Latest news with #SarahVine
Times
14 hours ago
- General
- Times
How the Goves kept up with the Camerons: the cost of richer friends
I f you're keeping up with the revelations from Sarah Vine's new Westminster wife's kiss'n'tell you will know that the best bit of How Not to Be a Political Wife so far is the Gove's fallout with the Camerons. Vine, now the former Mrs Michael Gove and free to do her worst, takes us back to the very beginning (before the Tories did well enough at the 2010 election for Dave and Sam to take up residence in Downing Street … Chequers karaoke nights ahoy!) and painstakingly walks us through the gradual unspooling of their friendship. Was it Brexit that broke these two couples apart — Gove supported Leave, Dave Remain, remember — or was the friendship holed below the waterline by Cameron demoting his friend from minister for education to chief whip two years previously? Hard to say, but the other strong possibility, as Vine admits, is that their relationship was always on a ticking timer with the less powerful Goves scrabbling to keep up with their more affluent and powerful Notting Hill set chums.
Daily Mail
22-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Exiting menopause is like gaining a superpower - I am no longer a slave to my hormones, SARAH VINE tells PETER HITCHENS on provocative Mail podcast
Exiting menopause is like entering 'sunlit uplands', with your moods no longer governed by hormones, Mail columnist Sarah Vine described on the latest episode of the Mail's Alas Vine & Hitchens podcast. Vine, 58, admitted to co-host and broadcaster Peter Hitchens, that she now realises most of the 'stupid decisions' made in her life were 'hormone-related'. She added that the 'awful' symptoms of perimenopause and menopause were worth it for the sense of 'liberation' that comes afterwards. Menopause is when a woman's menstrual periods permanently stop, typically occurring in her late 40s to early 50s, marking the end of her reproductive years due to declining hormone levels. 'I have this theory that menopause is like a superpower', Vine told Hitchens. 'Everybody thinks that the menopause is awful, and it is quite awful to go through. I certainly had a rough time with it, but once it happens, it's like entering sunlit uplands. 'You enter a hormone-free existence. You're not full of estrogen and progesterone anymore - you don't have these uncontrollable feelings about nurturing people and small babies. 'You're just a normal human being – you have things like logic; you're not trying to eat chocolate all the time because your hormones are annoying you; you don't get mood swings or PMS. It's just lovely!' She added that too much attention is paid to the uncomfortable symptoms of the transition and not enough to the joys of life afterwards. 'People write books about the menopause and perimenopause – they're doing TV shows about it. It's really a hot topic', the columnist said. 'But no one ever talks about life after the menopause. I can't tell you what a slave to my hormones I was – I realise that most of the things that I have probably done wrong, most of the stupid decisions I made, have been hormone related. 'I realise now that if I didn't have this crazed cocktail of chemicals running around my body, I would have been much more efficient.' The average age for a woman to begin the menopause is 51. The transition period, perimenopause, usually starts sometime in a woman's early forties. Symptoms of the menopause range wildly from woman to woman. Some report difficulty sleeping, hot flashes, dry skin and eyes, and decreased libido. These unpleasant changes may go on for years but can be mitigated with HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy). Vine told listeners not to fear menopause, describing life afterwards as 'a pretty zen place to be'. 'That like the idea of being that older woman who is sort of a sage figure', the journalist told the podcast. 'That is so much easier when you're post-menopausal. People should stop being so worried about it – it is quite a zen place to be.' 'I don't like the sound of that – sounds pretty pagan to me', Hitchens joked.
Daily Mail
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Britain needs the death penalty - I know because I witnessed the 'horrible' executions of two heinous murderers, PETER HITCHENS tells SARAH VINE on latest episode of provocative Mail podcast
Britain needs to reinstate the death penalty as a deterrent against the most cruel and unusual crimes, acclaimed broadcaster Peter Hitchens has told co-host Sarah Vine on the latest episode of the Mail's Alas Vine & Hitchens podcast. The best-selling author argued that the logic in having the death penalty is 'inexorable', with scientific developments in the DNA analysis of crime scenes now meaning 'very few' falsely accused people would receive capital punishment. Hitchens revealed that during his time as a correspondent in America, he forced himself to witness two executions, one by lethal injection, the other by electrocution, to test his convictions in the practice. He explained to Mail columnist Sarah Vine that although the experience was 'horrible', his view on the death penalty remained unchanged, permitting its use under 'very strict conditions.' 'I concluded about 30 years ago that I supported the death penalty under very strict conditions', Hitchens began. 'When challenged, I couldn't deny it. I instantly made myself a lot of enemies among the sort of people I knew then. It is an absolute test in modern liberal Britain: if you support the death penalty, then you're some knuckle-brushing barbarian. 'The logic for it is inexorable – the thing which put the capstone on it for me was witnessing two executions in the United States. I thought I should face the thing I had supported and in a sense, willed. 'I went to these executions – now, no one can say to me: 'Well if you'd seen it, you'd stop being in favour of it.' 'It didn't alter my view. It was a horrible thing, but it was meant to be. 'In an age of DNA, establishing someone's guilt is easier and more likely to be certain than it was before. I certainly am not suggesting the execution of all murderers – only the most heinous of them.' The broadcaster, who over his long career in journalism has written extensively on the subject, went on to detail his reasoning for supporting capital punishment. The death penalty was abolished in Britain in 1965, mostly due to evolving social attitudes and several high-profile miscarriages of justice. Hitchens said: 'You must make it plain as a society that you value life above all things. The only person who can forgive a murderer is the person who's murdered, and that person is not available – we do not have the freedom to forgive on their behalf. 'Then there's deterrence – when the death penalty was suspended in this country in the late 1940s, armed crime went up during that suspension and fell again when it ended. 'There is no question that since final abolition in 1965, the amount of homicide in this country has gone up. 'What's more, the amount of serious wounding has gone up, but that doesn't show in the homicide rates because the health service has gotten so much better. 'If people see someone getting away with murder, then it makes them angry. It makes them less inclined to keep the law themselves. Poorly enforced laws make people behave worse.' Sarah Vine tacitly agreed with her co-host, adding that now, in the modern world, we have far less painful and graphic methods of execution than when capital punishment was abolished. The most common method of execution in Britain was hanging. The deeply controversial 1955 hanging of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be given the death penalty in Britain, turned the public against the method of execution and capital punishment in general. Hitchens said however that if the death penalty was reintroduced, the method of execution should be 'genuinely frightening' by design. 'The thing has to have some force', the author proclaimed. 'When I saw the lethal injection, I thought it was morally creepy. It doesn't look like an execution – it's more like a medical procedure. That's dishonest – people are pretending to be doing something that they're not.' To catch the full debate on the death penalty, listen to the latest Alas Vine & Hitchens now, wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released every Wednesday.
Daily Mail
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Peter Hitchens questions whether 'smashed up' Britain was actually victorious in the Second World War on latest episode of the Mail's Alas Vine & Hitchens podcast
Best-selling author Peter Hitchens questioned whether Britain was victorious in the Second World War on the latest episode of the Mail's Alas Vine & Hitchens podcast. The broadcaster added that the public's belief in Britain's total victory constitues a 'pseudo-religion', with the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany actually leaving the country 'a dump'. In evidence of his claims, Hitchens told co-host and Mail columnist Sarah Vine, of his own late father's view of the war, who grew disillusioned years after fighting in the Royal Navy. The pair were debating the legacy of the Second World War in light of the upcoming 80th anniversary of VE Day. 'My father was in the war. He was a professional officer in His Majesty's Navy', Hitchens said. 'He started the war in the Navy and ended the war in the Navy. He ran guns and tanks backwards and forwards, between Scapa Flow in the Orkneys and North Russia. As my brother described it, he ran guns to Joseph Stalin. 'He lost a lot of friends and saw things he didn't really want to talk about… and as the years went by after the war, his life did not greatly improve. Nor did the lives of many other people of his kind. 'My father used to say in conversation: well, at least we won the war – he would then look meaningfully at anybody who was listening and say, "Did we?" 'I think he had a point. This country in 1945 looked like a defeated nation, not a victorious one. It was impoverished, smashed up, and broken.' The author contrasted how Britain emerged from the First and Second World Wars, arguing that despite the 'disaster' of the Great War, at least the country exited the conflict 'looking more powerful than we'd ever been'. After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, bringing an end to the First World War, the British Empire acquired territories from the defeated Central Powers, including large swathes of the Middle East and Africa. This elevated Britain to its territorial height. When victory was declared over Nazi Germany, the British economy was instead on its knees, and independence movements, broadly supported by the US, had been firmly fermented across the Empire. Beyond Britain's borders, Communist Russia had subsumed almost the entirety of Eastern Europe into the USSR and America had unquestionably supplanted Britain as the world's preeminent superpower. 'After the Second World War, this place was a dump', Hitchens said. 'Everything was rationed. There was worse rationing after the war than during it. Even bread had to be rationed, which is astounding for a supposedly advanced country. 'This carried on being the case for a very long time. When my father's naval pension turned out not to be worth very much, his general attitude towards the victory grew less and less happy. I don't think this was uncommon.' Vine disagreed with Hitchen's take on the legacy of the Second World War, telling her co-host that VE Day is important to celebrate to commemorate veterans of the conflict. She added that VE Day marks a time when Britain 'stood for something', fighting against tyranny, even if it wasn't in the country's material interests. She said: 'VE Day celebrations are really about the people who remain. There aren't many veterans left. It will be interesting to see if this sort of celebration continues once the last few remaining veterans have passed on. 'There's a very acute sense of Britain having stood for something. That we had been brave in the world, a country of people who had stood against a common evil. Vine said that VE Day marks a time when Britain 'stood for something', fighting against tyranny, even if it wasn't in the country's material interests. Listen here 'People really miss that now because I think we all feel that isn't the case anymore. VE Day is a love letter to that world.' The journalist then referred to her own grandfather, who had returned from the war psychologically scarred, as the reason for her continued celebration of VE Day. 'My grandfather Arthur fought throughout the whole of Europe and North Africa, ending up in Burma. He would have been the last person to glorify war. 'If he were alive today, he would not be celebrating the war. He would have celebrated his men. 'That experience destroyed his life. Afterward, he became a very serious alcoholic – and had galloping PTSD. 'When I think about VE Day, I remember his life. What he had to put up with, what he had to deal with. I don't want it all to have been for nothing.' Listen to the full episode of Alas Vine & Hitchens now, wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released every Wednesday.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Yahoo
Britain has a road rage problem. Stalking and death threats are the new normal
It's a beautiful, balmy day in early April, the sun is shining and the sky is blue. And yet my body is tense, my temper short and my blood pressure high. The reason? I've got to get in my car – again – and navigate the narrow, traffic-choked, infinitely infuriating road system in York, where I live. It's only 9.30am, but I've already spent more than an hour behind the wheel today, doing the school run. Later this afternoon, I will do it again in reverse. On an average day I spend approximately three hours driving, despite living in a city that's just under four miles across. And it's these endless, repetitive, distance-short but time-consuming journeys that drive me to distraction. Give me a motorway and four hours to get somewhere and I'll be zen. Stick me in a traffic jam when I'm a mere half a mile from my destination and I start to simmer. Throw in a pair of grumpy kids and a dog who hates being in the car and I – shamefully often – hit boiling point. But, I'm not alone. Britain has a road rage problem, and right now it's bubbling over. A Freedom of Information request of UK police forces by The Telegraph found that the number of overall crimes featuring 'road rage' or 'aggressive driving' in the crime report has increased by over a third (34 per cent) between 2021 and 2024, cited in reports ranging from criminal damage and theft to stalking, harassment and threats to kill. In the last few months alone, there have been multiple stories of uncontained anger and desperate police appeals for witnesses: a man threatened with a crowbar in a road rage incident in Weymouth; a fist fight between a car and motorbike driver in Jersey; a BMW driver who received an 18-month driving ban in January after driving aggressively behind a coach carrying 80 children in Essex; a couple threatened with a knife outside McDonald's in Plymouth after they were blocked by an aggressive van driver. In February, the journalist Sarah Vine tweeted a Porsche driver's numberplate to her 58,000 followers after he tailgated her, then rammed into the back of her car when she was driving her daughter through south-west London, having seemingly taken umbrage at Vine stopping to let a pedestrian cross the road. I had a similar experience in leafy Windsor the same month – pulling over to ask someone for directions, I was hooted at angrily by a Subaru estate driving behind me that swerved aggressively in my direction before pulling away. The car was adorned with Trump 2024 and 'Stuck Farmer' stickers – although statistics do not reveal whether Right-wing/Republican voters suffer more rage on the roads than their Left-wing counterparts. In my own home city of York, meanwhile, North Yorkshire police are currently investigating an Audi driver who got out of his car and punched the window of a Renault on the seventh circle of hell, aka the outer ring road, at 8.30am on a Wednesday in the middle of March. Having spent many fruitless hours on that same road, I can almost sympathise. It's hard not to conclude that our highways and byways are becoming angrier – and potentially more dangerous – places to be. But perhaps that's not surprising. Car traffic on Britain's roads increased to 251.3 billion vehicle miles in 2023 (the latest year for which official figures are available), and some 60 per cent of journeys taken are by car. Despite this, the average speed at which you can travel has been steadily decreasing: in Liverpool, for example, it takes 50 seconds more to travel 10km than it did this time last year; in Manchester and Nottingham you can add 40 seconds on to your 10km travel time, according to TomTom's most recent traffic index. Throw in the imposition of 20mph speed limits in city centres; low traffic neighbourhoods, where cars are prohibited from taking certain routes; smart motorways and average speed checks taking motorway limits down to as low as 50mph; potholes galore and steadily rising prices at the pumps and it's not surprising that motorists feel the system is stacked against them – even if they're no petrolhead, just someone who needs to get from A to B as quickly and conveniently as possible. And when the chips are down and you feel as if you're on the losing end, well, you get angry. With, clearly, some fairly drastic outcomes. Road rage, observe the neuroscience professor Johan Bjureberg and psychologist James J Gross in their 2021 academic study on regulating it, has been a problem since the advent of cars. Whether you define it as any sort of hostile behaviour directed at other road users, or only the most serious forms of aggression, driving anger is reliably associated with traffic crashes. And there are reliable triggers: slow drivers (who drive me insane), hostility of other drivers, time urgency (again, often an issue for me) and yes, daily stressful events, as well as traffic congestion. My own rage, I realise when I stop to think about it, comes less from the external factors of driving – the roads; the other drivers – and more the internal, or more specifically, the immediate proximity of certain figures, otherwise known as my children, and also pets. I don't get enraged by what's going on outside the car, I get enraged by what's going on inside it – which in turn makes me more susceptible to irritation at other drivers, and consequentially dangerous driving. I haven't ever punched a car or another driver, but I've definitely lashed out at my kids when they've been fighting in the back, turning round to aim a wild slap at the nearest knee. I've also screamed at them, yelled at the dog and on one particularly frustrating morning, when the council appeared to be digging up almost every road into the city, kicked everyone out of the car, locked the doors and made them run along the pavement while I crawled through the slow-moving queue trying to calm myself down (I let them back in eventually). This sort of reaction, says Ray Coates, is not unusual. 'Sometimes it just comes out,' he reassures me. Coates, a mild-mannered, dapper man in his 50s, has come to take me through a two-and-a-half hour road-rage course that aims to help drivers confront their issues and deal with them. A trained coach and mentor, former driving instructor and a singer-songwriter in his spare time, Coates looks as if he's never lost his temper in his life. But then he tells me he has five children, and used to often drive them all to school – and sometimes their friends too. This man has clearly been through fire. Drivers Domain, the organisation that Coates works for, started offering road-rage courses about eight years ago, after publishing a blog on the topic and seeing a surge in enquiries for training. Take-up is not as high as it might usefully be – Rob Morgan, the company's founder says they only do 10 to 12 sessions a month at most. The biggest demand comes from the south-east, especially London, and the majority of people doing the course are men, at a roughly 80:20 split, although, says Morgan, 'they don't always say, but often they are forced to do it'. As an example, he cites the case of a recent client whose wife had told him he was scaring her behind the wheel, and he had to do something about it. 'We're not mental health professionals,' adds Morgan. 'But the basis of the course is to get people to self reflect, and to understand the causes of their actions.' The morning that Coates sends me a text to tell me he's outside my door is not a good one. I'm running on six hours' sleep, I've got far too much to do and I'm wired and lightly jittery on too much caffeine. Our 10-year-old Volvo estate – a lumbering but useful workhorse – is also starting to seriously p--- me off. At the decade mark, it has seen various things starting to go wrong, and despite an expensive full service last month, my dashboard has recently started to inform me that my parking sensors aren't working and need attention. Quite when I'm going to attend to them I'm not sure. Coates sits at my kitchen table with a coffee and runs through some more basic driving psychology with me. Even Roadcraft, the police drivers' handbook, has a section about 'red mist' he tells me. It advises that the key to preventing it descending is to concentrate on the driving task in hand, rather than the incident. 'Don't get into a personality conflict with another road user,' the handbook states. 'Be dispassionate and concentrate on your driving.' We're going to do an initial analysis drive where I can talk about how driving makes me feel, Coates explains; then we'll come up with some solutions. I have to pick three recent incidents where I felt the red mist descend. I tell him about the time I was so furious at my kids for making us late that I shouted at them for half the journey to school. The drive last weekend where the dog whined so incessantly I couldn't look at the road in front properly and had to stop the car and illegally put her in the back with my eight-year-old, otherwise I would either have run myself off the road or deliberately run her over. The afternoon where, having decided to be nice and pick my 11-year-old up from school rather than making him get the bus, I got there faster than I'd anticipated and ended up trying to find him somewhere en route for 20 minutes (he'd started to walk to meet me as instructed), sending me into such a boiling rage that I absolutely lost it at him when he finally got in the car. Reflecting on both my feelings and how I displayed them outwardly at all these times makes me feel seriously ashamed. To a detached outsider, I must seem like an insane person – or at the very least, someone with severe anger issues. If, as Coates says, driving is 'like an amplification of certain characteristics of humanity,' should I really be behind the wheel at all? Congestion in our towns and cities is bad, and it's getting worse. TomTom's annual traffic index puts five British cities in the top 100 of the 500 most congested in the world. In London, drivers take an average of 33 minutes and 22 seconds to travel 10km, losing 113 hours per year to the rush hour. Congestion generally is estimated to cost the economy £30 billion a year. Coates points out that we have an expectation when we get in a vehicle that it will be convenient – that's why we're driving and not taking the bus, after all. 'You don't tend to think of driving as unreliable,' he says. 'But almost as soon as you leave the drive there are going to be challenges. That's going to be an incredibly difficult repetitive situation to face. So what can we do about that?' I tell Coates I realise that I've come to actively resent my car. Until we moved to the outskirts of York a couple of years ago we lived in London and rarely used it, except to head out of the city occasionally at weekends. Then, it was a source of freedom. Now it's become something I rely on, not as a means of escape, but as a burden of tedious duty. I am not achieving anything on these journeys, I tell him; the time is not productive for me. I look at cyclists (my previous mode of transport, when my children's school was on our road and I worked in an office every day) and envy them their freedom and the wind blowing in their hair. Also, my car is a hot mess that smells of dog and assorted foodstuffs, and is not a fun place to be. Is it any wonder that I find myself getting snappy and distracted behind the wheel? One thing Coates says sticks in my mind. 'We tend to think of traffic as everybody else,' he points out. 'But, we are the traffic.' He once deliberately engineered road rage, he tells me. 'I made it happen. I then realised that I was just looking for somebody to vent at.' Easier to do that, perhaps, than confront the realisation that you – as 'the traffic' – may be someone else's problem. We've decided to retrace the school run I've already done this morning (predictably traffic-free at this point). Chatting away, I realise I'm not completely disliking this drive, although, I tell Coates, I have underlying stress about the amount of work I have to do right now, which feels incompatible with wasting a morning just driving around. He asks about this stress and I tell him it's there most of the time, but that I'm usually quite good at concealing it, it just bubbles away underneath the surface. I am, I tell him, the proverbial duck – outwardly serene; paddling like f--- underneath. In their academic paper on road rage, Bjureberg and Gross observe that 'it is not the situation per se that elicits the emotion but rather how the situation is viewed'. If we can notice our mounting tension, choose to change how we think about our situation in the light of the ultimate goal (getting my children to school on time and in one piece) and remind ourselves that we're not the only ones on the road, we can hopefully calm down. Coates's advice essentially boils down to the same thing. If I can try and notice what I'm feeling first, rather than pretending everything is OK and pushing it all down, only for it to explode later, it will help to dissipate my rage. He also suggests I make use of my compartmentalising ability while I'm in the car – after all, when you're in it, there's nothing you can do except, well, be in it. I admit to him that getting angry in the car doesn't serve anyone – especially not me. In fact, it makes things actively worse – the more wound up I get, the more I shout. Again, something backed up by academia: Bjureberg and Gross note that short-term venting strategies – shouting and swearing, for example – generally only lead to more aggressive behaviour in the future. When, a couple of days after my driving course, my report from Coates arrives, I am nervous. After all, I basically revealed all my most psychotic tendencies to a virtual stranger who knows exactly how dangerous those tendencies can be when someone is in charge of a couple of tonnes of metal. But what is most surprising about the report is what he managed to pick up on between the lines. As we were driving along, Coates asked me about positive memories of being in the car. I'd remembered my dad taking me to school, on the very same roads that I now wrestle with daily, and how that time – although often traffic-choked and frustrating – was also precious daily time with him. We entertained ourselves by looking out for the same people every day: the young man we christened 'The Bouncing Boy' because of his springy gait; the lady with the mad hair that looked like a wig. I realise I've subconsciously done the same thing with my own children – looking out for familiar spots each day – and that however frustrating and time-wasting I find our daily journeys, when I stop to think about it, I do value the time we have together in the car. It's a space to chat, prepare for the day ahead, listen to any worries or concerns – and one that I am increasingly aware, as my children grow up, is a place and space that won't last for ever. Coates's advice is that I build on this, focusing not on the frustration, but taking a 'legacy' approach that can help me build positive memories in the car with my kids. He also made me realise that ultimately, although right now driving pisses me off, I'm also grateful I can do it. The flip side of the tedium of my car is the freedom it brings; I can't imagine being totally reliant on public transport, or worse, someone else, to get to where I want to go. Perhaps this is the key to all of our 21st-century, selfish, entitled rage on the roads: realising that we can get to where we want to go under our own steam. Our cars might not bring ultimate freedom any longer, but for most of us, it's still a damn sight better than the alternative. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
