What the Queen did when Boris resigned

Putin’s secret sons

Vladimir Putin has two young sons – Ivan, nine, and Vladimir Jr, five – who are hidden away at a heavily guarded presidential palace and rarely interact with other children, according to a report published by the Dossier Centre investigative journalism website. Their mother is the former Olympic rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabaeva, 41, and the boys spend most of the year at their father’s residence on Lake Valdai, northwest of Moscow, surrounded by governesses, nannies, teachers and officers from the Kremlin Federal Guard service. Since the invasion of Ukraine, the house has been protected by air defence systems.

Ivan and Vladimir have a huge collection of Lego, two ponies, rabbits and a St Bernard, and when they travel – to ski in the Russian resort of Krasnaya Polyana, or to spend July on Putin’s yacht in the Gulf of Finland – do so only on armoured trains or private jets. Though the Russian dictator has long despised American cartoons, comparing them unfavourably to Soviet-era animations, Ivan is said to be a huge fan of Disney, and annoys his father by impersonating characters from its most popular films. Each boy has a personal chef who prepares separate meals, and, like their dad, each has his own mug and drinks only from it. Putin has never acknowledged the boys and is notoriously touchy about his personal life. When a newspaper in Moscow reported in 2008 that he was in a relationship with Kabaeva, he said: “I have always had a negative attitude toward those who, with a runny nose and their erotic fantasies, interfere in other people’s lives.” The newspaper was shut down soon after.

Starmer’s Achilles heel

Henry Kissinger used to argue that in politics “instincts matter more than policy”, says Tom McTague in UnHerd. What really counts, he said, isn’t so much intellect but character, that “great mishmash of moral assumptions, prejudices and instincts formed in early life”. Margaret Thatcher was driven by the “patriotic, self-reliant methodism” of her father; for Tony Blair, it was the “missionary zeal of Christian progressivism” he found at Oxford. What about Keir Starmer? In the absence of any professed beliefs, it’s only through his political decisions that we get a glimpse of the instincts that guide them. And his decision to revoke some arms licences to Israel is the “most revealing moment of his premiership to date”.

Starmer clearly hoped his lawyerish fudge would signal a compromise, “maintaining Britain’s legal obligations and its diplomatic standing”. But it ended up “annoying everyone and assuaging no one”. This is the danger at the heart of the Starmer project. His “left-legal liberalism” is uniquely ill-suited to a world in which the mythical “rules-based order” of old has been replaced by the “hard realities of power politics”. A world in which Houthi rebels control the Red Sea, the US has all but abandoned the pretence of global free trade, and Vladimir Putin laughs at his international arrest warrant. The instincts of other recent prime ministers, and the foibles that would topple them, were clear early on. David Cameron’s breezy over-confidence, Theresa May’s indecisiveness, Boris Johnson’s unseriousness, Liz Truss’s arrogance and Rishi Sunak’s political naivety. To that list we should add Starmer’s “left-legalism”.

How I miss the joys of smoking

I was 13 when I started smoking in earnest, says Robin Ashenden in The Spectator, “and had been impatient to develop the habit long before that”. Back then everyone smoked, and they did it everywhere – buses, trains, on the underground, at the cinema. “We were a tobacco culture.” Chat show guests would “puff away languidly”; Prime Minister Harold Wilson would rebuff interviewers by firing up his pipe; households had tabletop lighters and cut-glass ashtrays “to sanctify the habit for their guests”. Children bought candy-cigarettes in facsimiles of the adult packet – “Just like Dad”, said one advert – and most of us couldn’t wait to convert those sugary sticks into the real thing.

I loved everything about smoking. It’s impossible to imagine my teens without a fag in my hand and the “pleasant feeling I was doing something naughty”. There were the cigarette packets, “all of them faintly iconic”: from the deep purple of the Silk Cut square to the lavish gold of Benson and Hedges and the “baronial flat packet” of Dunhill (favoured by gangsters, apparently, because it didn’t ruin the line of your suit). Hotels and restaurants had matchbooks to filch, or, if you were flash, nestling in your pocket was a Zippo lighter. I even remember a wonderful wooden donkey rescued from an Ipswich junk shop which, at the lift of its tail, “casually shat a Gauloise”. Our breath, our clothes, our hair stank, but we were tolerant enough with each other not to care. People who wouldn’t let you smoke in their houses seemed “odd and finicky”. And if I’m honest I enjoyed the addiction itself – “that sense, 20 or 30 times a day, of coming home”.