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Spectator
30-07-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Could Danny Kruger save the Conservatives?
I've seen signs of life in the Conservative party – unlikely I know, but true. I had thought it a dead thing, dripping its life-blood slowly into Reform. But ten days ago I saw on YouTube a speech that a Tory MP gave in the House of Commons and… I don't know. I felt hope. The MP was Danny Kruger, member for East Wiltshire, and as it happens he's a friend of mine. I'll say straight away then that this is absolutely not an attempt to promote him as next leader, though the post-Kemi era does seem to be approaching fast. For one thing, Kruger is a middle-aged white Etonian, cursed by association with the last two Etonian PMs. For another, from what I've seen of it, high office acts like high altitude on humans. The rarified air gets to them in the end. They go crackers for want of normality, and when they descend their brains have changed. Fundamentally decent men become deluded – Rishi. The others – Boris – live as high-functioning addicts, dreaming of the next power-fix. So it's not that I have ideas about party leadership. It's just that I'd clean forgotten it's even possible for a politician to stick their neck out in public – to state simply what they believe – and how powerful that is. Kruger's speech, addressed to his fellow MPs, made the point that this country is Christian in its bones and in its beginnings and that, like it or not, through the parish system, we are all members of the Church of England. If there's a crisis in this country, he said, which there indisputably is – an epidemic of anxiety and hopelessness in the young, among adults even talk of civil war – then it's to Christianity that we should turn. I know: sky fairies and invisible friends – perhaps you thought we'd outgrown them. There are two religions moving into the space from which Christianity has been ejected, said Kruger. One is Islam; the other is wokery, which has become competitive oppression – victim-signalling, you could call it. 'I don't think that 'woke' does justice to its seriousness,' said Kruger. 'It is a combination of ancient paganism, Christian heresies and the cult of modernism all mashed up into a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power that is hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities and nations… It must simply be destroyed at least as a public doctrine. It must be banished from public life from schools and universities and from businesses in public services.' It was a Thursday afternoon, about 4 p.m. when Kruger addressed the House. Most MPs, having lunched, had drifted back to their constituencies, so you have to picture the MP for East Wiltshire delivering this tub-thumper to an almost entirely empty chamber: row upon row of plump green benches, punctuated with just the odd crumpled suit. 'The fact is that the strong gods are back, and we have to choose which god to worship,' said Kruger, undaunted. 'I suggest we worship the God who came in the weakest form, Jesus Christ.' The room may have been empty but more than three million people have now watched the footage online. The comments keep rolling in, thousands of them: 'Don't worry, we're listening, Danny.' 'We're here even though your colleagues aren't. Bravo!' It's the response, as much as the speech, that has given me hope. For decades now, the Conservative party has considered Christianity embarrassing. And Danny Kruger's faith has cost him. He converted at a time when the only acceptable form of Christian faith in the Conservative party was the David Cameron sort – a faint and flickering radio signal, low vol. Even the friends we share from university will usually preface talk of meeting with a little verbal dance designed to ward off stigma: 'I'm having dinner with Danny, I mean, I can't stand Christians but…' I've often wondered how they'd react if they heard this in the context of another religion: 'I'm off to meet Sadiq. Yeah, I can't stand Muslims but…' Three years ago Kruger gave another speech in the Commons, this one about the importance of not importing American culture wars over abortion. In it, he reminded his peers that 'in the case of abortion' a woman's 'absolute right to bodily autonomy… is qualified by the fact that another body is involved'. He wasn't advocating changing the law, just reminding everyone that somewhere along the journey towards birth the baby acquires rights of its own. It was fascinating to me that as a result of this reasonable speech, Danny became unacceptable to whole swaths of his constituents – and how instinctive their reaction was. Asking reasonable, ethical conservatives to engage with his argument was like asking snakes to wrap themselves around a hot pipe. They'd wince and flail, sidle off. Too embarrassing. Not what People Like Us say. But the point for the party perhaps is that it's People Like Us who are now old hat. The world has changed, young people have changed. It's not the 1990s any more. Look at the growing appetite for Jordan Peterson, who points to the Bible as a store of wisdom. Look at The Spectator's recent 'Recovering the Sacred' event. Damian Thompson, presenter of the Holy Smoke podcast, presided; the editor spoke alongside two priests and a Regius Professor of Divinity. The event was sold out. My Catholic priest friend who has a church in central London says that the size of his congregation has doubled, and it's young people from all over the world filling the pews. Orthodox Christianity is on the rise in America, Catholicism in France. And Danny's right, the old gods are back, too. In Silicon Valley, among the young tech lords who actually shape our future, the talk is about which of the biblical demons they are summoning as AI evolves. I'm serious about this. It's normal in the valley to discuss Moloch and Ba'al over sushi. There's an opportunity here, but only if the Conservatives have the courage to embrace this country's founding faith.
RTÉ News
21-06-2025
- Sport
- RTÉ News
Quotable bosses adding to the gaiety of summer
Have we entered the golden age of the gaffer in inter-county football? The manager in its modern guise has been with us for just over a half century now. Back in the Pathé News era when plummy-voiced old Etonian commentators chortled at the physical roughness of the Gael, there were noted figureheads whose duties broadly approximated to that of a modern manager. Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan in Kerry, John 'Tull' Dunne in Galway, Fr Tommy Maher with the Kilkenny hurlers. However, the cult of the manager only arrived in earnest in the mid-70s, when Jimmy Gray decided there was too much anarchy on the Dublin sideline and installed the already legendary Heffo as chief capo. Kerry, always watchful regarding revolutionary developments elsewhere, stuck Micko in an equivalent role for the following year and we were away. They've been with us ever since. A brooding presence, often portrayed as a destructive one. In the intervening decades, the inter-county manager has been blamed for ruining the club game, their players' training-life balance and the entire sport itself. But, despite it all, they remain a vital presence. For the past six months, the League of Ireland's current stable of managers have been hogging the headlines, cognisant of their responsibility to serve as hype-men for the product. One manager, in particular. Since arriving into the LOI's managerial paddock in a blaze of publicity three years ago, Damien Duff has excelled in the rather vague discipline of 'mind-games', otherwise known as 'saying stuff'. As a former player of Jose Mourinho's during Chelsea's glory years of the mid-2000s, he has learned from one of the greats. But who is the Duffer or Jose of the inter-county managerial game right now? A few names are jockeying for the accolade. Clearly, longstanding Donegal messiah and disruptor Jim McGuinness is a compelling candidate. The Glenties grandmaster re-wired the entire sport during his first stint, such that they eventually had to form a committee of illustrious elders to rewrite the rules altogether. In his first year back in 2024, he set about building a wall, if not around aul' Donegal, then at least around their training centre in Convoy, to prevent against Marcelo Bielsa-style spies surveilling their match preparation. In 2025, he seems instead to be building an 'us against the world' mentality up there, if his pre-prepared monologue outside their dressing room last Sunday is any guide. Clearly, this intervention followed in the wake of some heavy research, given Jim's knowledge of the precise travelling distance between Hyde Park and Mayo's training ground. "That would only happen because it's us," McGuinness argued, having apparently not plotted the exact distance from Valentia to Tullamore. McGuinness' outburst was subsequently re-interpreted as an attempt to strong-arm the CCCC into placating him with a seven-day - rather than a six-day - turnaround this weekend. Sure enough, Donegal-Louth throws in at 4pm on Sunday. In the game at large, much like Jose in his early years, McGuinness is regarded as a mystical coaching superbrain and a managerial svengali. This was especially apparent when Donegal were scoring no goals during the league. In the case of the average hired hand on the managerial merry-go-round, a dearth of goals would be taken as straightforward evidence of his team's attacking limitations. Not so in Jim's case, where the automatic assumption was that he must be hiding something. Something so clever that he didn't want to roll it out until the optimal moment late in the season, when the competition would have no time to react. Or else he had run the numbers and calculated that pursuing goals was a waste of effort in the new scoring dispensation, and that he was simply quicker to realise as much than the Kerry lads, who scored them by the truckload during the league. But Jim faces stiff competition for the accolade from within his own province. While Joe Public and much of the sporting commentariat are calling for a statue to be erected to Jim Gavin, Kieran McGeeney has carved out a role as the FRC's dissident-in-chief. During the league, Geezer regularly complained that no one was allowed utter a word of criticism about the new rules, something he has nonetheless been doing in almost every interview since. As a stout defender of the modern game, circa 2024, McGeeney's issue seems to be less with the rules themselves than the 'in-my-day' pundits and former players whose incessant carping provided much of the impetus behind their introduction. With Pat Spillane now positioning himself as cheerleader-in-chief of the new Gaelic football, McGeeney inevitably finds himself drawn in the opposite direction. Having seemingly reconciled himself to the new rules, McGeeney is now peeved that they're changing again. "Listen, honestly, they just seem to be able to do what they want," McGeeney said, on hearing word that the 50m penalty for interfering with a midfield mark was about to go, just before the knockout phase. "Some teams tell them to do something, I'd love that direct line. Whoever has that direct line into Jim (Gavin) and Eamonn (Fitzmaurice), I would love that." We obviously have no clue to whom Geezer is referring... other than to note that a certain inter-county manager, let's call him J'OC, branded the 50m penalty for the midfield mark "ridiculous" and insisted it would have to go after Kerr... his team... ironically got the benefit of it in a group stage game. McGeeney followed that up with the pithiest explainer of the mechanics of the GAA tackle zone that we have read for some time. "Everything is a foul. Everything isn't a foul. You just swing with the punches and do what you can." While it isn't worded that way in the legislation, Geezer's summation certainly rings true in practice. But McGeeney and McGuinness aren't alone among the contenders. In the west, Pádraic Joyce has emerged as the king of the blunt speakers. It became an article of faith for managers during the Alex Ferguson era that 'thou shalt not criticise your players in public.' The Galway boss seems remarkably indifferent to that edict as he breezily offers stinging assessments of his players' performances in post-match scrums. After the win over Armagh, Joyce said that Shane Walsh had been subject to much unfair criticism in Galway. Some Galway supporters did offer up the rejoinder that perhaps Walsh's staunchest critic was none other than the Galway manager - Pádraic Joyce himself. Sure enough, in a subsequent round of interviewers, Joyce responded to questions about Walsh's Man of the Match display by sighing that it had been "a long time coming". And we're only three months removed from his famous "they missed about 2-10 between them" press conference after the league loss to Dublin. If Galway's 2025 season was Ireland at Italia 90 - and they came pretty close to drawing all three group games - then Joyce is simultaneously its Jack Charlton and its Eamon Dunphy. In the process, Joyce seems to have created a scenario where his players seem cheerfully immune to what their manager says in public, though his legendary status in the county has given him some leeway. Between the 'mind-games', the megaphone diplomacy, the clap-backs at the pundit class, and the brief spot of caustic post-match analysis, the managerial paddock are spoiling us this summer. The media aren't complaining.
Evening Standard
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Evening Standard
How to make a white lady, David Cameron's favourite cocktail, according to Sarah Vine
There is much ado regarding Sarah Vine's memoir, How Not to Be a Political Wife. It is a book about rivalry and resentment, entitlement and marriage. Everyone in Westminster is talking about it – how it delves into the testy, Etonian politics of the David Cameron premiership, from ascent to decline. How it is as much about friendships, parties, trips to Ibiza and the cocktails made.
Spectator
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Harold Wilson was awful and brilliant
Does anyone still talk about Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister who died 30 years ago today? Though the Labour party often seems keen to forget a leader who won – almost uniquely – four out of five elections, he was, perhaps more than anyone, the prime minister who ushered in the modern age. When he stood in the general election of 1964, he was widely billed as a moderniser. Up against Tory Alec Douglas-Holme – the grouse-shooting Old Etonian Earl, who described the old age pension as 'donations' to the elderly and had, as chancellor, used matchsticks to understand economics – Wilson seemed like the dawning of a new age. Words like 'thrusting,' 'dynamic,' 'purposeful' and 'scientific' were thrown about him, and he promised a 'New Britain' 'forged in the white heat' of a technological revolution.
New Statesman
21-05-2025
- Sport
- New Statesman
Letter from Wigan
Photo by George Hutton In early March, Darren Orme was reported missing from his home on the Beech Hill estate in Wigan. He was well known locally as a 'superfan' of Wigan Athletic football club, and his disappearance galvanised the local community in his support. As the days passed and he had not been found, flowers, scarves and football shirts were left in his honour outside the Brick Community Stadium, as if his loss was already being mourned. The stadium, renamed in May 2024 to reflect a partnership with a local anti-poverty charity, is the home ground of Wigan Athletic and Wigan Warriors, the all-conquering rugby league club coached by Matt Peet. Both clubs are owned by Mike Danson, the CEO of GlobalData and owner of the New Statesman, who was born and grew up in Wigan. Under his ownership, the two clubs, once rivals, are working in collaboration as the Wigan Sporting Group and will share an open-plan office at the Robin Park Arena, adjacent to the Brick stadium. Darren's body was eventually found in a river near the stadium. His funeral was held on 24 April and many hundreds of local people were in attendance alongside players and officials from the football and rugby clubs. 'We'd never seen anything like it before,' Kris Radlinski, who played 332 games for Wigan Warriors from 1993 to 2006 and is now the CEO of the club, told me. 'There was silence, there was respect. The funeral procession did a lap of the stadium on the way to the church. At the end of the lap, the procession stopped, and the family got out to thank all the footballers and rugby players who were there. It was a powerful moment, the closest together the two clubs have felt in 30 years.' Professor Chris Brookes (universally known as 'Doc'), chairman of Wigan Warriors, agreed the symbolism was striking. 'The two clubs now need to move forward in a connected way, so we are working actively to combine resources and efforts, maximising our contribution to the people of Wigan and our loyal fanbases.' The sports group is an anchor institution in a town that has very few. Lisa Nandy, MP for Wigan since 2010, says 'sport is the glue holding the town together'. Danson, Radlinski and Peet are all from the town and understand that the Warriors are much more than a club: they represent a culture, a community, and create a sense of shared belonging. When George Orwell came to Wigan and Barnsley in the 1930s to write about the effects of mass unemployment, he found an England he could respect – even believe in. Deep underground with the miners in the Wigan coalfields, this contrarian old Etonian encountered a way of life that profoundly affected his politics. Orwell did not sentimentalise the northern working class in The Road to Wigan Pier, but admired their fortitude, togetherness and patriotism. He believed in a socialism that was not 'book-trained' but was compatible with the common decency of the 'submerged working class', among whom he briefly lived in Wigan. In a 1943 BBC broadcast, Orwell acknowledged that Wigan, though 'not worse than fifty other places', had 'always been picked on as a symbol of the ugliness of the industrial areas'. Lisa Nandy understands the sentiment. 'A whole industry has developed around understanding the rise of Nigel Farage's Reform,' she scornfully said. 'These people travel up from London almost like David Attenborough to observe these strange people in the wilds. They write absolute shite about us and then get back on their trains.' I told her I was in Wigan not as some kind of anthropologist but because I'd been asked to visit by Tom Gatti and Gordon Brown to write about the connection between sport, politics and the common good for this special issue of the magazine. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Nandy and I met on a bright morning at the Robin Park Arena where civil society groups were taking part in the Warriors' inaugural mental health awareness week. We spoke to a group of 12-year-old boys; they were among 40 children there, some of whom had been excluded from school. They were being encouraged to see how sport could offer discipline and definition to what one volunteer, a former police officer, called 'their often-chaotic lives'. 'I don't want to be in school,' one boy told me. 'I want to be here. I want to be active!' Wigan has advantages, not least in elite sports; the diaspora of former Warriors players includes Andy Farrell, head coach of Ireland rugby union team and now also of the British and Irish Lions squad that will tour Australia, and Sean Edwards, who is the defence coach for the French rugby union national team. The town's largest employer is Heinz, but it provides largely low-skilled work in food processing and packaging. Like other former coalfield communities (many of them rugby league towns), Wigan suffers from intergenerational inequality and economic stagnation. 'Not long ago mining and industrial production offered back-breaking work, but work with purpose: it won wars and underpinned our security,' Josh Simons, the former head of Labour Together and a local MP, told me. 'Since then, the internet revolution has offered little to northern towns. Our public realm has been left in ruins and our public services trashed.' Wigan has the highest male suicide rate in the country and some of the highest rates of domestic violence. It has the highest school suspension rate in England and as many as 23,000 children live in poverty (the theme of this guest-edited issue). Between 2010 and 2017 the local council had its budget cut by 43 per cent, the third worst affected local authority in England. There is inadequate infrastructure for new housing and lower than average life expectancy. Loneliness is a scourge, particularly among young men. The area has had several local 'asylum hotels', invariably located in poorer areas in England, which have been another source of tension, alongside rising house prices and rent costs. 'Rents have got higher and higher and so more and more houses have been turned into HMOs [houses of multiple occupancy] because that's the only thing that people can afford,' Nandy said. 'But on top of that, we've also had Serco buying up asylum accommodation, very concentrated in particular postcodes, even particular streets, because they go for the places that are cheapest. And obviously that's caused serious problems because you've then got several families in accommodation that's only meant for one. You've got problems with bin collections, with a very transient community in what used to be a very settled community. And so it's a double whammy because not only is the community changed beyond recognition, without people having any control over it, but it's also that the prices that your kids are now paying [for housing] have become ever higher.' (Serco say they do not buy property but lease from private landlords.) In a previous conversation, Nandy mentioned to me that the north of England was so tense it could 'go up in flames'. What did she mean exactly? 'Last summer, when we had the horrendous murder of those young girls [in Southport], there was already a real sense of tension in the north. People have watched their town centres falling apart, their life has got harder over the last decade and a half… I don't remember a time when people worked this hard and had so little to show for it.' She referenced again the 'huge pressures on housing'. And then said: 'All of that has fuelled a real sense of anger about what people are being asked to put up with. And it all really came to a head around Southport, because, you know, your children being safe, your community being a decent place to live. It was one of those absolute flashpoint moments… a moment of release. I don't mean the violent organised thuggery. People rejected that very strongly here, but people want to speak out, to be heard.' The notion of something going up in flames suggests that one spark could ignite a conflagration. 'That's what happened last summer.' Could it happen again? 'It could do. I mean, we are not complacent about it all.' I've been visiting the post-industrial north-west for more than three decades and wrote about the decline of the racially and religiously segregated towns of Rochdale and Oldham in my book about the condition of England, Who Are We Now? (2021), which Nandy told me she had read. In a speech in Manchester in July 2019, shortly after he became prime minister, Boris Johnson lamented the decline of the old mining and mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire. 'The story has been, for young people growing up there, one of hopelessness, or the hope that one day they'll get out and never come back.' Johnson promised to 'level up' the north but the Conservative wish to reduce regional inequalities amounted to little more than rhetoric. Who now speaks seriously of levelling up? 'It was totally discredited,' Nandy said. 'It became very much a group of civil servants being tasked to wander around the north of England, pointing at things and saying 'let's put a bit of money behind that' rather than empowering communities to be able to make that contribution themselves. What we got here in Wigan was a small refund on the money that had been taken from us, but dictated by a group of civil servants in Whitehall as to how we could spend it.' Politics is about place – where people live, go to school, work, interact, play sports, socialise, worship – but what happens when a place loses its purpose? Visiting the former mill towns of the north-west for the first time, I noticed the grandeur of the civic architecture – the High Victorian town halls and arcades, the great churches, the former libraries and exchanges, the miners' and technical colleges – but was dismayed to observe how many of these buildings had been neglected or were derelict, a standing rebuke to generations of politicians who had failed the north. Wigan has not lost its purpose, but it is burdened with social, economic and spatial inequalities, reduced social mobility and diminished aspiration. Mike Danson explained how Wigan is attempting to address these issues. 'In her book Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin described how Abraham Lincoln got various parties to work together during the Civil War for the greater good,' he said. 'In today's communities we are facing huge economic and social problems, but the challenge is to solve them. In Wigan we have a team of 'community anchors'. David Molyneux and Alison McKenzie-Folan at Wigan council are exceptional, similarly our MPs offer a special set of skills. On the sports side, the rugby and the football clubs work together. The combination, with charity and business, shows a unique way of working – our own team of rivals. They are all locals, and they want to create change and a thriving town for the next generation.' One plan is to invest in Al and tech hubs. Wigan has local expertise in sport, sports data and food processing. Josh Simons said: 'We're working to ensure the AI and data revolution actually benefits local people – so food and process manufacturing businesses in Wigan have the latest in AI-powered technology and skills.' On Saturday 17 May, I visited Edge Hall Road in Orrell, three miles to the west of Wigan town centre, for the official opening of a new high-performance centre for women and girls. Edge Hall Road was originally built as the permanent ground of Orrell rugby union club, but in recent years, under the previous ownership of Wigan Warriors, the site had become derelict. Transformed by £350,000 of investment, it is now the new home of Wigan Athletic and Wigan Warriors women's teams and when I visited girls were out on the pitch in small groups playing football and rugby. Simons was there and we chatted again about the social and economic challenges affecting the local community. Like all Red Wall Labour MPs, he is keenly alert to the threat posed by the Reform insurgency. Orrell has 11,000 residents but very limited healthcare. Simons has been working with the Wigan sports group, in partnership with the NHS, to create a new health hub at Edge Hall Road that 'will benefit the whole community'. The key word here is community. A nation is more than an 'imagined community' because our lives are embedded in relationships, institutions and networks. Lisa Nandy used an Orwellian phrase when she spoke to me of the 'country that lies beneath the surface', by which she meant the experience of those who feel submerged, or frustrated, or ignored. Simons said the people he represented were 'angry and they are right to be'. For most people politics is not national, it is experienced locally, through a run-down, boarded-up high street, a bankrupt or impecunious council, an unreliable bus service, uncollected rubbish, a dysfunctional postal service, a school playing field sold to property developers, a GP practice where you cannot get an appointment, a hospital in special measures. If communities beyond the great cities are deprived of investment and opportunity, if economic security and social capital are missing, if the intermediate institutions and places where we gather and interact are absent or become derelict, as the Edge Hall Road site was, people's collective aspiration becomes thwarted. More than a sports club, the regenerated Edge Hall Road is a social asset, 'anchoring' a community, creating a sense of common purpose and belonging. Wigan and the post-industrial north need more of them. [See also: Why George Osborne still runs Britain] Related
