‘Easter-holiday treats can be expensive for hard-working families,’ Michael Simmons notes, but for those on benefits, not so much. A working family of four will fork out £111 for a trip to the Tower of London, or £108 to visit London Zoo. With one parent on Universal Credit (UC), however, that drops to just £4 and £26 respectively. Welfare-advice websites expose how the public sector is ‘geared permanently to making welfare an increasingly attractive way of living’. Those on welfare are not enduring the cost-of-living crisis in the same way as the rest of us, with successive governments fiddling with prices and prioritising claimants. On its own, UC is not particularly generous by international standards, but health-related top-ups transform the picture, while it is our failure to incentivise people back to work that really makes us stand out. Welcome to Benefit Britain: ‘Extreme generosity for those on welfare and punishment economics for everyone else.’

 

The two-week ceasefire agreed this week with Iran, in Paul Wood’s view, is ‘a lesson that you can win every battle but lose the war’. Donald Trump's deal ‘gives the mullahs the power they always had but never quite dared to use with impunity – leverage over the world’s oil supplies and, by extension, the global economy’. The question with Trump, Wood suggests, is whether there is method in the madness – or just madness. Going from threatening that Iran’s ‘whole civilisation will die tonight’ to asking whether ‘this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!’ is a sign of Taco: ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’. The ‘worst thing’ you can be for the President ‘is a Loser’; the ‘US under Trump is a frustrated, impotent giant’. ‘US influence,’ according to Wood, ‘will be much diminished after this war.’ And the President will be ‘branded with a scarlet L on his forehead’.

 

James Heale describes how, in a bid to kill off the Conservatives, Nigel Farage ‘has sought to woo the party’s voters by taking their talent and ridding Reform UK of all suspect economic baggage’. As one Tory observes: ‘We are all Sunakites now.’ Some Reformers are worried about ‘Tory-fication’, but Farage ‘believes the experience brought by new arrivals is necessary to make the party fit for government’. A ‘game of mirroring is now playing out’. Reform has a list of ‘policies stolen by the Tories’ while Farage has taken to calling Badenoch ‘copycat Kemi’. Both parties are looking to the next generation. Reform is assembling an ecosystem of ‘new right’ policy wonks at Reform HQ, while Badenoch ‘wants to bring forward the 26 Tories from the 2024 intake’. Reform, meanwhile, have cold-called a serving Lib Dem councillor in the search for candidates for the local elections. But after May, the ‘intellectual and policy case’ for a settlement between the parties will be ‘overwhelming’, one Tory MP suggests. 

 

Recently, Olivia Potts awoke to a tip-off about Gentleman’s Relish: the ‘incredibly niche spread is disappearing from our shelves’. AB World Goods, the parent company, has confirmed to Potts ‘that it has ceased production of the beloved English spread’. More properly called Patum Peperium, Gentleman’s Relish is an intensely spiced version of potted anchovies traditionally spread thinly on hot toast. Created in 1828, it ‘knocks Marmite’s love-it-or-hate-it reputation into a cocked hat’. James Bond, Nigella Lawson and Jessica Mitford were fans. Unveiled at the Paris Food Show in 1849, it became a Victorian and Edwardian essential ingredient. In 2000, ‘three-quarters of a million pots sold a year’, but sales have ‘dropped drastically’. No single employee is said to know the whole recipe, so fans will ‘need to use their best guesswork’. If you can still find a pot, count yourself lucky.

 

As we mark another anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, Nick Parker argues, we ‘should be less inclined to celebrate and more disposed to worry’. What was achieved in 1998 was remarkable, writes the former operational General Officer Commanding in Northern Ireland, but it depended on consistent political leadership. Now, that leadership is ‘faltering’, with ‘the risk of the past being weaponised in ways the Agreement was designed to avoid’. ‘If those asked to act on behalf of the state come to believe that decisions will be revisited decades later through a different legal and moral framework’ then morale declines and initiative fades. The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill ‘does not resolve the problem it seeks to address’, with no meaningful threshold for reopening cases, no clear recognition of context and continued exposure of individuals’. The bill ‘must restore balance’ and not allow ‘legal process’ to ‘displace political judgment’, thereby destroying ‘the balance that made peace possible’.

 

Catherine Ostler can’t resist a courtroom drama. Seeing Prince Harry and other journalists duke it out with the press, she is reminded of when, as editor of Tatler, she had Elizabeth Hurley pose for the cover ‘in a satin gown in a breezy field with a friendly goat’. The cover asserted that people had better sex in the country and sold extremely well. The courtroom drama in the background of Ostler’s book The Renoir Girls is the Dreyfus affair. The whole of France ‘took one side or the other’, with the divisiveness ‘fuelled by cartoons depicting Jews as animals, puppet masters, complete with blood libel and the like’. During a weekend in Kent, Ostler visited ‘the daubs of Matthew Collings’, showing ‘prominent Jews pulling puppet strings or eating babies, Stars of David everywhere, blamed for terrible events for which they bear no responsibility’. The anti-Semitic cartoonists of the Dreyfus era, Ostler reflects, at least learned to draw.

Also in this issue: Charles Moore reveals the hidden incentive for young doctors to strike, Ben Judah explains what British politicians can learn from Charles de Gaulle and William Atkinson asks if Viktor Orban’s time is up. Robin Simon confronts the reality of Old Masters using optical aids and David Whitehouse explores the dark side of the Moon.