ukraine’s border grow and

Russia faces the threat of sanc-

tions, the German chancellor seems un-

able to utter the name of the new east-

west gas pipeline in public.

Germany already imports more than

half its gas from Russia. Nord Stream 2 —

completed but awaiting regulatory

approval — will double the capacity of the

first Nord Stream pipeline to 110 billion

cubic metres a year. Doubling your

imports of Russian gas through a Russian

pipeline when Mr Putin is seen to be

exploiting his energy position for geo-

political ends exposes Mr Scholz to the

charge that he is putting his country’s

interests ahead of Europe’s. Germany’s

chancellor has refused to send arms to

Ukraine; British deliveries have even

made detours round German airspace.

On a practical level this is a story of

myopic energy strategy. Germany’s head-

long dash to ditch nuclear power has left it

precariously reliant on gas imports. In

2002 nuclear accounted for almost 30 per

cent of its electricity. By the end of this

year, after its last three plants close, it will

be zero. The anti-nuclear lobby has been

vociferous, and Germany has been push-

ing into renewables, but the sun doesn’t

always shine and the wind doesn’t always

blow. The loss of nuclear’s consistency

has forced Germany to lean more heavily

on coal — and Russia.

Britain is in a milder version of the

same predicament. Over the past decade

our use of renewables has increased four-

fold while the burning of fossil fuels has

reduced by more than half. A string of

investors have abandoned plans to build

nuclear plants because of government

dithering. The remaining seven plants,

owned by France’s EDF, with British Gas’s

parent, Centrica, retaining a small stake,

provide about a fifth of our energy. All but

one are due to shut over the next decade.

Gas is the backup generator in our energy

system. Centrica’s closure of the Rough

gas storage facility, off the Yorkshire coast,

five years ago increased our exposure to

volatile wholesale prices, which are now

forcing up fuel bills.

Much of the price increase is driven by

demand from Asia. But Britain also feels

the knock-on effects of Europe’s relation-

ship with the Russian state-owned giant

Gazprom, which has been accused of

refusing to pump in extra supplies to exert

pressure on Europe over Ukraine.

On a broader level this is a story of frac-

tured western leadership. By massing

more than 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s

border, Mr Putin is doing what he does

best: using force to test where the fissures

lie in Europe and Nato. While Mr Scholz

bites his tongue, the European Commis-

sion president, Ursula von der Leyen, has

said that Nord Stream 2 “cannot be

excluded from the sanctions list” if puni-

tive measures are slapped on the Kremlin.

The pipeline needs approval from both

Berlin and Brussels, and Ms von der Leyen

told newspapers this month that its future

would depend on “Russia’s behaviour”.

Germany is said to be prepared to sign up

to a common sanctions package, and Pres-

ident Biden has said the country is “com-

pletely, totally, thoroughly reliable”. We

must hope that proves accurate if the

moment comes.

The first problem in this puzzle —

energy security — is a long-term one. The

UK business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng,

deserves praise for cutting the Gordian

knot on nuclear funding in October by

backing a “regulated asset base” model

that allows developers to pass some of the

upfront cost on to consumers. Britain now

needs to embrace a proper building pro-

gramme: up to eight big plants and 40

smaller ones are needed if we are to have

any chance of hitting net zero by 2050.

Germany, which has definitively ended its

relationship with nuclear power, has no

such escape route. That is why Nord

Stream 2 is so important to Mr Scholtz.

The second problem of fragmented

western leadership is a shorter-term issue

in the case of Ukraine but no easier to

solve. We are, in effect, in a new Cold War

with Russia. If Mr Putin puts boots on the

ground in Ukraine, the country will

already have been lost. Western leaders

need to prevent that and persuade Mos-

cow it would be too painful economically.

In 1980 the USSR backed down from

invading Poland when it judged that the

costs would be too great. The US had

threatened to impose a total trade boycott

and to sell arms to China, which was at the

time in the anti-Soviet camp. The USSR

was in a weak position, bleeding heavily

from a war in Afghanistan against the

US-backed mujahideen. Now, however,

Mr Putin is confident, and a joint state-

ment this month with China’s President Xi

against “further enlargement of Nato”

cemented the axis of autocracy.

European and US leaders need to show

unity and develop a package of sanctions

so harmful that it makes Putin think twice.

Germany must play its role. Going soft on

Russia and negotiating on the basis of Mr

Putin’s draft security agreements issued

in December, which include barring

Ukraine from Nato, is not an option.

A European country such as Italy feels like

another world now. Masks are worn

everywhere — even on the street. It is near

impossible to order a drink in a café with-

out proof of vaccination. In Scotland and

Wales masks still have to be worn indoors.

England, where compulsory mask-

wearing was scrapped last month and all

restrictions, including the obligation to

self-isolate with Covid, are due to end next

month, is pulling away from the pack.

This is a cause for celebration. Boris

Johnson ignored Sage’s scientists and

refused to lock down for a fourth time to

deal with the Omicron variant. Never

mind that the right wing of the Tory party

put lead in his pencil: that decision has

been vindicated. A year ago, 1 in 100 infec-

tions resulted in death, but now it is 1 in

2,000. The rollout of at least one vaccine

dose to 77 per cent of the population and

the less lethal nature of Omicron com-

pared with earlier strains have allowed

the NHS to deal more easily with this

wave. Covid is receding to a point where it

becomes a fact of life. It is time to get on

with the business of living.

Over the past two years we have put up

with restrictions unknown in peacetime.

The tragedy of 180,000 Covid-related

deaths has been mirrored by the damage

lockdowns did to the economy, educa-

tion, mental health and relationships. We

face severe challenges as we emerge into

normality, including a cost-of-living crisis

that will hit families and businesses. We

have a governing party in disarray. Yet the

prospect of glorious freedom after two

years of pain should lift the country’s spir-

its. This is a moment to savour.

A moment to savour, mask-free

A good marriage is priceless. A flash wed-

ding, maybe not. Our report today that

expensive weddings are twice as likely as

average to end in divorce will come as no

surprise to many.

We suspect the less you spend, the bet-

ter your chances. For lasting happiness,

nip to the register office and then take a

romantic stroll to your reception at the

Dog and Duck. Cake? Everyone likes Colin

the Caterpillar from M&S (although Curly

from Tesco is a bit cheaper, and most

people like that too). Dress? Charity shops

have some excellent ones (it’s all those

divorces). Flowers? Get hitched in spring,

when free daffs are everywhere. And

remember to save that ring you won in a

Christmas cracker.

Yes, this is hard on the artisanal-table-

decoration and awful-DJ industries. But if

they wait a while, they can cater to all

those 25th anniversary bashes instead.

Posh wedding, short marriage

ESTABLISHED 1822

West’s energy failures have

given Putin his chance

Stephen Bush

If exam leave for parents was extended, no parent would ever go to work

statement, Patel sounded as if she were

responding to the shocking exit of a police

officer with an impeccable record.

Part of the problem is that if either the

Labour mayor of London, or the Conservative

home secretary, wanted to deliver a serious

speech about how to improve the Met they

would have little in the way of serious

resources to draw upon from within either

party. Although the Police Federation itself

does impressive work on the question of police

reform, the number of people who are

seriously engaged with the problem across the

two big parties can be counted on the fingers of

one hand.

One reason for that is fear: Conservatives are

scarred by what many privately blame for the

political mess they got into under Theresa May.

Her authoritarian leanings on a swathe of other

issues mean that May’s record on police reform

is often forgotten, but the former prime

minister was one of the most radical home

secretaries since the war. She approved a

number of initiatives and reports — public

disciplinary hearings, for example — some of

which ultimately contributed to Dick’s

downfall. But some Tory MPs blame May’s

reforms for the bad relations between the

government and the police, and one of Patel’s

priorities as home secretary has been to repair

the relationship. Few Conservatives have any

ambition to build on what May did.

On the Labour side, while there is plenty of

private discussion about how to get better

policing, it is easier to get someone under

witness protection to give you their full home

address than it is to get Labour politicians to

talk about it publicly. They fear that they will be

seen as soft on law and order and they think

they have their own repair job to do, to dispel

the perceptions that built up about Jeremy

Corbyn at the time of the 2019 election.

Both sides are missing a trick. Most voters

know full well that the police have a difficult

job, particularly with the advent of social

media and cybercrime, and are equally aware

that British policing in general and London’s in

particular could be revolutionised. By being

too scared to tell the truth about policing, for

fear of looking soft on crime, both parties

simply sound out of touch to anyone who has

had the misfortune to be the victim of crime in

modern Britain.

Stephen Bush is political editor of the

New Statesman

Dominic Lawson is away

I

magine for a moment that a child is

struggling in school. The mother is

concerned about her son’s difficulties with

reading and writing and arranges a

meeting with his form tutor to discuss it.

At the meeting the teacher assures the

worried mother that he is “as passionate

about improving literacy as I am about

pursuing beautiful women”, and bombards her

with emails asking her out.

The teacher is found guilty of gross

misconduct — and then given another job

working for the head teacher at the same

school. We reveal the story to the public.

Does anyone seriously believe that the head

would make it to the end of the next day

without having to resign?

Yet that is the substance of the remarkable

story broken by Emily Dugan last week, with

the only differences being that the concerned

mother was in fact a single woman and

mugging victim called Kristina O’Connor, the

errant teacher a copper called James Mason

and the head teacher in question the

Metropolitan Police commissioner, Dame

Cressida Dick.

Although Dick did, belatedly, resign as head

of the Met on Friday, she did so in a statement

that made clear she had been forced out by

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, not that she

was resigning as a result of failures in the

organisation she runs.

She didn’t find room in her statement to

apologise to O’Connor, or to the families of

Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack

Taylor, three men whose murders by Stephen

Port might have been averted had the Met not

bungled the investigation of the 2014 killing of

Port’s first victim, Anthony Walgate.

Nor did Dick find space to apologise to the

families of Sarah Everard, Daniel Morgan,

Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman. Each and

every story involved a scandal of the same

degree of obvious significance as Dugan’s

scoop, yet each and every story failed to rouse

any sense on the part of the commissioner that

her position and leadership was anything other

than exemplary.

Equally alarming was the reaction of the

Home Office to Dick’s belated departure, which

was to grumble about the lack of notice from

Khan. It complains that the mayor gave no

warning that he was about to declare his lack of

confidence in the Met commissioner when,

given the recent run of scandals, the Home

Office surely should have been crosser that it

took Khan quite so long. Again, let’s imagine

what would happened had a teacher behaved

in the same way as Detective Chief Inspector

Mason. I don’t think that Nadhim Zahawi, the

education secretary, would have been taken

aback if the local council had called for heads

to roll. So why is Priti Patel’s department

complaining about Khan’s action rather than

his inaction?

What unites Khan’s sluggish response,

Patel’s surprise and Dick’s reluctance to quit

earlier? Low expectations. It’s true to say, as

Dick often did when called upon to justify the

latest mess, that the police have a difficult job,

and that the Met, who are not only London’s

force but in charge of counterterrorism

operations across the country, have an

especially difficult job. But it’s not clear why

“having a difficult job” makes it harder for a

police officer to understand that when a

woman turns up at a police station having been

mugged, it isn’t an opportunity to set yourself

up with a hot date.

It is also worth pointing out that the Met

performs its “difficult job” with less

effectiveness than many other police forces in

England and Wales. For the past seven years

the police inspectorate has ranked London’s

constabulary as “requiring improvement” on

what some might describe as the police’s No 1

metric: “Keeping people safe and reducing

crime”. Let’s also remember that, among other

failings, DCI Mason couldn’t even track down

Kristina O’Connor’s mugger.

No head teacher could survive in their job

after seven years of bad Ofsted reports: most

heads don’t survive one. But the difference is

that we expect that particular “difficult job” to

be done well, whereas neither the Met’s

departing commissioner, nor the two

politicians in charge of the force, really seem to

believe that policing can be done well. In her

first public remarks after Dick’s resignation

J

o Whitfield is chief executive of the food

arm of the Co-op. She’s 53 and has two

teenage boys, and is now taking four

months off to help one through his

GCSEs and the other through his A-

levels. The four months is unpaid, and

although unpaid leave of up to a year is

technically available to all Co-op staff,

the fact that Whitfield took home £1.4 million

last year will have made the decision easier.

She said, “I always knew that this year would

be a big year, with my boys undertaking key

exams. We decided as a family that, to prepare

for the inevitable pressure and emotional

turmoil that would involve, when the time

came I would look to spend more time with

them to ease the challenge.”

Whitfield has in the past spoken of putting

family first, and said that it was important

working parents be honest about the challenge

of juggling professional and family life so that

young women understood that the demands of

this eternal balancing act were universal. “If

you get it right enough of the time, that’s what

matters. There is a lot of angst about the

juggle,” she has said. Her husband shared

childcare when their children were young, and

then “role-reversed” as they grew older and

Whitfield needed to travel more for work.

The past two years have been peculiar and

discombobulating for students. This year they

will sit proper papers rather than be marked on

assessment as they were in 2020 and 2021,

though exam boards will be publishing

information about the exams’ content in

advance to take into account pandemic

disruption. This must surely make them easier,

but it seems right that this cohort’s difficult

and confusing trajectory should be eased a

little.

When I read about Whitfield, I thought,

“Good for her,” and I do still think it, sort of,

except that it is also the thin end of the wedge.

Because where do you stop? Never mind

A-levels and GCSEs: every year is a big year for

children. The pressures of school and general

“emotional turmoil”, as she put it, start the

moment they set foot in reception. Do you, for

instance, take time off when your children are

peeled away from the only life they know to go

to school for the first time? That’s an emotional

readjustment of seismic proportions for them,

and yet it is also when many women go back to

work part-time. The transition from primary to

secondary school is another potentially fraught

period.

And for every one of these clearly

signposted giant peaks, there are thousands of

little hillocks that are just as stressful and

emotionally demanding for children as sitting

exams, if not more so. They are to do with

negotiating friendships, hostilities, popularity,

shyness, independence, boys, girls, puberty

and so on and on and on — and that’s before

you even get to academic learning. Multiply all

of the above by a thousand if your child has

special needs or a learning disability, though

that is not what I am writing about here.

So my issue with taking four months off to

help children with exams is that if you take the

argument to its logical conclusion — if you’re

going to help children negotiate school stresses

and “emotions in turmoil” — then you need to

be there pretty much all the time. You end up

staying at home until the children eventually

leave the nest for good. So what are you saying?

That it is not possible to be the best mother you

can be if you also go out to work? That stay-at-

home mothers, that most maligned of species,

have got it dramatically more right than

everybody else? That having children ought to

mean subsuming, or at the very least pausing,

your personal ambitions and professional

interests? It’s complicated, because at least one

of those things is true, and, as with all

inconvenient truths, it’s much easier to lump

them all together and call them all a lie — a

weird, slightly “tradwife” lie at that: one that

depicts a woman only as a mother and care-

giver, whose own needs are irrelevant and

whose duty it is to make everything lovely and

easeful for everyone except herself. Aside

from the fact that not everyone is, can be or

wants to be a mother, most of us would view

that idea of motherhood with horrified

incredulity.

Then there’s the fact that, as far as we know,

Whitfield has not taken a block of child-based

time off like this previously. In doing so now,

she is conveying the absolutely supreme

importance of exam success to her sons. She

was at work five days a week; now she’s here

for breakfast, lunch and dinner, ready to talk

trigonometry and make essay plans. No

pressure, Whitfield children!

On balance I feel that, although my own

approach was not optimal — I could have

helped a little bit, instead of thinking, “Let

them get on with it. They’re perfectly clever

and nearly adults” — it was perhaps, in the end,

preferable to the stresses and emotional

turmoil of presenting myself as the

omnipresent solution to a problem that didn’t

really exist. Children who work hard do well in

exams. It’s stressful, and then it passes. Not

doing well isn’t the end of the world. If I’d

made £1.4 million last year and had four

months off, I’d pack my bags and take my

children travelling.

@IndiaKnight

India Knight

Big boys don’t need Mum

at home for their exams

Yes, policing is hard. But only thinking the unthinkable will fix our forces

The pressures of

school start the

moment they set

foot in reception

What unites Khan’s

sluggish response

and Patel’s surprise?

Low expectations

Conspiracy of silence over

the police is truly criminal