Watching online – highlights of the Games immediately went viral – how do these achievements make you feel? Do you smile at the bizarre running styles, or laugh when a robot collapses and has to be stretchered, by humans, from the field? Or do you experience a frisson of dread at the manifest steepness of these humanoids’ learning curves?

‘Be careful what you wish for’ seems a sensible principle to apply here. The choreographed marching of the Games opening ceremony reminds me of the machines-take-over scene from I Robot, the 2004 movie inspired by the writings of Isaac Asimov; or else of a Nuremberg rally.

A darker tech milestone was reached in Zaporizhzhia in south-east Ukraine this week, when 19-year-old student Tetiana Bubynets became the first ever civilian to be killed by a drone operating entirely autonomously. ‘This is a risk for the whole world,’ said Col. Serhiy Minaiev, the commander of air defences in Zaporizhzhia. ‘In a few years, we will be living in a Terminator movie. It’s no joke. Machines are making decisions to strike.’

It sounds like the beginning of the end of the world. And yet I find myself resisting the impulse to join the Jeremiahs. The sword of technology is so often doubled-edged. Many new inventions – nuclear power, dynamite – can be used for good as well as causing great harm. Sometimes innovation brings unintended consequences. Since the invention of the car, for instance, between 60 and 80 million people have died in traffic accidents: about twice the number of combat deaths in World War One and Two combined. Yet it is not the car per se that kills, but the person behind the wheel; it’s not the gun, but the person pulling the trigger. AI will be no different. It’s what we choose to do with the invention that counts. Which way will the world choose to jump?

Some countries, such as China, have gone in for AI with greater enthusiasm and commitment than others. Israel is another. This summer, Netanyahu approved a sweeping new national program designed to turn Israel into an ‘AI superpower,’ with major investments planned in computing infrastructure, quantum technology, and R&D; the country already boasts some 2,400 active AI start-ups.

Some of these serve military purposes. Israel, notoriously, is a global leader in drone and surveillance technology. For Gazans, the IDF’s adoption of new AI-driven targeting systems has been a particular catastrophe. According to an investigation by +972 Magazine, a machine-learning program called Lavender assigns Gazans a numerical score indicating their suspected likelihood of being connected to Hamas, allowing the IDF to target them accordingly. ‘While the military had under 300 targets in Lebanon in 2006, the number has increased to thousands in Gaza,’ said Lt Gen Aviv Kochavi of the Target Administration Division.

Israel claims that every target choice is approved by a human. But the process is troublingly cursory, according to +972, who suggest that Lavender has made human decision-making ‘too robotic, essentially transforming human operators themselves into killer robots.’ Even the IDF admits that Lavender makes ‘mistakes’ in ten per cent of its decisions. Since October 2023, according to the WHO, some 59,000 civilians have been killed in Gaza, 22,000 of them children. In practice, it seems that the Terminator era – what the New York Times calls ‘a dystopian future in which killer robots roam the skies making life-or-death decision that reduce targets to data points’ – may already be here.

And yet not all of Israel’s embrace of AI has led to outcomes so negative – far from it. For instance, the country is at the forefront of another global AI-driven revolution, in healthcare; the WHO recently singled out Clalit, the largest Israeli healthcare provider, as a model for other nations to follow. Algorithms can spot signs of disease in in X-rays, MRIs or ECGs faster and more accurately than human; machine-learning is already cutting years off the discovery and testing of new drug compounds. In the event of, say, the next big pandemic – perhaps one involving a pathogen much more dangerous than SARS-CoV-2 – AI could end up saving the lives of millions.

That could also be true of the role has to play in agriculture. This year’s heatwaves have focussed minds more than ever on the fragility of the world’s water supply. Climatologists are now warning that an ‘unprecedented’ El Nino event is developing, presaging another record-breaking summer next year, along with droughts and storms that, according to Goldman Sachs, could cause a 16 per cent surge in food prices. Clearly, the way the world manages natural resources and farms the land must change.

As I discovered while researching my book, In Search of the River Jordan, Israel has one of the longest track records in this department. The country is a world leader in desalination, thanks to six large plants along the Mediterranean coast, which since 2016 have produced more drinking water than its citizens strictly need – an extraordinary achievement in the drought-stricken Middle East.

Israeli agricultural techniques are no less impressive. Around half the country’s irrigation water is recycled urban waste water, a higher proportion than anywhere else in the world. And it is used sparingly. In fact, modern drip irrigation was invented by the Polish-Jewish émigré, Simcha Blass, in the 1950s. Netafim, the dripper manufacturing company Blass founded at Kibbutz Hatzerim near Beersheba, is still going strong, with operations in 110 countries and revenues of more than a billion dollars. Netafim’s products help to feed nearly a billion people in 150 countries, while conserving tens of billions of gallons of water annually. The company’s corporate logo, ‘Grow more with less’, is clearly as pertinent as ever.

According to Max Moldavsky, the company’s Director of Innovation and Climate Solutions,’ AI is now driving a ‘fourth agricultural revolution.’ (The first, second and third, he says, were driven by the invention of the plough, mechanization, and micro-drip irrigation). AI’s true power, he believes, lies in uncovering patterns via soil sensors that humans often miss. The guesswork of traditional farming will be eradicated. Yields will be maximised, waste cut to almost zero. Farmers will become ‘digital agronomists,’ assisted by AI which can suggest ‘unconventional’ strategies such as ‘asynchronous planting, novel intercropping, or microbial solutions to reduce fertilizer dependency.’ For the future, Moldavsky envisions even greater changes in farming, from swarm robotics to ‘closed-loop, zero-waste urban micro-farms’.

AI might kill us – but it could also heal us, feed us, protect the earth, save humanity from itself. Perhaps no sword has ever been so sharply double-edged. Which edge will we prefer?

In Search of the River Jordan: A Story of Palestine, Israel and the Struggle for Water is published by Yale University Press

THERE has been much national soul-searching this week as Britain marks the tenth anniversary of Brexit – the folly of which will be something to contemplate once again next month, when the children and I start our summer holiday in a long hot EES queue at Schiphol (current estimated wait times: ‘up to multiple hours’).

I never doubted that Brexit was a mistake. Britain is a country in Europe: you can’t deny the geography. It is a relief, although I also always thought it inevitable, that we Europhiles are now coming back into fashion. Keir Starmer may or may not last long enough in office to attend next month’s ‘reset’ summit in Brussels, but whatever happens, ‘Remoaner’ is not the insult it once was. Like Catholics emerging from priest holes after an era of persecution, we no longer have to bite our lips in polite company – or in overheated airport queues.

I was brought up in the faith. The vote of 2016 came as a profound shock, almost as a personal affront, because it torpedoed one of my core assumptions about my and Britain’s place in the world. The damage we have done to ourselves, to our neighbours, and above all to the prospects of my children, still makes me groan.

My conversion to the cause dates from 1979 when my father, Adam, was elected to represent Strathclyde West at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. He took his new mission seriously, and his passion rubbed off on me in my formative years.

As one of the first ever cohort of directly elected MEPs, he and many of his colleagues saw themselves in frankly romantic terms as radical reformers, almost as revolutionaries – and who could blame them? Because the principle underpinning the whole European project, ‘ever closer union’, really was a radical idea, with its utopian promise of peace and prosperity through frictionless trade and travel. Throughout the 1980s our family Volvo bore a sticker on the back that read ‘My Country: Europe’, and I was proud of it.

I understood, even as a teenager, that they were engaged in something noble, a grand experiment in democracy, involving the application of principles and ideals laid down by the visionary fathers of post-war Europe: Adenauer, Schuman, Monnet, Spaak and, yes, Churchill. Brexiters forget that their talisman called for the creation of a ‘United States of Europe’ as a means of cementing the peace after World War Two. ‘In this way only,’ he said, ‘will hundreds of millions of toilers be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life living.’

Not only could the ‘better together’ spirit overcome national differences: it could also transcend party politics. Dad was a Conservative MEP for a constituency that encompassed much of Red Clydeside. (He was, to be fair, only narrowly elected, after two recounts; Labour were so certain of victory that they barely bothered to campaign). The dockers and factory workers didn’t think much of him at first, but that soon changed when he secured a large structural fund grant that helped postpone the closure of the Tate & Lyle refinery in Greenock. (Over the fifty years of EU regional investment, from 1975 to 2025, Scotland received more than £7.7 billion in European funding, supporting over sixty development programs, and creating more than 235,000 jobs. Scotland had good reason to vote as it did in 2016, for Remain).

In 1989, after university, I signed on as an intern at the European Commission in Brussels. The annual stagiaire program was intended not just to train up the next generation of eurocrats but, very specifically, to cultivate the friendships and contacts that would oil the machinery of integration. We stagiaires worked hard but played hard, too. There was much late-night dancing on the tables of Brussels jazz bars. I still have friends from that time.

These were heady days for the continent. Communism was crumbling in the east, with revolution upon revolution in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, the Baltics. The blue and yellow sticker on the back of our Volvo was joined by a red and white one championing Lech Walesa’s Solidarnosc movement. When the Berlin Wall was breached in November 1989, I flew to Berlin for the weekend and, armed with a bolster and hammer, joined the crowds gleefully demolishing it.

In Brussels, the future seemed ours to fashion. The Commission was gearing up for the introduction of a single currency, for borderless travel under the Schengen Accord, and preparing the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 which would eventually turn the old EEC into the European Union of today. I was interned with DG X, the directorate-general for information, communication and culture, which among other excitements arranged for the Hothouse Flowers to shoot the video for their hit single Don’t Go on the roof of the iconic Berlaymont building (pictured).

Not everyone was so enthusiastic about European progress. Part of my job was to monitor the weekly press conference, which was sometimes given by the Commission president himself, Jacques Delors, an ambitious, visionary official, famed for his fiery temper. To some in the British section of the press corps, baiting him was a favourite blood sport. None was better at this than a young Boris Johnson, the new Brussels bureau chief of the Daily Telegraph.

Recently fired from the Times for fabricating a quote, Johnson was now in his element as a peddler of jolly but false stories about bans on bendy bananas or prawn-cocktail flavoured crisps. He also delighted in winding up the Commission president, who was not good at hiding his impatience with the euroscepticism embodied by Margaret Thatcher; and in those days, nothing sold a newspaper so well as another juicy row with the high priest of those Barmy Brussels Bureaucrats.

Delors would proudly announce some new regulatory initiative. One by one, and egged on by Boris, the British correspondents would hum and suggest in various ways that Number 10 mightn’t like it very much, until eventually, inevitably, Delors would explode: ‘Je m’en fous de Madame Tatchère!’ Et voilà: every British hack had their story for the following day.

Boris was not the first to specialise in knocking Brussels. The Private Eye founder, Christopher Booker, did it for almost thirty years in his column in the Sunday Telegraph. His notorious inaccuracy prompted my father to publish a counter-blast article entitled, wittily, The Fiction Prize for Booker.

Defending Europe was never easy, though, whether in the press, in parliament, or in the pub. Our island nation’s exceptionalism, and long-standing suspicion of foreigners, meant the road to Brexit was probably set long before Booker’s or Boris’s time. I also became a journalist, and joined the London-based weekly The European, eventually becoming its political features editor. Among other projects we produced a glossy booklet in 1992 called Maastricht Made Simple, but it didn’t sell well.

Neither, in truth, did The European. A pet project of the notorious fraudster Robert Maxwell, the paper never really found its voice. The kindest critics said it was ahead of its time. In retrospect, its fate was sealed when Maxwell died and it was sold to the staunchly Eurosceptic Barclay Brothers; the paper closed for good in 1998.

British views of Europe were becoming ever more polarised by the time of the Millennium. At Westminster, pro-European Conservatives like my father were a dying breed; there are virtually none today. In 1999, when the prominent Eurosceptic Michael Portillo was selected to represent the safe Tory seat of Kensington and Chelsea, Dad tore up his party membership card in protest.

Portillo was one of those MPs whom John Major famously dismissed as ‘bastards’ for their anti-EU beliefs, a cadre that subsequently came to dominate the old Tory party; it was the bastards’ successors who persuaded – or perhaps forced – David Cameron to promise an in/out referendum in 2013.

Fast forward to 2026. For the last five years, more voters have regretted Brexit than not. Remorse, furthermore, has only grown since 2021. According to the latest polls, 57 per cent of us now think it was a mistake versus 30 per cent who still don’t: the widest gap ever.

Earlier this month at a book festival in Cumbria – a county that voted overwhelmingly for Brexit ten years ago – I listened to Michael Heseltine, a survivor of that almost extinct generation of senior pro-European Tories, describe Brexit as he always has as ‘a grotesque act of national self-harm.’ He was cheered to the tent tops.

Given such sentiment, Starmer’s promise of a ‘reset’ seems too timid. The upcoming change of prime minister, however, is an opportunity for something more radical – perhaps, even, for a new referendum on EU membership. Polls suggest that 60 per cent of 18- to 28-year-olds would vote to rejoin if they were given the chance, compared to just 9 per cent who would vote to stay out. So what will Andy Burnham do?

The signals so far are mixed. Last month he pledged not to ‘re-run’ Brexit arguments, and that he was not proposing that the UK rejoin. ‘Britain will be stuck in a permanent rut if we’re just constantly arguing,’ he said. On the other hand, he remarked last year that he would like to see us back in ‘within his lifetime’ – which may indicate where his true preference lies.

Like a political weather vane, he knows when and where to spin, a skill that has propelled him to the top. Now that he has arrived, however, the spinning can and should stop. A leader must show leadership; no prime minister has ever succeeded by vacillating. For the sake of Gen Z, I hope he will have the courage of his convictions. They know, as he knows, that now is the time for it.

***

Where were you when Brexit was announced? The author was in a mosque in Woking, researching his book Al Britannia, My Country: A Journey through Muslim Britain (2017), published by Bantam Press

They are wrong about her, although the error is perhaps understandable. Half the country are confused. To be clear: Deborah Hinton OBE, an 82-year-old former magistrate from Cornwall, is merely a supporter of terrorism: in her case, of Palestine Action, which the government proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July 2025. The High Court ruled the proscription unlawful in February, but this week the Court of Appeal unexpectedly overruled that decision, and announced the government was in the right after all.

To recap: Palestine Action are a group of activists appalled by Israel’s bloody campaign in Gaza – the UN call it a genocide – and almost equally appalled by (as they see it) Britain’s passive support of it. In August 2024, four of them travelled to Bristol and broke into Elbit Systems, the British subsidiary of Israel’s biggest weapons manufacturer, before setting about the place with red paint and destroying half-built drones with sledgehammers. They were arrested after a scuffle with the police and, when Palestine Action was subsequently proscribed, charged not with criminal damage but with terrorist offences.

Deborah felt so strongly about this heavy-handedness that she joined seven others, mostly pensioners, in a silent protest on the steps of Truro Cathedral, where she displayed a placard that read I OPPOSE GENOCIDE. I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION. She was soon arrested. Public support for any proscribed terrorist organisation is a criminal offence. The episode was a farce. Even the arresting officers thought it was ridiculous, and apologised as they led her away. But the law is the law, they said, and it was their job not to question but to apply it. She was held in a cell for more than seven hours.

She has since become something of a figurehead for a pro-Palestine Action protest movement that has seen some 3,000 people arrested, 700 of whom have been charged. Their prosecution has been delayed pending the adjudication of the courts – Deborah has spent an anxious year on bail, with conditions including a ban from Truro city centre – but now the Appeal Court has decided in favour of the government, she could be facing a prison sentence of up to 14 years.

‘Obviously I’m very upset, I’m very nervous, but I couldn’t do anything else but do what I did,’ says Deborah. ‘We are heading towards an authoritarian state, and as I saw it, it was my duty to take a stand.’

She is not the only one shocked by the Appeal Court ruling. The British public knows what real terrorists looks like: they go on knife rampages, drive trucks into crowds, blow up teenage pop concerts. Attacking an empty armaments factory really isn’t in the same category. (Palestine Action’s supporters do not fit the mould, either. According to police figures the average age of those arrested is 59, compared to an average of 31 for all other terrorism-related arrests. They are overwhelmingly white, middle class and, remarkably, 6.5 times more likely to be female than male).

The worst that happened in Bristol was when Sam Corner, 22, assaulted and injured an arresting officer, Sergeant Kate Evans, with his sledgehammer. ‘Palestine Action’s activities have caused injury as well as property damage,’ the Appeal Court justices gravely intoned. Yet there was no prior intent on Corner’s part to hurt anybody. He brought his hammer along to smash up drones, not people. On video, furthermore, the assault looks rather less heinous than it sounds. He does not swing the hammer at Sgt Evans, but appears to almost tap her on the back. It was a stupid and criminal thing to do: a case of GBH, for sure. But, ‘terrorism’? During his trial, Corner – an Oxford maths graduate from Devon who lives with his parents – said he’d panicked after being pepper-sprayed, and acted to protect a co-activist whom Sgt Evans was trying to restrain.

The Appeals Court judgement was a nuanced one. The Lady Chief Justice, Sue Carr, wrote: ‘When the severity of the effects of proscription on [an individual’s rights to freedom of expression and assembly] are balanced against the importance of the objectives of protecting national security and the rights and freedoms of others … we find that the latter in this case outweighed the former.’

I don’t presume to question the correctness of that piece of jurisprudence. Nor do I query the judges’ independence from political influence, as some have done. But doesn’t their legal pin-dancing miss the main point? Which is what prompted the protests in the first place: the appalling suffering in Palestine, above all in Gaza - along with our government’s supine response to this.

Since the Israeli invasion in 2023, an estimated 72,600 Palestinians have been killed in the Strip alone, 80 per cent of them civilians, of whom 21,000 were children. More than a thousand Gazans have been killed since the so-called ceasefire declared eight months ago.

I have skin in this story. I made friends in Gaza while researching a book in 2019. I also have connections on the other side, including Israelis from Nir Oz, one of the kibbutzim attacked on October 7^th. The atrocities on both sides make me wince. But I was brought up on the principle that two wrongs don’t make a right, not on some Old Testament credo of vengeance.

At a recent online conference I listened to the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, explain the importance of Britain’s recent, belated recognition of Palestinian sovereignty, which he called a ‘beginning’ rather than an end in itself, ‘light in the middle of the tunnel,’ and ‘not a symbol but a foundation for a just and lasting peace.’

His speech was delivered with the well-rehearsed slickness one expects from a diplomat who has represented Palestinians in New York, Washington and London since 2011. Only once did I see the mask slip, when he asked why the UK does not recognize the International Court of Justice’s finding that there is a ‘plausible risk’ of genocide in Gaza. ‘For the love of God I cannot understand [this]’, he said.

Considering what has happened to his extended family, his restraint was a surprise. On 12 February 2024, an Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp in Rafah killed seven-year-old Sidra Hassouna, a relative of Zomlot’s, whose mutilated body was left dangling from the edge of a roof with her legs blown off; an image of this horror went viral on Instagram. At least 73 other Palestinians died in the blast, including Sidra’s sister, baby brother, parents and grandparents. All had recently fled to Rafah from the north of Gaza on the orders of the IDF, who said the move was necessary ‘for their security’. A military spokesman later explained that the airstrike was ‘covering fire’ – a diversion – for an operation to rescue two Israeli hostages who were being held a mile away.

It is well to remember Sidra Hassouna when considering whether Palestine Action is right to try to force our government into meaningful action against Israel. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, as the saying goes. Tom Wainwright KC, who represented Sam Corner, said of his client’s destruction of drones: ‘They may have been involved in taking the lives of men, women and children in Gaza. That is why they acted. That’s something that – in a sane world – would be commended.’

We do not, unfortunately, live in a sane world. But I tell my children that Aunt Deborah and her brave co-protestors do at least live in this world – unlike the lord and lady justices of appeal, who appear to inhabit a world of their own.

In Search of the River Jordan: A Story of Palestine, Israel and the Struggle for Water is published by Yale University Press

Books and pictures, of course, but also carpets, chandeliers, barometers, clocks – my god, the clocks. I’ve gone in for ornate gilded mirrors in the past, and wine tables, trench art, late Qing embroidery, Victorian kitchenware, copperplate printing blocks, toy motorbike and sidecars, an invitation to the coronation of George IV, and a massive cast iron radiator cover salvaged from Oldham Town Hall.

I trawl online auction sites as a hobby, and often bid for stuff that I wasn’t looking for, and rarely for anything I need. The family home has filled with objects over the years; some might say overfilled. Old photographs, it is true, make our interiors look quite minimalist.

Freud suggested the collecting habit stems from a desire for order and routine instilled in infancy during potty training. I did briefly become interested in transfer-decorated chamber pots, so he may have had a point, although I do not think of myself as especially anally retentive. My tastes are too eclectic; my obsessions are spontaneous, chaotic, seldom sustained. I am more like a mad old magpie with ADD and a soft spot for almost any shiny old tat. The randomness of it all is an important part of the fun.

I was reassured when I discovered how common my affliction is. The consumer psychologist Russell Belk says the bug infects one in three of us, and theorizes that it is a modern substitute for a primal scavenger hunt. The dopamine hit of a successful auction bid is, I can attest, an addictive, visceral thing. The buzz of winning something is often so great that the actual taking possession of it can be an anticlimax. I imagine that some cavemen secretly preferred hunting woolly mammoths to the tedious business of eating them, too.

The best auction buys act as portals to the forgotten past. In the online era when research is so easy, one can tumble down some very deep rabbit holes indeed. Every old object has a story or tell – or at least, invites us to discover its history, and to fill in the gaps with our imaginations where we can’t. This exercise is irresistible to many, as proved by the success of A History of the World in 100 Objects, a Radio 4 series made in collaboration with the British Museum. First broadcast in 2010, the show soon won an audience of four million. The formula has since been copied by museums all over the world.

I have before me now an object worthy of inclusion in any such project: a large silver coin an inch and a half across, dated 1740, mounted on a chain. A small figure 8 stamped on one face - slightly corroded, rough to the touch, but still perfectly legible - indicates that it is a Spanish dollar worth eight reales: a coin once renowned for its reliably high silver content, much lusted after by pirates operating throughout the Spanish Main. My Spanish dollar, if you haven’t guessed, is none other than (and better known as) a ‘piece of eight’, as immortalized by Long John Silver’s parrot in Treasure Island.

The assay mark on mine shows it was struck in Mexico City, the oldest mint in the Americas, which produced eight-real coins for three and a half centuries. Spain’s empire was already past its peak by the 1740s, but it still controlled immense amounts of territory, including the world’s most productive ever silver mines. And as the design of my coin shows, it maintained a global vision to match.

The obverse displays the coat of arms of Philip V, ‘King of Spain and of the Indies.’ The reverse bears two crowned globes, representing the old and new worlds, beneath the unifying motto UTRAQUE UNUM: the two are one. The globes are framed by pillars, for which reason this coin was also sometimes known as the pillar dollar; they represent the Pillars of Hercules, the classical symbol for the Straits of Gibraltar, once considered the edge of the known world, and are wrapped in banners bearing another national motto, PLUS ULTRA: Further Beyond.

Though much prized by collectors, my coin is not rare. So many were struck that the Spanish dollar became the world’s first truly international currency. It may literally be the forerunner of the modern US dollar: the $ symbol is said by some to derive from the banners that wrap in an S-shape around those pillars. No numismatist disputes that the term ‘two bits’, American slang for the 25¢ coin known as a quarter, derives from the custom of clipping the coins into eight wedge-shaped ‘pieces’ in order to create change.

What was going on in 1740 when my coin was struck? Britain was increasingly challenging Spain’s old dominance of the new world, on land as well as at sea. The War of Jenkins’ Ear was under way; Admiral Edward Vernon’s victory at Portobelo in Panama was celebrated at home by the first ever performance of Rule Britannia.

In the same year, a squadron led by Commodore George Anson set out for the Pacific via Cape Horn in a bid to intercept a fabled treasure ship called Nuestra Señora de Covadonga, the so-called ‘Manila galleon’, on its annual trading run from Acapulco to the Philippines. On this occasion the Señora’s cargo included 1,313,843 pieces of eight; the ship was so heavily laden that its captain had removed almost all his cannon to make room for it. The battle to capture it took less than 90 minutes.

Anson sailed home via China, an epic circumnavigation that took five years and, thanks to scurvy, cost the lives of all but 188 of the 1,854 crewmen who set out. The survivors did, at least, return to Portsmouth rich. Anson, now a national hero, wrote a best-selling memoir, was ennobled by George II, and ended up as First Lord of the Admiralty. His personal share of the prize, £91,000, was the equivalent of about £20m today.

His success must have been galling for Philip V, whose country’s economy was unhealthily dependent on silver shipments from the New World. The Royal Treasury routinely operated at a huge deficit, and in 1739, unable to pay the army or the bureaucracy, it went bankrupt. Small wonder perhaps that by 1740 the King was a manic depressive – a disorder that could only be soothed, it was said, by a nightly palace performance of the castrato singer Farinelli.

I wish my piece of eight was from Commodore Anson’s haul, although its actual provenance is almost as thrilling. It came from the hold of the 32-gun Hollandia, a Dutch East Indiaman that ran aground in fog off the Scilly Isles on 13 July 1743. The ship, a new type known as a fluyt, was just ten days into its maiden voyage from Texel to Batavia – modern Jakarta – a trip that usually took at least five months. The crew fired their cannon to alert the locals, but no help came from the shore. All 276 of them drowned, along with 30 passengers.

The ship sank in 30 metres of water where it lay forgotten for more than two centuries. In 1967, however, a solicitor from Golders Green called Rex Cowan decided he would try to find it. His was a classic mid-life crisis: ‘Rex,’ he later said he asked himself, ‘Do you really want to be a middle-aged lawyer, or even an old lawyer? Do you always want to go into the office in a suit and help rich people get richer, or defend a murderer?’

Cowan didn’t know how to dive so he hired a team who did and equipped them with a proton magnetometer, an advanced piece of kit in those days; and in 1971, close to bankruptcy and running out of time, he at last found what he was looking for.

The ensuing salvage operation reads like a Tintin adventure. The whole process lasted a decade, and had to be carried out in secret. Rival treasure hunters set fire to his dive boat and cut the brake cables of his car. Cowan eventually hauled up some 35,000 pieces of eight; at one point, some of this immense booty was hidden in bins in the Cowans’ bedroom.

His decision to sell the treasure was controversial. Some archaeologists accused him of commodifying a human tragedy. But Cowan needed to finance further successful salvage operations, off the Scilly Isles, the Orkneys, and the Netherlands. He did not, at any rate, go back to soliciting. He became the country’s most successful inshore wreck salvager, and a magistrate, and sat for 23 years on the government’s Advisory committee on Historic Wreck Sites; he died last year aged 97.

Cowan once explained that he did what he did not for financial gain, but to uncover ‘lost voices coming from the sea’. I don’t hear anything when I put my coin up to my ear, but I know just what he meant. And it thrills me that this sliver of South American silver is still tradeable, and still changing hands after so many years.

THERE can’t be many readers my age who don’t miss milk deliveries. The electric whirr of those hook-nosed white and orange floats, the rattle of bottles in their crates, the jaunty whistle of the milkie at the garden gate: all were once part of the soundtrack to daily British life.

Doorstep delivery reached its peak in the 1970s, when 95 per cent of households received their milk this way, just as they had done since the first electric milk float made its round in 1932. Small wonder that milkmen – and they were almost always men – remain so deeply embedded in the national psyche.

Because the job brought them into contact with bored housewives – and thus opportunities for philandering – the milkman became a staple of smutty ’70s comedies. Brendan Price and Diana Dors starred in an atrocious 1975 film called The Amorous Milkman (‘Randy milkman Davey ends up delivering more than pints of milk on his round!’).The Two Ronnies had a sketch called The Seduced Milkmen. Only Fools and Horses, The Dick Emery Show, Benny Hill and even Father Ted all flogged the same horse.

My preferred cultural reference point is the track that launched Billy Bragg’s career in 1983, which cheerfully borrows from Lady Macbeth:

If you’re lonely, I will call
If you’re poorly, I will send poetry

I love you

I am the milkman of human kindness
I will leave an extra pint

In the 1990s, however, with the demise of the Milk Marketing Board and the transition to a free market, the home delivery business began to collapse. Supermarket competition, better and bigger home fridges, and Tetra Pak cartons that made glass bottles redundant all played a role. By the early 2000s, milkmen were going the way of the rag and bone men and itinerant knife grinders that I just remember from my London childhood. Milk delivery felt quaint, an anachronism; the very word ‘float’ is a carryover from the 19^th century. (A float was a type of horse-drawn cart with a lowered axle designed to prevent milk churns from tipping).

But then came Covid, when home delivery was suddenly useful again – and the milkies were reprieved. Their service was an eco-friendly one, ahead of its time. Today’s consumers appreciate the recycling, and welcome the chance to support a local business – enough, anyway, not to begrudge the 30 per cent premium they pay over supermarket prices. There are at least 3,000 milkmen and women still working today, delivering 500 million litres a year: about three per cent of the market, enough to fill 200 Olympic swimming pools (or, if you prefer, the equivalent of one minute of the Victoria Falls in spate).

Here in central Edinburgh we are among the lucky three per cent. Visitors from elsewhere go teary-eyed when they spot the bottle holder by my door. For the last five years our milk has been delivered twice a week by McQueens Dairies, a third-generation family business that began with a single round in St Andrews thirty years ago. We get our eggs from McQueens, too.

It’s hard to say if this renaissance will be sustained. I enjoy being smug, but in truth our deliveries have not always gone smoothly. Our first milkman must have been a trainee or something, because twice in the first week we heard a crash of glass in the small hours, to be followed at breakfast time by a puddle of milk on the doorstep and an apology note. A butter-fingered milkman! The comic potential seemed so great that I told my nephew Ollie, who is trying to make it in stand-up.

The deliveries settled down, but not for long. Supporting the local economy is one thing; feeding the local birdlife is quite another. No-one minds a bluetit pecking the tinfoil now and again, but in Edinburgh we have seagulls.

These crafty marauders are said to have been driven inland by declining fish stocks in the Firth of Forth. Some, like Larus Marinus, the great black-back, are truly fearsome: the largest gull species in the world. A big male can weigh more than five pounds, with a wingspan of five foot seven. They also come armed with a beak like an upturned bowie knife, curved at the tip, three inches long. And they have serious attitude. Never mind bottle tops: these killers can make confetti out of an eggbox.

I dealt with that problem by leaving out an old biscuit tin marked EGGS, but that eventually attracted marauders of a different kind: three lads out on the lash one Friday night, who simply walked off with it. Presumably they were hoping to find a set of door keys. This occurred just as my friend Simon was coming up the front steps.

‘Those neds,’ he said, ‘just nicked your egg tin. Shall we go and have a word?’

Si always had chutzpah. That evening, unusually, he was wearing an eyepatch. I unwisely followed him to the local corner shop, where we found two of the tin thieves distracting the salesman while the third stuffed the inside of his hoodie with stolen packs of crisps. They were not best pleased by the interruption, which forced their exit to the street, where we again confronted them, and I demanded the return of my tin.

These boys were man-children, perhaps 17 years old, but one of them, I realised too late, was huge, and correspondingly uncowed.

‘I knaw whaur yer tin is,’ said one of his spotty-faced sidekicks. ‘Thar it goes, awa’ tae the dump, look!’

He giggled like a hyena as we all turned to watch a Biffa lorry slowly vanishing around the corner. The big lad, finding my tin empty, had evidently tossed it into a nearby (and just emptied) wheelie bin. Now he took a step towards me, sneering. I took a step back, wondering if I was about to become a knife crime statistic. But Si magically saved me.

‘Lads, lads,’ he drawled, lifting his eyepatch with a flourish and pulling down one eyelid, ‘do you see this?’

The three of them stared, rooted to the spot. Si’s eye was an awesome sight, a reddened, suppurating mess, bulging in its socket.

‘Whit’s that?’ said hyena boy, aghast.

‘I’m afraid it’s cancer,’ growled Si.

‘Cancer? Yer jokin’.

‘Are ye alright?’ said the third.

‘Well… you know,’ said Si.

This was delivered with just the right mixture of bravado and grace. With human contact established, the possibility of violence evaporated, and the trio soon melted away.

Si was not, in fact, alright. The cancer spread and he died within the year, in early 2022 – although not before I shared with him the surprising end to the story. One morning a fortnight later I opened the front door to find another biscuit tin, a flowery yellow one filled to the brim with two dozen eggs, and a note inside, laboriously printed in pencil with many crossings-out. It read:

Dear Sir,

my mum asked

me to xxxxxxxx to xxx to

say sorry.

you my friends

and me were

wrong. heres a new

tin. love

I’ve been thinking about that note this week, and of Si, because those original pirates, the seagulls, are back. They always migrate into town to nest in Spring, but seem more aggressive and brazen this year than ever. Edinburgh’s flat tenement roofs make good substitutes for their natural clifftop roosts – and McQueens Dairies are their Deliveroo.

The milkmen come so early that I never see them, but I suspect that we do not always get the same one down our street. One of them, anyway, keeps forgetting to put my eggs in the (now rusty) yellow tin. The gulls have had’em for two weeks in a row now. After the last delivery they also overturned a bottle, adding milk to the mess on the doorstep, which sunshine has turned into a kind of stovetop; it looks as though someone has been making scrambled eggs and not done the washing up.

This morning, therefore, I reluctantly cancelled all deliveries until further notice. I might restart them after the summer, by when the gulls should have headed back out to sea. Then again, I might not. There’s no denying that buying eggs and milk from Sainsburys would prevent a lot of hassle. Nostalgia will make me put up with a lot, but there are limits.

People may care about the environment but don’t necessarily want to read about it. The narrative is depressing, the science is confusing or dull, and the problems only ever seem to get worse. My agent warned me that my last book, about water shortage in the Middle East, would be a hard sell – and he was right. We stick our heads in the sand, or vote Green in the hope that someone else will do something about it, and move on.

Still: the CCC’s assessment that the UK ‘was built for a climate that no longer exists,’ rang a bell with me. My terraced house, on the edge of Edinburgh’s New Town, was built in 1821, at the tail end of the Little Ice Age when temperatures averaged at least a degree less than now.

It isn’t quite the outlier it sounds. Britain’s housing stock is the oldest in Europe, nearly a quarter of it built before World War One. Old houses tend to be poorly insulated; they leak heat in winter, overheat in the summer. Since 2013, various government schemes have led to the upgrade of around 2.8m properties, but that is still only about ten per cent of the national total: not nearly enough, says the CCC, if we are to survive the future.

My house is not among the upgraded. Its high ceilings are lovely, as are its huge sash windows, but those desirable period features come at a price. I am not pleading fuel poverty, exactly, but my heating bills are huge.

It was not always thus. The Georgians heated their homes with locally mined coal. It was cheap and plentiful: in 1830, the city burned about a thousand tons of it a day. Even so, they did not waste it. The central hall and staircase of my house, which relies for light on a cupola with a centimetre gap around its base to prevent condensation, was never intended to be heated. People stayed warm by huddling around the fireplaces within each room, and keeping doors shut. (When a fire burned out, the ash was swept from the grate and dumped in the attic – pneumoconiosis be damned – to improve insulation. I know this because the ash is still there).

The pollution was so awful that country folk nicknamed Edinburgh Auld Reekie. Open coal fires were not fully banned until the 1990s, when the city became a Smoke Control Zone. My house was converted to gas central heating earlier, in the 1970s, when most of the fireplaces were boarded up and radiators were installed throughout, including in the draughty hall, which seems profligate now. The price of gas in real terms has quadrupled since the ’70s. It’s been years since I turned on my hall radiators, therefore. I badger the children to keep the doors shut every winter, and then we migrate from room to room, just as we would have done 200 years ago. O tempora, o mores! My home is a monument to a past that has receded as surely as the Little Ice Age.

The CCC worries more about future heat than the cold. It says that 90 per cent of British homes, new ones as well as the older kind, are prone to overheat in hot summers, with consequences for the sick or elderly that can be fatal. In July 2022, when temperatures in southern England rose above 40C, an excess 3,000 people died. And yet such heatwaves are expected to be routine by 2050.

Here in Edinburgh, hotter summers sometimes seem quite an attractive proposition. The city is unlikely ever to experience the extreme temperatures of the south. Our all-time high of 31C was set in July 2022, which was nine degrees cooler than the London record that was set at the same time.

Improbable as it sounds, a significant number of visitors now come to Scotland for the weather. That is partly why Edinburgh’s tourist numbers are at a record high, with over five million visitors last year: easily the most visited city in Britain, after London. The European Travel Commission recently found that 28 per cent of European holidaymakers specifically seek out cooler destinations in order to avoid the southern summer heat - a trend that Conde Nast Traveller calls ‘coolcationing’.

Climate change doesn’t just mean more Scottish sunshine, unfortunately. As any roofer or slater will tell you, Edinburgh already receives about ten per cent more winter rainfall than it did thirty years ago, and an increasing proportion of it is falling in short, heavy bursts. My house’s old iron downpipes are simply too narrow to cope with the new volume. On two occasions, so much rainwater has backed up in the roof gutters that it has overtopped the lead flashing, leading to spectacular flooding in the upstairs front bedroom.

The CCC says the UK must start to think like a hot a country, and is calling for air-conditioning to be installed in all care homes and hospitals within the next ten years, among other measures.

I certainly need to future-proof my home: bigger downpipes, better insulation, perhaps even a different method of heating it. I have considered installing solar panels on the roof, which would be perfect for it, being double-pitched and south-east facing, but I am forbidden from doing so by Edinburgh’s powerful conservationist lobby. The New Town is a Unesco world heritage site, and the roofline’s appearance is sacrosanct. The Council gets shirty if one paints a front door a shade other than ‘black, a rich dark, or another muted historic colour’.

The CCC concludes that at present, none of our national climate change adaptation plans is fit for purpose: not one of them.

It feels a peculiarly British failing. It is not just our housing stock that hasn’t pace with change. Our whole national mindset sometimes feels attuned to a world that no longer exists. We cling to our exceptionalism (We invented football! Our language is the world’s lingua franca! Britannia ruled the world!) while struggling to adapt to the new realities or, worse, ignoring them altogether and trapping ourselves in the past.

Brexit, to me, is the clearest example. In a world rapidly herding into trade blocs and strategic alliances, and increasingly controlled by autocrats, we thought we were special and strong enough to go it alone. How on earth was that ever going to work in our favour? The Remainer principle of Better Together has persuaded a majority of the public, yet still our leaders dither. Streeting says yes, Burnham says no, and Britain’s paralysis continues.

But that is a topic for another column. Meanwhile I will go on living in my badly insulated, barely waterproof museum piece of a house. I suppose I could always charge tourists a fee to come in and look at it.

James Fergusson’s In Search of the River Jordan: A Story of Palestine, Israel and the Struggle for Water (2023) is published by Yale University Press

CAN anyone please explain why Iran shouldn’t have the bomb?

‘The only thing that matters, when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon,’ says Trump, over and over like a mantra, until it has become a kind of article of faith that no-one, including otherwise critical European leaders, seems able or willing to challenge. But if nukes really are the main casus belli, doesn’t the lack of debate seem extraordinary?

It would be better, of course, if Iran didn’t have the bomb. The world would be safer if no-one did. But the fact is that Iran’s opponents do, Israel as well as America. The Saudis, too, have expressed an interest in developing one since 2018. The balance of power in the Middle East has long been out of whack. The thought is counter-intuitive, but might not an Iranian bomb help restore that balance, and bring a new stability to the world’s most volatile region?

The nuclear arms race after World War Two was scary, but the fear of MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – did mean that the Cold War remained cold for almost half a century. Even at its tensest moments, such as the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962, the two sides stepped back from the brink. Why couldn’t the same apply in the modern Middle East?

This was precisely the argument made by the now-forgotten American political scientist, Kenneth Waltz (1924-2013), in a famous 1981 essay, Nuclear Weapons: More is Better. While acknowledging the potential risk of allowing the global nuclear stockpile to grow, Waltz thought that the benefit outweighed it in Iran’s case, and that the prize of mutual deterrence in the region could be worth it.

He was no warmonger, but a vocal critic of the US wars in Vietnam and Iraq. He was no armchair theorist, either. As a veteran of the Pacific War against the Japanese, as well as of the Korean War, he experienced the horrors of modern conflict for himself – unlike President Bone Spurs. Right up until he died, Waltz argued that Israel’s ‘nuclear monopoly’ had fuelled instability in the Middle East, and that a nuclear Iran would restore what he called a ‘balance of terror’.

Such arguments are not much heard in Washington these days, nor anywhere else. Trump’s adamance to the contrary is based on the notion – repeated this week in his audience with Xi Jinping – that the regime in Tehran is ‘a little bit crazy’, and therefore can’t be trusted with the solemn responsibility of nuclear weapon ownership.

Pot, kettle, black, critics might say. Trump has raised the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Iran at the Pentagon. It was he, not Mojtaba Khamenei, who posted on Truth Social last month that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.’

To be fair, the Iranian regime is not uncrazy. It violently suppresses its internal critics, and is horribly careless with the lives of innocents. Its leaders are, as Trump says, a ‘vicious group of very hard, terrible people’ – and paranoid, to boot. In 2007, intelligence officials reportedly detained 14 squirrels near the Natanz nuclear facility, alleging they were carrying spy cameras. In 2018 a senior general, Hassan Firouzabadi, advised the Supreme Leader that ‘foreign enemies’ had deployed ‘special lizards’ with skin capable of attracting ‘atomic waves’ that allowed them to gather data on the nation’s uranium mines.

Yet the leadership does not, as a rule, think or behave so irrationally. It is true that the concept of martyrdom is central to Iran’s brand of Shia Islam, but that does not mean the ayatollahs are themselves suicidal. On the contrary, preserving the regime is one of their guiding principles – and a very successfully applied one, considering their Revolution has survived for 47 years. Their strategic thinking, in other words, is anything but crazy.

Their present defence strategy turns out to have been more carefully and intelligently prepared than America or even Israel expected. The allies’ ‘decapitation’ of the regime has merely strengthened the hand of the IRGC, while the dispersed nature of Iran’s command and control centres has made them unexpectedly resilient to attack. According to the latest US intelligence, Iran retains up to 70 per cent of its pre-war ballistic missile stockpile, and 60 per cent of its launchers. Despite everything, the Strait of Hormuz remains under their control.

None of this suggests a state heading off the rails. Besides: even if Iran had the bomb, under what possible circumstances, other than in retaliation against a first strike, would they ever use it? They know what MAD means. Iran’s greatest enemy, Israel, is thought to possess at least 90 warheads, deliverable by air, land or sea. Launched from their base at Sdot Micha, and travelling at over 15,000mph, Israel’s Jericho III missiles would reach Tehran within ten minutes.

In any case, Iran has ways of exerting leverage over its opponents that are cheaper, less risky, and available now. The regime has long projected its influence abroad through proxies: Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis. Now, in the age of drones, they have found a more direct way of coercing the neighbours. Shutting down the Strait of Hormuz is not the half of it. With their attacks on the Gulf states’ uniquely vulnerable desalination plants, Iran has already shown that it is capable of rendering swathes of Arabia physically uninhabitable without any recourse to nuclear war.

We all ought to keep in mind what led to President Truman’s decision to bomb Japan in August 1945. I have recently been reading Saul David’s account of the battle for Okinawa, a small island half way between Taiwan and Japan. America’s capture of it cost 240,000 lives, half of them civilians. David’s book is called, without much hyperbole, Crucible of Hell. Yet the next stage of the US campaign, planned for November 1945, would have been worse: the invasion of Japan proper, which was predicted to cost more than a million lives.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki obviated that sacrifice. Asked in 1985 if he would do it again, Lieutenant Jacob Beser, the radar operator onboard Enola Gay, had no doubt. ‘If you take the highest figures for both cities, say, 300,000 combined casualties… versus a million, I’m sorry to say, it’s a good trade-off.’

Remember that despite Trump’s claims of an ‘imminent’ threat, Iran does not actually have the bomb. Its ability to build one is also in question, dependent as this on its enriched uranium, a significant portion of which has been buried under rubble since America bombed it last year.

Iran may not, ultimately, even want to build a bomb. It may want the world to believe it could – but that is a different thing. After all, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons in 2003 - a fatwa that remains in place, despite Western scepticism. The state’s centralized weaponization program formally ended at the same time, fully 23 years ago.

In short, Trump’s given reason for war against Iran doesn’t bear scrutiny. It certainly isn’t comparable to Pearl Harbour, to which he alluded, with a gaucheness unusual even for him, in a meeting with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in March. But even if it were true, and Tehran was about to develop a bomb: so what?

To repeat: the Cold War remained a cold war for half a century. The deterrent effect of MAD demonstrably works. And Kenneth Waltz may have had a point when he argued the path to peace in the Middle Peace could be nuclear-armed.

Here in Edinburgh NE and Leith, Gus and Mary, respectively 17 and 18, will be exercising their democratic privilege for the first time.

I’d like to be able to report that all is excitement in the house. They understand the importance of Scottish parliamentary elections. But, honestly, I cannot. They have, to be fair, been revising at the kitchen table this past fortnight, for exams that will determine their choice of university. Yet it is striking how they do yet know where they will put their crosses.

In this constituency, at least, their uncertainty feels typical. No-one I ask seems to have any clear preference; most only say who they don’t want. That is probably why the race to represent us at the Scottish Parliament looks so tight, with the candidates for the Greens and Labour both polling within a percentage point of the incumbent, the SNP’s Ben Macpherson.

Reform are naturally trailing badly in Edinburgh, a city proud of its liberal heritage, but it is a different story in Scotland overall, where the party are projected to win as many as 23 seats, in second place behind the SNP.

This will come as a shock to Scots if it happens. Reform, the party of Brexit, still feels like a little Englander party; its heart is in Kent, not Kirkcaldy. The Scots have long voted to their own tune, not least in the referendum on Brexit. How could this happen?

One answer is disgruntlement, as in England, with all politicians: 38 per cent of Scots are say they ‘politically disaffected’, according to a poll for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and some may be willing to give any new party a whirl.

A related reason is voter apathy. Turnout tomorrow is expected to be 40 per cent, ten per cent lower than the last Scottish Parliament election in 2021. This would be to Reform’s great advantage, because Scotland’s list voting system uses a complicated proportional representation formula that favours parties with the least chance of winning via first-past-the post – a weighting that proportionally increases as overall turnout falls.

This matters. Reform Scotland is no different from the party south of the border in the way it stirs up antipathy towards foreigners. It matters particularly in a city Edinburgh, which at the last census in 2022 was revealed to be the most ethnically diverse city in Scotland. (One in four Edinburgh residents was born outside the UK, compared to one in five in Glasgow).

The day after a stabbing incident in Wester Hailes in March, Malcolm Offord, Reform’s leader in Scotland, linked the attack to ‘a massive insurge of immigrants and illegal immigrants’, a comment that he later explained was based on a photograph of the attacker that he had seen, and a conversation with a local taxi driver. But what does the attacker’s migrant status have to do with what happened? One doesn’t have to look far for a more plausible explanation: Mustafa Kokoneh (a British citizen since 2019, it turns out) is currently being held pending trial at Carstairs high security psychiatric hospital.

The Reform Party deny they are xenophobes. And yet cheap jingoism is official policy. Two weeks ago, on St George’s Day, Suella Braverman unveiled a ‘Patriotic Schools Initiative’. Writing in the Daily Telegraph she explained how, under Reform, all schools would be obliged to display a portrait of the king, and to fly the Union Flag (alongside, in Scotland, the Saltire): ‘not hidden away. Not treated as controversial, but displayed with pride.’ Funding, she added, would be provided for flagpoles.

Braverman also proposes an overhaul of the curriculum, one that teaches ‘the full richness of British history… not a myopic one focused on the “evils of the empire” or how our flag is “racist”. No, we will teach our kids an honest account of a country that has done more good than almost any other.’

Braverman’s Britain is reminiscent of North Korea, another country where schools must display portraits of the head of state, and where the national narrative has also been hijacked by ideologues.

Reform are of course not the first right-wingers anxious to meddle in schools. In East Birmingham in 2014, Muslim-dominated state schools were accused of covertly radicalising their pupils, right under the noses of Ofsted. The allegation was wholly unfounded, but the so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ affair caused moral panic in Whitehall. Schools were closed, teachers were sacked, and the education of hundreds of mostly poor Muslim children was disastrously interrupted.

The Conservative Education Secretary, Michael Gove, insisted that British schools would henceforth have to promote what the Home Office still calls ‘Fundamental British Values’: the importance of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance.

I was researching my book Al Britannia, My Country in those days, during which I visited dozens of schools. Their headmasters universally loathed the government’s interference. David Elstone, the head of a private secondary school in Hull – a school with ‘many Iraqis, Iranians, Turks… lots of recent refugees’ – was typical.

‘We’ve got to teach the children British values,’ he said, ‘but what are these, and how different are they from anyone else’s? A friend of mine, the head of a school in Durham, got inspected recently. He passed, but the inspector said, “Your pupils aren’t using the right language… I didn’t hear them using the world tolerance.” I mean – are the Home Office going to control the language we teachers use? I heard it on good authority that [the then Home Secretary] Theresa May wants the school day to end with us all singing to the flag. I mean, how much division is that going to cause? I thought “live and let live” was the whole point of British values.’

Suella Braverman, another ex-Conservative, ex-Home Secretary, is the natural heir to those Cameron-era neo-cons. Al Britannia, a survey of British Islam, was conceived partly as a rebuttal of the wilder claims of the populist right, at a time when Muslims were under unprecedented collective scrutiny following the rise of Al Qaida, Isis, and a decade of terror attacks across the West.

Nigel Farage claimed that parts of urban Britain were so Islamicised that they had become ‘no-go’ areas for the police. I looked everywhere, and found no such places. He also claimed that in some communities, British law had been supplanted by Sharia. I attended a Sharia tribunal and learned that this was nonsense, too. And much else besides.

Scotland once knew how to deal with the dog whistlers of the right. In 2013, when Nigel Farage led UKIP and attempted to launch that party’s campaign in Scotland, he had to be evacuated from the Royal Mile in a police riot van.

In 2007, following a failed Islamist suicide attack on Glasgow airport, First Minister Alex Salmond went straight to the Central Mosque where, against the wishes of the Home Office in London, he made a point of revealing that the perpetrators were outsiders.

‘Sometimes you’ve got to get across the road and give them a hug, he told me. ‘Meeting them half way isn’t always enough.’

He made the display of public solidarity even more explicit soon after, when he ordered that the ‘Welcome to Scotland’ sign at the airport be changed to incorporate a large photograph of a young Asian draped in the Saltire.

I know what version of Scotland I prefer. It amazes me that the message of Al Britannia still needs repeating, yet it does, as urgently as ever.

Can Scotland be saved from itself? The election tomorrow should not be about who can fix potholes. The most important thing, to my mind, is to keep Reform as far from power as possible.

Gus and Mary, who have been taught in MODS classes how our electoral system works, understand that not voting increases the likelihood of letting Farage’s mob slip into Holyrood by the back door.

So it doesn’t matter who you vote for on the peach-coloured list ballot, so long as it isn’t for Reform – and so long as you vote.

Al Britannia, My Country: A Journey Through Muslim Britain (2017) is published by Bantam Press

I WATCHED my daughter Amelia run the London Marathon last weekend, roaring her on from the Victoria Embankment. She hit The Wall early and threw up as she crossed Tower Bridge, but still finished in four hours 23, which is to say, half an hour faster than my own running time 21 years ago.

Amelia was five weeks old then, but she was there in the Embankment crowd, strapped to her mother Melou. So this was, technically, her second London Marathon. Melou died of cancer five years ago. Amelia was running for Worldwide Cancer Research, for which she raised an impressive £3,700. The symmetry was pleasing, and moving, and of course I couldn’t be prouder of Amelia. The generations passeth. In another twenty years, perhaps I will come to the same spot to watch a grandchild run.

What an extraordinary festival of humanity this event has become. The first London Marathon in 1981 attracted a mere 7,000 participants. This year there were a record 59,830 finishers, cheered on by an estimated 800,000 spectators. It is the largest and most popular such event in the world.

There is something wondrous about being part of such an immense mass of people: a levelling, humbling, humanizing experience, despite the enforced embrace of the collective, and the sublimation of the self. SW1 was certainly no place for enochlophobes last Sunday. The crowds reminded me of a vast swarm of insects. (I have just been reading Laline Paull’s novel, The Bees). Westminster buzzed and hummed; all normal traffic, even Lime bikes, were driven out of our temporary hive.

Watching the runners is mesmerising, like gazing at a river, a view that is constantly changing and yet, paradoxically, always the same. Every runner’s body shape is different, like fingerprints, and every gait is unique: some bounce, some glide, some limp. The sensory input can be overwhelming – dizzying, even.

The biomass alone is impressive. If the average adult weighs 62 kilos, 60,000 runners weigh 3,720 tons, about the weight of 35 blue whales. I thought about how everyone jumping at the same time is supposed to cause an earthquake; I recalled that sign on Albert Bridge that orders troops to break step when marching across it to prevent mechanical resonance. The Marathon lends itself to such musings.

I became obsessed with the runners’ shoes: much in the news this year because the new sub-two hour record holder, Sabastian Sawe, was wearing the latest Adidas supershoe, the Adizero Adio Pro Evo 3 (RRP: £450). Emerson said that ‘when you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the shoe leather has passed into the fiber of your body.’ So perhaps it is a good thing that Marathon runners spend so much on footwear: an average of £215 each, reportedly, or £13m in total, this year alone.

My spot on the Victoria Embankment is far along the route, almost at Mile 25, which makes it an excellent place from which to watch. By this stage, a great many runners have the haunted expressions of the heroically exhausted. Some wear their pain and suffering like martyrs’ badges of honour. More than one heavily built man jogged by with his chest stained with blood; experienced runners know to tape their nipples over with zinc tape to prevent chafing.

Every runner has their story. The banal and the epic, the comic and tragic, side by side and over and over, multiple vignettes of life of itself. Across the road I saw a young woman fall into the arms of her spectating mother – and then properly collapse, a blubbering heap trembling in the gutter. She could run no further, and was wheeled away by St John’s ambulancemen.

She was perhaps a modern Pheidippides, a professional courier who ran to Athens in 490BC to announce the Greeks’ victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon. ‘Vενικήκαμεν,’ he cried, ‘Nenikēkamen! We have won!’ before falling down dead from exhaustion. Pheidippides naturally did not have the benefit of supershoes, and had probably completed the course barefoot – unless he was wearing sandals, which one imagines would chafe a lot - although it was probably not that but heat stroke that killed him. (The Battle of Marathon was fought in September, when local temperatures reach 30C. Perhaps that explains why, in Luc-Olivier Merson’s 1869 painting, Pheidippides is completely naked).

Marathon to Athens is 25 miles, the distance that Olympic athletes ran until 1908. In that year, when the Games were held in London, the route was extended to 26.2 miles at the request of Queen Alexandra, who wanted the race to start at Windsor Castle and finish in front of the Royal Box at White City Stadium. The torture of the modern marathon’s final mile is her fault, therefore; knackered runners are justified in cursing her name as they pass Buckingham Palace at the start of the final straight.

I know I did. Amelia’s birth in 2005 played havoc with my training program, which effectively stopped a month too early. I wasn’t fit enough on Raceday, and from the half-way point I began to wind down like a spring. The fancy-dress brigade, the nutcases dressed as fridges and rhinoceroses and Cornish pasties, soon began to catch me up. By the time I reached the Embankment I was barely moving at all – and was in fact overtaken by a speed-walking Charlie Chaplin, complete with spinning cane and clown boots on his out-turned feet, who politely raised his hat as he passed.

There was another low moment when I was overtaken by a man dressed as a New York taxi, with about ten feet of black and yellow foam bouncing from his shoulders. I salvaged some pride on The Mall where, still execrating Queen Alexandra, I found a last teacup of energy to pip Yoda from Star Wars to the finishing line.

At the end of her race, Amelia met an ex-soldier who had completed the course in a wheelchair – an ordinary NHS one, not one of those carbon-fibre three-wheelers. His hands were so blistered they resembled balloons. ‘They’re nothing compared to what my mate’s feeling,’ he said. He explained how this mate, who had also competed in an NHS wheelchair, had covered the first 24 miles so quickly that he was on track for a new world record in the standard wheelchair category. (There is one). As he struggled up the Blackfriars Bridge underpass, however, an able-bodied runner spontaneously helped him with a push – an act of kindness that immediately nullified his record attempt.

The human body is surely not designed for such punishment. Even the pros sometimes break: witness Eilish McColgan, the Commonwealth 10,000m champion, who finished this year with one shoe soaked in blood. ‘Not long after halfway, I had a really, really bad blister and it sounds strange saying it but the only way I can really describe it is that it felt like my foot exploded,’ she said.

It may be hard for non-runners to understand why people do it, but I think I do: the fun and laughter, the jeopardy and the drama; the endorphins and adrenalin, personal challenges overcome; the human impulse to flock together, the celebration of movement and energy almost for its own sake; the joy, in short, of being alive. There is also the satisfaction of raising so much for good causes and the less fortunate: more than £95m in 2026, another record in a multi-record-breaking year, when more than 1.1m people applied to take part.

One of Amelia’s high points was encountering a runner dressed as Daddy Pig, widely rumoured to be Harry Styles in disguise, accompanied by the fitness coach Joe Wicks. Of course she took a selfie.

Long live the London Marathon.

A fascinating collection of Chinese propaganda posters came up at my local Edinburgh auction house this weekend, from the times of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, 1966-76.

As the Iran crisis turns traditionally isolationist China into the world’s peace broker (once the role of America, now emphatically vacated), what might they tell us about the way the Chinese once saw outsiders – and perhaps still do?

My favourite poster (above) was most likely produced in the early 1970s to mark International Workers Day, a major national holiday in China, then as now. The caption, helpfully translated in the auction catalogue, reads ‘Long Live the Great Unity of People all over the World’; and there is no doubt that the wholesome smiling figures it portrays, one of them with a pickaxe over his shoulder, are the Proletariat. Worker solidarity against foreign imperialism was a central tenet of Maoist ideology.

An official poster, then. Yet the characters it portrays are weirdly unrepresentative of the citizens of the Earth. Just four of the thirty-strong crowd are identifiably women. There is only one black person, and perhaps three brown people. Four of the front row could be Chinese; the man with the sash around his waist might be from the Balkans; the one in a thobe, keffiyeh and sunglasses is obviously a Gulf Arab. For the most part, though, it is difficult to say where they are supposed to be from.

These are theoretical, generic Johnny Foreigners. Visually, it is not racial differences that most clearly unify these happy Marxists so much as… their teeth. Every mouth is gleaming like a toothpaste advert. There’s not a filling among them. Perhaps the poster’s creator had a Martin Amis-style fear of dentists, and wanted to expunge all need for them from his private PRC utopia. More likely, though, is that the artist had only a vague idea of what foreigners looked like, and was making it up.

China under Mao was isolated to an extent difficult to conceive in today’s internet age. Ordinary citizens did not travel abroad. The mass media, such as it existed, was tightly state-controlled, and purged of any foreign ideology, including imagery, that might contaminate the purity of revolutionary thought. For source material, artists had little choice but to turn to their own imaginations.

There is perhaps another, more sinister explanation for the poster’s blandness, which is that celebrating foreignness too much, or favouring one type of foreigner over another, could be construed as politically suspect; and that, in Mao’s China, could be extremely dangerous.

Mao distrusted all foreigners, not just bourgeois western capitalists. When Kruschev renounced Stalinism in favour of peaceful co-existence with the West, Mao denounced him as a ‘revisionist traitor’. In 1969, border disputes in Manchuria and Xinjiang led the communist superpowers to the brink of war. Another poster in the auction (pictured) points to how close a conflagration really was.

It is easy to forget or ignore the barbarity of the Cultural Revolution, and how shockingly recently it occurred. The number of ‘bad elements’ who were ‘purged’ in Mao’s Red Terror may have reached two million. In the southern Guangxi province, most notoriously, an estimated 150,000 people were massacred using methods that included disembowelment, boiling, and burying them alive. Even more nightmarishly it is reliably reported that several hundred people were eaten, sometimes at public barbecues sponsored by the CCP. The revolution literally ate itself.

The paranoia and fear engendered by so dark a national experience took decades to fade – if, indeed, it will ever be truly forgotten by the descendants of those who went through it. To the ordinary Chinese who survived Maoism, foreigners remained as exotic and potentially dangerous as Martians. Things began to change in the late 70s under the modernizing Deng Xiaoping, whose reforms included opening China up, tentatively, to tourism.

I was one of those early tourists: a closely guided school trip in 1982, when I was 15 and a half. Beijing in those days is still one of the most alien places I have ever been. Everyone wore Mao suits in either green or blue. There were almost no cars, only vast traffic jams of Flying Pigeon bicycles, whose riders ignored the frantic whistles of white-gloved policemen perched on stands at the major junctions.

We schoolboys were the first non-Chinese people that most of them had ever seen, and attracted crowds wherever we went. (We didn’t exactly try to blend in. I recall wearing an armless t-shirt featuring a close-up face of the punk diva Siouxsie Sioux). We were issued with special tourist money, which we were encouraged to spend in shops reserved for foreigners: dull, empty places that sold dusty cans of Coke for a dollar, about China’s average daily wage.

One day I approached a peanut seller, an old woman who filled little paper cones from a giant sack on the pavement next to her. A crowd instantly gathered. The tourist money banknotes were tiny, with denominations written solely in Chinese. I proffered what seemed to be the smallest one, and motioned at the peanuts. The old woman looked back in outright terror, dropped all her paper cones, and began pushing forward the entire sack, which must have weighed a hundred kilos.

Mao did not invent Chinese xenophobia. The ‘ourselves alone’ principle, the idea that China does best with the least possible foreign input or interaction, dates back at least to the 15^th century, when the Han Ming emperors applied a policy of haijin, literally a ‘sea ban’ on private foreign trade.

Things have obviously changed since. In 2025, and in spite of US tariffs, China reported a trade surplus of almost $1.2trillion, the largest in history. Meanwhile, a burgeoning middle class is travelling abroad more than ever before: a reported 54 million of them in 2024, who spent £209billion. That change is very apparent here in Edinburgh, where tens of thousands of Chinese now visit each year. In the summer, Hainan Airways operates four direct flights per week from Beijing. Foreign visits into China are also at record levels.

The Chinese, in other words, are finally joining the world. Xi Jinping has warned against the isolationism of the past, although he has not entirely embraced its opposite. Old habits die hard. Instead, he has opted for a policy of what he calls ‘defensive self-sufficiency’, a phrase that still evokes Biguan Suoguo, the ‘closed-door’ foreign policy of past centuries.

Even so: the best chance for peace in the Middle East today is a five-point plan promoted, alongside Pakistan, by China. There seems little doubt that Xi’s ‘self-sufficiency’ extends to the protection of vital trade interests abroad, including in the Gulf. Half of China’s energy imports flow through the Strait of Hormuz, after all. The Middle East crisis is visibly drawing his country ever further out of its old isolationist shell.

It feels like an important pivot point. Historians may remember it as the moment that the mantle of world policeman passed definitively from Washington to Beijing. It is the deepest irony that the man who promised to make America great again has started a war that could end up doing just the opposite, while nudging their main rival in the world to a new greatness of their own.

James Fergusson is the author of Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds (Harper Collins 2004)

IMAGINE being one of the 2,200 Marines on board the USS Tripoli, standing off somewhere in the north Arabian Sea, ready for action these last three days now. What anticipation, what dread they must be feeling.

Their Amphibious Ready Group has been at sea for three weeks. OpSec protocol means internet access has been restricted since they left base in Okinawa, so they likely know less than you or I do about what’s really going on in the world. Probably it is just as well. When your commander-in-chief reveals almost daily that he isn’t sure what he attacked Iran for, an intelligent Marine might think twice about laying down their life for this particular mission.

Is Kharg Island oil terminal the target? There will be no element of surprise if so. The media have been wargaming it for weeks. So, apparently, has President Bone Spurs. ‘We could take it very easily,’ he says, with lofty certainty. ‘I don’t think they have any defence.’

The Marines will be hoping this assessment is intelligence-based rather than another of his hunches. Iran has an estimated 600,000 men under arms, with hundreds of thousands more in reserve. Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, Speaker of the Parliament of Iran, says these forces are ‘waiting for the arrival of American troops on the ground to set them on fire’.

Mark Twain said history often rhymes. (As his pen name proves, he knew something about manoeuvring ships in shallow waters!) The USS Tripoli is named in memory of the Battle of Derna in 1805, a famous moment in the First Barbary War between the US and Ottoman Tripolitania, and the first foreign military intervention in US history. The parallels with today’s imbroglio are already striking, and perhaps offer a useful cautionary tale:

With the blessing of Thomas Jefferson, a heavily outnumbered detachment of Marines sought to impose regime change in Tripoli with the aim of protecting international sea lanes from piracy.

Under the command of Lieutenant Willliam Eaton, and in uncertain alliance with Arabs, they marched 600 miles through hostile terrain to attack the port of Derna, which they captured after fierce fighting, aided by superior US naval weaponry. Eaton, though wounded, hoped to push on to Tripoli but was held back at Derna, and six weeks later was ordered to evacuate his hard-won foothold.

On his return to America he was feted as a hero, despite the ambiguity of his victory. Instead of toppling the murderous Karamanli, Washington ended up paying him $60,000 to release the 300-strong crew of the captured USS Philadelphia, a 36-gun frigate that had to be scuttled by fire. The engagement cost the infant republic much in lives and prestige, and did nothing to end the Barbary Wars, which continued for another ten years.

Is the White House paying attention? The signals are not good. The President, to put it mildly, is not a details man, and nor are his representatives. In one recent interview, Trump’s ‘Special Envoy to the Middle East and Special Envoy for Peace Missions’, Steve Witkoff, referred to the Strait of Hormuz as the ‘Gulf of Hormuz’.

British history has an even more relevant lesson to offer: we Limeys know all about storming the Iranian coast. In a surprise dawn assault on 25 August 1941, three imperial British divisions, with air, navy and armoured support, went ashore at the head of the Persian Gulf, and swiftly seized Bandar Shahpur, Khorramshahr, and the important oil refinery at Abadan.

The main objectives were to deny Iran’s oilfields to the Axis powers, and to open a so-called ‘Persian Corridor’, an overland route north along which weapons could be supplied to the Soviet Union in their fight against Nazi Germany. The operation was a success, in part because its goals were limited and so closely defined, unlike Operation Epic Fury’s. The Anglo-Russian occupation of Iran lasted until 1946.

But operational success does not mean that there were no unintended consequences. It was, for one thing, far from bloodless. The British task force was assisted by the Soviets, who attacked Iran at the same time from the north: a much more violent affair that killed hundreds, including an estimated 450 civilians.

Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi had declared his country neutral in 1939, but Britain and Russia ignored this, forced his abdication, and replaced him with a compliant puppet, Reza’s 21-year-old son Mohammad. Later, in the era of Mosaddegh, British and American manipulation of Iran’s oil wealth helped cement Britain’s reputation as a ‘Little Satan’ to America’s ‘Great’ one; but it was Churchill who first embraced the Machiavellian approach.

In his memoirs, Churchill invoked a maxim of Cicero’s, Inter arma silent leges – In times of war, the law falls silent – to justify ‘the exercise of overwhelming force against a weak and ancient state’. It is a justification of which Trump, still blowing hot and cold over the replacement of Ayatollah Khamenei, would no doubt approve.

When Trump recently complained that Keir Starmer was ‘no Churchill’ when he declined to join his naval coalition, the Labour MP Emily Thornberry retorted that Trump was ‘no Roosevelt’ – which is fair. Roosevelt approved the D-Day landings, which were executed out of necessity rather than choice, and were - at least, one hopes - of greater consequence for America than this Iran one of will ever be.

Trump is no Eisenhower, either. The principal architect of D-Day cared about the troops under his command, understood the risks of what he was asking them to do, and insisted on taking specific and personal responsibility in a famous note written before the landings began. ‘If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone,’ it says. Compare that to Trump, who is already denouncing his sycophantic Secretary of War for being gung-ho. If Kharg Island (or wherever) turns into a bloodbath like Omaha Beach, it is clear who will be his scapegoat.

But it won’t work. The lesson of history is that that the buck stops with the Commander-in-Chief. Hubris hangs over the Gulf like smoke from a burning oil refinery. Spare a thought for the poor Marines crammed aboard the USS Tripoli, brooding and anxious as they await their orders to invade.

James Fergusson’s A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (Transworld 2008) was the British Army’s Military Book of the Year

It is eight years since I visited Jalud, a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank, but I recognized it immediately on YouTube last week. Footage showed a car in flames in the little town square, scorch marks around the entrance to the mayor’s office, Star of David graffiti on the walls. In another clip, a phalanx of at least 50 black-clad young men, full of purpose and menace, are seen jogging out of the night towards town: the dreaded Hilltop Youth, the violent vanguard of the Settler movement.

We should be shocked by images like these, but are we? The internet is so flooded with them that they have become clickbait. It’s more than two years since the IDF invaded Gaza, war is still spreading, and one torched Palestinian village looks very like another.

We should all resist the impulse to scroll on, but (I would argue) especially us Brits. As the originators of the Balfour Declaration, the document that led to the establishment of modern Israel, we are more responsible than most for this mess, with a concomitant duty to help clean it up.

But what can Britain do? In the era of Trump and Brexit, our influence on the world is at an all-time low. Our government recognized Palestine as a sovereign state last year – and about time too – but that made zero difference to the settlers, who are more determined than ever to kill off the very possibility of a two-state solution. There are now some 780,000 settlers living in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, occupying so much land that a second, Palestinian state looks a physical impossibility.

With the explicit support of the Netanyahu government, the tacit support of the US, and with the rest of the world distracted by Gaza and Iran, the settlers are now driving Palestinians away and taking over their land faster than ever before. There were a record 1,828 settler attacks across the West Bank last year, and some 37,000 Palestinians were displaced, according to UNOCHA. Their suffering is eclipsed by what has happened to Gazans, but is hardly negligible. Over a thousand West Bank Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, one in five of them children.

Matters were bad enough when I visited Jalud in 2018. The mayor, Abdullah Haj Mohammed, described how only the previous week, local settler youths had crept into town to slash car tires and scrawl propaganda on walls. He had made a point of documenting such incidents, of which there had been so many that he had covered an entire office wall with photographic evidence. His faith in eventual justice was moving. I hoped it wasn’t misplaced.

Jalud is an ancient farming town that has prospered since the 16^thcentury at least. It contains some fine if crumbling buildings from the early Ottoman era, with elegant staircases and high domed ceilings. But longevity counts for little in the 21^st century West Bank. It is Jalud’s great misfortune to be closely surrounded by hilltop settlements, all of them new, all of them built on land that formerly belonged to Jalud. They are collectively known as the ‘daughters of Shiloh’, after the earliest and largest settlement in the area. Amply supplied with water by the IDF, they have sprouted on the hilltops like rhizomes.

Mayor Mohammed led me upstairs to his roof where he pointed them out, contemptuously reeling off their names. We were joined there by half a dozen village men, gnarly old farmers who pulled up their trouser legs or lifted their caps to show me wounds inflicted in past clashes with the hated invaders from up the hill. ‘I’ve still got olives up there,’ said one. ‘The last time I tried to visit them was in 2011. We came back with nineteen injured.’

In 2018, most of these new settlements were considered illegal ‘outposts’ even by the Israeli courts. But that changed last year when three of them were granted formal municipal status. Across the West Bank, some 49 such outposts or settlements have been legalized since 2022. Before then, almost none had been approved since the late 1990s.

The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who himself lives in the illegal settlement of Kedumim, was quite open about why. ‘We are advancing de facto sovereignty on the ground to prevent any possibility of establishing an Arab state in Judea and Samaria,’ he said.

In 1998 Ariel Sharon, a former general who became prime minister, and a noted champion of the settler movement, urged young Israelis to ‘grab the hilltops’. His idea was to drive parallel wedges of control eastwards, advancing like a giant game of Join-the-Dots, with the goal, transparently, of linking up with the already colonised Jordan Valley. Once established, these west-east fingers of highland could be thickened, squeezing out the Arabs who live in the valleys below, until they conjoined to subsume their land.

‘Everyone that’s there should move, should run, should grab more hills, expand the territory,’ Sharon said. ‘Everything that’s grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don’t grab will be in their hands.’

The strategy, unfortunately for Palestinians, is working. Jalud, located south of Nablus in the middle of one of those thickening fingers of land, is in a fight for its very survival. The territory under Mayor Mohammed’s jurisdiction has shrunk to a quarter of what it was thirty years ago. For all the villagers’ steadfastness – a quality much prized by Palestinians, who call it ‘samoud’ – it is hard to see much future for the town.

I did not think it politic to mention to the mayor that, the previous year, I had spent a night in one of the surrounding settlements, posing, with my children, as a family of AirBnB tourists.

Esh Kodesh – the name means Holy Fire – was established in 2000. By the time of my visit it had grown to some 60 families, most with a great many young children. The settlers take seriously their mission to repopulate their Promised Land. They were living in crowded caravans and pre-fabs, from which rock music and the smell of marijuana drifted. An armed sentry kept watch from a tower next to a small synagogue in the centre. It was, as tourist t-shirts in Jerusalem say, all very Guns ‘n’ Moses.

Not everyone was as friendly as my AirBnB hosts. We were stopped as we arrived by three youths carrying mattocks, their faces streaked with mud and sweat, who wore their side-locks long and thick, entirely different to the delicate spiralled payot worn by the Jerusalem haredim. They peered at us with dark suspicious eyes, feral and unwelcoming: members, I was sure, of No’ar HaGva’ot, the notorious ‘Hilltop Youth’.

Their founder and inspiration is Avri Ran, an organic chicken farmer with four convictions for assault. Like their idol Meir Kahane, the New York Rabbi convicted for terrorism in the 1970s, the Hilltop Youth advocate the ethnic cleansing of all Arabs from both Israel and the occupied territories.

The West Bank, the Golan Heights, east Jerusalem, and now eastern Gaza and southern Lebanon: with the settlers in control, who is to say where Israel’s territorial ambitions end? Two years ago, Bezalel Smotrich remarked on camera that ‘it is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus.’ Some interpretations of the Torah suggest the land God gave to Israel extends as far as the Euphrates, an area incorporating not just most of Syria but all of Jordan and half of Iraq.

At sunset at Esh Kodesh, I sat on a wall with my daughter Mary, and looked down the hill towards Jalud. In the foreground was a well-watered vineyard, the lush green vines heavy with grapes. Beyond it was a grove of stunted olive trees, most of them dead. Its owners in Jalud were unable to get close enough to tend them.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Mary, puzzled. ‘Why can’t they just share?’

She was nine then, half her lifetime ago, but her question remains germane. Will anyone ever answer it?

James Fergusson is the author of In Search of the River Jordan: A Story of Palestine, Israel and the Struggle for Water (Yale University Press 2023)

So, the TACO bell rings again. Who knows what really drove Trump to put off ‘obliterating’ Iran’s power plants? But when Tehran threatened in response to destroy Gulf state desalination plants, it seems he must have grasped at least some of the potential consequences: an instant humanitarian catastrophe, refugees by the million, the collapse of the world oil market, regional and global economic meltdown, dire electoral effects at home.

Add the fact that the Qataris, 99 per cent of whose drinking water comes from desalination, presented Trump with a $400m jumbo jet last year. They called this Air Force One replacement an ‘unconditional’ gift, but one does wonder if they might not have demanded it back had Trump gone ahead.

The Gulf sheikhs have always been proud of their desalinating prowess – and fond of demonstrating it, too. Dubai, famously, is home to an indoor ski-slope, with a cooling system that generates 30 tons of real snow a day. There are also 22 well-watered golf courses in the UAE. But it is not just for fun that the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (pictured), is surrounded by a 30-acre lake studded with swivelling jets that shoot water 500 feet into the air, all choreographed to music. Geysers of oil are all very well, but in a desert, it is fountains of water that really impress the locals. In the Middle East, the ability to supply water is the key to political control.

Such mastery of nature smacks of hubris now, however. New drone technology has changed everything. The Gulf’s desalination plants, strung out along a thousand miles of coastline, and in some places a scant 20 miles from Iran, suddenly seem almost absurdly vulnerable. Their owners have learned the hard way that not even the most sophisticated interceptor systems can fully protect them from a drone swarm.

The sheikhs have long wanted to reduce their dependence on desalination, and have tried hard to develop other sources. The Saudis, for instance, have invested heavily in solar-powered Atmospheric Water Generators (AWGs) that extract moisture from the air. Yet inland Riyadh still mostly relies on water piped from a single desalination plant, Ras Al-Khair, 400km to the east. The strategic folly of such over-reliance has now conclusively been laid bare.

We have no reason to be complacent here in wet Britain. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has exposed weaknesses in our vital supply chains, too. Scarcer car fuel is just the start. The shortage will soon affect food import costs, which will be passed on to consumers. Food production costs will also rise because fertilizers have been blockaded, too. The NFU President, Tom Bradshaw, has warned that the price of cucumber and tomato will rise within six weeks, with other crops and milk expected to follow within three to six months.

That sounds bearable, but may be the thin end of a wedge. The profits-driven, just-in-time system that governs Britain’s food supply is much more precarious than it appears. According to Professor Tim Lang, author of a report for the National Preparedness Commission published last year, the country produces just 54 per cent of the food it needs, with imports making up the rest. This is one of the lowest self-sufficiency rates in Europe – and it is still falling. The Netherlands, by contrast, manages 80 per cent self-sufficiency, and Spain 75 per cent.

Lang thinks that we should all be stockpiling food as an insurance policy against climate shocks, cyberattack, or all-out war. The Swiss government maintains enough stock to feed its entire population for three months, and is increasing this period to a year. The British government advises households to keep just three days’ worth of food in their cupboards.

Lang also points out that 95 per cent of our food is supplied by nine big retailers, who are in turn ‘fed’ by just 131 giant distribution hubs. ‘In drone war, that’s a sitting duck,’ he observes. Recent analysis published in the journal Sustainability found that even a small gap in food supplies could lead to social unrest and possibly food riots, thanks to ‘chronic’ issues that have turned the food system into a ‘tinderbox’. In other words, Britain’s over-reliance on imports, and the chokepoints in our distribution system, make us every bit as vulnerable to attack as the desalinated water system in the Gulf.

Britain has been here before. Agricultural output began to decline with the Industrial Revolution, and dependence on imports steadily increased, as workers moved from the land to the cities. By the start of World War Two, the country imported almost two thirds of its food, and was especially reliant on wheat from the US and Canada. German attacks on supply ships in the Atlantic had forced David Lloyd George’s government to introduce rationing in 1918. The U-boat campaign this time around was even more devastating. At the height of it in 1940, Hitler’s submariners destroyed 2.6 million tons of merchant shipping. Churchill later wrote that it was the only time that he ever contemplated surrender.

The solution had different facets: public education, rationing, stock-piling. The newly created Ministry of Food devised a vitaminized soup called ‘Blitz Broth’; at one stage there were enough stocks of it held in secret storage around the country to feed five million people. Most important of all was a massive government drive to return the country to a state of food self-sufficiency, a famous campaign that became known as ‘Dig for Victory.’

Parks, gardens and grazing land were dug up or ploughed on an unprecedented scale. It was considered the duty of all householders to turn their back gardens into vegetable patches. Flowers were considered a frivolous use of earth, even in window boxes: proper patriots planted theirs with herbs and lettuce. Windsor Great Park was given over to wheat. Even Lord’s cricket ground was not spared.

Small-holders became the Home Front’s heroes. Women, the so-called ‘Land Girls,’ filled farm jobs vacated by men who had gone off to fight. Between 1939 and 1944, the arable land area in England and Wales increased by 63 per cent. Wheat, barley and potato crops almost doubled, while the production of oats rose by two-thirds. By the end of the war, almost three-quarters of the food consumed in Britain was produced domestically, up from a third just six years before.

What lessons might there be in all this for the water-stressed states of the Gulf? The Arabs cannot dig for victory as Britain did; they will not find enough water under the sand. But public education, rationing, and stock-piling all have roles to play. They could also mitigate the vulnerability of their water system by thinking small, as Britain’s wartime Ministry of Agriculture did, and diversifying their supply. As Churchill found, sourcing vital commodities from many domestic sources rather than a single large distant one will always make their delivery more resilient to external shocks. It is a lesson that 21^st century Britain would do well to apply to its food distribution system, too.

James Fergusson is the author of The Vitamin Murders: Who Killed Healthy Eating in Britain? (Portobello Books 2007) and In Search of the River Jordan: A Story of Palestine, Israel and the Struggle for Water (Yale University Press 2023)

KENSINGTON’s Arab supercar season usually starts in June, when temperatures in the Gulf reach 40C and the region’s mega-rich decamp, Shimla-style, to second homes (and garages) in the sylvan cool of west London. This year, however, the monstrous revving of engines has come early, as the Gulf’s gilded ones flee a different kind of heat.

I grew up in Kensington in the 1970s and 80s, and although I moved out of London twenty years ago, my father and sister still live there. I go back regularly, and mark the many changes with a connoisseur’s eye. Last week I spotted a Bugatti Veyron crawling up the High Street, a toy poodle peaking from the lap of the young woman languorously reclined in the passenger seat. A supermodel in a supercar! You were supposed to gawp. The tires of a Veyron cost £6,000 each.

No-one knows how this extravaganza began, or who started it. Perhaps the swanky car showrooms along Park Lane, a fixture since the 1930s, were the original magnet. They are very like the clusters of dealerships along the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, or the Corniche in Beirut. Park Lane, at any rate, has delineated the eastern edge of the princelets’ circuit for the last twenty summers at least. Their route continues around Knightsbridge, Kensington, Holland Park, the Bayswater Road. My father’s house is close enough that, on sultry nights with the windows open, it can be hard to get to sleep.

The impulse to show off is of course nothing new in London. It is, perhaps, an automotive version of that great social ritual of the 17^thcentury, the Promenade in St James Park. The past is a foreign country, and all that - but it is also often much closer than we think. Holland Park, where my siblings and I used to go for after-school walks in the early 1970s, only came into public ownership in 1952. It was previously the sporting estate of the 6^th Earl of Ilchester; a friend of my brother-in-law’s knew a man who had shot pheasants there in the 1930s.

Supercars aside, the Royal Borough has a history of disturbance triggered by events in Iran. In May 1980, I heard the bang the SAS made as they blew their way into the Iranian embassy on Prince’s Gate, rescuing all but two of the 26 hostages taken by Arab separatists from Khuzestan.

In December 1978, two months before the ayatollahs’ revolution, my parents were for some reason invited to a reception at Prince’s Gate. The ambassador, a debonair courtier-type called Parviz Radji, didn’t do things by halves. When my parents came home, they were still agog at the amount of caviar they’d seen piled around an ice-carved swan. They had been issued a soup spoon each as they arrived, and directed to tuck in.

The embassy was gutted by fire during the SAS siege, and left unrepaired for more than decade; it did not reopen until 1993. One day in 1987 I slipped inside the derelict building for a look-see. It was like The Old De Vil Place in One Hundred and One Dalmatians. The roof had partially fallen in, pigeons roosted along the ornate cornicing, and the rain-rotted staircase hung to the walls by a thread.

Snooping on the top floor, I found an office cupboard stacked with creamy writing paper embossed with the Lion and Sun crest of the ousted Pahlavi dynasty. I still have a few souvenir sheets, all perfectly dry and useable. There were also boxes of unpaid bills, including for large orders of pre-revolutionary caviar. No doubt the accountants had been interrupted in the execution of their duties by the tumult back home.

The moniker ‘Little Tehran’ is usually applied to Finchley, but to my mind Kensington deserves that crown. An estimated 12,000 Iranians are said to live in west London, with the borough their unrivalled focal point. The majority came as refugees from the Revolution, although Iranians were established in Kensington well before 1979. Iran’s Melli Bank, the largest in the Middle East, has had a branch in the High Street since the 1960s. The Apadana restaurant, at the western end, has been open for business for just as long. The grocery next door, which specialises in the sale of Caspian Sea caviar (including to the Prince’s Gate embassy), is another old institution.

Much of the High Street was dowdy in the ‘70s, with an inexplicable number of shoe-shops, yet it was probably never a typical British shopping centre - and it definitely isn’t now. In fact, to my eye, it increasingly resembles a shopping centre in Dubai. The shoe-shops have gone; these days there are too many businesses selling overpriced pastries.

You need to be rich to move here. Despite recent sharp declines, the average house price is £1.2m – four times the national average – while average monthly rent is £3,500 (a mere two and a half times the national average).

Commercial rents are commensurately high, at an average £86 per square foot, the highest in London, and seven times what it costs to rent shop space in cities in north-east England. Yet when businesses around here go bust – and they do – there are always others keen to take their place. The prestige of the location, and the lure of profits to be made from the well-healed clientele, apparently outweigh the risks and costs. The turnover at some addresses is dizzying. No shop stays boarded up for long.

Kensington’s transient, entrepot flavour is borne out by statistics. One in twelve homes in the borough is a second home, the highest proportion in London. Some neighbourhoods feel as hollowed out as a Cornish fishing village in the off-season. The second home market is worth £6bn; one in ten homes in the borough is foreign-owned.

Some of the new ownership is no doubt dodgy. As many as 6,000 homes are said to be registered to anonymous foreign shell companies. In 2022 the soon-to-be MP, Jo Powell, launched a campaign called Kensington Against Dirty Money. ‘It is simply wrong that while many of these luxury properties stand empty, thousands of households in this borough are on the waiting list for a home,’ he said. ‘Residents deserve better than living in the shadow of empty mansions bought by tax-dodgers and money launderers.’

Iran, once again, played a part in this unsavoury story. Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader who may or may not be heavily injured following last month’s airstrikes in Tehran, was recently reported to own, via middlemen and shell companies, two ‘luxury properties’ in Kensington, bought ten years ago for £35m. These were, according to reports, part of a wider London property portfolio worth £100m.

The Kensington ones, thrillingly, are reported to be ‘next door’ to the Israeli embassy on Kensington Palace Gardens, the gated-off road of mega-mansions known as Billionaire’s Row. That location, according to an anonymous ‘terrorism and security expert’ quoted in the Daily Mail, means that Iran ‘owns the view into the back of the Israeli Embassy from less than 50 metres away.’

It sounds like a plot device from a John LeCarre novel. But I am no longer surprised by anything that happens in this fascinating corner of London, the best barometer I know for the political weather of the world.

James Fergusson is the author of Al Britannia, My Country: A Journey through Muslim Britain (Bantam Press 2017)

FOLLOWING events in the Middle East can feel like living in one of those cartoons showing old soldiers reliving the wars of their youths. (‘The Hun were dug in here, here and here’, says moustachioed Uncle Monty, as he nudges salt and pepper pots across the dining room table). Nevertheless: in the IDF’s ongoing fight to control southern Lebanon, its preoccupation with the River Litani (pictured) makes this amateur Israel-watcher think that their occupation could become permanent.

For those fixated on events in the Gulf, a recap:

In retaliation for last month’s assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Iran-backed Lebanese Shia militia, Hezbollah, launched missiles at northern Israel on 2 March. Israel responded with strikes against the Lebanese capital, Beirut, and followed up this week with a ground invasion from the south. In the last fortnight, at least 820 Lebanese have been killed, and a million people, 20 per cent of the population, have been displaced.

The IDF are no strangers to fighting in southern Lebanon. In fact they left only recently, in November 2024. Israel has invaded Lebanon six times since 1978, with their longest occupation lasting for 18 years, from 1982 to 2000. Is another long-term occupation on the cards?

IDF officers explain that southern villages are being ‘evacuated’ with the aim of creating a sterile buffer zone designed to deny Hezbollah the cover to attack Israel. The defence minister, Israel Katz, has decreed that villagers ‘will not return to areas south of the Litani line until the safety of [northern Israeli] residents is ensured.’ But when might that be? The creation of a buffer zone might not by itself remove the Hezbollah threat. Fierce hill-fighting is ongoing. In this volatile part of the world, can the safety of northern Israelis ever truly be ‘ensured’?

Israel puts faith in security buffer zones. Think of eastern Gaza; or consider the Golan Heights, seized from Syria on the final day of the Six Day War in 1967, thus denying the Arab coalition the positions from which it had shelled Tiberias. Israel has occupied the Heights ever since, and indeed annexed it (albeit illegally, according to the UN) in 1981; and, it must be said, no shells have fallen on Tiberias since.

The war against Iran, and the extraordinary support of the Trump administration, have now presented Israelis with a probably unique opportunity to create another such zone in southern Lebanon, and (as they see it) permanently fix the Hezbollah problem that has plagued their nation for 44 years.

There may, however, be a bit more to the strategy than that. Why has Israel Katz settled on the ‘Litani line’ as the tactical limit of his ground operation?

The desire to control the region’s principal rivers has underpinned Jewish strategic thinking since Theodor Herzl’s time. The first Zionists knew that in the Middle East, water would be essential if their Homeland project was to succeed. Levi Eshkol, a prime minister of the 1960s who oversaw the construction of modern Israel’s water system, likened water to ‘the blood flowing through the arteries of the nation’.

Most important in those days was the River Jordan, which Israel has fully controlled since the Six Day War of 1967. But the strategy was once much broader than that, extending to watercourses well beyond the Jordan basin – such as the 102-mile River Litani, which flows entirely within the territory of modern Lebanon, from east to west, 30km from Israel.

As long ago as 1919, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first Israeli president, included control of the Litani among the ‘minimum requirements essential to the realization of the Jewish National Home’. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, also proposed occupying land as far as the Litani in the 1940s.

Arabs could perhaps be forgiven for suspecting that Israel has never given up its pursuit of regional hydro-hegemony. The long-occupied Golan Heights, after all, are not just a potential artillery position: they also form the principal catchment area of the Sea of Galilee, the feeder lake of the River Jordan, and a vital strategic resource in its own right.

That is true of the Litani, too. The river is Lebanon’s longest, draining a quarter of the country’s rainfall. It is a vital agricultural resource, including for the Beqaa Valley, the traditional Hezbollah stronghold. (In 2006, a year of conflict with Hezbollah, Israeli airstrikes knocked out many of the river’s associated irrigation canals). A hydroelectric power station, powered by a dammed reservoir at Qaraoun, generates 10 per cent of the country’s electricity - and could produce more.

When the dust settles on the IDF’s latest ground operation, will their tanks simply retreat back home? It would be surprising if Netanyahu’s war cabinet are agreed on that. Control of the Litani is too valuable and too long-coveted a prize - and the opportunity now to seize it, too great for them to ignore.

James Fergusson is the author of In Search of the River Jordan: A Story of Palestine, Israel and the Struggle for Water (Yale University Press 2023)

Wars evolve in unpredicted directions. ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’, as General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, helpfully reminded us this week. It is nonetheless astonishing how quickly Trump’s special operation is changing shape. Where might it be heading?

The immediate focus is on control of the Straits of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s crude habitually passes. Tanker traffic is backing up, and the entire world is feeling the economic pinch. Yet oil may not be the real story here. It is telling that neither the US nor Israel has yet attacked Kharg Island, Iran’s vital offshore oil terminal: an omission that suggests there are limits to America’s appetite for collapsing Iran’s economy entirely (or else, for the greater global oil shock that would doubtless ensue).

A tit-for-tat missile exchange last weekend offers a glimpse of a different, arguably even more frightening future: one that could soon spiral far beyond the allies’ control.

The targets were coastal desalination plants, beginning with an attack on Iran’s Qeshm Island. Iran blamed the US, and retaliated with a drone strike on a plant on Bahrain, the headquarters of the US Fifth fleet.

‘The US set this precedent, not Iran,’ said Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who called the Qeshm attack ‘a dangerous move with grave consequences.’

The development should come as no surprise. The CIA have been pointing out the vulnerability of the Gulf’s desalination plants for more than 40 years; they have even warned that their destruction could lead to the forced evacuation of the cities they supply. There are some 400 such plants scattered along Arabia’s Iran-facing coast and, thanks to advances in drone technology, they can now be attacked more easily and cheaply than ever before.

The region’s dependence on them is immense. About 42 per cent of the UAE’s drinking water is the desalinated kind, as is 90 per cent of Kuwait’s, 86 of Oman’s, and 70 of Saudi Arabia’s. Not for nothing are these petrostates sometimes described as ‘saltwater kingdoms.’

To the puzzlement of some observers this week, the desalination plant tit-for-tat has not immediately escalated. Iran has instead reverted to attacking shipping, oil infrastructure, US bases and assets, and Dubai Airport. This might be because Tehran judges these to be more useful targets, at least for now; or it may be that they fear the implications for themselves of targeting water infrastructure.

Attacking a resource essential to the survival of civilians is a Geneva Convention war crime. It is also unIslamic. Provoking a humanitarian catastrophe would do permanent damage to Iran’s reputation internationally, and could terminate the country’s historic claim to regional Shiite hegemony.

The regime is also painfully aware of how vulnerable its own water supply is. Iran’s 87m people depend on reservoirs and wells for their water, not desalination. But years of over-extraction, and a five-year drought driven by climate change, created such a shortage this winter that President Masoud Pezeshkian warned that the capital might have to be evacuated.

Dams and wells are as vulnerable to attack as desalination plants. A retaliatory water war could spell Mutually Assured Destruction. Perhaps the new leadership has decided against such a risky strategy – for now.

For an illustration of what happens when desalination plants break down, look no further than Gaza. The Strip was one of the most water-stressed places in the world even before the IDF invasion. Decades of overextraction of the local aquifer have caused the water table to drop below the level of the sea, which leached in and rendered the well water undrinkable. Gaza’s 2.3m people therefore depend either on water piped in from Israel, or on desalination. But the plants have almost all been damaged by the recent hostilities; most do not function at all for lack of parts and the electricity to power them.

The UN calls the resulting water shortage ‘a silent yet deadly bomb.’ For much of the last two years, many Gazans have had access to less than 3 litres a day – far below the absolute minimum of 20 litres that the World Health Organization says ‘should be assured to take care of basic hygiene needs and basic food hygiene.’ Diarrhoea, vomiting bugs, skin disease and thirst are part of everyday life in Gaza.

It is difficult to know precisely how many have died in consequence, but the Lancet and other authorities it has contributed significantly to a ‘staggeringly high’ number of ‘excess deaths’ since October 2023. The UN has warned for years that Gaza could eventually become ‘unliveable’. Many people would say that it already has. A Palestinian-conducted poll last year found that almost half of Gazans would leave if they could.

The ayatollahs must wince when they look at Gaza, but they have surely not dismissed the possibility of a water war altogether. The ease with which the Gulf’s desalination plants can be attacked, and the international leverage that this could create, could prove irresistible as pressure on their regime grows.

The Gulf sheikhs forgot a cardinal rule when they first developed desalination in the 1970s: in the desert, you must secure your supply.

The regional power that has followed that dictum most closely is, perhaps predictably, Israel. The Israelis are as dependent on desalination as the Arabs are: some 80 per cent of their drinking water comes from five large plants along the Mediterranean, all built since 2005. These are just as vulnerable to drone or missile attack as those in the Gulf, but Israel has a back-up source: the headwaters of the River Jordan in the Sea of Galilee, which was in fact the state’s primary source before the desal plants came online.

From the 1960s, the Galilee’s waters were distributed to the populous cities to the west and south by a system of underground pipes and canals known as the National Water Carrier. The main pumping station, known as Sapir on the edge of the Galilee, was of such vital strategic importance that it was housed inside a bomb-proof mountain. It is still in working order, and security remains tight. Israelis have not forgotten that one of the first armed operations ever mounted by the PLO, in 1965, was an attempt to sabotage a new water tunnel a few miles to the west.

Compare the James Bond villian-style fortification of the Sapir Pumping Station with the Gulf, where the first and apparently only line of defence is a shield of expensive missiles that may, Johnny English-style, be running out.

Arab leaders are aware of their overdependence on desalination. A leaked diplomatic cable sent from the US embassy in Riyadh in 2008 warned that the Saudi capital relied on a single plant for more than 90 per cent of its drinking water. But what else are they supposed to do? The hunt for alternatives has often looked desperate. In the 1970s, Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Faisal funded a conference on towing icebergs from the Arctic to the Red Sea – a crazy idea that nonetheless was still under discussion in 2010.

The Egyptian academic Ismail Serageldin, a former vice-president of the World Bank, warned in the 1990s that ‘the wars of the next century will be about water.’ 2026 could be the year that prediction comes true.

James Fergusson is the author of In Search of the River Jordan: A Story of Palestine, Israel and the Struggle for Water (Yale University Press 2023)

A campaign called ‘A Very English Chat’ has invited the public to name their favourite national icon, with a view to creating a virtual ‘pocket museum’ of 50 such objects designed to ‘tell the story of England in 2026.’

The aim, says organizer Andy Green, is to ‘take the heat’ out of the conversation about Englishness that has increasingly been hijacked by battles about whether it’s ok to fly the flag of St George.

Supported by the likes of Billy Bragg and the former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas – both, arguably, icons of Englishness in their own right – it is a laudable initiative that deserves to catch the public imagination. Artefacts proposed so far include the Magna Carta, chicken tikka masala, a beach windbreak, and a Morris Minor.

I couldn’t approve more of this last suggestion. My first car, bought in 1987, was a Morris – a Traveller model, built in 1963. With double doors at the back and a timber frame, it resembled a Cotswold cottage on wheels. The ‘Moggy’ was an icon of Englishness from its outset, and the marketeers at Cowley, Oxford, where it was produced, knew it: the shade of ivory that mine came in was even called ‘Old English White’.

I soon became obsessed with this vehicle, and spent a small fortune looking after it. When the ash-wood frame began to rot, I found a specialist joiner in Hornsey (I lived in London then) who was able to replace it. Then, when the big end began to knock in its crankcase, I found someone to put in an entire new engine. Mr Wimpey was a mechanic of the old school who operated out of a mews in Shepherd’s Bush. He was a wizened chain smoker of legendary grumpiness, but when I’d finished running the new engine in – which I did by driving at precisely 30mph from London to Durham and back – it purred so sweetly that he patted me on the back.

Once the work on it was finished, my car was close to what showmen call concours condition. ‘Pride and joy’ did not do justice to my relationship with it. I washed and polished it until it gleamed. I was charmed by the signature rasp of the transmission between gear changes, by the archaic trafficators that flew out from the door pillars, by the floor-operated headlight dipper, by the smell and feel of the leatherette seats (upholstered in a fetching Cherokee Red).

Better than all these things, however, was the car’s extraordinary power to make people smile. I noticed how, in merging rush hour traffic for instance, the default aggression of other drivers often simply melted away. Even in London they would slow and wave and mouth a cheery After You. Once, as I bowled up the M40 at a stately 60mph, a Hell’s Angel cruised alongside on a chopper. Keeping pace beside me, he looked my bodywork up and down for a full minute through his scary mirror sunglasses, before nodding surly approval and roaring on into the distance.

Where did all this come from? Was it nostalgia for a lost England (whether real or imagined), a simpler, slower time, when roads were uncrowded, technology was uncomplicated, society felt unfractured, and manners prevailed? Perhaps that is what the Morris Minor still evokes. A small, inexpensive people’s car, unpretentious in its utilitarian ambition, it is nonetheless a pretty vehicle, with gentle curves and proportions that continue to please. Pristine examples are highly sought after. In 2017, a fully restored Traveller sold for £37,000.

Its shape is down to the famous designer, Sir Alec Issigonis, who also created the Mini. The story goes that in 1948, just as the prototype was due to go into production, Issigonis suddenly decided it was too narrow, complaining that it looked like ‘a poached egg’. So he ordered his engineers to cut it in half and insert a four-inch strip down the centre of it. The bumpers of the first models still feature a four-inch plate in their centres, hastily bolted on to bridge the gap. The cult of the amateur: how English is that? By 1961, a million Minors had been sold: a rate of sale faster even than the Mini, and the first British car ever to pass that milestone.

One day in 1989 I came out into the street where I kept my car to find that someone had stolen its petrol cap. This was not the modern locking type but a simple twist-and-push job, secured to the filler neck by the flimsiest piece of chain. Cork-lined and chrome-plated, it belonged to the innocent yesteryears of the motoring age. I knew at once that it would be almost impossible to replace, and cursed the thoughtless philistine responsible. But I kept calm and carried on, and bought a cheap plastic cap before someone dropped a match down the tank.

That summer I found myself on holiday in Andalusia, staying with family friends who lived there called Davidson; Malcolm Davidson had shared a London house with my father in the 1950s. He had a magpie’s eye for antiques, which is why, on a daytrip to Gibraltar, he insisted we ‘look in on’ a shop he knew there.

‘You never know what you might find,’ he said.

The shop turned out to be a giant warehouse filled with rows of trestle tables loaded down with seemingly endless boxes of old bric-a-brac, most of it obviously junk. I began without much enthusiasm to sift through the nearest box - and almost immediately recognized, complete with its chain, an early 1960s Morris Minor petrol cap, identical in every respect to the one I had lost.

‘What did I tell you?’ said Malc when I showed him, without the least sign of surprise.

I returned with my booty to London, and united it with the car that it was designed for. It fit so snugly that I wondered for a moment if I had found my actual stolen fuel cap. The satisfaction was intense. I felt like a Greek on the day of the return of the Elgin Marbles.

A few weeks later, the fuel cap was stolen again. There was no sign of the rest of the car, either. A busy London street was, I suppose, a stupid place to keep it - not that I had much choice. The thieves had obviously noticed it there, and returned to hotwire it. I had put a Krooklok on the steering wheel - there was little other security to speak of in an old Morris – but that was evidently not much of an obstacle for determined villains. Mr Wimpey was furious; it was almost as though he’d been robbed.

‘You numpty,’ he wheezed. ‘A lovely car like that. It will be half way to America now.’

I didn’t discover why he thought that, although it might have been true. At any rate, I never saw my Morris again. I grieved its loss for years.

Still: its legacy hasn’t quite disappeared. Twenty five years later, I bought (and still own) a motorbike and sidecar, the former made by Royal Enfield, the latter by Watsonian Squire. It is an absurdly English-looking outfit, like the one in Wallace and Gromit, and I love it because it makes people smile in the same way that my Morris once did.

My ‘combination’ is in fact not a vintage outfit but a modern pastiche of the rigs on the roads in the 1960s; when I bought it, its modernity was given away by its contemporary registration number on its black and yellow plate. To preserve the illusion, therefore, I needed a period black and white plate. So I wrote to DVLA, gave them the whole sob story, and asked if I could reincarnate the old six-digit, two-letter registration of my stolen 1963 Morris – a number valuable in its own right, these days. And DVLA, to my delight, said yes. The unexpected kindness of strangers! Surely that is an artefact worth including in any new museum of Englishness.

The news from the Middle East is all frightening, but none more so than a report that certain US military commanders have been telling their men that this is now a Christian Holy War.

It appears not to be a one-off. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog for religious extremism among America’s 1.4m active-duty personnel, recently announced that it had received more than 200 complaints against pep-talking officers. One complainant, an NCO, said his commanding officer had ‘urged us to tell our troops that this was “all part of God’s divine plan”… he specifically referenced… the Book of Revelation… Armageddon, and the imminent return of Jesus Christ’. The NCO added that the officer said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark His return to Earth.’

For sceptical Europeans unversed in biblical prophecy, the Book of Revelation (16: 12-16) describes how the ‘kings of the earth and of the whole world’ gather at a place called Armageddon for a final battle against God. This cataclysmic event signifies the end of all human government. Christ returns in triumph, the dead are resurrected, and true believers, dead as well as alive, are swept up into the sky to their everlasting salvation.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. Armies recruited from the populace they serve will naturally reflect their convictions; and 23 per cent of Americans believe in the Second Coming of Christ, according to the Pew Research Centre in Washington. They believe, further, that this will ‘definitely’ happen by 2050.

The fundamentalists have of course been emboldened by Donald Trump, who relies on the Southern bible belt for votes, and who has pandered to the belief in the coming apocalypse so assiduously that Rolling Stonemagazine once dubbed him ‘the End-Times President’. To the credulous, Trump’s very name is a sign from God. (‘The last trump’, mentioned in Corinthians, refers to the final blast of the ram’s horn trumpet that signals the beginning of the Rapture).

Christian fundamentalism, meanwhile, is written literally across Trump’s most loyal lieutenant, ‘Whiskey Pete’ Hegseth. The self-styled Secretary of War’s tattoos – which he proudly says represent ‘faith, firepower, and freedom’ – include the words Deus Vult (‘God wills it’, a rallying cry of the First Crusade in 1095), along with a Jerusalem Cross (another reference to the Crusades), the word kafir (unbeliever), and the cross and sword insignia of his former infantry regiment, which are inspired by the gospel of Matthew.

We need to pay attention to this stuff. Prophecies have a nasty habit of becoming true. This has nothing to do with clairvoyance, but everything to do with the so-called ‘Thomas theorem’, first expressed in 1928 by the sociologists William and Dorothy Thomas, who observed that ‘if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’. Put another way, the subjective interpretation of a situation causes actions that have objective consequences, regardless of whether the initial interpretation is correct.

Believers in the Second Coming may at some level want it happen. If war on Iran is framed as the beginning of the End Times, it follows that the violence entailed is something to embrace, or even celebrate. Perhaps that explains why the Pentagon dubbed the assault ‘Operation Epic Fury’. Perhaps it also explains the naked triumphalism of the Secretary of War, who told us this week that America’s ‘radical Islamist Iranian adversaries’ are now ‘toast’, and boasted about the torpedoing of an Iranian warship, a possibly illegal act that cost the lives of at least 87.

Time will tell if his braggadocio is misplaced, but the fact is that no nation has ever been subjugated by airpower alone. Bombing is the easy part. Lasting control, and the right sort of regime change, require the winning of hearts and minds. The hard lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan are that these cannot be won without putting military and civilian boots on the ground; and also that they are very difficult to win even when you do. Yet Hegseth scorns the very idea of post-conflict engagement. Instead, he merely brags that Operation Epic Fury ‘has delivered twice the air power of shock and awe of Iraq in 2003, minus [the former Iraq administrator] Paul Bremer and the Nation Building.’ That is all very well, but what will happen when the air campaign ends, as sooner or later it must? Bellicose rhetoric is no substitute for a strategy.

It is not widely known that Armageddon is a real place, an ancient ruined chariot fortress on a hill near Nazareth in northern Israel. The tradition that the Final Battle will be fought here stems from events in 609 BC, when the pious King Josiah of Judah was killed in a battle with Pharaoh Necho II.

If a Final Battle really is to take place, there can be few likelier spots for one than northern Israel - and few more fitting within it than Tel Meggido, as it is properly called. The hill overlooks the Plain of Jezreel, a place just as suitable for a modern tank battle as it once was for chariots. There is even a major Israeli air base close by called Ramat David, home to three squadrons of F-16s as well as a specialised drone unit. All have been at their busiest these last few days, after an exceptionally busy two years.

Tel Megiddo has long attracted tour groups from Bible-Belt America, for whom it is a major highlight of their Holy Land itinerary. They were out in force when I visited, easily identifiable by the bibles they clutched, their spirited theological debate, and the matching red baseball caps they wore. In The Innocents Abroad, an account of his tour of the Holy Land in 1867, Mark Twain describes ‘a fantastic mob of green-spectacled Yanks, with their flapping elbows and bobbing umbrellas’ who ‘entered the country with their verdicts already prepared… The veneration and the affection which some of these men felt for the scenes they were speaking of heated their fancies and clouded their judgement.’

Is Hegseth a modern innocent abroad? His fancy certainly seems heated. He should at least be more careful what he wishes for, and of the example he is setting for the vast army under his and Trump’s control.

With them in charge, it feels as though the end really could be nigh.

James Fergusson is the author of In Search of the River Jordan: A Story of Palestine, Israel and the Struggle for Water (Yale University Press 2023)

I have just been reading the government’s new report on last autumn’s controversial police decision to ban supporters of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football team from attending a match against Aston Villa. Published by the Home Affairs Select Committee, its 33 pages once again condemn the procedural failings of the West Midlands Police, whose Chief Constable, Craig Guildford, was forced to resign over the affair earlier this year. Committee member Joani Reid has now added to the pile-on, with a press release that calls the Maccabi fan ban an ‘extraordinary and unjustified decision’ that ‘ranks among the most serious policing failures in recent years’.

Guildford’s force undoubtedly made mistakes. His researchers decided to ‘sex up’ the dossier of evidence against Maccabi’s fans, some of which turned out to be generated by AI, and entirely false. A parliamentary inquiry was misled. WMP also failed properly to consult the local Jewish community over the implications of the ban, which opened the door to accusations of ‘confirmation bias’, favouritism towards Birmingham’s Muslim community (who certainly were consulted), and secret antisemitism, a charge levelled by Keir Starmer himself.

But were the police’s failures really as grave as the government continues to imply? It is an unfashionable view, but I feel sorry for Craig Guildford, an obvious scapegoat for the inadequacies of almost everyone involved.

First: Was the decision to ban Maccabi fans ‘extraordinary’? No: fans are banned all the time, in Britain as well as abroad. Eintracht Frankfurt fans were banned from a match against Napoli last November; Feyenoord fans were banned from a game against Roma in 2024. In England in 2019, Red Star Belgrade were banned from Tottenham, and Eintracht Frankfurt (again) from Arsenal. The Maccabi fans were not even the first to be banned from Villa Park: in 2023, pre-match violence prompted WMP to prevent Legia Warsaw fans from entering the grounds.

Second: Was the decision ‘unjustifiable’? Hardly. The thuggery of a section of Maccabi ultras - known as the ‘Fanatics’ - is internationally notorious. One of the most puzzling aspects of this saga is WMP’s decision to exaggerate the evidence, which was surely unnecessary. Before a match in Amsterdam against Ajax last winter, fans were heard singing a song with the lyrics ‘There are no schools in Gaza because the children are all dead.’ There were other provocations. One Dutch Arab was allegedly thrown in a canal. At another match in Stuttgart, fans were filmed making Nazi salutes and singing songs glorifying mass rape.

Of course social media footage can be manipulated. No doubt some of it has been. But there is nevertheless enough unadulterated imagery out there for those with eyes to see what is going on; and it is not antisemitic to observe that Maccabi fans very often spell trouble. According to Middle East Eye, Dutch police told their British counterparts that significant numbers of Maccabi fans are ‘experienced fighters… linked to the IDF’: perhaps not so surprising given Israel’s current war footing, and that the draft in Israel has long been mandatory. The violence of some Maccabi fans – a relatively new phenomenon, according to Israeli football watchers – appears to be a sad reflection of the brutalization of contemporary Israeli society in general.

Now put yourself in the position of the Gold Commander on match day at Villa Park. Consider the volatile public mood in autumn of last year, when the tv news was full of starving Gazans being shot dead as they queued for food: some 2,600 of them in the preceding four months alone. Now consider the especial anger of Muslims about that, and that there are some 340,000 of them in Birmingham, representing almost 30 per cent of the total population. (The proportion in Aston, where Villa Park is located, is even higher: some 70 per cent of locals there identify as Asian or British Asian). Given such an environment, wouldn’t you worry that the mere presence of Maccabi Fanatics could provoke serious public unrest? I think I would.

It’s all very well to insist, as Keir Starmer did after the ban, that ‘we will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets’ and that it is the police’s job ‘to ensure all football fans can enjoy [a] game, without fear of violence or intimidation’. But Starmer did not have to police Villa Park. In the event, Maccabi club authorities themselves announced that it would not let its fans attend the match, even if tickets were allocated, because of the risk to public safety. The clincher of that decision, reportedly, was intelligence that Tommy Robinson was planning to attend the match, in the absurd guise of a Maccabi supporter. If so, the club authorities must have concluded that he was not wanting to come in order to watch the game.

Third: Did the decision to ban really ‘rank among [their] most serious policing failures’, as Joani Reid claims? What about Hillsborough, or the Rotherham grooming scandal? What about David Carrick, or the Stephen Lawrence investigation, or the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, or Blair Peach? Whichever way you spin them, the WMP’s failures were minor compared to any of those.

So, where does Reid’s curious hyperbole come from?

The Select Committee made a great deal of the fact that the city’s Jews were ‘not properly consulted’ on the decision. ‘The impact has been lasting,’ according to Reid. ‘Many have felt singled out and pushed to the margins of their own city.’ Perhaps Birmingham’s should have been consulted. At the very least it would have been considerate. But, ‘lasting impact’? Really? In what way? In any case, were the police obliged to consult them? What, actually, did the risk of affray involving a group of fans from abroad have to do with them?

More to the point, why is Reid so very solicitous of the feelings of Birmingham’s Jews, a community who, at the last census, numbered less than 1,700, or 0.15 per cent of the city total? Could it have something to do with Starmer’s old fear of Labour being seen to be antisemitic, an allegation that threatened to tear his party apart in the Corbyn era? If so, Labour has truly been led through the looking glass. As the Guardian’s Jonathan Liew has pointed out, it takes ‘dizzying contortions’ to ‘choose to stand with the far-right foreign football hooligan against the local police force.’

Perhaps the most noteworthy detail of the Select Committee report is what it does not mention, which is the root cause of the intra-community aggro that the police anticipated: Muslim fury at the atrocities in Gaza, and the impunity with which they continue to be carried out. No doubt the report’s silence on this matter is of a piece with Labour party policy generally, and its myopic failure to condemn or even discuss Israel’s actions with any robustness these last two years.

But, as Labour’s drubbing at the hands of the Greens at this week’s Gorton and Denton by-election suggests, continuing to ignore Gaza could come at high political cost. Gorton and Denton in Manchester has a proportion of Muslims similar to that in Aston in Birmingham. And there are four million Muslims in Britain. ‘Gaza has not been forgotten or forgiven,’ said a Labour councillor in Manchester. ‘Lots of us are now worried for our seats’.

When they banned Maccabi fans from Birmingham, the West Midlands police were acting in the best interests of all the citizens on their patch. As prime minister of all Britain, Keir Starmer might do better if he followed their example.

James Fergusson is the author of Al Britannia, My Country: A Journey Through Muslim Britain (Penguin 2017), and In Search of the River Jordan: A Story of Palestine, Israel and the Struggle for Water (Yale University Press 2023)

‘It is rare to read a voice that quietly pulls a reader in and lingers long after the last page,’ she wrote. ‘I actually recommended your work to my niece right after reading it because it stayed with me that much.’

I was pleased, at first - what writer does not want to be told that their voice is ‘rare’? - but, reading on, I was soon disabused.

‘While reading your work, I noticed one particular strength in your voice that might not fully shine through yet in how your book presents itself publicly,’ Janice said. ‘I can show you what it is and how it could subtly change the way your book resonates online.’

Here we go, I thought. Another self-appointed expert in the dark art of public profile manipulation – one of a parasitic new breed of ‘digital consultants’ that has proliferated online over the last couple of years. As a professional author with books for sale on Amazon, as well as my own promotional website (www.jamesfergusson.info/), I am an easy mark. Their approach is always the same: a personalised ‘cold email’ designed to draw a potential customer into a genuine conversation. With practice I have become adept at spotting their pitches, and speedier at jabbing the delete button. But something about Janice’s pitch made me pause.

Its tone was unsettling. It seemed intimate, feminine, ambivalent: sexy, even, in its themes of connection, trust, unconscious attraction. Her attentiveness seemed designed not just to persuade, but to seduce. I have never received a cold email quite like it. And I wondered at the mention of a niece. What was that about? Was Janice’s flattery geared to appeal specifically to a male ego? Who, actually, was this mysterious admirer with the generic Anglo name? Her email contained no clue: no signature block, no company name, no address of any kind.

It dawned on me that Janice’s words must be computer-generated, and that Janice herself was probably just a machine. Her praise, when read closely, was so generalized that it could apply to almost any non-fiction book. Her ‘personalized’ message was most likely part of a giant mailshot, no doubt created using one of the latest AI-powered programmes like Clay or Smartlead, software tools specifically designed to help marketing companies break through spam filters by individuating the way their pitches are phrased. But, still: it was an odd sort of pitch. It was not technically a phishing email. It contained no links or requests for personal data or payment. Janice was after something, all right – but what?

I replied to Janice as though I thought she were human.

‘Yes! I’d love to hear your thoughts on making my book resonate online!’.

A second email soon arrived, as generically emollient as the first one.

‘Hi there,’ she purred. ‘I’m still thinking about the emotional signature I noticed in your writing, it’s rare, and it’s the kind of thing that quietly shapes how deeply readers connect with an author, often without either side realizing why…’

This was beginning to resemble a scene from Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 scifi film, in which a young programmer called Caleb is tricked into falling in love with Ava, a beautiful fembot. Garland’s movie is about the Turing test, conceived in 1950 by the great computer scientist, Alan Turing. He originally called his test the ‘imitation game’, in which a human conducts a three-way conversation with a machine and another human, both hidden behind by a screen; if the interrogator cannot reliably distinguish between them, the machine wins. That’s what happens in Ex Machina. It does not end well for Caleb.

Proceeding cautiously, I asked Janice if she worked independently, or with an organization of some kind. Back came the reply: yes, she ‘worked with a team under The UK Author Discovery Club’. I had never heard of this useful-sounding body, and clicked on the link provided. ‘Join our vibrant community of authors dedicated to optimizing their Amazon presence,’ I read, on a page decorated with photos of smiling young women in business suits. Could one of these perhaps be my Janice?

I hoped not, because this website was immediately suspect: a cheap, amateurish rush-job. A banner at the top revealed it to be based on a template provided by a free website-building program developed by Wix, a software company based in Tel Aviv. The headers and all the written content were AI-generated slop. But the greatest giveaway was the photo of maybe-Janice. Animatedly leaning forward on a sofa, making a point, perhaps, about the book on the table in front of her, with blonde hair tumbling attractively around her shoulders, she very clearly had… three arms. I closed my laptop with a snap, praying I hadn’t just downloaded the digital equivalent of an STD.

Janice failed the Turing test this time. But no doubt she will be back, in the guise of some other avatar, with a new and wilier approach. My suspicion is that she never really intended to sell me a profile optimization workshop. I worry that her true motive is more sinister, and that she approached me not in order to sell something but to gauge and learn from my response to her technique. This is, as I understand it, how AI works. When a fish does not rise the bait, an angler knows to go on changing the fly until it does. It is disconcerting to find myself in the position of the fish – although this is not, unfortunately, my first experience of digital predation.

In AI-land, the content of books is merely so much data to be ‘scraped’, primarily useful for the expansion of Large Language Models, the datasets on which AI depends for its ‘training’. ‘Emotional signature’ doesn’t enter into it. Last September the giant American AI development firm, Anthropic, settled a class action by authors who said the company had stolen their work to train its AI models. Anthropic agreed to pay out a staggering $1.5bn in compensation, or $3,000 per title, since some 500,000 book titles were affected - including three of mine. To us struggling authors, that sum is welcome. But the mere fact that Anthropic were able to shrug off such a huge bill says a lot about where things are going. Founded just five years ago, Anthropic is currently valued at an estimated $350billion.

Where will it end? Does the rise of the machines imply the redundancy of people? What happens when Janice passes the Turing test, and becomes capable of writing an email – perhaps even a whole book – that is indistinguishable from a human-created one? To borrow from the language of The Terminator franchise, Skynet is nearly sentient, and Janice a T800, one of its 1^st Gen, soon to be replaced cyborgs. The class action against Anthropic was led by the thriller writer Andrea Bartz, whose best-selling novel, published in 2021, is called We Were Never Here. One hopes her title is not prescient.