How Trump made his name

The Tories need to fall back in love with London

If there’s one “iron law in politics”, says Robert Shrimsley in the FT, it’s that “people will not vote for parties that do not seem to like them”. Which makes it hard to understand why the Tories are so down on London. They snarl at the capital’s “metropolitan” values and rail against the evils of north London elites. For the forthcoming mayoral election, they have chosen as their candidate Susan Hall, a “spiky” nobody who’ll struggle beyond the suburban base and tries to depict Labour incumbent Sadiq Khan as some sort of “demonic figure”. There is no optimism, no love for this “vibrant metropolis”. Recent Tory HQ campaign ads supporting Hall depict the city as a “crime-ravaged hellhole”.

The Tories don’t need to “go woke” to reclaim the affection of Londoners. They just need to demonstrate that they actually care about the capital: a post-Brexit strategy to attract investment; a proper plan to build more homes. Previous leaders have shown that you can follow mainstream Conservative values and still be viable in London. Boris Johnson won two mayoral elections in part because of his “obvious affection” for the city; David Cameron and his allies were happily known as the “Notting Hill set”, and used issues like gay marriage and environmentalism to look at ease with the times. This is not to argue that winning London is the path to a future Tory victory. “But being chased out of it will certainly herald defeat.”

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No wonder kids today hate Britain

In a recent after-school detention, says an anonymous teacher in The Sunday Times, a handful of pupils did their best to convince me that “Afghanistan was much nicer now the Taliban were in control”. They do let girls go to school, one boy insisted, “but they stop them when they turn 11, which is very fair”. It turned out these children not only supported gender inequality but were “fans of executing all manner of criminals too”. My school is a large academy in the south of England, catering to those from poor families. Most are Muslim, and their hero is the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate. The more I get to know them, “the more distressed I am” by some of their views.

I asked a class of 13-year-olds if they hated Britain. “Thirty hands shot up with immediate, absolute certainty.” Many of the boys hold “shocking views on women” – one of them regularly interrupts lessons with diatribes about how Western society is “brainwashing young men” into becoming more feminine. A Kurdish boy tells me he admires Saddam Hussein. “Iraq’s just a bit rubbish now,” he reasons. Due to the Gaza war, no group is more despised than the Jews, with pupils “regularly making comments of pure hatred”. As repugnant as this all is, the fact that our children hate Britain is hardly a surprise. Their curriculum is “packed with hand-wringing about Western imperialism and institutional racism”. I once taught at a school for mostly white, middle-class children, and even there, without the influence of Islamism, the kids were “imbued with a sense that their country is particularly bad”. Solving this problem is tricky. But it might help if – like at Katherine Birbalsingh’s Michaela academy – schools started dissuading students of these prejudices, instead of confirming them.

It’s time we gave Chamberlain his due

When most people hear the name Neville Chamberlain, says Kevin Williamson in The Dispatch, they think only of the British PM’s worst and most consequential mistake: believing he could “buy off Adolf Hitler and thereby avoid an unprofitable war”. Only last week, a US lawmaker joked that a political opponent who opposed sending aid to Ukraine should have her office renamed the “Neville Chamberlain Room”. But Chamberlain wasn’t a bad man. Pursuing peace with Germany was a mainstream view at the time, and trying to avoid unprofitable wars had long been a key plank of British foreign policy. “We have a clear conscience,” he said when war broke out. “We have done all that any country could do to establish peace.”

Contrary to his cartoonish historical portrayal, Chamberlain was “a patriot and a statesman”. After standing down as PM, and despite suffering “excruciating pain” from intestinal cancer, he continued to serve in Winston Churchill’s war cabinet for the few months he had left to live. Churchill himself was in little doubt about his predecessor’s qualities. “It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events,” he eulogised in parliament. “But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed… they were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart – the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.” When Churchill offered Chamberlain the Order of the Garter, he refused. “I prefer to die plain ‘Mr Chamberlain’,” he said, “like my father before me, unadorned by any title.”