The drumbeat grew louder last week, with breathless reports that the veteran New Labour figure, who has spent more than a decade in the United States running a refugee charity, was preparing to “break his silence” with a landmark speech. And then — surprise, surprise — this key acolyte of Tony Blair used the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks memorial lecture at the London School of Economics to reveal that he was actually a Burnham fanboy. Titled, unironically, “Kings, Priests and Prophets: Power and its Missing Guardrails”, Miliband spoke of backing the former Manchester mayor’s devolution agenda, claiming this “big change” was “long overdue”. He argued that centralization of power in London had inflamed Britain’s dissatisfaction with democracy alongside issues such as inequality, technology and the failure of international institutions.

He was right to highlight these challenges facing our country. Barely one-in-five British citizens feel well represented by their government, while three in four are worried about the state of their democracy. Yet this is precisely why it would be absurd for Burnham to bring back this man. For there are few people who better symbolize the arrogance, elitism, political failures and shameless sense of entitlement of the political class than David Miliband.

The boyish-looking Miliband is now 60, and seemingly desperate to come home after a disastrous 13-year stint at the helm of the International Rescue Committee (IRC). His tenure saw him rapidly expand the charity co-founded by Albert Einstein only to then drastically scale it back again, with spiraling deficits as several major donor nations of differing political complexions slashed aid spending. While a necessary realignment, given the serial failures of a bloated aid system that poured cash into conflict zones and the pockets of gruesome regimes, it triggered shock waves across the industry. There were staff cuts and predictable shroud-waving claims about disastrous consequences.

“There is a clear path through this period,” Miliband told IRC staff in a letter last year, as he announced job losses. “I am just so sorry at the price to be paid to get there.” Yet insiders told me how this charity’s bosses used the donor cuts to cover up their own ineptitude. They passed me documents two years ago showing the IRC faced a $50 million deficit due to fund-raising shortfalls, accounting mistakes and cost overruns, despite one bequest of $16.5 million. Miliband warned his top team they had found a “larger deficit than anticipated” and bemoaned there had been “no humanitarian emergency that has significantly buoyed our unrestricted incomes since the Russian invasion of Ukraine”.

Miliband had expanded his charity fast, which boosted his profile and won applause, but then the approach was laid bare by the aid cuts. As investor Warren Buffet famously said about financial crashes exposing poor strategies, “only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked”. These fiscal woes came amid festering internal concerns over management. So there was disquiet over the IRC’s muted initial response to Israel’s attack on Gaza, in contrast with its forceful reaction to Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine, which coincided with rumors that Miliband wanted Sir Keir Starmer to make him Britain’s ambassador to Washington. This job, of course, went instead to Peter Mandelson with disastrous consequences — although recent reports suggest Miliband still fancies this plum diplomatic posting.

Almost 1,700 staff signed a petition complaining over the “absence of prompt, resolute and non-discriminatory condemnation that we expected from our leadership”. There were claims of self-censoring statements, soft-pedaling on Israel and top-down interference, driving a wedge between the leadership and frontline staff. One top figure from the Middle East, looking upset, told a meeting she could not understand their “complicit stand”, saying the IRC was “failing” both itself and Palestinians under attack. “We have not gotten everything right, and for many, this has shaken your trust in the IRC,” admitted a senior executive.

Perhaps such unrest is inevitable in a global organization that at one point had 19,300 staff around the world. But Miliband was already ruffling feathers before he started cutting staff. He faced claims of bullying from minority staff who accused the leadership of reinforcing a “white supremacy culture”, although these were dismissed by a law firm that reviewed discrimination policies. Staff previously circulated a petition calling for top executives to be made more accountable. There were also complaints over their use of unpaid interns — ironic given their mighty salaries. 

Underlying these concerns is a clear belief among some insiders that Miliband saw the post as a platform for his self-aggrandizement. “My strong sense is that the majority of people connected to the IRC will welcome David’s departure,” said one executive, who left recently. “His 13 years at the IRC increasingly appear to have been driven by his ambition to accumulate wealth and stay relevant and connected to global centers of power, just waiting for the moment when the return to real power was finally within his grasp.”

“For many current and former IRC staff, especially in the last five years, the organization has come to be associated with a toxic culture of compliance, mismanagement of funds and teams, and retaliation against anyone who challenged David and his COO [chief operating officer]. These concerns have been accompanied by publicly documented accusations of racism, iniquity and evolving values based on their interests as opposed to the IRC’s mission. There’s no doubt that change is both needed and long overdue.” 

Such dissent — breaking into the media on several occasions — indicates at the very least deficient diplomatic and leadership skills, although it is hard for outsiders to determine the truth about internal rows at major organizations. Yet one thing is clear: David Miliband has done very well financially for himself while running his charity, even as he tours the world condemning aid cuts and pleading for more cash for impoverished refugees. 

It is instructive here to take a closer look at the astonishing sums involved. When Miliband took over as president and chief executive of the IRC in 2013, he succeeded George Rupp, a former head of Columbia University, whose package was $466,209 a year — an impressive sum for a charity chief, even by US standards. Yet in his first year, this former Labour Cabinet minister who once railed against fat cats saw this bumped up to $600,000. His pay package more than doubled over subsequent years: according to the most recent financial filings, from 2023, he was handed $1,246,992 — including a $150,000 bonus and a $55,000 housing allowance. This is “one of the highest in the humanitarian sector”, noted The New Humanitarian drily as it reported on the leadership board’s decision to take a temporary 20% salary cut while laying off thousands of their staff. He has also been promoted by booking agencies as a “wonderful” conference speaker, with fees starting at £25,000.

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No wonder staff have told me that it is “demoralizing” to be led by someone earning “a millionaire’s salary” at a time when they face intense humanitarian and financial pressures. His IRC spokespeople, of course, insist that he gets fair reward for his labors set by the charity’s compensation committee. To his critics, however, it is seen as obscene to pocket such sums from a heavily taxpayer-funded charity dedicated to helping the poor and dispossessed.

Miliband has been charitable to his friends, though. According to tax filings, the second highest-paid IRC executive is Madlin Sheerman, the senior vice-president who pocketed $550,151 in 2023. She just happens to be Miliband’s former special adviser who ran his botched 2010 leadership campaign. His former speechwriter, Laura Kyrke-Smith, was appointed head of the IRC’s British arm, collecting a six-figure salary, before becoming a Labour MP in the 2024 election. His Westminster researcher, Ollie Money, ended up as IRC’s global communications director before joining The Economist group two years ago. Even Lord Doyle — Starmer’s communications chief who sparked a furor over his ties to a sex offender after being given a peerage — spent some time in Miliband’s well-paid team, as did Miliband’s former speechwriter Ravi Gurumurthy, who now runs Nesta.

Burnham says politics in Britain is broken. He is right. Yet putting Miliband back in the Foreign Office is hardly going to fix it — and not just because of his self-enrichment and cronyism while running a respected charity. After all, his track record on international affairs is appalling. He was a firm supporter of the disastrous Iraq War, a misguided conflict that did much to demolish public faith in Westminster. Although Miliband later expressed regret for the neo-colonial misadventure, he told the Chilcot Inquiry how he believed this conflict — which sparked chaos in the region and spurred the rise of Islamic State — had strengthened Britain’s reputation in the Middle East. This was a ridiculous claim to make of a war that so tainted our nation’s reputation, even for one of Blair’s most dedicated cheerleaders. 

That conflict was useful to Vladimir Putin, who used it to justify his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It also undermined Western arguments about the importance of backing a democracy’s defense against unwarranted foreign attack. And, at a time when the Kremlin is on the attack, unleashing covert attacks on the West in league with an alliance of autocratic allies, we should not forget that Miliband was the supine foreign secretary when Putin launched his first European land grab in 2008, sending Russian tanks into Georgia to stymie the growth of its democracy and frustrate its desire to join Nato. 

The Kremlin stirred up separatist tensions, made baseless claims of genocide, then sparked a short war that ended with Russian forces 30 miles from the capital Tbilisi and two chunks of the country breaking away as self-declared republics. Here was Putin’s template for later events in Ukraine, a clear warning for the West that smart historians will see as leading directly to the atrocities 14 years later in Bucha, Izyum and Mariupol. Miliband condemned the Georgia invasion as “entirely unjustified”, yet for all his tough talk, he did nothing. Not even a single sanction. “Isolating Russia would be counterproductive because its international economic integration is the best discipline on its politics,” he trilled. “Our approach must be hard-headed engagement.” So how did that realpolitik work out? 

Traveling the world, delivering grandstanding speeches, making new contacts and opining in interviews — you would think he would be great at diplomacy. But, according to journalist Tim Shipman, he’s one of the rudest men in politics. “I was reminded of the comment by a Labour adviser that if David Miliband was at a party talking to Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela,” he wrote in the Spectator, “he would still be looking over their shoulders to see if there was anyone more important to talk to.” Similarly today, as he seeks to escape from his IRC travails, it is like he is looking over shoulders for a more important opportunity.

Miliband often pontificates on his theory that we live in an “age of impunity”, which he defines as “the exercise of power without accountability…the mind-set that laws and norms are for suckers”. If Burnham delivers his desired post of foreign secretary, Miliband will have proved this point with painful precision.

Their crime was only discovered after the distraught child ran away the following day and was picked up by police. It took her weeks to recover from the physical attacks, while her parents say the mental agonies led to a suicide attempt. Last year, the two employees who abducted her — Liam Ramsey and Stephen Hurst, both in their forties — were found guilty of offenses including sexual activity with a child, intentional strangulation and supply of a class A drug. They were jailed for 11 and nine years respectively. “I was in care to be looked after, taken care of and protected from harm,” the teenager said in a victim’s statement. “These men have done the exact opposite to that. They have sexually abused me for hours and have caused me so much pain and destruction.”

Her words were echoed by the police officer leading the investigation, reiterating how the people who should have been keeping this girl safe were instead “the ones who groomed her, sexually assaulted and abused her”. It has now emerged that those children’s homes were illegal — the girl had been sent there under a loophole that means so-called holiday placements for vulnerable children do not have to be registered with Ofsted if they last no longer than 28 days. Even worse, both men entrusted to look after this at-risk teenager in an unregistered home had criminal convictions, including for violence. Ramsey had been employed despite a previous incident of neglect when he failed to get medical help for a child who suffered a head injury at another unregulated home.

The full details of this sordid saga were published last month by Tom Wall, a journalist with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Given the disturbing nature of the case — with such overt and systemic safeguarding failures — his investigation should have sparked a national furor. But given the shocking lack of concern for kids growing up in society’s underbelly and the shameful decay of social care under both Labour and Tory governments, the disturbing revelations caused barely a ripple in the media.

We should be appalled that local authorities are dumping vulnerable children in these unregistered homes, often for months at a time and at a cost to taxpayers of thousands of pounds per week. It is a criminal offense to run an unregistered home. Yet this unfortunate teenager was placed in one such home run by a firm called MAP Adventures, set up by a former army sergeant and claiming to offer “crisis intervention” and “adventure therapy” for children in Britain, Cyprus, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. “Our team is highly qualified,” boasts its website, which is still seeking donations despite the firm having been shut down following exposure of abuse by its staff.

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Yet many more children are still being sent into similar unregulated homes: 800 last year, according to a recent report by the Public Accounts Committee, despite the fact that such units provide “no assurance over the quality of care or that children are safe”. Children — often with the most complex and acute needs — have been sent to live in Airbnbs, caravans, holiday camps, hotels, houseboats. These are supposed to be short-term, sticking plaster solutions — better than leaving them in hospitals, police cells or risky family environments. But according to the report, the shortage of regulated homes means the average stay for these often-traumatized youngsters is six months.

Most councils do not even know how many illegal homes operate within their area. A new study by researchers at Anglia Ruskin University, based on interviews with police and frontline social workers, claims that one unregistered home was infiltrated by an organized crime group, which even had a member working as a counselor to feed information back to the gang. One interviewee said they had seen such unregulated properties used as “trap” houses for dealing drugs and stashing weapons, with so little control that “you’ve got people coming and going, children going missing for days”. The report concludes that such places create ideal conditions for exploitation “in which children become highly visible to perpetrators while remaining institutionally invisible to safeguarding systems until a critical incident occurs”.

So this scandalous case of an abused teenage girl serves to symbolize the betrayal of Britain’s most vulnerable by a state that has allowed our Cinderella social care system to steadily shrivel while financial sharks swoop in. It offers one more item in the mounting case against Westminster: another corrosive example of political failure. Note, though, how Wes Streeting did not bother to mention social care in his self-aggrandizing resignation letter as health and social care secretary, while making great play of his claimed health service achievements.

The issue was also sidelined, incredibly, in the recent local election campaigns, even as the surging costs of adult and children’s social care cripples councils, accounting for more than half their spending. Perhaps this is unsurprising given how Conservative and Green leaders have sneered at social workers, dismissing their crucial labors as simply wiping bottoms. Voters also place care low down their list of priorities for local officials — beneath potholes, litter, dentistry and the rise of the far-Right, according to the final YouGov survey ahead of this month’s ballot. Yet in every year since 2010, spending on children in care has grown faster than inflation.

England spends two-thirds more than a decade ago, even though the number of children looked after by the state has risen only 16%. Average annual spend per child was £318,400 in the year ending March 2024, although placements in complex cases can exceed £1 million a year.

A key reason for these soaring costs is the growing and uncontrolled use of private providers, which now run more than eight in 10 homes. While some are exemplary and many are regulated, others are owned by people with questionable experience — such as that former sergeant in the army’s physical training corps. Or Ampika Pickston, a reality TV star and girlfriend of porn baron David Sullivan, who owned a home in Altrincham ordered to close last year by a court on safety grounds. Many more are owned by private equity. These outfits use their usual fiscal trickery: loading up debt on firms while slashing costs and extracting cash behind opaque corporate structures with a mesh of cross-payments and routine use of offshore tax havens. These operators — run by billionaires and multi-millionaires — tend to pay front-line staff a pittance.

Eight of the 12 biggest childcare providers are owned by private equity. So when you hear complaints about the lack of local authority funding, bear in mind that CareTech, the biggest operator that began with a single adult home in Luton, paid one director a seven-figure salary and made £223.2 million gross profits according to its latest accounts. At least £1 in every £6 that it takes from councils ends up in the pockets of bankers and investors. Meanwhile, a damning Ofsted report published last month following an emergency inspection at one of its homes found “serious and widespread concerns” with children “at risk of accidental death”. A child with high risk of self-harm was left with a kitchen knife. Another was burned with hair straighteners, then took an overdose of 16 ibuprofen. Two managers and a staff member have been suspended.

Even the world’s richest family — the al-Nahyan dynasty that rules Abu Dhabi — has alighted on this crisis-ridden corner of our public services to boost its immense wealth, enjoying some of the sector’s biggest margins. Yet it is four years since the Competitions and Markets Authority warned that Britain had “sleepwalked” into a system where the biggest suppliers of children’s homes and foster care made excessive profits while many vulnerable children received dire care. A new analysis by Revolution Consulting exposes how the biggest operators are still creaming off 17.1% margins from taxpayers.

Even smaller players can milk such a badly-controlled system. Take a Stockport-based firm called Your Chapter. It used to be called Care 4 Children but changed its name in 2022 after inspectors found “serious and widespread” safeguarding issues that left young people in its care being exposed to bullying, drug use and sexual exploitation. According to its latest accounts, Your Chapter — boasting a “client base” of more than 100 local authorities — earned £22.95 million caring for 70 children at 22 residential centers in 2024. This enabled it to hand almost £13 million in dividends, interest payments, consulting fees, salaries and rents to three bosses: its founder, his wife and the former managing partner of a private equity firm.

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Your Chapter says it invested £15 million of its own capital in properties and is proud to have delivered high-quality residential care, education and therapeutic services to more than 2,000 young people over the past decade. Yet such disclosures provoke fury in the childcare sector. “It is indefensible that companies operating children’s homes can make massive profits while the needs of so many children are going unmet,” said Anela Anwar, chief executive of Become, the charity for children in care and young care leavers. “This is local authority money meant to protect vulnerable children, not bankroll excessive profiteering. The system is being exploited and children being treated as a commodity. The Government must take urgent action.”

So what is the verdict of the children being sent into this expensive system? One 20-year-old man told me he was moved around 93 different placements during nine years in care, detailing some of the abuse and bullying that he suffered. Were any of them any good? “Probably two or three, maybe four or five at most,” he replied. “I don’t see anything good in the others.”

A 19-year-old from Hampshire, who entered the system aged 12, said she was sent to 24 different homes. At one unit she had her fingers broken deliberately by a care worker, who also stuffed a sanitary pad in her mouth after she ran away, while she claims to have seen a six-year-old child dragged down some stairs by his hair. “No-one ever wants to believe a kid over a carer,” she said ruefully. “The system is so messed up. You don’t know what normality is inside it. I didn’t have a decent teenage life, I didn’t make friends, I didn’t get to see my family for months on end, I didn’t even go out. You just stay in and watch television.”

This teenager ended up in prison on remand for four months after assaulting a carer. This is far from unusual: more than one in four people behind bars spent time in care as children. “It sounds really bad but prison is so much better,” she said. “At least I was getting food three times a day while the staff all wanted to talk to you and help you — it felt like luxury compared with some of the children’s homes.”

What a damning indictment of a system that is supposed to protect the most damaged and vulnerable children: life is deemed better inside prison than in a broken care sector. But perhaps more damning still is the fact that the rest of the country — including our politicians — simply does not seem to care.

Having fled her home in western Ukraine in the early days of Russia’s invasion, Iryna recalls the warm welcome received at first. Locals offered food, homes, and clothing to the more than 1.5 million refugees who poured over its border. “We were treated very kindly,” she says. Yet just in the last months, the mood has shifted alarmingly.

Iryna is far from alone in her anxieties. Several other women I met at a UNITERS Foundation center, a charity in the Polish capital offering support to Ukrainians, spoke of similar fears. One pensioner from war-torn Zaporizhzhia was even pepper-sprayed outside an optician’s. “Now I try not to speak Ukrainian on the streets. If there are gatherings of Poles, my son recommends I stay away and watch out for myself.”

Hostility is surging. The center’s windows have been smashed several times, and state funding has now been terminated. In Przemyśl, a rail hub by Ukraine’s border, the mayor removed the blue and yellow scarf from a big teddy bear in the Christmas market after an outcry. In the Baltic coast region, a school teacher called his Ukrainian teenager pupils “scum”, while other youngsters spat on and beat the refugees so badly that one was left with a broken nose. One pupil also reportedly played recordings of bombs falling on Ukraine while yelling “time to hide” at his victims.

Poland is far from unique in seeing rising resentment to refugees. But these are people fleeing a neighboring country riven by war, not some distant land with an alien culture. Moreover, Poland too is a country that suffered from Moscow’s repression for decades — it shares Ukraine’s loathing of Russia and helped lead Europe’s initial response to Vladimir Putin’s assault on Kyiv. But attitudes have changed and show how bitter political struggles over the future, often entwined with unresolved perceptions of the past, are erupting across the West. Sensitive historical fissures underlie this transformation, combining with an all too familiar catalog of modern issues — disinformation, migration, populism, security, technology and trade battles — to create a highly combustible political environment.

“This is not yet a catastrophe but it is a new challenge for us,” says Miroslaw Skorka, chairman of the Association of Ukrainians in Poland. “For Poland, the story about victory over the Ukrainians was very important for post-war communist identity. So even during that explosion of support in 2022, a part of the population stayed silent. Now there is a schizophrenia: we need Ukrainians in the labor force to work and help grow our economy, but immigrants get scapegoated in schools and on the streets.”

Living on our island nation, with borders that have been fixed for centuries, British people often forget the turbulence endured by those living in the regions that historian Timothy Snyder has called the “bloodlands” of central and eastern Europe. Thousands of ethnic Poles were murdered in the Second World War by nationalists seeking to create an independent Ukraine, then many Ukrainians were in turn killed in savage retaliatory violence. In 1947, after the communist takeover, about 140,000 Ukrainians — including Skorka’s family — were forcibly moved in Operation Vistula from their homes in south-eastern regions to western areas taken from Germany in order to break up their community and curb support for insurgents, resulting in much hardship.

This left lingering historical sores on both sides — and these have been inflamed by resurgent nationalism, divisive politicians and the Kremlin’s adroit abuse of social media to spread discord in democracies. The sharp decline in sympathy for Kyiv is highly significant in a country that spent years warning complacent politicians in the West about Moscow’s expansionism, and that moved rapidly to bulk up its own armed forces in response to Putin’s aggression. Recent surveys of Poles have indicated that the majority oppose their neighbor joining either Nato or the European Union, and almost half want to reduce military support.

According to Marta Prochwicz, deputy head of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Warsaw, the nation remains united over its core approach to Russia. “Poland is as anti-Russian as Ukraine — it’s practically impossible to find pro-Russian attitudes in Poland. At the start of the war, the public mood was very supportive. Because of the common threat, the automatic, knee-jerk reaction of the party in power was to give military equipment to Ukraine straight away.”

When Vladimir Putin attacked Kyiv, the ruling party of Poland was the conservative Law and Justice (PiS). It had governed since 2015 and presided over a period of controversial judicial reforms, an abortion ban and the harsh anti-LGBT rhetoric. Yet faced with a looming election and the strong threat from the rival liberal party, led by former EU president Donald Tusk, PiS tried to fire up voters with populist policies and stunts. They unsuccessfully demanded Second World War reparations from Germany, backed farmers protesting against cheap grain flooding the market under an EU deal designed to help Kyiv, and urged Zelensky to apologize for wartime massacres by nationalists 80 years earlier.

Despite Tusk’s party winning the subsequent election, the stirring up of those issues had lasting effects. Farmers protesting at the border, and the increased talk of exhuming graves of massacre victims, started to turn the mood against Ukrainians. Donald Trump’s return to the White House accelerated these changes.

This year’s bitter, hard-fought presidential contest also saw the unexpected victory of populist historian Karol Nawrocki, an independent backed by PiS. Nawrocki opposed Kyiv’s accession to the EU or Nato until “important civilizational issues” for Poland were resolved — referring to the wartime massacres by Ukrainian nationalists — while proposing to give Poles priority access to benefits, doctors and schools.

This has led to tussles with Tusk over extending support to refugees, although the prime minister — weakened by his party’s failure to win the presidency — has ruled out sending troops to back a ceasefire in Ukraine. Last month, Nawrocki agreed for “the last time” to extend legal status for Ukrainians until March, leaving their future uncertain. This is despite studies suggesting that more Ukrainians work in Poland than in any other European nation and that they generated 2.7% of the country’s GDP in the last year. Meanwhile, sabotage attacks and September’s drone incursion into Polish airspace rattled many citizens — especially after two Ukrainians linked to Russian intelligence were identified last month as suspects behind some rail blasts.

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The flood of people over the border highlights how Poland — with its fast-growing economy and rapid post-Soviet modernization — has transitioned from a nation of emigration to one that offers alluring prospects as well as sanctuary. After Russia’s invasion, the million Ukrainians who came to Poland, joining the 1.3 million already there, were typically from more middle-class backgrounds than the earlier waves of “invisible migrants” working in low-paid jobs in fields and factories. Yet as one screenwriter with three university degrees tells me, she decided it was better to return home and endure Putin’s bombs than to be repeatedly offered cleaning jobs. “It is not a problem to clean some toilets — but it is a problem if I have to do this for the rest of my life.”

Now a new influx of men aged between 18 and 22 is further fueling concerns, given reports that at least 100,000 men have reportedly left Ukraine after the ban on adult males going abroad was lifted in August. Among them is Roman Melnyk, 22, an English teacher from Kyiv I met at Warsaw station. “This is my first day abroad in my whole life,” he says, explaining that even his soldier father had urged him to leave their war-torn country. Yet these refugees have been less warmly received than predecessors. “We should not allow Ukrainians of military age into Poland,” was the response of the far-Right Confederation party. “Poland cannot continue to be a haven for thousands of men who should be defending their country, yet burden the Polish taxpayer with the cost of their own desertion.”

In contrast with the war’s early days — when the Polish president received a standing ovation in parliament for declaring that Ukrainians were not refugees but guests — polling now shows that opposition to accepting Ukrainian refugees is at its highest (at 45%) since responses started being recorded following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. And most Poles now believe too much assistance is being offered, saying benefits and health care should only be offered to refugees working and paying taxes.

Research has also shown that the words most associated with Ukrainians on social media are “demanding” and “cunning”. One analysis found that 94,000 anti-Ukrainian posts appeared on X in just over four months this year, often linking Ukrainians to sabotage attacks in Poland or anti-Polish atrocities in the Second World War. Pro-Russian accounts have also blamed Ukraine for the recent drone incursions. And these stories feed neatly into Russian disinformation narratives, which the army has described as a key part of Russia’s strategy of “cognitive warfare”.

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Putin’s disinformation tricks have undoubtedly intensified the political divisions and hostility toward refugees. During the presidential campaign, for instance, seven cities received fake emails supposedly from Ukrainian House, a leading cultural and support center, seeking consent for demonstrations in support of Nawrocki’s main rival. It emerged later they included a word left untranslated from Russian. “How can you be a Polish nationalist and repeat divisive narratives that obviously have their roots in the Kremlin?,” asked Ben Cope, the NGO’s director of programs.

Yet Olena Babakova, an academic, journalist and migration researcher who moved from Kyiv 17 years ago, believes it is wrong to overestimate the Kremlin influence. “I often attend meetings with Polish politicians and when I ask why relations are poor, they blame Russian propaganda. And it was the winning presidential candidate who said the Polish NHS should develop an algorithm to automatically move Ukrainians to the end of the line for doctors so Poles could be first. If that is not racist, what is?”

She argues that refugees get scapegoated for wider economic and political failures. These are all familiar issues being discussed from Washington and Westminster through to Warsaw. Yet toward the end of our conversation, Babakova unwittingly echoes the British-Hungarian writer Gitta Sereny, who wrote about the complicity of a similarly passive society that refused to confront uncomfortable truths in darkening times.

“I have friends who tell me they limit their public presence in cafes, supermarkets or on the street in order not to be insulted,” Babakova says. “It is not that all Poles are anti-Ukrainian but the voices of a hostile minority, perhaps about 20%, have become so loud while the majority stays silent. Ukrainians who tell me they have experienced hate speech and violence always say the biggest problem is not that they were assaulted — but that everyone around them was silent.”

Eventually, this surging tide of gentrification engulfed Gabriela. Two months ago, she had to move from Condesa to another flat, about five kilometers away across the capital’s massive urban sprawl. “They told me they would not renew my lease because the owner wanted to tear down the building. I imagine they are going to build a new building — and if they follow the other buildings on the street, they will build luxury apartments or Airbnbs to be used by foreigners.”

Gabriela, who has studied in the United States, understands why many Americans might want to flee their car-oriented and often-costly cities. But she admits to anger at seeing so many gringos — often working remotely from their new homes — take over her native district. “Mexico prides itself on being very welcoming but it’s impossible to compete with American salaries,” she says. “Of course it is fantastic when you can live a much more affordable life. But when I was a kid, the only foreigners who came to Mexico City were people interested in our culture since it was deemed the most dangerous and polluted city in the world. Now so many of them come here, but they are not interested in our country.”

Such complaints are far from unusual — and laced with cruel irony at a time when Mexicans north of the border are being hunted down, detained and deported. Visiting Mexico City early last year, I was amazed to hear so many American accents in its most prosperous enclaves. Friends told me there was growing fury over an “invasion” that exploded after the pandemic, when the nation had comparatively loose restrictions. Anti-gringo graffiti and stickers began appearing. Then came three demonstrations over the summer in Condesa, culminating with protesters attacking boutiques, cars, coffee shops and taco restaurants aimed at tourists. Some chanted “Fuera Gringo!” (Gringos Out!); others held signs saying things like “Gentrification is colonization!” and “Learn Spanish, dog”.

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum — who is facing fresh demonstrations over corruption following the murder of a popular mayor — quickly condemned the display of xenophobia. And Mexico City is far from the only place to face protests over rapid gentrification that pitches rich against poor, local against newcomer, localism against a globalization. There have been similar complaints in other tourist hotspots where short-term lets inflame such issues. Last month, for instance, I was investigating this issue in Lisbon, where the typical price for a home has surged to 21 times median household income — making it the least affordable European capital for local people.

The shift in Mexico City’s image can be traced to 2016, when The New York Times unexpectedly labeled it the world’s best place to visit. The first substantial wave of gringos  — a word which in Mexico refers specifically to Americans — arrived in central areas like Condesa, Polanco and Roma the following year. A pair of natural disasters inflamed the influx. First, in 2017, the city was struck by an earthquake, leaving homes damaged. Many local families moved out and house prices fell. Then numbers soared during the pandemic — and gentrification started to ripple into adjacent districts.

In Condesa, perhaps one in five homes are now an Airbnb or other tourist house. And while there is limited data on numbers of foreign residents — many use tourist visas — last year 56% more temporary-residency permits were issued to Americans in Mexico City than five years earlier (though foreigners make up a tiny minority of Mexico City’s 9.2 million people). All this in a city that saw the lowest rate of new house-building of any Mexican state over the last decade, notwithstanding its Left-wing leadership.

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These are familiar concerns in many cities: an influx of foreigners seeking fun, freedom and fewer financial shackles, before becoming a focal point for generational fury over housing inadequacies and political ineptitude. Yet while the new arrivals have put pressure on costs — property prices have risen eightfold in under two decades in prosperous Polanco — the tensions are also cultural. It was no coincidence that the initial protest took place on 4 July: US Independence Day. Behind the volley of demands for rent controls, or effective regulation of short-term lets, locals are angry over the arrogance of many Americans in their city. “When I was in Condesa, the people who lived there spoke Spanish,” says Vanessa Gonzales, 49, a hairdresser driven out last year after her salon’s landlord demanded a near-tripling of rent. “Now it’s all English, English, English. We’re Mexican but you go to the restaurants and menus are in English.”

When Gonzales first opened a salon near her home in Condesa 15 years ago, almost all her clients lived in the district; now barely one in 10 remain. And, as she explains, many Mexicans “do not love American people” for economic, religious or historical reasons — a feeling intensified when strutting newcomers refuse to respect their culture. Fernando, a taco seller working with his two nieces, tells me that gringos complained about the smell of his food, the umbrellas over his stall and even how he clogs up the street. “They’re not even from here,” he says, “and they complain that this commerce should not be here.”

There are even more brazen examples too. A young American model sparked outrage last year after posting on Instagram that people should stop giving money to traditional street musicians playing automated organs since they were “polluting with their noise.” Another American in Condesa — a long-term resident married to a Mexican man and running an Airbnb in their home — tells me she was horrified to hear a group of “vile” young Americans discuss their cocaine use recently while standing in the queue at her local bakery. “This was so incredibly offensive in a country that has been ravaged by drug violence,” she says. “Although most guests at our Airbnb have been very pleasant, it sums up the arrogance of some of the people coming here.”

This seems to be the key issue — along with corrosive suspicions that rich foreigners get favorable treatment in their city. One podcast featured someone who spoke about trying to make a booking at a popular restaurant in Spanish and being told there was no room: only to get an English-speaking friend to call back and be told there was an available table. There are even scandalous claims that some restaurants have toned down the heat in their salsas.

True or false, there is a unique edge to this Mexican outrage at gentrification, since it comes at a time when the White House has dispatched controversial federal enforcement units to find and deport undocumented migrants. “Whenever I open YouTube I get this fucking Pam Bondi ad where she says don’t come to the United States illegally because we will catch you,” says Sebastian Rojas, a musician who was born in Condesa, but who moved after being “strangled” by high rents. “At the same time you see all these gringos living like kings and enjoying the beauty of the best parts of our city.”

Emilio Guerrero Alexander, a filmmaker, makes a similar point in response to claims that Americans are entitled to gentrify his city when millions of Mexicans go to the US. “This is not a two-way street,” he says. “Some people are unlucky to have been born in areas where there is lots of criminal activity and murders so they go north to escape this misery. They just want safety and a better life for their families. But the Americans coming to Mexico City are people who realized — mostly during the pandemic — they will be richer here and buy more with their dollars… They are coming to have fun and don’t even try to get into our culture. Some do — but sadly it is just a minority.”

Even some Americans tell me they supported the protests against them. “It makes sense that people are upset,” says Shaynn, a charity worker who has lived in the city for four years. “I do my best to be conscious about where I spend my money, the kind of housing I live in, how I pay or hire people — but my being here definitely has a negative impact, which is something I grapple with. Anyone earning in a foreign currency, especially dollars, and spending in pesos negatively impacts on people living here by increasing prices.”

Such ambiguities are also apparent among Mexicans. In one luxury spa, for instance, a therapist tells me she supported the protests despite feeling hypocritical. “We have to treat them like special guests because they come with money, so it feels like I am betraying my own culture,” she says. “And I hate seeing gringos coming to the city and paying huge amounts of rent when we can’t afford to live in these most beautiful parts because they have raised the costs so much.”

This woman also has relatives living north of the border. “It feels a bit icky,” she admits. “My family has friends who aren’t citizens in the US and they are being profiled the whole time. Our government sees all these Americans as bringing money into our country, but I do feel some resentment when I hear these people saying how much they love Mexico City, how they love having such fun here and how it’s so cheap. It feels like we are being colonized.”

This word is heavily loaded in a nation colonized by Spain for centuries, and then invaded by the US in 1846 and 1916 — and the fact that it kept cropping up in my conversations underlines the depth of disquiet about gentrification in the Mexican metropolis. “I support the protests since it feels like we have been colonized again, predominantly by Americans,” says Armando, 25, working in a Roma boutique selling $130 hoodies.

Not that everyone agrees. Eduardo Garcia, 64, a writer and podcaster, argues that though the demonstrations reflect genuine grievances over high rents and the conversion of buildings into short-term lets, they got out of hand and damaged the nation’s image. “The protests left a bad impression,” he tells me. “A lot of small businesses, a lot of the waiters such as those here, benefit from the high number of foreigners coming to the city. If foreigners think twice about coming to Mexico and feel unwanted, they could hurt these people.”

Protests against over-tourism in places such as Spain suggest they do not deter arrivals and have little long-term impact, but can lead to small behavioral changes, such as switching to hotels. Yet studies indicate the capital has seen hefty price rises in its swankier parts, with a single room in Condesa or Roma Norte now costing $1,000 or more — higher than average monthly wages. One report, published last year by the National Academy of Sciences, revealed average house prices quadrupled over two decades before 2022, while the country’s per capita income declined relative to inflation. “Gentrification in Mexico City,” the authors concluded, “is impacting housing accessibility and displacing its residents.”

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Given international trends, some suspect these shifts are an inevitable consequence of our globalized economy. Garcia, who is married to an American, says his country was cut off from the rest of the planet when he was growing up, with its low trade, poor-quality domestic consumer products and tourism limited to beach resorts. “Now Mexico is competing with the world, producing better products, and is attractive to foreigners,” he continues. “I saw these changes and like these changes. I believe in the strength of Mexican culture — and there is nothing to be afraid of foreigners coming into your country and changing it a little bit.”

His stance is supported by the economist José Alberto Lara-Pulido, head of the center for sustainability at Ibero American University. “Gentrification is tough,” he says. “It has a relationship with xenophobia because a lot of people from the US came to the richest areas of Mexico City, prices of houses have risen and local people are being pushed away. There is fear of real-estate speculation. But for me, it is just the market working and a big city should welcome people from all over the world.” Foreign business owners defend themselves too, claiming they create jobs, pay decent wages and assist local suppliers. “The frustration is valid but misdirected,” says Fahra Bellak, a 40 year old from Edinburgh who runs a thriving bagel shop in Roma Norte. “Farmers tell me they come into the city and make four times as much as in rural areas, which helps sustain their farms. We buy our eggs from an organic farmer — when we started it was seven trays a week, now it’s more than 60, so he says I’ve helped him grow his farm. Our coffee guy says the same.”

Regardless, the authorities are responding. Following the protests, Mayor Clara Brugada proposed a 14-point plan to regulate rent prices, protect residents, and build affordable social housing. Critics, however, point out that existing rules to limit occupancy of short-term lets to a maximum of six months a year are rarely enforced, while Sheinbaum, during her own tenure as mayor, has faced accusations of fueling the boom — after signing a 2022 deal with Airbnb to lure digital nomads and tourists.

Lara-Pulido argues that Mexico’s real problem is not gentrification but rampant inequality in a land where about half the population work in the informal sector; where inflation has long been high; where the economy is dominated by a handful of huge corporations; and where it is hard to start or close a business. “There are much bigger issues with our economy,” he stresses. “A lot of young people cannot afford houses with these rising prices but the solution is not regulating prices or controlling Airbnbs but the creation of a more prosperous economy.”

In Mexico, as in so many places, these issues are divisive. A self-proclaimed “social warrior” since his student days 50 years ago, veteran housing activist Enrique Gonzales labels the anti-gentrification protests as a publicity stunt, used to divert attention from other important issues such as inadequate security, healthcare and infrastructure. “Mexico has a long history of hospitality and welcoming people from other societies,” he says. But, like many others, Gonzales is ambivalent about the tide of American arrivals given events north of the border. “The gringos here are happy, they feel safe, but the Mexicans in the US are all scared, hiding in the shadows.”

Earlier this year, his daughter Emma, 39, had to leave her home in Texas after two decades amid the immigration crackdown, leaving behind her 12-year-old daughter. She hopes to return soon after obtaining US citizenship. Yet to her father’s shock, Emma tells me she likes Trump for his straight-talking style — even as she supported the anti-American protests in Mexico. “These people, the gringos, are taking something that does not belong to them,” she says. “This is why there is war in the world. It’s not because they are American but because they are pushing up prices and changing the economy. It is already very hard for people like me and they are making life harder.”

Both the Gonzales and their beguiling city ultimately show how the arguments over globalization, housing, migration, populism and tourism that strain our own societies are being echoed across so much of the planet. “Our culture is changing, our way of life is changing,” adds Enrique. He is right, of course — but the big challenge of our era, one that even divides this family, is over the best solution.

Welcome to Oktoberfest, the world’s biggest beer festival, which began in 1810 to celebrate a royal wedding and this year drew over six million revelers from across the world. Like a giant Christmas party, it is filled with good-natured revelers and resounds with goofy German humor. Locals mix with tourists and celebrities. The Bayern Munich football team had visited for a few steins, with Harry Kane dutifully decked out in lederhosen — while Arnold Schwarzenegger was spotted a couple of days earlier chaotically conducting a band. Armies of waiting staff rush around delivering plates piled high with pork and vast glasses of frothy booze. “It’s better than I thought it would be,” says Osvaldo from Mexico City, having polished off his fifth stein. “We don’t have good beer because it is mixed with other shit,” he says. “But here it’s different — you don’t need lemon and all that other stuff.”

Beer, of course, is more than just a drink in Germany. It has special significance; it is part of their nation’s cultural heritage. And it also has economic clout: Germany is one of the world’s biggest beer producers with around 1,500 breweries, many of them based in Bavaria. But beyond the revelry, all is not well for this cornerstone of German culture. For just like the country’s pivotal car industry, the cherished brewing sector is struggling. Sales of alcoholic drinks fell more than 6% in the first half of this year compared with last year. And the average German now consumes only 88 liters of beer a year, down from 126 at the start of the century — a decline fueled in large part by abstemious younger generations.

Even here at Oktoberfest, the problems are apparent. “I don’t really like beer — it’s so heavy,” confesses one young woman outside a raucous tent. Her friend agrees. Young Germans, she tells me, are significantly changing their approach to well-being. “They want to live healthier.”

Not that everyone is into wellness. In one tent, I come across a lively group snorting what I presume was cocaine from the top of a bald man’s shiny head. One gives me a big grin as he sniffs deeply, then wipes his nose. Two tables down, another ebullient gang of pals pass around a mirror with chunky white lines laid out on it. Minutes later, I pass yet another high-spirited gaggle tapping small piles of powder onto their clenched fists. Yet as Benedict, a 24-year-old data analyst, tells me when I describe these enthusiastic scenes of debauchery, Oktoberfest “is the biggest drug festival in the world if you count alcohol as a drug”. And it seems many do. In a YouGov survey, almost half the 18-24 age group said they were teetotal — the highest in Europe. Consumption of alcohol among younger teenagers is at an all-time low, storing up future problems for the beer sector.

The German drinks industry is far from alone in confronting such a situation. Times are tough in Britain, too, with scores of breweries and hundreds of pubs closing annually; wine sales in France have crashed, and in the US increasing numbers of the young in the land that once had prohibition are more likely to be teetotal.

But in Bavaria, the heartland of the traditional brewing industry, the crisis is hitting hard.  Schönbrunn, close to the Czechia border, has been the home of the Lang-Bräu brewery for 172 years, surviving some of the most tumultuous events in European history. But after struggling for the past two decades, it has closed. When I visit, the brewer Richard Hopf, 38, explains what it was like to close a family-run firm after six generations. “Some people were crying — most of the village is very sad,” he says, trying to capture the significance of small breweries in these close communities. “In the past there was the church, but for the last 30 years it was the brewery,” he tells me “People would come here, buy your beer, drink one, talk. It was a big place for getting together. Everyone knows each other here.”

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Hopf shows me around the maze of rooms where for decades his family fermented, cooled and stored their beer, pointing out proudly the machines which could fill 6,000 bottles an hour, but now stand silent. This plant used to produce 1.5 million liters annually, exporting about 20% of their output to China and Korea at one point — although most sales have been within a 30-mile radius.

As we tour the ghostly plant, he tells me about his father winning a burst of global media attention after making “Erotik bier” — with a highly-suggestive label — as a joke. But those carefree days are long gone. As the cost of energy and staff rose in recent years — and with cut-throat supermarkets dominating sales — beer prices remained largely static. “The end result,” he says wistfully, “is the market just goes down and down and down.” And in such a climate, the family firm could not get the financing needed to modernize — so these days their storage rooms are stacked high with empty bottles.

While the closure has been painful, Hopf and his brother were left with little choice. The machinery and buildings were constructed in the decades after the Second World War and were too dated for efficiency. “You must think 20 years in the future,” he explains. “You have to forecast the beer you might sell then, but we knew things were only going to get worse because the baby boom generation is dying and younger ones drink less beer.”

It is a similar story in Bamberg. A hundred kilometers away, set in rolling hills, it reflects centuries of history and is famed for its number of breweries and its diversity of beers — including the local specialty, Rauchbier, a smoked draft served straight from oak barrels. Inside Schlenkerla, a bustling time-warp tavern, one manager explains the appeal beer’s appeal, telling me their brands sell around the world. “I was recently in Lviv, in Ukraine,” she says, “and I saw a whole shelf of our beer there.”

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But having survived the war largely unscathed, its breweries know they face a struggle. And it soon becomes clear that this 28-year-old saleswoman is emblematic of the sector’s problems. “Bavarians are more likely to drink beer than other parts of Germany but I prefer wine,” she tells me. “I don’t drink so much personally. I am very boring. When you work here it seems like only older people drink.” When I ask her what she meant by “old”, she replies: 40.

The manager of an Irish pub over the road echoes the sentiment. “I know it is a national symbol but it’s not for me,” he confesses. In Wirtshaus Graser, the town’s newest microbrewery, the barmaid says business is good — but even she sounds a warning, admitting that Gen Z Germans seem far more abstemious than their predecessors. “I am from the generation that partied and drank a lot during their teenage times.”

Falling sales, rising costs and generational change have created an existential crisis for German beer makers — and sales of the alcohol-free products that now comprise almost one-tenth of their output will not fully plug the gap. But exports are falling even faster than the intensifying domestic decline, leading the head of one major brewery to warn two months ago about a “landslide” that would sweep away both big and small firms. “The brewing world is crumbling,” says Stefan Blaschak, managing director of Oettinger, which is closing one of its four plants. It is a huge dent in the self-image and confidence of the nation that powers the European economy — something which cannot be masked by all the beer-soaked revelry, drinking chants and sea of lederhosen at Oktoberfest.

Concealed by the jollity of Bavaria’s biergartens and the frenzied Oktoberfest partying, another national champion is flailing in an economy that is strugging to adapt to a world of rapid political, societal and technological change. The number of German jobless hit 3.02 million in August, the highest figure for a decade, as the manufacturing giants that drove the post-war economic boom shed staff. Industrial output slid 4.3% on the previous month as car production crashed to its lowest level since the start of this century. All those dirndl-clad waitresses clutching overflowing steins of golden Helles might be the nation’s fetching global image, but it is pretty sobering to see that Germans, of all people, are losing their thirst for beer.

Despite being the most popular politician in Venezuela, María Corina Machado has been banned from standing in this weekend’s election. Forbidden from flying, she must rely on cars and motorcycles — even canoes, horses and tractors when the roads are deliberately blocked — to criss-cross the country for campaigning. She is kept off most of the media. Her rallies have been attacked. Her aides and supporters have been beaten, detained or forced to flee into friendly embassies.

Machado endures all of this in the hope of forcing out a thuggish regime that preaches socialism while pillaging the state, sparking economic meltdown, mass hunger and the world’s worst displacement crisis. “Last week, we went to the state of Apure and we stopped to have breakfast,” Machado said when I heard her speak last month. “A couple of hours later the regime sent officials to close this tiny restaurant on the route. If we stay in hotels when we travel around the country, they are closed for several months. Many of the people who give us sound, move us around on buses are searched at their homes and their trucks or equipment are detained, for months sometimes.”

Little wonder this 56-year-old woman, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, has been nicknamed the Iron Lady. As she admits, it will be tough to defeat one of the world’s most repulsive regimes — and there have been previous false dawns. If the elections were fair, her rival President Nicolás Maduro would be ousted along with his gangster pals in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela after overseeing the impoverishment of an oil-rich nation and driving out 7.7 million citizens — one-fifth of the population. The polls suggest the opposition has more more than twice the support of the ruling party. But they are taking on a government with a record of electoral fraud and frustrating democracy.

So Machado plans to mobilise hundreds of thousands of supporters to monitor all the polling stations during Sunday’s vote, which is being held after a deal was brokered last year in Barbados for fair elections in return for lifting United States sanctions and allowing in some outside observers. “We are not naive knowing what the regime will do,” she told fellow dissidents attending the Oslo Freedom Forum. “We’ve been facing persecution, violation of human rights. But the regime is weaker and weaker every day. They have totally lost their social base and at the same time the networks they use for terror in the population are breaking down.”

Last October, the charismatic Machado — a conservative former parliamentarian who once called for outside intervention to save her country — won a massive majority in the opposition’s primary contest. But after one survey found she was backed by more than two-thirds of voters with Maduro languishing on 8%, officials disqualified her from running for public office for 15 years on grounds of supporting sanctions. But she remains the driving force behind Venezuela’s united opposition. Machado and her substitute candidate, former ambassador Edmundo González, have been drawing big crowds to rallies despite all the efforts to disrupt their campaign. Such is the disillusionment over the country’s economic collapse and desperate desire to reunite families divided by the mass exodus of citizens, they claim they can win power against the odds.

Analysts compare Machado’s popular appeal, energising the opposition and rousing people out of apathy, with the rise of her arch-enemy Hugo Chávez in the Nineties — although her mission is rooted in despair rather than Marxist ideology. The flamboyant former army colonel, who led a failed coup in 1992, took office seven years later by harnessing public anger over corruption, inequality and nepotism. Then his socialist party machinery strangled democratic institutions such as the civil service, courts and press, while his cronies plundered state coffers. Chávez’s former finance minister estimated they stole $300 billion before their leader’s death in 2013, when he was replaced by Maduro.

Yet Chávez was feted by Western Leftists as a progressive idol supposedly fighting for social justice. Seduced by his social programmes, foolish Western celebrities, journalists and politicians turned a blind eye to his human rights abuses and looting. Never mind that his government fired 18,000 workers who went on strike in protest at the politicisation of the state-run oil firm, replacing them on the public payroll with loyalists. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called him an “inspiration” for demonstrating “wealth can be shared”, while his sidekick John McDonnell praised Venezuela for showing “the contrast between capitalism in crisis and socialism in action”. Hollywood actor Sean Penn called Chávez a model democrat, even demanding jail for “mainstream media” journalists who dared to brand him a dictator.

Amid all this naive adulation for the Chavismo creed, Venezuela’s economy ended up suffering the biggest collapse outside of wartime in the past half-century. A country with the world’s biggest oil reserves was hit by severe blackouts, hyperinflation and mass hunger as bakeries could not find flour, hospitals ran out of medicines and pro-government militia terrorised urban areas.

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Faced with the inevitable disillusion that followed, last year Maduro tried to stir Venezuelans up into patriotic frenzy with a referendum on grabbing two-thirds of next-door Guyana after the discovery of big offshore oil reserves. But his ploy failed: turnout was thought to be lower than the 2.4 million voting in the opposition primaries, which were run without any state support. This did not stop the Venezuelan president from stunts such as printing new maps of his enlarged nation and granting energy licences for the disputed region, provoking fears the border dispute might be used to postpone the presidential election.

The tragedy of this failed revolution was symbolised by the mass exodus of people, many of whom fled across Latin America and into the United States. In the past two years alone, almost half a million Venezuelans entered the US. Two months ago, I was in Ecuador — home to the fourth largest number of these refugees and under a state of emergency amid spiralling gang violence — where I heard of growing hostility and xenophobia towards Venezuelan exiles. Yet one journalist told me how the region used to look wistfully at oil-rich Caracas, seeing a peaceful and prosperous beacon of stability.

But this is an election that might have immense significance extending far beyond those exiled Venezuelans who dream of going home. For if Maduro’s regime can be forced from power, it would be a serious setback for the axis of autocracy led by Russia and China that is engaged in an epochal global struggle against democracy, seen most acutely on the battlefields of Ukraine. As the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum dissects in her book Autocracy, Inc, Venezuela has evolved under Chávez and Maduro into a central player in an international alliance of repressive regimes. These states assist each other with a sinister and self-serving web of kleptocratic financial systems, surveillance technologies and propaganda machines to defy sanctions, shred internal dissent and challenge democratic freedoms. So Caracas developed commercial, fiscal and political links with Beijing and Moscow while Cuban security experts helped stifle opposition and showed them how to weaponise chronic food shortages created by theft and incompetence. Few were surprised when, in March, Maduro hailed the re-election of his Russian ally Vladimir Putin as “a flawless electoral process”.

Yet Applebaum points out that these Left-wing internationalists built their most important ties with the Islamic theocracy in Iran, highlighting how these new networks of repression are built on shared lust for power, wealth and impunity rather than ideology. “What binds them is oil, anti-Americanism, opposition to their own democracy movements and a shared need to learn the dark arts of sanctions evasion,” she writes. Iran has bought Venezuelan gold, advised on crushing dissent, helped with a drone factory and assisted with repairs on oil refineries. In return, Caracas has laundered cash for Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group, and has provided passports for its leaders.

It is hard to believe that people power might finally topple the government of Venezuela, that its leader would accept the electoral verdict and not resort to trickery or violence even if defeat is beyond doubt. Yet Machado insists the regime is alarmed by her civic uprising and that even many former Chávez supporters want the misery to end so their children can return from exile. Her declared mission is bold: to turn the most corrosive hub of crime and destabilisation in the Western hemisphere and a key ally of Putin and Iran “into the biggest promoter of human rights in the region”. If that happens, it would certainly be a victory to celebrate far beyond the borders of this devastated South American country.

Despite contributing pretty insignificant amounts to state coffers, these levies have dominated the debate heading into Monday’s knife-edge general election. Labour, having ramped up these taxes during its four-year term, stands accused of driving away swathes of their super-rich along with the next generation of ambitious wealth creators. And now, in Britain, the Left is considering doing the same thing.

Borsch does not pay wealth tax herself. But she admits her eyes were opened to Norway’s stifling bureaucracy and over-regulation after buying a stake in a local hotel — surrounded by salmon-filled rivers and steep mountains — four years ago. “We need these entrepreneurs,” she says, arguing that taxes must be fair. “And we need billionaires too. We want people to live in the whole of Norway — but if we want to stimulate businesses, then it has to be made affordable for people.”

Norway, one of the planet’s most prosperous nations, is propped up by the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund thanks to its North Sea oil and gas. This cash, which supplies about one quarter of state revenues, ensures it has run a budget surplus every year this century — in sharp contrast to most other debt-laden Western nations and despite very heavy spending on benefits for its 5.5m citizens. All these energy riches, however, failed to prevent the current government, led by Labour’s Jonas Gahr Støre, from driving up their supposedly “redistributive” wealth taxes, sparking an exodus of many of its richest and most ambitious citizens.

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Annualized wealth taxes have been a feature of Norway’s tax system since the late 19th century — and despite ditching inheritance tax, the country has clung to the concept. Defenders of the tax system like to claim that Norway is just promoting equality with its progressive Scandinavian system. Yet in reality, it shows with striking clarity why these outmoded wealth taxes have been ditched in almost all developed countries that adopted them. They drive away the very rich, the risk-takers and the entrepreneurs — the lifeblood of any economy.

Even as Britain considers wealth taxes, eight of the 12 OECD countries using such imposts have abolished them since 1990 — including, in 2007, neighboring Sweden after IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad and tennis champion Bjorn Borg joined their rich fleeing abroad. “It’s not sustainable to keep taxes that radically diverge from other countries,” said Sweden’s then-finance minister, Anders Borg. “Not if you want the money to stay in the country.” He hailed the move as “a step on the way back toward making Sweden an entrepreneurial society”. Kamprad was among those who returned home from tax exile.

The issue caught fire in Norway after Støre’s coalition ramped up capital gains tax three years ago from 31.64% to almost 38%, while bumping up the annual wealth tax. An individual with worldwide wealth of 1.76m krone (about £126,000) is taxed at 1% above this threshold, a rate that rises marginally on assets above 20m. At the same time the government — arguing that some of the richest citizens, since they had no income, paid no tax towards the wildly-generous Swedish welfare state — slashed rebates that lessened the load on corporate capital which, combined with raised taxes on dividends, effectively doubled wealth taxes for many business owners.

The problems are two-fold. First, it is easy for the highly-mobile super-rich to move — and at least 100 of Norway’s 400 top taxpayers have left, largely to Switzerland. About £30bn is estimated to be controlled by Norwegians living abroad — and the owners of half this wealth have moved out in the past four years. Second, entrepreneurs pay tax on the paper valuation of their assets, including any offices, factories or stock. This is a complex calculation for unlisted companies, especially challenging for fledgling firms since injections of capital are taken into account, regardless of profitability. As a result, they are often forced to take out cash or even sell assets in order to pay taxes — neither of which is good for growth.

Among the most prominent to leave as a result was Norway’s biggest taxpayer, the billionaire industrial tycoon Kjell Inge Røkke. His relocation to Lugano costs about £13m a year just in lost taxes. Tord Ueland Kolstad, a wealthy property and salmon farming investor, moved to Lucerne. “This was not what I wanted, but the toughened and increased tax rules of the current government means that I have no choice,” he told TV2, a Norwegian broadcaster. Meanwhile, Norway’s biggest bank has set up a special branch in Zurich and one tech innovator told me how he attended a recent party in Lucerne at which there were at least 200 Norwegian tax exiles. Like it or not, targeting fat cats comes with collateral costs.

One of the key figures in this debate is Fredrik Haga, the founder of a successful Norwegian start-up. Haga declared he was moving to Switzerland in a social media post that went viral after being shared by Elon Musk. Haga said that despite living in a two-bedroom flat in a cheaper area of Oslo, he would have had to pay significant wealth tax on the high “paper” valuation of his cryptocurrency data business, even when it was loss-making. “No politician ever told me how I’m supposed to pay the bill”, he said, later widening his attack onto the state’s spendthrift approach to “green virtue-signaling”. “I hope at least Norway can be a cautionary tale for other countries for how much of a self-inflicted wound taxing unrealized gains can cause,” he said last month.

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Experts agree that it is bad for long-term economic health, deterring investment while doing little for equality. “Realistically, this is a business tax, and thereby a tax on the country as a whole,” said Ole Gjems-Onstad, professor emeritus at the Norwegian Business School. Gjems-Onstad believes such measures are particularly harmful in the post-digital world. “The net wealth tax makes it impossible to scale up modern businesses that may run for years without making a profit but still be very valuable, as shown by a company such as Amazon. Swedish successes such as Klarna, Spotify and Skype are simply not possible in Norway.”

Inevitably, seeing the startling exodus, Støre’s government responded with the imposition of hefty exit taxes. “I was afraid they would lock us in,” said one entrepreneur who moved to Switzerland three years ago. “And once they have locked you in, they can keep raising it. It is a financial prison.” Professor Gjems-Onstad argues that this is the natural consequence of these fiscal measures. ‘‘If you have a net wealth tax, then you need an exit tax, since this is the only way to stop people from leaving,” he said. “The tax is dependent upon domicile. As long as you leave, the company can stay in Norway. So the advice for young entrepreneurs is to leave Norway before they are visible on the radar, before there is a third-party evaluation that has resulted in anyone investing in the company. The ambitious young go to Sweden.”

The belief is that in order to thrive, ambitious young Norwegians must leave the country. The view has been widely shared — and mocked — on social media in the run up to the election. Among those causing a stir was Christer Dalsbøe, founder of a tech startup. Dalsbøe performed a song that went viral, slamming high taxes and “insane” politicians. “Don’t come to Norway,/ We will tax you till you’re poor./ And when you have nothing left,/ We will tax you a little more,” he sang, sitting at a piano. Such videos, along with diatribes on TikTok and X, helped yield a shock result in this week’s mock election in Norwegian schools: the Right triumphed despite Labour’s slim lead in national polls. It suggests that the traditional Left-wing bias of teenagers is being eroded by the populist Right — a phenomenon seen in many other countries. “We’re going into the election on a platform of lower taxes and fees, more freedom within schools and perhaps the most important of all, a thicker wallet for all Norwegians,” said Simen Velle from the hard-Right Progress Party, which more than doubled its vote share over 2021 and backs the removal of wealth taxes. “I think most youth agree with all that.”

Not everyone does agree, however. One Left-wing party created a “wall of shame” showing images of all their wealthy fellow citizens who have moved abroad, while Store condemned the exodus in parliament. “When you’ve made your wealth in Norway, put your kids in school, benefited from the healthcare system, driven on the roads and reaped the rewards of its research, it’s a breach of the social contract,” he said. Yet Jens Stoltenberg, the finance minister, has called for a review of all Norwegian taxes, including on wealth, after the election — and if his party wins, he is expected to invite all main parties to participate.

As Sir Keir Starmer weighs up demands from union chiefs and Left-wing MPs to introduce similar taxes, even those who support such a regime advise caution. “If you want a wealth tax it requires a lot of information about individuals and companies, along with a very savvy tax authority and information system,” said Kristoffer Berg, a Norwegian economist and tax specialist at Cambridge University. “It is a very complicated tax to do well. I think Norway does it reasonably well, but there are still problems and loopholes in the assessments.” He declined to answer when I asked if he thought Britain had “a very savvy” tax information system.

The faults of wealth taxes are being discussed across Norweigan society. “Suddenly there are so many people engaged on this as an issue,” said Mathilde Fasting, an economist with Civita think tank. “People who do not pay wealth taxes have become much more interested. Many people think it is stupid. And this mood has grown because of the unfairness, since Norwegian companies end up paying much more than foreign ones. People ask: why should Norwegian companies pay more tax than foreign firms?” Like many economists, Fasting argues that wealth taxes can deter investment while doing little for equality. “If you take them away, you would get an increase in the Gini co-efficient that measures inequality of just 0.001%. This is negligible — especially in Norway, when you have such heavy spending on schools, healthcare, welfare systems and pensions.”

Norway shows the risks of playing with crude wealth taxes and adopting crowd-pleasing efforts to “soak the rich”, especially in Europe’s polarized political climate. A move that was intended to be a modest financial tweak to placate the Left has turned into a costly lesson for the country in capital flight, the mobility of the super-rich and the need to nurture precious wealth creators in this digital age. Given his stumbling government, Starmer might be tempted by such measures — but given the state of the struggling economy, this would be unwise. “This tax does nothing,” said Fasting. “I would advise your Labour party strongly against doing a wealth tax.”

Yet five years after Katrina smashed into this fabled city, President Barack Obama’s respected education secretary hailed the storm as “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans”. Arne Duncan’s words were crass. But — as we can see clearly two decades later — they were true. For the winds and rain that lashed the city also shattered the systemic inertia and stifling bureaucracy that had betrayed generations of children, unleashing a schools revolution unmatched anywhere for its radicalism and scale.

New Orleans had one of the worst-performing public school systems in America before Katrina. Young lives were being betrayed by low expectations, dreadful teaching, incompetent officials, crumbling infrastructure and corruption.

Today it is still a struggling city in one of the nation’s poorest states. It is shedding jobs in its biggest industries including tourism, despite the throngs of visitors out partying on Bourbon Street or munching beignets in the French Quarter, and its population is shrinking. Yet it offers important lessons about education involving parental choice, school autonomy and accountability that extend far beyond the Big Easy.

The breaking of those levees smashed a mindset that sanctioned failure. Surveying the devastation that left just 16 out of 128 schools intact, and about a third of school buildings destroyed, state legislators took a massive gamble: they sacked all 7,000 teachers, side-lined unions, invited ambitious all-comers in to run their schools, and offered parents almost total freedom over where to send their children. This drastic move was backed by rigorous assessment of their performance, resulting in at least 50 of the remaining 75 schools being shut down or handed to new operators over the following years.

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Now, a new report by experts at Tulane University has analyzed scores of studies conducted over more than a decade into this bold experiment. And it concludes this daring act of liberation from local bureaucrats, converting all New Orleans schools into charter schools — publicly-funded, but with freedom and flexibility to set curriculums in line with contractually-agreed goals — was a huge success. “It’s the largest, broadest and most sustained improvement we’ve ever seen in a US school district with substantial improvement everywhere we have looked from test scores and parental satisfaction through to college access and reduced involvement in crime,” says Doug Harris, professor of economics and director of the Education Research Alliance.

That sounds pretty definitive. Yet Harris admits that when he started to study the reforms and track their outcomes with colleagues, back in 2012, he was a skeptic. But the data — which includes the value-added metrics vital for a city where almost one-third of children grow up in poverty — was persuasive. Before Katrina, New Orleans sat at the foot of most key rankings in Louisiana, the second worst US state for education. Almost two-thirds of its schools were judged failing. And the city ranked near bottom nationally in reading and math, with 19 out of every 20 high school seniors testing in school exit exams below basic proficiency in English and math.

Yet things quickly changed. New Orleans has gone from being one of the country’s worst school districts — with graduation rates 18% below the national average — to middle of the pack with graduation rates rising nearly 20 points in the scheme’s first decade. Improvements have plateaued, but they have been sustained, dipping in Covid amid school closures before recovering sharply. “We’ve leapfrogged thousands of school districts,” Harris says, “which has never been seen before.”

As the professor points out, the reforms were courageous, controversial, and “ugly” at times — imposed, as they were, by legislators in the state capital Baton Rouge. “It was not pretty to see them put in place on a majority-black city in a majority-white state,” says Harris, pointing to the history of voting disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South. There was a decline in the number of African-American teachers — who fell from 71% of the workforce to fewer than half a decade later, before rebounding slightly — while the number and pay of managers soared. Rehired teachers faced longer hours and lower salaries.

Initially, critics on the Left said “the rhetoric of reform often fails to match the reality” with advances coming at expense of disadvantaged students. Then they claimed the city’s undeniable improvements resulted largely from extra cash pouring into the system. The Tulane report accepts money was a factor, but argues the reforms fueled public support for higher spending on education, since local people could see the results at last. It adds that, before 2005, when the system was infamously dysfunctional, schools were “ineffective in converting school resources into improvement” — meaning that increasing education spending without the post-Katrina reforms would likely have failed.

Among those watching the horrific Katrina news footage was a former corporate financier with Boeing who was planning to move into education. Ben Kleban told me five years later how he moved to Louisiana from New York at the age of 26 to set up a school, starting out in a refurbished building with 120 pupils aged between 11-15. His venture grew fast, took over a nearby failing school, improved proficiency tests, and won a national medal in recognition of its successes. “For too long,” he said, “the public school system found excuses rather than being properly accountable to parents,” explaining how he relied on “basic business practices” with a daily flow of data on attendance, discipline and classroom performance.

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Kleban was far from alone. After Katrina, New Orleans became a magnet for ambitious educationalists, innovative entrepreneurs and idealistic philanthropists seeking to improve lives of disadvantaged children. And many of those teachers who lost out in the post-hurricane purge ended up being offered options to return.

Among them was Deanna Reddick, a single mother starting out on her teaching career when Katrina struck, resulting in evacuation with her daughter to Baton Rouge followed by closure of her school. Today, she is the school leader in charge of almost 1,000 pupils at KIPP Morial — one of nine campuses in the city under the umbrella of the Knowledge is Power Program, a network of 278 public schools in 21 states. When first hired there in 2006, the algebra teacher was struck by the transformed educational atmosphere, vastly different from her previous school.

“You could tell when you walked in that everybody was on the same mission,” she says. “Everybody was working towards the same thing for every single student in that building. My lens expanded — I wasn’t just concerned with what was happening in my own classroom. There was a team dynamic. We are only as strong as our weakest classroom.”

Reddick admits she feels under constant pressure to deliver, knowing her school, which has a strong emphasis on creative arts, might close or be handed to a new provider if she stumbles. Yet she says she never wants to rest on her laurels. “I want to feel that sense of urgency when I walk in the building every day. We have no time to waste.” And her emphasis on results and the pressure to perform on pupils does deliver change. The Tulane report found that enrollment of non-white pupils increased in higher-performing schools, while — against expectations — there was also an increase in the diversity of school options available for parents and pupils.

Kleban left his three-school group in 2016, after winning an election to join the city’s school board. Seven years later, it wound down operations after their charters were withdrawn. Curiously — and despite often-strong cultural ties to communities — such rapid churn in schools isn’t having the deleterious impact one might expect, suggesting that the closure of bad institutions can be a wise move. “In America — and probably in Britain too — there is often strong local attachment to schools, yet if they’re not working they need to be replaced,” argues Professor Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “Sometimes even parents stay loyal to a school failing their kids. But a school district has a duty to provide the best schools by whatever means it can.”

Harris and Hill — having both followed the New Orleans experiment closely — believe it shows why the Left should be much less in hock to demands of teaching unions and the Right far more cautious about the idea that vouchers alone can lift school standards with their absolutist faith in the market. Indeed, the Tulane report suggests Louisiana’s embrace of vouchers actually had a “negative effect on school outcomes”. It argues that they may have drawn students out of the city’s publicly run charter schools, now a proven success story, and into private schools that may be less good than generally thought with “positive outcomes driven by the demographics of those who can usually afford them”.

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Given the successes, should the NOLA experiment be replicated elsewhere? Even before Katrina, there were thousands of charter schools across America, including five in New Orleans. But no other district has been desperate enough to push the idea quite as far (although an elected school board was given back overall control again in 2018). There have been sporadic attempts to mimic the New Orleans revolution in places such as New York, Chicago and Indianapolis, but most efforts were either experimental, pusillanimous or petered out after the ouster of their political patrons. A similar — if much less drastic — approach based on choice, autonomy and accountability, with academies and free schools, was adopted successfully to drive up standards in Britain. Sadly, though, Labour’s education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, seems determined to undo 30 years of political consensus, which has again shown the benefits of devolving decision-making to schools, in a bid to suck up to the unions.

Local politics remains messy, to say the least, in New Orleans with the mayor LaToya Cantrell indicted last week over wire fraud, obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury after an investigation into her alleged affair with a former police officer. And the city has some of the worst urban poverty rates in America. But its radical and largely unique school experiment does offer hope for the future. As Reddick puts it, “‘I am a true believer that every one of my students — no matter where they come from, no matter where they live, no matter what trauma they might have suffered — that they can be successful.’” And since Katrina, she says, there has been a new urgency around education. Then Reddick echoes the infamous words of Arne Duncan all those years ago. “When I think about education — and it sounds horrible to say — Katrina was one of the best things that happened to New Orleans.”

Sir Robert Wade-Gery, the deputy cabinet secretary she tasked to help draw up the battle plans, told Lady Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore how the idea of picking a fight with Arthur Scargill’s union was dismissed in the corridors of power. “The woman’s mad,” he recalled people saying. “You can’t win miners’ strikes. All you can do is buy them off.” Yet, as we now know, Thatcher’s preparatory tactics — which included building coal stocks around the country, passing laws to curb union strength and appointing a ruthless ally in Ian MacGregor to run the National Coal Board — eventually won the day.

Her victory, after a year-long dispute, was a defining moment for both Thatcher and the country, paving the way for the liberalization and globalization of Britain’s economy, yet leaving a legacy of shattered communities as the mining industry was shredded.

No one in their right mind would wish for repetition, of such a bitterly divisive dispute. Yet, when I see leaders of the British Medical Association talk of being “excited” at the prospect of going out on strike again, it is hard not to wonder if we need a politician with the tenacity of Thatcher to tackle today’s most powerful union and help salvage public services.

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For almost a century, the prevailing political view has been to buy off this self-serving union, rather than risk a battle with our widely-admired physicians, regardless of the costly consequences for taxpayers and any corrosive impact for patients. So, extra cash gets pumped repeatedly into health service coffers, only for much of it to end up flowing into the pockets of doctors. Yet with their productivity falling, NHS dissatisfaction rising and health projected to soak up a spiraling share of national wealth — an additional 1% of Gross Domestic Product each decade — this is simply unsustainable.

Thankfully, Westminster is shedding the strange delusion that our NHS is envied across the planet. But the latest 10-year plan, filled with familiar ideas, and talk of tackling bureaucracy by Health and Social Care Minister Wes Streeting are simply not enough for a struggling health service that — in the words of its new boss Sir Jim Mackey — views patients as an “inconvenience”. If we are to have any hope of saving the health service, we need politicians with the bottle to stand up to the arrogant and selfish doctors’ union.

It was Dr Ross Nieuwoudt, co-chair of the BMA’s resident doctors’ committee, who said so shamelessly that “the vast majority” of his 55,000 members “are excited to go again”, anticipating another wave of possible prolonged walkouts. Let us bear in mind these bolshie medics have taken industrial action 11 times over the past three years, leading to about 1.5m cancelled appointments in the chronically overloaded National Health Service before they won a bumper pay deal last year. It was worth 22.3% over two years, thanks to an incoming Labour government. Their actions cost the country £3bn, according to the NHS Confederation. Yet, now they are holding another ballot — closing on 7 July — over their latest pay demands, which are a 29% wage rise.

Nieuwoudt, a surgical trainee from Merseyside, is the joint leader of the rebranded junior doctors part of the BMA, which has been seized by a campaign group called DoctorsVote. These are Scargill’s true successors, despite their white coats, stethoscopes and suits. The medic hastily corrected himself after an outcry over his statement, insisting that he meant “excited as in energized — not excited as in looking forward to it”. Yet, his slip was revelatory. The full-time basic pay for a resident doctor hits £54,300 this year. The latest government offer — equating to a 5.4% rise — is the highest in the public sector. Even Nieuwoudt — who styles himself a “pay restoration enthusiast” on social media — admitted this was “generous” in a radio interview, before insisting that “it needs to be more generous”. But still these activists cannot wait to get out of their wards and back on the barricades.

These militant young doctors want a fresh mandate for what one is terming “terrible disruption”, based on dodgy claims that cherry-pick the data and inflation metrics. The BMA is also holding an “indicative ballot” of senior doctors in a dispute on NHS consultants, the top grade of doctors who reportedly earn an average £145,000 a year. The union wants this to rise more than one-third over the next three years — and if not, they might join residents on the picket lines (when not padding out their pay with private work in a sector thriving from patients frustrated by long NHS waiting lists).

The BMA, of course, insists it is driven by the desire to protect patients. Yet, do not be fooled: this body has always been ruthlessly focused on protecting the interests of its members — to the extent that it even fought the home secretary to stop 500 Jewish doctors fleeing the Nazis in 1938 from coming to Britain, resulting in only 50 of them being able to find safety in this country. Then it opposed the creation of the NHS that it now claims to defend so doggedly in a fight that a prominent historian waspishly pointed out lasted longer than the Second World War. Labour’s Health Minister Aneurin Bevan — accused by one leading BMA figure of setting Britain on the path towards National Socialism — loathed doctors’ leaders, viewing them as “politically poisonous”, but infamously said he had to “stuff their mouths with gold” to win support. Sadly, this approach has been adopted repeatedly by his successors.

The first significant action by consultants in the NHS was a four month work-to-rule in 1975 in defense of private work, then junior doctors walked out later that year to protect “on-call” and overtime rates. Ministers backed down both times. After Tony Blair’s government ramped up health spending, one BMA negotiator of a notorious 2004 contract for general practitioners boasted that he had led their salaries to soar 60% over three years. Dropping out-of-hours cover in return for a small cut was seen, he said, as “a bit of a laugh” — although this reform lies behind the overcrowded A&E wards and has even led to a rise in avoidable emergency hospital admissions for children. “It’s right we make our GPs the best paid in Europe,” said the Prime Minister, when put on the spot over soaring salaries.

The Tories endured a BMA strike in defense of gold-plated pensions in 2012, then a lengthy contract dispute four years later with junior doctors, whose leaders piously intoned to the public that their wave of strikes was about “safety, not pay”. Leaked WhatsApp messages, however, later revealed that their “only real red line” was over weekend payments while exposing a desire to draw out their action to tie up health bosses “in knots for the next 16-18 months”. Publicly, they said the tussle could be resolved if the government would only negotiate — yet privately, their top official said the “best solution” would be for ministers to impose a deal on them. And the chair of the junior doctors committee urged colleagues to participate in “rubbish” mediation talks “to play the political game of always looking reasonable”.

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When you hear hard-pressed doctors complaining today about staff shortages, it is worth remembering also that the BMA resisted the expansion of training places for many years, arguing against “the overproduction of doctors with limited career opportunities” and demanding a ban on opening new medical schools. This stance was backed by a vote at its 2008 conference after impassioned warnings about a glut of doctors lowering standards, which would be “wrong and immoral and a waste of taxpayers’ and students’ money”, in the words of one GP representative. Since that debate, the number of full-time equivalent NHS workers has surged by at least 30%, propped up by heavy recruiting from abroad with international staff now comprising more than one-third of NHS doctors.

When the historian Rudolf Klein reflected on the institution earlier this century, he concluded that “keeping the doctors happy — that’s the story of the NHS.” Now even a Labour government accepts this system is “broken” and the public is losing faith shown by record levels of dissatisfaction. And yet will simply pour in more and more money.

No modern health service is immune to serious problems. And Labour’s instincts are right: to drag the NHS belatedly into the digital era; shift care from hospitals to community services, focus more on prevention and empower patients. But we have heard this several times before over the past two decades. Meanwhile, spending on the voracious NHS keeps on rising faster than economic growth. It accounts for about four in every 10 pounds of the daily state spending budget and is constantly prioritized over all other public services — even defense of the realm at this time of rising threat from hostile nations. And the National Audit Office predicts NHS staffing needs to increase by at least two-thirds more over the next 12 years.

Health soaks up more than double its share of public spending at the turn of the century and roughly four times more than when I was born in the Sixties. Yet, the services have often become shambolic, waiting lists are still appalling and fatal safety scandals keep emerging from maternity through to mental health services. Almost everyone has anecdotes about delayed or dire treatment, despite the best efforts of so many caring, dedicated and skilled staff. But the response of the BMA — persistently exploiting public trust in their profession while bleating about protecting the interests of patients — is to threaten yet more strikes to hoover up more cash for its members. Just as when Scargill badly misled the miners, these militant medics need to be taken down by a bold political leader for the wellbeing of our nation.

Now Trump is trying to scare California, sparking fresh fears about abuse of power. Yet Moltani also voted for Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor seen on the Right as an emblem of progressive elitism, the figure at the center of the President’s explosive confrontation with the state. So, like millions of his fellow countrymen, this Sikh entrepreneur highlights both the key role of illicit migration in shaping the United States and the unpredictable electoral churn in Western democracies as populism reshapes politics.

Moltani, though, doesn’t recognize the shaven-headed man with a British accent who has just interviewed him about retail theft and soaring energy costs. It’s Steve Hilton — the former advertising man who tried to modernize the British Tory party before fleeing to the US in 2012 to become a Fox News presenter and Trump cheerleader. Now, in his latest reincarnation, he is campaigning to become the Republican governor of a state dominated for two decades by the Democrats.

Hilton’s campaign feels a long way from the Cameron days when he was talking about hugging hoodies. Quite the contrary, he has recently been to Los Angeles where he filmed campaign videos about the city’s “tense and menacing situation” of civil unrest. Trump is provocatively targeting anti-ICE “troublemakers”, though Hilton claims to be baffled by journalists seeing this as an issue revolving around their President.

“The real story,” he tells me, “is the total inability of California’s government to protect people, communities and small businesses from the violent, activist-driven mob. No one is ever held accountable.” He abhors the vandalism and destruction of small businesses that has taken place. And he describes the collapse of civilized standards of life in Los Angeles angrily: “the overwhelming smell of piss and shit everywhere you go that’s become normal.”

This “obsession” with Trump is absurd, he claims, given the way America’s second city is being allowed to collapse into “squalor and decay”. The real questions, he says, surround Newsom’s failure to stop protests escalating out of control. “Instead you see how our authorities seem incapable — or unwilling — to control violent criminal behavior. Why didn’t Newsom call in the National Guard immediately? Instead, he was issuing pathetic political statements, pandering to the Left, to the activists who the Democrats really represent, rather than protecting the law-abiding majority. It feels like a civilizational collapse.”

Once Hilton pushed claims about “Broken Britain” under New Labour; today, it is “civilizational collapse” in California under the Democrats. These are themes I heard repeatedly during the three days I spent on the campaign trail with him as a multitude of tangled issues around immigration and violence kept cropping up.

It might seem that he has embarked on a quixotic quest — especially when his fight could pitch him against former vice president Kamala Harris. After all, this state is the bedrock of American liberalism. But even Newsom admits the Democrats’ brand has become “toxic”, as bureaucracy drives out businesses, the high cost of living forces out families, and growing encampments of mentally ill and addicted citizens expose the failure of progressive politics. But given that Trump managed to flip 10 of California’s 58 counties last year, and with voters backing a measure making it easier to prosecute theft and drug crimes, Hilton’s “positive populism” might find a fair hearing. But success will depend on his navigating the endless waves of political turbulence stirred by the President while persuading people such as the gas station boss in Huron that he is a suitable person to run the world’s fourth biggest economy.

Hilton is leaning into the hustle, deploying skills honed on prime-time television. “The next revolution is going to be the California revolution,” he tells a meeting of farmers and funders, referencing the name of his former Fox News show. “People say it’s impossible — you’ll never have anyone but Democrats. Bullshit. They want us to give up, they want us to be demoralized, they want us not to fight back. I’m here to tell you I’m sick of this. I moved here with my family in 2012. This is my home. I raised my family here; I started a business here. I am here because I love this place and I’m sick of seeing the soul, the spirit of California, being crushed.”

His life story is sold as part of his pitch for the state’s top job. He talks about his Hungarian immigrant parents, his time in American politics, his teaching at Stanford, his pride in becoming a US citizen four years ago. He jokes about his accent — although one admirer at a fund-raising dinner confided to me that it makes every Brit sound smart to them. Driving around the state in an orange truck emblazoned with his name and “Golden Again” campaign slogan, this unlikely candidate gamely dons a Stetson, clambers on a horse at a ranch and poses for the endless selfies that are now routine for anyone in the public eye. He seems to easily embrace his new role as an American politician, his energy never flagging over the endless interviews and dinners.

Hilton rides in a truck emblazoned with his ‘Golden Again’ campaign slogan. Credit: Ian Birrell 

Hilton’s core campaign message is simple: that his home state symbolizes an American dream that has curdled under the one-party rule of hard-Left Democrats. His hatred of red tape and visceral disdain for an overbearing state is familiar to anyone who has worked with him — as I did in the early days of Cameron’s regime. As one mutual colleague once told me, outsiders would see a liberal Tory with his T-shirts and bare feet, yet he was often the most devout ideologue pushing Right-wing radicalism in a coalition government. Cameron sniped in his memoir that Hilton’s ideas were “one part brilliant to several parts bonkers, the latter of which included cutting the civil service by 70%”. When I mention this, he laughs and says it was really 90% — making Elon Musk look like a statist wimp.

There are plenty of targets for him in California, where an expanding thicket of red tape has led the state to be deemed the worst in the country for doing business as well as having the highest poverty rates. “It’s bottom of every list you want to be the top of and top of every list you want to be the bottom of,” Hilton intones frequently.

In these initial weeks of his campaign for an election 17 months away, Hilton is criss-crossing the state to reach beyond Fox News viewers — the channel is watched by about two million Americans daily — and establish himself as a serious contender. He travels from roundtables in San Francisco to massive farms in the agriculture belt. In a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown, I listen as his audience complains about rent controls, vacant properties in the city and newly arrived migrants milking the welfare system. In the farmland, they bemoan the water restrictions and labor laws impacting their efforts.

It is often forgotten that California’s agricultural sector is the biggest in America with all its almonds, cows, grapes, pistachios, and strawberries — all helping the state overtake Japan in economic size but all the while heavily reliant on migrant workers. During a visit to the world’s biggest cheese-making plant in Hilmar, Hilton questioned the use of undocumented migrant labor, and asked why they could not attract more American workers. “It’s a harder job than most people are used to — cows have to be milked daily,” replied one man. Another claimed that Californians were deterred when they can collect $50,000 a year in state and federal benefits. “We have able-bodied Americans living off the government and we need to reduce that safety net to the people that truly need it,” said Matt Budine, the president of Progressive Dairy, a consultancy involved with 13% of US cows.

Yet Budine was skeptical about Republican claims that these jobs would be filled by local people even if they paid six-figure salaries and improved facilities in fields. Most Americans, he tells me, have been “conditioned” to look down on such work, and it would take decades to change such attitudes. “If the migrants are kicked out and it becomes problematic for dairy producers, then we will put in robotic dairy milking systems — big carousels that only take four workers for 8,000 cows versus four workers for 1,000 cows. The jobs go away. It costs more money.”

What about his attitude to climate change? After all, he once voted Green and was the architect of the Tory slogan “vote blue, go green”. He bats aside any suggestion of shifting views, insisting there is a big difference between the green agenda of environmental protection and the Left’s “monomaniacal” zealotry on climate that has led to California’s energy prices being the highest in the US. At one point he jumps out of the truck to shoot a video showing a big solar farm sitting by tomato and melon fields. “That will do very well,” he says, walking back to the vehicle. “It’s just so ridiculous ripping out crops for this. It’s all done by private equity.” It’s the perfect example, he says, of how “insane” Democrat policies end up harming the environment while setting undeliverable targets that hurt local interests. It’s not green, he says. It’s stupid.

It is odd watching Hilton in this latest incarnation: a Republican candidate campaigning to save California. The sun-kissed state does have profound problems, yet traveling alongside him much of it seems far from ruined. And I am unpersuaded by his arguments for Brexit or Trump, let alone his claim that these two populist movements might further his ideals that have not altered over the past 20 years.

Certainly, a Republican victory in California next year would be the ultimate rebuke for the desperate Democrats. And while it seems unlikely, only a fool would make predictions amid the turbulence of our current moment. And now this state of 40 million people — with its veneer of progressive politics and great wealth masking chronic problems — has been sent spiraling by the President into the center of a bitter showdown over America’s future. “It’s now or never for California,” says Hilton. “We’ve got the best shot of winning for a long time because I think people sense we can’t go on like this.” On this point at least, he is surely right.

My visit was shrouded in secrecy. No one was to know where I was going. So we met beside a nondescript bank in Kyiv to ensure the taxi driver did not discover our destination. I was led along a cluster of ordinary streets filled with residential blocks, offices and shops — and sharply told to stop my questions when we passed a woman walking her dog. Then, suddenly, we ducked down into a basement and I was ushered through a heavy door.

I found myself in a clandestine white-walled workshop cluttered with shelves of tools, boxes of machine parts and spools of wire. Here, a handful of men in their 20s and 30s were making some of the most sophisticated military drones on earth.  The future of warfare was being built before my eyes.

A Buntar 3 drone was there on a table with its wings removed. It looked like a big model aircraft, with its gray fuselage and tail propeller. But these craft, almost four meters long, are highly complex machines that cost up to $100,000 each. They take off and land vertically using four wing-mounted rotor blades before flying like conventional aircraft with a range of 80 kilometers. They can remain airborne for more than three hours. The carbon-fiber body contains a $30,000 camera with thermal imaging capabilities to detect enemy positions day or night. This is backed up with sophisticated software created from combat experience that integrates tools to monitor altitude, weather and terrain with the Delta battle management platform used by Ukrainian forces, which links to artificial intelligence systems.

There were 31 small stickers on its fuselage — 23 black ones marking its test flights and 8 red ones denoting combat missions on the frontline of the grim war despoiling the biggest country in Europe. Bohdan Sas, the firm’s 26-year-old co-founder, showed me around a rabbit-warren of rooms, pointing out carbon fiber being painstakingly layered, compressed in vacuum packs and spray-painted, explaining how they had created specialist software to speed and simplify military operations.

Bohdan with a Buntar 3 drone which can cost up to $100,000. Photo: Ian Birrell.

Welcome to the weapons factory of the future. For this is not just the sort of place where the war in Ukraine might be lost or won. These fast-evolving drones are changing the way that battles are now fought the world over. “In places like this, we are pushing the boundaries of warfare and reconnaissance,” says Sas, who started his career in technology as a teenager linking dumbbells to fitness trackers. “Because of the war, both Russia and Ukraine have developed their drone technology incredibly quickly.”

Buntar Aerospace — set up two years ago, spread across several locations and also making cheaper reconnaissance craft — is one of about 250 such drone-makers that have sprung up across Ukraine. Some are buried like this one in basements, others are located in smart IT office hubs or crumbling former Soviet factories. Together they reveal how the art of war is evolving with amazing rapidity in this country as unmanned land, air and sea vehicles reshape 21st-century combat. Innovative firms and creative brains are disrupting the defense industry in a world where even homemade drones can destroy expensive military aircraft, ships and tanks. “Right now there are only two countries in the world that really know how to fight this new type of war — Russia and Ukraine,” says Sas. And as I was told by several Ukrainian experts — from defense analysts through to frontline drone operators — this should be causing grave concern in Europe.

The new military age dawned at the end of 2020 in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, fought between Armenia and Azerbaijan, when waves of drones turned the tide of the battle in a mountainous region that traditionally favored defenders. The fighting lasted just 44 days — unlike the previous conflict between these two former Soviet republics that lasted six years — and resulted in decisive victory for Azerbaijan. Its drones, bought from Israel and Turkey, destroyed air defense systems, armored vehicles and artillery forces on the ground. They provided speed and intelligence with control and communications systems that hoovered up data and helped determine targets at lightning speed.

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Ukraine and Russia began using drones for intelligence and targeting after the Kremlin’s initial invasion of Crimea, with Russia developing an initial lead through exploiting Israeli technology. But Ukraine had also invested in Turkey’s Bayraktar drones and used them to great effect in repelling the mechanized Russian forces attempting to seize Kyiv three years ago. Yet as one Ukrainian drone operator told me last week, comparing the craft from 2022 — such as one that buzzed me in the Donbas trenches days before Moscow’s full-scale invasion — with those dominating today’s battlefield is “like comparing rocket science with the horse and cart.”

For Ukraine, necessity has been the mother of invention. As it fights for its survival, the nation has become a world leader in drone manufacture and warfare by exploiting previous strength in defense manufacturing, engineering and technology. “Ukraine has now started to be the creator of a new military doctrine,” says Mykhailo Samus, a military analyst and new generation warfare expert who argues that this arose from a need to deploy asymmetrical tactics against a much bigger foe. “We are fighting drone-centric warfare with drones now conducting different roles including first as the intelligence to find clear coordinates of the enemy, then of course as the weapon itself but also as the command and control system. So if you look at drones, they are weapons that can find and destroy.

Samus points out that the “kill cycle’” — the time it takes between obtaining coordinates of an enemy position, transferring this information to command and control, then taking the decision to fire a missile to destroy a target — can now be just a couple of seconds. This can be devastatingly effective and far less cumbersome than the old methods of battle.

So while all the tanks and trenches we see on news reports are eerily redolent of previous wars, this conflict offers a glimpse into a future of highly automated fighting. “This new doctrine changes all our understanding of military tactics”’ says Samus. “So it’s very important to have our own European understanding of this future, the battlefield future of war. This is the new reality.”

Yet the frequencies used to control drones and send back footage often change weekly in cat and mouse games with enemy-jamming systems — something impossible on many traditional military systems or civilian drones. So both sides are in a constant race to keep up with their adversary’s advances. Nations at war, I am told by one Ukrainian official, must “innovate or die.”

In a war dominated by drones, electronic warfare is both critical and complex. Bear in mind that until recently, armed forces relied on a handful of jamming stations to throw a ring of protection around their frontline. Ukraine’s military had fewer than 100 such systems — and they relied on the standard 900 megahertz frequency typically used for civilian drone telemetry. But now battlefield drones can use frequency bands ranging from 100 to 12,000 megahertz. Different frequencies, however, require different signal generators and antennas to detect and jam them.

So the following day I visit an electronic warfare company helping to shape this new reality of warfare. Unwave, formed less than two years ago, has 100 staff inside an old factory in Kyiv region who are churning out thousands of jamming devices each month. Walking round the factory, I find small clusters of workers building an astonishing array of devices from sophisticated, multi-channel jammers designed for fixing onto armored vehicles, through to smaller backpack-carried systems and handheld devices to alert soldiers to nearby drones costing $300 each.

Tetiana at the electronic warfare factory. Photo: Ian Birrell.

“The idea is for every person on the frontline to have a device like this — it’s an absolute necessity, like having a helmet or gun,” says Taras, the firm’s product manager. “If you go into the dead zone there might be hundreds, maybe thousands, of drones flying overhead. Yet when we talk about this being a drone war, it’s really a war of frequencies. It’s about finding the frequencies and evading the frequencies.”

This felt like a more familiar factory set-up with men and women clad in blue overalls, some making metal antennas but others operating 3D printers or peering through microscopes at intricate electronic parts. They seem driven by similar motivation. Sergii is a burly former builder from a devastated border region. “It’s more than just work for me,” he tells me, choked as he tells of his pride in helping his nation and friends in the military. “It is not like going to work and getting some money — I’m helping those who defend us.” Tetiana, who is using a magnifying glass to check circuit boards placed in drone detectors, only joined the firm earlier this month. For her, it is personal with a brother fighting and friends of her husband killed by the Russians: “I wanted to do something useful. I love my country, I want to live here and I don’t want to leave.”

The mood of resigned self-sufficiency amid turbulent geo-politics is striking. Such is the agile desperation of this nation caught in an existential fight for survival, that this firm produces its own batteries to reduce reliance on China. I am shown classified projects being built in case critical support from the United States is lost. This firm is even manufacturing unmanned ground vehicles — flat-bodied with tracks and cameras — for de-mining, ferrying supplies and evacuating wounded. The boundaries of military technology are being pushed constantly — as Taras tells me: “This is far superior to what would have been around even two years ago. Much of this didn’t even exist then.”

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Military procurement systems — infamously slow, bureaucratic, corrupt and profligate — must also innovate to survive when a nation is under such assault. Brave 1, the state agency that helped foster the birth of Buntar Aerospace, boasts of assisting 3,500 innovations from 1,500 “teams” since its own creation two years ago to respond fast to military needs. It collates demands from the frontline, then uses competitions and hackathons along with monetary grants to meet them. Such an approach is both disruptive and necessary in today’s theater of war. “The period of life for a military system used to be maybe 30 or 40 years but now it is sometimes just three or four weeks before it’s taken over by another technology,” says Oleh Donets, who coordinates their links with Ukraine’s armed forces.

Ukraine is effectively crowd-sourcing frontline information to survive. And this method of invention has yielded some unexpected results, such as the development of interceptor drones to shoot down other drones. “It was like a crazy idea — drones to counter drones,” says Donets. They began with an ambition to destroy the low-cost Iranian Shahed that are now being mass-produced in Russia and used to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defense systems. After about nine months of working with a close-knit group of companies, however, they ended up developing devices that proved far more effective against Moscow’s reconnaissance drones — and are now shooting down about 1,000 a month of them.

Inside a weapons factory. Photo: Ian Birrell.

At the start of this war, soldiers were tinkering with racing drones, adding explosives or grenades and then trying to drop them onto Russian positions. By 2023, it was reported that 10,000 drones were being destroyed monthly as both sides ramped up production. Last year, Ukraine produced 2.2 million, from basic drones flying short distances to aircraft flying deep into Russia to target arms dumps, munitions factories and oil refineries. President Zelensky recently claimed their engineers have designed a drone now with a range of 3,000 kilometers, which could hit even locations in Siberia.

Their biggest success, though, has been at sea, where a $250,000 craft loaded with 500 kilograms of explosives has shown it can sink a $300-million warship bristling with weapons. Kyiv’s maritime drones managed to defeat Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, pride of Moscow’s navy, forcing it to retreat from its Crimea base. They hit 17 air and sea targets, totally destroying 15 of them — striking five ships, six patrol vessels, two landing craft, two helicopters and, earlier this month, shooting down two SU-30 fighter jets using Sidewinder missiles. This was a step change in combat: the first time a surface drone brought down a combat aircraft.

These sea drones — which entered service only two years ago — have been devastatingly effective, causing Russian losses valued at half a billion dollars. And Ukraine is proud of them. Last week in Kyiv, Lieutenant-General Kyrylo Budanov, their head of military intelligence, joined members of his secretive Group 13 special forces team to display the all-new Magura (Maritime Autonomous Guard Unmanned Robotic Apparatus) craft. Four models were on display: a ship “killer” capable of swarm synchronization; a kamikaze vessel able to carry high loads of explosive; and two equipped with missiles and machine guns. One speaker at this slick event — which felt like the launch of a glitzy sports car, rather than a new robot army— hailed the arrival of “a modern fleet of the 21st century” while another described their success as akin to “the parable of David and Goliath.”

Members of Group 13 were there, faces masked by dark glasses and black balaclavas, and I ask them about striking enemy targets. “It’s like hunting — it is very difficult,” says Xena, a female member of the team. The team’s commander — known by his call sign Thirteenth — concedes that it had been challenging to create a new type of military vessel. “Previously, there was no such experience anywhere, there was no place to draw information,” he says. “These things completely change the philosophy of defense. They are changing the nature of warfare. No one was prepared for such a turn of events. Now many countries in the world, including Great Britain, are very quickly thinking how to reformat their fleets because they have turned out to be very vulnerable.”

Group 13 with Thirteenth at front and Xena on right. Photo: Ian Birrell.

Ukraine simply cannot afford to be complacent in this field of battle. Russia is also finding new ways to harness military innovation and has proved effective at scaling up production as it shifts from its traditional top-down, monolithic approach in an economy retooled around war. The Kremlin has even introduced “drone studies” into classrooms to help produce the next generation of developers. It has taken a lead also in using fiber-optics — with filaments up to 40 kilometers long — to avoid jamming, showing how advances can be creative adaptation of existing technologies rather than innovative breakthroughs. As one Kyiv source tells me, “We shouldn’t underestimate them. They are changing, everything is changing.”

The rest of the world is watching, although largely left playing catch-up. In the United States, tech start-ups are seeking to similarly disrupt the huge defense sector with the invention of autonomous weapons, drone swarming and artificial intelligence. China, too, is investing heavily in such futuristic technologies — and is preparing to launch a high-altitude drone mother ship that can release 100 kamikaze craft. But where does this leave Europe? There is concern in Ukraine that it is failing to see the true threat posed by the Kremlin even as warfare is being so drastically transformed. One analyst tells me about meeting the head of a next-door nation’s navy at an annual defense conference. “Each time I ask him how many drones he has and he says they have three. That was maybe fine when he said it in 2022 — but not in 2023, let alone in 2025.”

Europe simply cannot afford to remain wedded to the old military technologies such as battleships and tanks, suddenly so vulnerable, or it risks becoming dangerously left behind. As I am told by Vadym Adamov, a 21-year-old drone specialist, it is impossible to imagine doing almost any tasks today on the battlefield without them. “We evacuate with drones. We are mining with drones. We are shooting with drones. We do everything with them. The only limit is your creativeness on how to use them.”

Thirteenth, the commander of Group 13. Photo: Ian Birrell.

He believes this is a disruptive revolution in defense that bears comparison with the advent of the Guttenberg Press in the 15th century, “when words were taken from the hands of mighty people into the hands of ordinary people”. He points to a project he assists called Victory Drones, which has produced thousands of craft by teaching civilians how to make them. “In two weeks you can learn to assemble a drone with parts you buy yourself,” says Adamov. “You send it to the military and for $300, you’ve got a drone that can destroy a tank. Most of the stuff comes from China — it’s like Lego for adults.”

This young soldier, 10 years old when Russia invaded Crimea to start the war in Ukraine and a veteran of three years in combat, has little memory of living in a country without conflict. “So for me it is almost routine. You do not expect everyone to obey international laws — we see that if you have a big army you can go in, take what you want. There are no moral values in this new world. Now if Russia marches into Europe they will be really successful because they have learned all the lessons of modern warfare.”

He has a warning for us in Europe. “The first Russian rocket that hits your capital opens up a portal into a different world. When you find yourselves in this new world — and there’s more and more chance you will find yourselves here — you will be looking back at doing nothing for three years of the Ukrainian war. When I go to Europe and say to people I’m in the military, they say ‘Oh I’m so sorry’. But I say I’m sorry because we are on the verge of the Third World War and I should be sorry for you since you don’t know how to kill people with drones.”

Who knows if he is right in his fears about a Third World War? But his nation certainly bears the bloody scars of Russian aggression. And perhaps the ultimate irony is that one day soon we might end up looking for help from Ukraine in fighting to defend ourselves in the coming robotic techno-wars.

Additional reporting by Kate Hatsenko

The departed President’s bid to throw a ring of legal protection around Dr Anthony Fauci, his former chief medical adviser, reeks of elitist arrogance, displaying shocking contempt for ordinary citizens. Biden defended this deeply anti-democratic measure — announced only after he entered the Capitol to watch his unwanted successor Donald Trump’s restoration to power — on the grounds he had to protect public servants who were facing “baseless and politically motivated investigations” that might “irreparably damage their reputations and finances”.

Given the dark political climate in the United States, such an argument might be sustainable for General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who called Trump a fascist after serving under him before in the White House, or for Liz Cheney, the ex-Republican congresswoman who took such a bold stance over the January 6 insurgency. Perhaps it was even understandable on a personal level, if unforgivable politically, that he tried to protect his own family members. But there is no defense for offering clemency to the central figure in a scientific scandal of epic global significance.

Fauci is the veteran infectious diseases expert and physician who was famed for his calming presence and constant urging to follow the science during the pandemic. Put aside, however, his stance on divisive decisions such as mask mandates, public safety rules and vaccinations. Controversial in many nations, they became toxic tribal issues in the US, fueling the societal fissures that Trump exploited with such intuitive skill on his return path to the White House. Ultimately, though, these were policy decisions taken, rightly or wrongly, during an unprecedented, rapidly evolving health crisis that engulfed the planet.

The most noxious stench hanging over Fauci’s head relates to his central role in the clandestine efforts by a cabal of top scientists to stifle debate over the origins of Covid-19 that appeared so mysteriously in Wuhan. This central Chinese city was hundreds of miles from the nearest wild bat colonies carrying the most similar coronaviruses. But suspicions were aroused since it is home to one of China’s two maximum bio-security labs. It had known safety concerns. And, clearly, the initial outbreak was covered up by Beijing’s communist dictatorship, which inflamed the disease’s impact as it spread its deadly tentacles around the world.

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Fauci spent almost four decades as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest biomedical research agency. Early in the pandemic, it emerged that Wuhan Institute of Virology was funded by this body to carry out high-risk, gain-of-function research into bat diseases. This work, it transpired, was sometimes performed in dangerously low biosecurity conditions. But it emerged Fauci played a pivotal role in pushing the idea that it was conspiratorial nonsense to suggest Covid might have leaked from a laboratory in tandem with his friends Francis Collins, then head of NIH; and Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, another major research funding body.

This trio promoted an orthodoxy of natural zoonotic transmission that prevailed until it became impossible to ignore all the circumstantial evidence suggesting a lab leak. They pulled together a group of loyal scientists, some with close links to China or compromised by close ties to Wuhan, who wrote influential papers for prominent journals ridiculously praising Beijing for transparency and dismissing “any type of laboratory-based scenario”. Despite private concerns over “Wild West” biosecurity in Wuhan, and the possibility of lab leakage, this group managed to focus media and political attention onto a Wuhan market selling wild animals, ignoring how this idea had been dismissed by Chinese public health leaders and scientists alike.

This scandal — which implies deliberate and self-interested obfuscation over the cause of this century’s biggest public health catastrophe — involved some of the most influential figures in global science. Though all three central players have since left the posts they held at the time, Farrar has moved to the World Health Organization as chief scientist, despite his central role in trying to clamp down debate on the cause of a pandemic. (This is one more reason why it is tough to shed any tears over Trump’s decision to end US funding to this mismanaged UN organization given it has kowtowed to China, pumped out misinformation and failed to probe the origins of Covid properly.)

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Details about the activities of Fauci’s gang had to be pieced together from scraps of evidence gathered through leaks, freedom of information requests and Congressional inquiries by a small but tenacious group of online investigators, dissident scientists and determined journalists. Now even Tim Spector, the professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, who advised Downing Street in the pandemic, freely talks about “the trail of shredded documents” and fear there was a cover-up. As Spector stated two months ago: “The most likely source of this was a lab leak from Wuhan.”

Spector suggested these efforts were intended to protect scientific credibility in the early months of the outbreak. Other experts believe that Fauci and his friends were protecting their own backs after they outsourced dangerous experiments to China, work that had already been banned in the US itself. It must be stated that we do not have conclusive proof either way on the pandemic’s cause. But the evidence of deceit, exposed on an issue of such seismic importance for the world, is a betrayal of both science and government — and this is why Biden’s pre-emptive pardon does such a sordid disservice to democracy.

Fauci claims — in a curious echo of Trump — that he is the victim of partisan threats of investigation and prosecution. “Let me be perfectly clear: I have committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me,” he said in response to Monday’s news. Yet it was noticeable that the pardon is backdated to 2014. This is, coincidentally, the same year that the US three-year ban on gain-of-function research took effect and also the start date for an NIH grant to Wuhan that biosafety experts such as Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, believe is linked to the “reckless” research that sparked global pandemic. “The pardon is a travesty,” he told me.

Rand Paul, leading the Republican charge against Fauci, responded by saying the pardon “seals the deal” over who bears real responsibility for the Covid pandemic, adding that he would not rest as chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee until the truth was fully exposed. Fauci sneered that the senator did not know what he was talking about when denying to Congress that he had ever funded gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan. Paul’s efforts should be assisted by Trump’s choice of Jay Bhattacharya to take over the NIH, given that the Stanford University health economist and lockdown skeptic sees evidence for a lab leak as “compelling” and has been critical of elitist efforts to silence dissident voices.

Yet in a strange twist, there are suggestions the pardon might help expose the truth. Why? Because Fauci has lost Fifth Amendment protection if (or when) Paul’s committee issues a subpoena forcing him to testify under oath about his actions. Meanwhile, others such as Collins have been left unprotected as have assorted aides and scientist stooges. “These pardons will not stop Department of Justice investigations,” one adviser to the Trump transition team told the journalist Paul D. Thacker. “We expected this and look at it as a predicate to get truth from people who can no longer use the Fifth Amendment. Now we can bring every one of them in front of a grand jury.” Or as Professor Ebright put it: “This sets the stage for full exposure of Fauci’s activities through prosecution of his co-conspirators.”

The evidence has shown clear efforts to avoid such scrutiny. One memo disclosed that “Tony” had told David Morens, a senior adviser to Fauci, how to avoid requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), suggesting that he stop using government-issued phones for his gmail accounts. A leaked email indicated that Morens was coached on evasion of FOIs by Margaret Moore, Fauci’s long-serving assistant — who pleaded the fifth when asked to testify. “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” he wrote. Another senior aide to Fauci misspelled key conspirators, presumably to avoid searches intended to fulfill FOIA requests.

Fauci denied working closely with Morens when interrogated by Congress. But he also said “I’ve kept an open mind throughout the entire process” — which certainly does not seem to match the facts of some of his public statements, nor his secretive activities behind the scenes to clamp down on debate.

Despite Biden’s pardon, the disturbing saga of the slippery Dr Fauci and his Covid cover-up still has some distance to run.

This is one thing that the organisation gets right: Beijing’s behaviour has been disgraceful. But as WHO faces the threat of losing its biggest donor with Donald Trump’s looming return to the White House, perhaps it should have been more honest — especially since its next post was a pledge to fight misinformation. For let us not forget it performed woefully in the pandemic. It assisted China’s cover-up, which inflamed the disease’s spread, and amplified early lies claiming “no clear evidence” of human transmission. It failed to investigate the origins properly. And even now claims its Chinese office “picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ on December 31 2019”, when, in fact, it was alerted by Taiwanese health authorities, on guard against another outbreak of Sars.

But we should not be surprised by a body that follows the diktats of a Communist dictatorship in refusing to recognise Taiwan. By the end of 2019, China’s scientists had already sequenced the genome of the virus. Yet WHO kowtowed so shamefully to Beijing that their joint inquiry into Covid’s origins — with a team of “experts” sent to Wuhan in early 2021 amid huge publicity — promoted a ludicrous theory that the disease jumped to humans from frozen food. To compound these failings, it hired Sir Jeremy Farrar, despite the former Wellcome Trust boss’s exposure as a central player in the bid to stifle debate by branding any suggestions Covid could have come from a laboratory as conspiracy theory. These efforts — led with his friend Anthony Fauci — were a grotesque betrayal of both science and the wider public, yet still this tarnished figure was appointed as WHO’s chief scientific officer.

Sadly, this is all par for the course. The pandemic revealed the arrogant and contemptuous behaviour of leading scientific figures, aided by prominent academic journals, patsy journalists and weak politicians. It is now beyond doubt that they strove to dampen speculation that Covid could be tied to a cutting-edge Wuhan laboratory with financial links to Washington. In recent days, we have seen how this corrosive rot even infected the security world after the Wall Street Journal disclosed suppression of a Pentagon study finding the virus had been manipulated in “gain of function” research. “What ended up on the intelligence community’s cutting-room floor needs to be re-examined,” said one FBI scientist.

We must hope all the evidence available to federal authorities on this weirdly contentious issue will be re-examined with Trump’s restoration — especially given his choice of Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest biomedical research agency that helped fund controversial experiments in Wuhan. The Stanford University health economist and lockdown sceptic has said the evidence for a lab leak is “compelling” while criticising establishment efforts to silence dissident voices.

Unfortunately Trump’s outbursts after the pandemic emerged about “the China virus”, and his promotion of daft ideas such as injecting disinfectant to treat Covid, made it easier to ostracise experts who dared question the orthodoxy of natural zoonotic transmission. The concept of an accidental lab leak became bound up in frenzied talk of bioweapons and malevolent activities. Yet his last administration concluded with a carefully worded State Department statement raising valid questions about sick scientists and risky research in Wuhan.

Dismissal of a possible lab leak — and for this to become such a sectarian issue — was always a curious stance in the absence of any firm proof. There were, after all, more than 300 known laboratory-acquired infections and 16 escapes of pathogens in the first 21 years of this century. The same year that Covid erupted in Wuhan, 10,000 people fell ill following leakage from a veterinary research centre in another Chinese city. Even in the weeks before Covid emerged, Farrar and Fauci helped oversee a WHO report highlighting growing risk of global pandemic from an escaped pathogen, which pointed out how scientific advances allowed “disease-causing micro-organisms to be engineered or recreated in laboratories”.

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A quick reminder of some facts: Wuhan was home to one of China’s two maximum bio-security labs — and hundreds of miles from the nearest colonies of wild bats with most similar coronaviruses. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) contained the world’s biggest repository of bat coronaviruses, had known safety concerns and conducted high-risk “gain of function” research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice. Its database of 22,000 samples and many unpublished sequences was taken offline in September 2019 — when some believe the virus emerged.

Yet Farrar was among 27 scientists who signed a now-infamous letter in The Lancet praising Chinese experts for their “rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data” and condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later found to have been covertly organised by Peter Daszak, whose New York-based EcoHealth Alliance funnelled US taxpayer dollars to WIV, following a teleconference call on February 1 2020 that sparked efforts to discredit lab leak theories.

This call was organised by Farrar in tandem with Fauci and Francis Collins, then head of NIH. Under their guidance, four participants and one other expert wrote a notorious Nature Medicine commentary saying they did not think “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. Yet it emerged later that these scientists feared a lab link was ‘“so friggin’ likely” even as they drafted their statement. Farrar complained about “Wild West” biosecurity in Wuhan with Collins. And a senior adviser to Fauci told Daszak he had learned how to make emails “disappear” from freedom of information requests “so I think we are all safe”.

Tragically, every sliver of evidence that has slid into the open since the pandemic has chipped away at public faith in science and politics thanks to the cavalier attitude of certain scientists, the arrogance of self-serving experts, and the complicity of a cabal of prominent figures attempting to deceive the world. Boris Johnson, prime minister during the pandemic, now says “the awful thing about the whole Covid catastrophe is that it appears to have been entirely man-made”. Yet still Lord Vallance — who, as his chief scientific adviser, joined that clandestine teleconference call — was elevated to the House of Lords and appointed science minister by Keir Starmer last year. Needless to say, my freedom of information requests to find out more about his involvement have been thwarted.

We still do not have a conclusive answer to the conundrum of Covid’s origin, despite growing acceptance of a possible lab leak. Yet this remains a crucial debate, important both in terms of accountability for a global public health disaster and to assist protection from another pandemic in the future. There have been jitters again in recent days over fresh scenes of Chinese hospitals overrun with masked people after a surge in cases blamed on flu-like human metapneumovirus — although unlike Covid, this is not a new disease, so there will be levels of immunity in the population from previous infections.

We should not forget, however, this attempted concealment of facts was exposed only by the diligent efforts of a few brave scientists, dissident journalists, data experts and online investigators prepared to challenge the consensus. As one of those involved, I was even subjected to a Facebook shadowban for one UnHerd investigation, which was labelled misinformation until I protested. It was gratifying to be recognised later in Congress as the first to lay out the lab leak hypothesis in mainstream media — but how depressing to see the sluggish response from many colleagues that still clouds this issue.

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Most significantly, it was the Drastic group of investigators who released the Defuse research project dating from 2018. This sought to create viruses with the defining feature of Sars-CoV-2: the furin cleavage site that allows its spike protein to bind so effectively to cells in many human tissues and is not found on any of the other 800 known Sars-releated coronaviruses. The proposal came from EcoHealth, WIV and Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina coronavirologist who pioneered such controversial gain of function research. It was rejected by US funders. Yet Shi Zhengli, the leading bat disease researcher at WIV, refused to answer when asked by a German reporter last year if she had pressed on with such experiments, claiming the issue had “nothing to do with the origin” of Covid.

This was a dynamite discovery. It showed that scientists in Wuhan with their long-standing US collaborators proposed to construct genetically modified coronaviruses. And hey presto — one year later, a novel Sars-related virus emerged suddenly in their city. It was either the most stunning coincidence — or a smoking gun. Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, was among those experts who saw this document and its drafts as the “blueprint for creating the virus that causes Covid-19”.

Yet still there is a cabal of scientists and media allies pushing the idea that the virus flared up in Wuhan’s bustling wet market. “We first believed the virus originated in the seafood market, but now it looks like that the market is just another victim. The virus existed [before the infections happened in the market],” said George Gao, head of China’s Centre for Disease Control, in May 2020.

Gao, an Oxford-educated virologist, later published a paper confirming that no animals tested positive from 1380 samples collected there in January 2020, adding that positive environmental samples they collected had been derived from infected humans, not animals. And even Baric – the world-leading expert who had warned US biosecurity chiefs that a lab leak might have caused the pandemic before WHO had declared a worldwide public health emergency, later told Congressional investigators that he believes the market was just “a conduit for expansion”.

But the theory keeps bouncing back like a bad penny. “Once you lose the market as the origin, all bets are off,” said Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, in private discussions among the Nature Medicine authors. Yet his colleague Eddie Holmes, a British biologist at the University of Sydney who had visited the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, said “no way” there could have been sufficient selective pressure to evolve a furin cleavage site there due to “too low a density of mammals” with small clusters of three or four animals kept in cages. As another of the team said, this begs the “million dollar question”at the core of the creation and spread of Sars-CoV-2.

First they blamed the pandemic on pangolins, then they turned the spotlight on raccoon dogs, which had been seen in the market by Holmes. Last year, there were excitable new headlines over a scrap of data obtained by Chinese researchers. ‘“Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic,” declared The Atlantic. “New data links Covid-19’s origins to raccoon dogs at Wuhan market,” reported The Guardian. “Have we found the ‘animal origin’ of Covid?” asked the BBC breathlessly.

The answer turned out to be no. The presence of these critters in the market was so well known it was even mentioned by WHO during its negotiations with China for access. The new report simply showed again that raccoon dogs and other mammals susceptible to Sars-CoV-2 were sold in Wuhan before the market was shut down on 1 January 2020, while saying that positive swabs from the market also contained trace quantities of genetic material from raccoon dogs. “Now we have definite proof that animals were there that could carry coronaviruses at the time of the outbreak,” insisted Peter Daszak, whose organisation is now blocked from US federal funding after misleading officials over work in Wuhan. “It’s another piece of evidence that the market was where it began, not the lab.”

Then the Chinese researchers posted their own analysis of the data. It confirmed yet again the presence of raccoon dogs on sale in the market. “However, these environmental samples cannot prove that the animals were infected,” they wrote emphatically. “Furthermore, even if the animals were infected, our study does not rule out human-to-animal transmission, as the sampling was carried out after the human infection within the market. Thus, the possibility of potential introduction of the virus to the market through infected humans… cannot yet be ruled out.

Many experts believe a debunked idea is being pushed as a deliberate diversion. “The incessant fixation on the market by one group of virologists — to avoid having to admit the science was compromised from the beginning — is preventing any other scenarios from being properly examined lest you are labelled a conspiracy theorist,” said molecular biologist Sigrid Bratlie, a strategic adviser on biotech to Langsikt Policy Centre in Oslo who admits to being astounded by the scale of efforts to suppress the lab origin theory.

Astonishingly, there still remains no conclusive proof over how this virus exploded in Wuhan. Yet we do know Beijing’s dictatorship tried to cover-up the initial outbreak, and then blocked outside investigations of the origins. Scandalously, we have discovered this disturbing obfuscation over Covid’s origins was assisted by some of the most prominent figures in Western science. This was the real conspiracy — and it is still being pushed today by the Chinese Communist Party’s useful idiots.

For this self-styled “anarcho-capitalist”, who campaigned with a chainsaw as a symbol of his desire to slash the bloated state and free the economy, has embarked upon a messianic mission to salvage his stagnant nation. Carried unexpectedly to power on a wave of public contempt for failed politicians and a corrupt elite, Milei is trying to unleash a libertarian revolution in a statist society that one aide describes to me as “turbo-charged Thatcherism”.

His radical experiment is being watched closely around the world. Debt-laden governments are grappling with surging spending — not least in Washington, where Elon Musk has been tasked by Trump to perform similar surgery to their federal budget, and in Westminster where shattered Conservatives are searching for fresh ideas after ejection from office. Milei has responded with a typical lack of modesty, bragging that he is “exporting the model of the chainsaw and deregulation to the whole world”, while telling The Economist his contempt for the state remains “infinite” after his first year in office.

This mercurial loner, who once sang in a Rolling Stones covers band, is engaged in a high-risk gamble: to shake his country out of its decades-long stupor by slashing subsidies, sacking public servants, scrapping taxes, shutting ministries, ripping up regulations and privatising scores of state enterprises from airlines and banks through to football clubs and waterways. He has rattled his many foes, who often write him off as a political joke or a poisonous far-Right populist. But as he comes up to the first anniversary of his ascent to power, Milei can point to significant successes in curbing the curse of inflation and shrinking the state — although consumer spending has crashed, poverty has risen and growth remains elusive.

Sources close to the president tell me that whatever the outcome of his revolution, Milei believes it will offer valuable lessons for the world. “He might fail but he thinks the experience will be important and benefit others — not just in Argentina,” says one. At the very least, this unusual leader is proving to be a rare politician who keeps his word and does not hide from telling harsh truths. He warned people his medicine would be hard for them to swallow, insisting “there is no alternative to adjustment, there is no alternative to shock” in an inauguration speech that predicted “negative impact” on jobs, real wages and the number of people living below the breadline.

This prediction proved right as prices surged to the world’s highest annual inflation rate. Since then, his tough austerity measures have restrained further rises, reducing monthly inflation from 25% to 2.7% on latest data. The gap between the official dollar and the blue (illegal) dollar has fallen. A generous tax amnesty brought $20bn out from under mattresses into the formal economy. But Milei’s actions, including the firing of 30,000 federal workers — one in 10 of its staff — have also reduced consumption by one-fifth since he took power; beef sales in this steak-loving country, for instance, have fallen to their lowest levels for 13 years after a price-freeze ended. And more than half the 46m population are living in poverty, with the minimum wage plummeting almost one-third in a year.

Inevitably, Milei’s reforms sparked protests, especially over cuts to university funding and from people such as pensioners or teachers whose incomes fell. Yet remarkably, this leader of a country in its second year of recession has retained his popularity, and has the support of around half the electorate. One poll even indicated a slight rise in his ratings over the past month. Much of this backing comes from fed-up younger voters, who flocked last year to support him and his exuberantly populist message of change. “People are suffering but they know someone has to fix the mess,” said political scientist Sergio Berensztein. “He won because a large proportion of voters said enough is enough. We are a failed state that is over-spending.”

Critics, though, accuse him of ideologically pursuing a cruel experiment in “social Darwinism” in which only the strongest survive. “It works in books, it works in lessons but it does not work in the real world,” said one leading Argentinian banker when we met earlier this year in Buenos Aires. Yet even this man — worried about the lack of growth strategy to go with savaging the state — readily admitted there had been “some very good financial results” when we spoke again this week. And as he said, “the old system was rotten” with the nation living beyond its means and with incomes for ordinary people stagnating while a succession of corrupt leaders milked the system.

Milei’s path to victory was fuelled by scandals involving the Peronists who have long ruled Argentina. They left the country owing an an astonishing $263bn to creditors — yet the state’s size had doubled over two decades as Left-wing populists sought to buy popularity with costly subsidies and corrosive interventions such as price and rent controls. Cristina Kirchner, the powerful vice-president and former two-term president who followed her husband into office, was sentenced to six years in prison for stealing from state coffers in a massive fraud involving public works. Her sentence was upheld by a federal court last month following an appeal. Another political operative was jailed after being caught taking out cash at a bank using 48 debit cards for staff at a provincial legislature — and later found to have placed at least 20 family members and friends on the public payroll.

So this political caste relied on lies, patronage and printing of money was ousted by arguably the world’s first anarchist elected leader of a modern democracy — a man who sees taxes as a form of state coercion, is such a devout free marketeer that he supported the concept of trade in human organs, and has argued that the only true role for government should be defence and law-enforcement. While often called far-Right — or compared with Donald Trump and his combative populism — he is, in reality, an intellectual character who likes to spend two hours a day reading economic journals — and a libertarian, not an insular protectionist.

This wildly-eccentric yet fiercely-ideological politician knows how to attract attention. During his election campaign, Milei’s interview with Tucker Carlson received 300m views in 24 hours. Musk was among those sharing it on social media, saying it showed how “government overspending, which is the fundamental cause of inflation, has wrecked countless countries”. After his victory, Milei flew to Davos where he argued that the West was in danger from dark forces such as feminism, socialism and environmentalism putting its values in jeopardy from a vision “that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty”. Last month, the 54-year-old firebrand became the first foreign leader to visit Trump after his presidential victory — his attacks on the state, its political sinecures and power hubs have made him a hero among many US conservatives and members of the MAGA crowd.

But where did he come from?

The son of a bus firm boss, Milei alleges he was beaten and verbally abused by his parents. “They are dead to me,” he said later. “My father always told me that I was trash, that I was going to die of hunger and that I was going to be useless all my life.” His biographer claimed this treatment left him so embittered that other pupils at his Catholic school in Buenos Aires nicknamed him El Loco for his angry outbursts. He went on to play soccer in lower-level leagues, then worked as an economist at a bank and a conglomerate, but this forceful — some would say furious — nature led to prominence as a pundit on television, where he would launch savage attacks on the ruling “caste”.

His freewheeling discussions on everything from the perils of inflation through to the pleasures of sexual threesomes won him fame, followed by a seat in parliament three years ago, where he continued to show great skill at grabbing attention with stunts such as donating his salary to a monthly raffle giving “stolen” cash back to the people. His most trusted adviser is his younger sister, Karina, who stood by his side during those dark childhood days. She sold cakes on social media and communed as a medium with dead pets before using her public relations training to assist his campaign, then becoming his chief of staff. He adores his four pet Mastiffs, named after economists and cloned from his first dog called Conan, calling them his “little four-legged children” and once claiming to have telepathic conversations with Conan.

“When I hear him talking about the dogs and the idea that he is chosen by God I find this hard to take,” said one respected financial figure in Buenos Aires. “But he is an honest person and he is motivated to change Argentina.”

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A government adviser described Milei to me a “very 21st-century politician” with his dishevelled image, insults and social media diatribes. “He has very direct communications with the people,” he said. “Remember just two years ago he was a crazy economist on TV. He’s also genuine — he says what he thinks and does what he says. He speaks his truth and made it clear he wants to adjust the economy.” This adviser added that he was very different in private. “He’s like a nice child — he’s very warm and does not appear egotistical. He is very willing to talk and listen. He is a much nicer personality than the public image: the lion calling everyone names.”

Another person who has known Milei for almost three decades said he used to be a conventional Keynesian economist until driven to his disruptive ideology a decade ago by the Kirchner’s mismanagement of Argentina. It is not hard to find voters who back his mission. “He is a madman but let’s see if he can make a difference,” said Jorge, serving me coffee in a small cafe in Buenos Aires. “I’ve worked hard all my life and have so little to show for it.” Jonathan Ezequiel, 33, one of the bicycle riders delivering food hailed by the president as being the vanguard of his vision of an unfettered economy, admitted he was struggling financially but saw the urgent need for change. “There was a lot of theft and corruption,” he said. “And a lot of money wasted on social plans for people who did not need them.”

Argentina — which had higher GDP per capita than France and Germany a century ago — should be as successful as its world-beating footballers, given its well-educated citizens, substantial energy resources and formidable agriculture. Instead, half its workers disappeared into the informal economy due to labour laws that Milei calls a “cancer”. There were 15 dollar exchange rates and import duties pushed up the prices of many goods — but subsidies drove down costs of cars. One analyst said this meant a fridge made in South Korea cost 10 times more in Argentina than in the US; another said this meant middle-class families such as his own could drive big cars which were subsidised by the poor. “This was not some kind of social democrat consensus,” he said. “It was opportunism, corruption and poor public policy.”

Peronist efforts to protect workers, restrain prices and fleece successful sectors such as agriculture prevented Argentina competing in the global market, resulting in some of the world’s lowest levels of trade as a percentage of GDP. The state payroll rose 10 times faster than the private sector over the past decade. One bus driver told me he failed to stop his daughters backing Milei due to their fury at the ñoqui — a derogatory nickname for officials who rarely turn up to work.

So can Milei salvage this nation? “I would give him a 40% chance of success,” said one well-placed observer. Although he has minimal current opposition — traditional parties were left shell-shocked and rudderless following his insurgency — the president’s coalition has little support in parliament and none among the 23 powerful provincial governors. He has never run anything in the past, loathes consensus, becomes easily embroiled in distracting culture wars and won power by railing against the political elite he needs to pass his reforms. Yet he has discovered the art of pragmatism in office, scaling down his pivotal “omnibus bill” after it was picked apart in Congress. “He has overachieved anybody’s expectations,” said one insider.

There have been stumbles. Milei embarrassingly signed a decree that included a 48% presidential pay rise soon after his accession, which he blamed on his predecessor after it was seized on by foes, then hastily ditched and sacked a minister. One ally — a former Peronist minister who defected and helped swing a key vote — was arrested last month in Paraguay after entering with $200,000 in undeclared cash. And there is anger among those who are losing out from his reforms — such as at one national scientific institute where staff were lined up in pouring rain outside their building to be told if they still had a job. “Perhaps we will have to emigrate, forced to do so by the destruction of science and public education,” said Natalia, 40, who works at the unit. “You cannot live on a scorched earth.”

Others rail against his weaponising of the culture wars and his direct appeal to angry young men frustrated by feminism. One of Milei’s first edicts was to end use of gender-neutral language in government and many of his young and liberal supporters loathe his anti-abortion stance and ambivalence over their nation’s military past. There are also fault-lines in his coalition between liberals and conservatives: he has already fallen out with his vice-president Victoria Villaruel, a hardline culture warrior whose father was an army colonel, to such an extent she no longer attends cabinet meetings.

Milei has launched a fascinating revolution — and as we have seen often in the past, such events are highly unpredictable. He knows he is likely to be judged on his economic success, especially his ability to curb inflation and kick-start growth — and that the most important weapon in his political arsenal is his personal appeal, based on despair, disenchantment and desperation for change that he has weaponised for an assault on the state and key power hubs of the Left.

Yet political popularity is a fragile beast, especially in a place scarred so badly by atrocious leaders. So he is engaged in a race against time: to prove to people that his remedies are right and the pain they suffer is worth enduring for the sake of their children and their nation’s future. The impact of this shock therapy will be watched intently around the world — and the waves could be felt far beyond Argentina.

But it will take more than a few blasts of brass, bratwurst and pilsner to lift the storm clouds over Wolfsburg. For this prosperous place, about two hours’ drive west of Berlin, is a company town like few others, built from Nazi roots off the back of Volkswagen — “The People’s Car Company” which overcame its fascist birth to become the world’s highest-earning motor manufacturer. Now, however, it is in serious trouble as persistently sluggish management considers closing plants in their homeland for the first time in their history.

Such is the scale of this crisis — labelled an “earthquake” by the local paper — there are even mutterings this mighty car giant might emulate the high-speed crash of Nokia, the Finnish behemoth dismantled and sold within a few years of being the largest maker of mobile phones. Tensions are rising as the powerful IG Metall union, which just began another round of negotiations with managers, insists all German sites must remain open, even as there have been furious clashes with bosses at internal meetings. ’The situation is not good,” said one worker. “I am 54 so my working life is nearly over and I hope to get my pension in three years time but this is very, very worrying for Wolfsburg. I hope this plant will not shut.”

That kind of statement seems unimaginable in this city made by Volkswagen. Step out of the station and you see the world’s biggest car plant, three times the size of Monaco and where 70,000 employees churned out almost half a million vehicles last year. In front of you squats a futuristic science centre designed by Zaha Hadid, which serves as a sculptural reminder that this otherwise rather dour place has some of the highest average incomes in Europe thanks to cars. Even that bustling main shopping street is named after Ferdinand Porsche, creator of the iconic Beetle car and founder of a globally famous marque.

Almost half the workforce in Wolfsburg helps make cars, the highest proportion of any city in a country with 47 other places heavily dependent on this core industrial sector. “Volkswagen not only stands for economic prosperity, but also has a strong emotional component,” said the city’s mayor Dennis Weilmann. “Many families have relatives or acquaintances at VW and the majority of Wolfsburg residents have been driving a Volkswagen since their first car. Volkswagen also invests in many different areas of society, from art and culture to voluntary work and leisure events. It is therefore completely understandable that the current news is causing uncertainty among citizens.”

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The city and car company have grown up together. Wolfsburg — twinned with Luton — was created in 1938 for one of Adolf Hitler’s pet projects: the mass production of cars for the people. It was originally named after the Kraft durch Freude Wagen (Strength Through Joy Car), and seen as a model Nazi town, only to be devastated by Allied bombs during the Second World War, after slave labourers were forced to manufacture rockets and military vehicles. Then, a British army major kickstarted production of the quirky and eventual global best-selling Beetle. Three generations later, the city is home to about 125,000 people with a university and football team — sponsored by VW, of course — that once won the Bundesliga.

Cars have come to symbolise nations ever since Henry Ford invented mass production. Think of the United States brimming with confidence in its post-war heyday — and you picture those huge Cadillacs with space-age tail wings. Italy has its gorgeous supercars and unreliable mass-produced motors. And the rollercoaster ride of Britain’s manufacturers reflected the economic and political zeitgeist in our own country. But in Germany the sector is a source of national pride, the key to an economy that showcases their consensual corporate model. As one top economist put it: “VW is the alpha male.”

So VW’s troubles after bungling the transition to electric vehicles are not just woeful for Wolfsburg. The sector powering Germany’s economic success for decades is struggling, exposing a national inertia at time of intense disruption and rapid technological change. As cars turn into computers on wheels, analysts fear the German giants are being left in the dust of faster-moving rivals from China and the United States. So there is sudden angst that all those beautifully-engineered marques, with their purring combustion engines, might soon look like expensive relics from another age — and fears that if the sector collapses, it will leave a large hole in the heart of the economy that props up the European Union.

And the consequences might not only be economic. Factory closures and job losses could easily push more voters into the arms of the populist parties thriving on both political extremes. Already, Alternative for Germany (AfD) is fighting against what it calls the “erroneous path to electro-mobility”, making opposition to EU plans to ban sales of petrol and diesel-powered cars a central part of its platform. Analysts suggest VW sites in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, and Dresden, Saxony, are potential targets for closure — both regions where the AfD is building support.

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The car industry accounts for about 1.8 million German jobs in total, 8% of annual economic output and 16% of exports. These are impressive figures. But Professor Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research, says that simply looking at the data underplays its significance, since it has been a key driver over the decades of innovation, which spills over to benefit other parts of the economy. “The big concern is China, electric cars and automated vehicles.” he says. “[Volkswagen] were leaders but now they are lagging behind in electric vehicles. They have lost the technological leadership.”

Last year, China exported more cars than Germany for the first time. Germany is still the biggest car exporter to Britain, but Chinese imports such as cheap BYD eco-vehicles have risen tenfold in two years, while Elon Musk’s Tesla dominates the upper echelons of the electric market. Beijing’s latest data shows their production of new energy vehicles has soared by almost half over the past year. Meanwhile German makers also face a reversal of fortunes in the lucrative Chinese market that provided almost a third of their revenues last year — and this hit VW’s premium brands such as Porsche and Audi especially hard. The firm’s share in this market has fallen from 19% to 14% since 2020, as buyers shift from petrol and diesel-powered vehicles, while BMW last month blamed “ongoing muted demand” in China for cutting their profit forecasts.

Fratzscher is confident German manufacturers can reinvent themselves as they have in the past. “I am by and large optimistic because the skills that made German industry strong over the last 70 years — and especially the last 20 years — are still there,” he says. “Now they need to shift this innovation to new technologies — not just batteries but software, where VW is struggling badly. But they still have strong brands and distribution networks.”  According to Fratzscher, then, “pessimism is over-done — although it depends, of course, how economic policy and geopolitics plays out. But taking a snapshot today of German industry, I would say it is pretty strong.”

But other experts disagree. In his forthcoming book Kaput: The End of the German Miracle, Wolfgang Münchau looks at how the nation slipped from technological innovators to sluggards due to blinkered attitudes, lack of investment and bad decision-making. He highlights the media prominence of an academic who argues schools should not use any digital content to underline their anachronistic attitudes. Then he tells the anecdote of a photographer who found it slower to send pictures on the internet to a printer 10 kilometres away than to travel there by horse. Such stories are familiar for anyone who spends time in Germany, as many football fans discovered to their surprise at the Euros this summer. Münchau polemically concludes that German car makers are like typewriter manufacturers, whose market was killed off swiftly by the arrival of desktop computers and cheap printers.

Reminding readers that VW sacked their chief executive, who tried to modernise the firm by focusing on electric cars, Münchau fears the problems may be existential for these car makers. “I am not predicting the German industry will disappear, but it will decline and no longer play the central role it does in the world and as a hub for German industry,” he tells me. He blames “oligopolistic groupthink and arrogance” along with a “lack of entrepreneurial dynamics” as the Germans fumble the problems confronting all legacy car producers, before going on to argue that the EU response of protective trade barriers against imported Chinese electric cars “is the playbook of how industries decline”.

VW must also navigate the nation’s consensual approach to labour relations that is currently also testing Tesla, which chose Germany over post-Brexit Britain as the location for its first European factory. Musk typically moaned about the red tape that delayed the opening of his plant near Berlin, while his employees created a works council against the wishes of their bosses. And the firm is reportedly warning staff that work practices and absenteeism levels must change if they are to continue in the country, attracting some criticism after managers were sent to the homes of workers on long-term sick leave.

Ultimately, the German car industry grew complacent, resisting the trend towards electric cars for too long. And once again, this sector symbolises wider issues in a society that became a corpulent victim of its own success — despite a reputation for taking the long-term approach. Its arrogance was shown by the emissions scandal, which led to huge fines and criminal charges, after VW’s cheating emerged in 2015. Then executives were slow to understand that electric cars are different products to traditional vehicles, ones that rely on powerful batteries and smart software rather than slick engines and smooth gear boxes. One economist in Berlin laughed as he told me how Tesla and Chinese firms update software constantly “but in Germany everyone thinks it is unbelievable that you can change cars through the air”.

Professor Andreas Knie, a specialist on transport and technology, believes the problem lies deep in Germany’s psyche, arguing that his country needs to transform its governance and corporate structures to embrace flexibility, failure and innovation. “We still believe we are the best footballers, the best soldiers, the best car makers — we don’t understand that the world is changing. Now in Germany we build the wrong cars. We are masters of hardware but not of software. We are losing market share dramatically. We will have 50% fewer jobs in the car industry in a decade.”

These are shattering predictions. And the problems are not unique to Germany: one in three European car factories is under-utilised. But Germany looks like an analogue country in a digital world. Knie fears that the cities dependent on the traditional car giants face a tough future. “Wolfsburg will be like Detroit — it will shrink very much. But so will other German car cities — even Stuttgart, the capital of the German car industry, will probably shrink,” he tells me. “It’s time to say goodbye to the car industry in Germany.” It seems ironic, but VW and Germany both seem to have forgotten Vorsprung durch Technik — that progress comes through technology.

Take-off began with daft endurance videos, such as spending 40 hours counting to 100,000 and watching a bad rap video repeatedly for 10 hours. As his audience grew, so did the scale and vision of his videos: crashing a train into a pit, stranding himself on a raft at sea for seven days, surviving for 50 hours in Antarctica. Then he began making serious money from advertisers and sponsors, finding the appeal of spraying around cash after handing $10,000 to “a random homeless guy” while insisting “this is not clickbait”. The latest MrBeast video features 100 identical twins competing for $250,000. It has had 53 million hits in two days.

Donaldson’s videos are slick and his success has made him rich. Forbes estimated he earned $54 million in 2022 — and his numbers have kept on surging. His burgeoning media empire, reportedly worth $700 million, shows the rising significance of YouTube, now the most popular source of content for television viewers in the United States. But in recent weeks he has been buffeted by controversies with revelations of racist comments made as a teenager, teen grooming allegations involving a transgender (now dismissed) co-host, and the launch of a lawsuit by five women against his production company and Amazon over claims they “systematically fostered a culture of misogyny and sexism” during filming of the world’s biggest reality show contest with 1,000 people competing for $5 million.

This is damaging — and not just because it might hinder the Amazon tie-up that lifts Donaldson to another level. MrBeast is built on his brand of benevolent niceness, with profits supposedly going “towards making the world a better place”. Having started out as a typical YouTube goofball, he became an internet superstar with acts of outlandish altruism. He doles out cars, houses, islands and yachts as well as cash. His videos boast of adopting a South African orphanage, helping paralysed dogs run, building 100 wells in Africa, feeding 10,000 people for Thanksgiving, paying a salary to everyone in a Ugandan village for a year. They have eye-catching titles such as: “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time” and “We Brought Water to Kenya”.

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This is performative philanthropy at its most cynical, glib and patronising, using disability and poverty as a platform to boost Donaldson’s own celebrity and wealth. His stunts promote the concept of simplistic solutions to challenging problems, wrapping the munificent American donor in a warm glow of benevolence as he drops in to spread a little of his MrBeast largesse to some lucky recipients. Inevitably, some charities have jumped on board — including, bizarrely, GiveDirectly, started by US economists to focus on data-driven interventions rather than more random MrBeast ideas such as “Giving 20,000 Shoes to Kids in Africa”.

Yet consider some of those stunts. Few things appeal more to well-meaning Westerners than needy orphans, so there is a boom business in unregulated and fake orphanages in poorer nations. Some are squalid, others fronts for abuse. Children are often lured from families with false promises of money, schooling or security. One recent Australian study examined this phenomenon of “orphanage trafficking” that “fabricated narratives” to attract funds from donors. Such concerns were raised by Lumos — a group founded by J.K. Rowling to end institutionalisation — with statements addressing MrBeast’s counterproductive focus: “Many orphanages across the world are set up to exploit children for profit, exposing children to harm and abuse. By promoting orphanages, even well-intentioned ones, we promote the work of those that are not, continuing the cycle of exploitation.”

Or take the issue of wells. Again, this might seem a sensible way for outsiders to help poorer communities. But the landscape of Africa is littered with donor-funded wells and water systems that failed due to lack of maintenance. This has long been recognised as a problem; one report 15 years ago found that £270 million had been wasted on building 50,000 rural water supply points that ended up broken on the continent. Thus one Kenyan activist praised MrBeast for shining a spotlight on the issue of clean water supplies, but pointed out the big issue was sustainability, saying her group worked in areas where six in 10 wells were broken. “People go back to drinking from the creek because there was no infrastructure put in place for follow-up maintenance for repair,” said Saran Kaba Jones, founder of Face Africa, which helps create locally-appropriate water supplies for communities.

Building such wells can be lucrative, however. One infuriated whistleblower passed me documents a few years ago showing that at least £16.8 million from a £25.4 million aid-backed scheme to install wells, water pumps and irrigation in some of Africa’s most deprived areas went to consultants pocketing rates above £600 a day. Former aid minister Rory Stewart has talked of visiting a £30,000 water scheme in which so much went into design, implementation and evaluation that only £1,500 ended up being spent on two toilets and some plastic buckets. Then there are multi-million-pound disasters such as PlayPumps, an infamous scheme backed by Western politicians and promoted by pop stars, in which African children would pump water by playing on a roundabout. It proved to be expensive, impractical, liable to break and reliant on either child labour or women forced to spend hours spinning on the carousel.

MrBeast’s stunt philanthropy is an online progression of the aid sector boom and concepts of celebrity saints that go back to 1984’s Band Aid. This initiative began as a pop star’s heartfelt reaction to scenes of starvation in Ethiopia but ended up helping a brutal Marxist dictatorship while turbo-charging a naïve idea that nice foreigners can solve complex issues of development by chucking in cash. So politicians wanting to look compassionate promoted neo-colonial aid policies that were at best farcical and at worst a costly fraud imposed on tax-payers. They were cheered on by a self-serving industry that swelled in size and power as it claimed to be saving the world while in reality help fuel conflict, foster corruption and corrode democracy — as seen most recently with aid’s toxic role in Afghanistan that assisted the return of the Taliban.

Many of these charities entered into a Faustian pact with celebrities. They used the fame of stars in the tussle for funds while in return providing a platform for actors, models and singers to pose as experts on charitable issues. For instance, Save the Children took some minor celebrities on trips to three continents to “better understand how breastfeeding is such a crucial lifesaver for babies in developing countries”. And these sorts of strategies paid off: former foreign secretary David Miliband pockets £1 million a year running the International Rescue Committee, which has recruited a stellar list of “ambassadors” and was handed at least £33 million from Britain last year.

The aid industry routinely demonstrates how naïve interventions can do more harm than good while raising questions over its real beneficiaries. Intriguingly, a leaked 36-page “braindump” guide written by Donaldson for his production staff and shared on social media sets out his insights, strategy and tips for hooking viewers. He says their aim is to make the best possible YouTube videos and explains the need for alluring titles. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. He argues that it is far cheaper and funnier to offer a prize of five packs of Doritos a day instead of $20,000. Then one section asks “What is the goal of our content” before replying “the goal of our content is to excite me”. And the document concludes by stating his determination to build a company worth “10s of billions”. 

Such desires are the driving force of capitalism, an economic system that has lifted so many people from poverty, raised life expectancy and improved our world. Yet it can be a ruthless creed — and there are valid questions over the exploitative nature of MrBeast’s stunts that are such catnip for YouTube’s algorithms. He relies heavily on “poverty porn” — the depiction of suffering people to trigger pity in order to elicit donations — although such manipulative and parasitical tactics have been ditched by many leading charities amid anger at “white saviourism”. People with disabilities have also criticised his videos as “inspiration porn”, a term coined by the Australian activist Stella Young to describe their objectification for gratification of others. At the end of one video on cataract surgery, Donaldson makes a particularly degrading and asinine comment: “I wonder if we’ll get 1,000 more views from the people we cured LOL.”

This unlikely media tycoon says money is just “fuel to grow the business and help people and not much else”, pledging to give it all away while expanding his interests into food. Yet his model of philanthropy relies upon creating viral videos to build mass audiences for advertisers and brand partners. It is Comic Relief on steroids — another altruistic enterprise that used celebrities, crass stunts and pity to raise cash while reinforcing damaging stereotypes reminiscent of Band Aid’s idea of an Africa “where nothing ever grows”. The charity sparked fury when it sent four wealthy stars to live in a Kenyan slum for a week to show how life there could be tough.

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Donaldson and his team also insist they are educating viewers, showing solutions, inducing meaningful change and inspiring younger people to do good — familiar arguments heard from previous celebrity pushers of performative philanthropy. They claim, for instance, that building two wells in Cameroon inspired others to build another 299. But as seen, the issue is how many stay operational. There have been a string of scandals involving young Western idealists such as Renee Bach, who, aged 20 and with no training, set up a feeding and medical clinic to “save” children in Uganda — ultimately leading to the deaths of dozens of babies. Another example is Katie Meyler, hailed in the White House for her work empowering girls in Liberia that raised $8 million, even as some were being raped by her co-founder and lover, who had Aids when he died.

Donaldsons’s impressive success has led to a spate of similar stunt philanthropists turning staged acts of kindness into revenue-raising spectacles for viewers on YouTube and social media clicks. One influencer in India donated buffalos to a milkman whose business was struggling, while a popular content creator in Nigeria — one of several MrBeast imitators in a country with eye-watering poverty rates — showered cash on a couple of women market stallholders. Like so much of the aid industry, this is altruism dependent on the whims of the donors — and it is designed for entertainment and fund-raising rather than a sustained attempt to drive change.

It might seem strange to carp over a few good deeds filmed for YouTube clicks. After all, even if this Gen Z mode of philanthropy is brash and narcissistic, some lives are being changed for the better. Yet at the same time, Donaldson is exploiting less fortunate people’s problems to shape his image of decency, while reinforcing the aid illusion that has blown so much money and achieved so little over the past half century. And there is no doubt who is the biggest winner from the MrBeast brand of benevolence: the man who could become the world’s first YouTube billionaire. 

Allison, then 56, later learned that she had stage 4 peritoneal carcinomatosis, an aggressive condition. By the time she saw a specialist early last year, he warned that she might only live a few months longer: chemotherapy tended to be ineffective for her cancer, buying a bit more time at best, and she was inoperable. Instead, she was told to go home, sort out her papers, and decide if she wanted medical assistance in dying.

Unsurprisingly, Allison was devastated. “I could barely breathe — I went in there hoping to come out with a treatment plan but was just told to get my will in order.” That night was the worst of her life as she broke the shattering news to her son and daughter at her home in Victoria. “I told them I might only live for another two months,” she recalled. “If I’d not had my children, I might have accepted MAID [medical assistance in dying] — but when I saw the effect on them, having just been through the deaths of my own parents, it made me dig really deep.”

So, determined to find help, she researched her condition, spoke to doctors as far away as Taiwan, flew to California for scans and eventually travelled to Baltimore for treatment. She had discovered that patients could be given debulking surgery to reduce their cancer, followed by targeted use of heated chemotherapy — yet back in Canada, she could not get even an initial telephone chat with a surgeon who performed such operations for two months. Aided by her tight circle of friends and relatives, she raised almost half the $200,000 cost for the operation by crowdfunding. By the time she managed to see an oncologist in her home province of British Columbia, she was already on the road to recovery.

Today, Allison is in remission. She lifts weights daily, and goes running and cycling. She recently married her partner on a beach in Hawaii in front of her children. But she remains infuriated that Canadian doctors offered to kill rather than treat her. “The way it was presented was shocking,” she told me. “I was disgusted to be offered MAID twice. Once I was even on the phone, when I was on my own having just come back from Baltimore. It left me sobbing.”

As the debate over assisted dying heats up in Britain, with Keir Starmer promising a free vote on the matter if he wins the general election, and with politicians in Jersey approving plans for its use only last week, we should take notice of Allison’s case. For she does not share the ethical or religious concerns held by many opponents of euthanasia. Nor does she oppose Canada’s 2016 MAID reform; she agreed with her father five years later that it was an “appropriate” option for his intensifying pain after many years of prostate cancer.

But she has deep worries about assisted dying being offered by doctors in a health system that is floundering — especially with inadequate and overwhelmed oncology services when cancer patients comprise almost two-thirds of the soaring numbers of citizens opting for MAID. “We do not have a good standard of care here, especially for cancer — and that is why it is so dangerous to have MAID, especially when it can be used to take a bit of pressure off physicians and the government.” She knows of three other cancer patients whose families fear they died needlessly — including the person whose home she bought after downsizing to pay her medical bills in the US.

Allison’s very existence challenges those who argue that Britain — with its flailing health and social care systems, shamefully long waiting lists and historically poor cancer survival rates — should rush headlong into legalisation of assisted death. So, what would she tell those advocating for the reform? “I would tell Britain to only accept assisted dying when the health service is fixed — otherwise it is a very dangerous step to take. We deserve decent and timely care rather than offers of faster death.”

Like her, I have no qualms over the ethics of assisted dying as an atheist — but huge concerns over its realities. This is based on my reporting on the issue from the pioneering nations of Belgium and the Netherlands, with evidence of the implications for vulnerable groups, especially those already suffering medical discrimination and societal marginalisation. One study last year, for instance, revealed eight Dutch people were subjected to euthanasia simply because they felt unable to live with their learning disability or autism, along with 16 other closely related cases. Disturbingly, many included being lonely as a central cause of their unbearable suffering.

Yet until talking to Alisson, I had not considered the implications of injecting this irreversible reform into a struggling healthcare system. In British Columbia, faced with growing waiting lists and corrosive healthcare bureaucracy, there have been reports of a number of cancer patients forced to resort to MAID. Samia Saikali, for instance, a 67-year-old grandmother in Victoria, chose to end her life that way after waiting more than 10 weeks to see a specialist. “The word cruel comes to mind,” said her daughter Danielle, pointing out that, with aggressive cancer, this delay can be the difference between having a shot at life or certain death. “Cruel to be given such a terrible diagnosis and then told to just wait and sit and wait.”

Yet studies indicate that Canada’s cancer care and survival rates are better than the UK, where waiting lists rose every year over the past decade. The NHS target for starting treatment after diagnosis is 62 days, showing how complacency is built into the British health system. But even this dismal target is missed for more than one-third of patients, despite there being evidence that each month of delay reduces the survival chances by about 10%. One study earlier this year into why British survival rates have fallen behind countries such as Canada found the average wait in Scotland for chemotherapy was 65 days — and 81 days for radiotherapy in Wales.

Concerns have been highlighted by Canadian bioethics professor Jaro Kotalik, co-editor of the first full analysis of his country’s reform, who warned British MPs last year that MAID seems to be more and more “a way to compensate for lack of resources and reduce healthcare costs”. He added that palliative care “appears to be a casualty of MAID” with reduced access, leaving some patients to feel that assisted dying was their only option since “their suffering has been inadequately addressed or because they perceive that their families or social supports would carry an excessive burden”.

Kotalik maintains that there had been far too little investigation or oversight of MAID since its introduction. “There is no real governance of this national programme, which relies for the purpose of collecting information about applicants and deaths entirely on self-reporting by providers,” he said. “I’m concerned about the possibility of people choosing MAID without the full or correct diagnosis, especially in cancer when oncologists are not involved. Options for a cancer patient should not be assessed just by a general practitioner or nurse practitioner so I worry patients are not fully informed about alternative options with different treatments and more comfortable outcomes.”

Such warnings become even more pertinent in light of the surging MAID toll on Vancouver Island, a haven for wealthy retirees with its beautiful beaches, forests and mountains. Euthanasia campaigners often reject claims that reform leads to a “slippery slope”, although numbers keep rising and icriteria have been expanded in nations that led the way. In the Netherlands — which in 2002 pioneered assisted dying for patients — it accounts now for one in 20 fatalities, with 58 couples dying together last year and the rules extended to include terminally ill children.

Canada has also seen MAID cases soar each year — and once again, protections have been eroded. In 2021, the central rule that natural death had to be “reasonably foreseeable” was removed. Latest figures disclosed that 13,102 people ended their lives under the scheme in 2022, a rise of 30% over the previous year despite postponement until 2027 of the controversial expansion to people with chronic mental illness. The country is catching up fast on Holland’s rate with 4.1% of deaths aided by doctors. Its annual MAID report also revealed that more than one-third of those choosing to die felt themselves a burden on family, friends or caregivers. Inevitably, there have been significant controversies with reports of pressurised fatalities involving disabled, elderly and impoverished citizens.

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Meanwhile, the rate of MAID cases under Vancouver Island’s health authority is more than twice as high as the rest of Canada; indeed, it may well be the world’s highest since it accounts for almost one in 10 deaths. I heard various explanations for this, ranging from the struggling state of the region’s cancer services through to a history of legal, social and medical activism in support of euthanasia.

Prominent practitioners include Stefanie Green, founding president of the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, who has assisted more than 400 deaths. She spent two decades as a family doctor focusing on maternity and new-born care before turning to assisted dying. “I’d always been interested in the intersection between medicine and ethics,” she told me. “The more I looked into it, the more I was drawn to it. The skill set was almost identical. It required a knowledgeable person to take people through a natural event. I would be with them during a very intimate event. It would take time to build up the trust. It is intense, it is intimate, there are the family dynamics.”

When I asked if medically induced death was really “a natural event”, she insisted that “the death is imminent” before adding that she found the work deeply moving. “Patients are grateful, families are grateful, and I am facilitating their final wishes. I am certain in all the cases they are 100% eligible, both legally and medically. The work is done properly. It is not for me to decide on their situation. It is their personal autonomy.”

Green is both passionate and proud of her work: intriguingly, she faces far more protests over the single day a week she spends performing infant circumcisions from campaigners who argue it is an infringement of the child’s rights. She agrees, however, that patients such as Allison have every right to feel disappointed. “She should feel aggrieved that the Canadian health system is not working efficiently and failed her. I will also demand better resources with more doctors and nurses. The government has failed — but that is not reason to cancel the MAID programme. It needs to be delivered carefully and cautiously.” Likewise, she agrees society often fails people with disabilities. “We must act to remedy this — but this shouldn’t mean we cancel desired, needed, legal medical services.”

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Green stresses that MAID requires people to make their own request to terminate their lives. “It cannot be triggered by anyone else. It cannot be coerced — subtly or explicitly. It must be consistent with their own values; they must demonstrate capacity. It is far, far more common to see people coerced out of their request for MAID than to have someone show up who has been coerced into making this choice — which we then note and find them ineligible.”

This debate is a moral minefield, with emotive and valid arguments on both sides. There is, however, a global drift towards legalisation of assisted dying, from Ecuador to Germany. In Britain, as lawmakers across the Channel prepare to debate assisted dying, YouGov polling suggests similar legislation would be backed by 44% of voters, although 31% remain unsure — and surveys have suggested twice as many people with disabilities would be concerned by a change in the law as support it, despite claims from campaigners to the contrary.

Christopher Lyon, a social scientist at the University of York, believes Britain should be very cautious in following Canada’s lead after witnessing his father’s assisted death in a drab Victoria hospital room in the summer of 2021. He was left highly disturbed by the experience, believing his father failed to meet the correct criteria for being moved rapidly to the category of “reasonably foreseeable” death, as well as being depressed and possibly drunk when giving consent. “It was absolutely horrific,” he said. “Britain would be wrong to go down this path. You see some people making the same arguments as in Canada about personal autonomy, control and the right to make decisions to end your life. It is perhaps a choice for people in very rare cases with extreme and unmanageable suffering at the very end of life, which is not what we see in Canada. But there is no doubt the evidence points towards a slippery slope with widening access — although it is really more of a cliff face. Ultimately, I doubt any assisted death system can be made safe.”

Lyon told me he was neutral on this issue before seeing his 77-year-old father die. “It is horribly hard to see your father in distress being killed by a doctor with no attempt to help. It is almost indescribable. It came across as so cruel — but also so avoidable.”

Reese died from a toxic drug overdose nearly two years ago. She was just 15 when her father went to wake her one summer morning and found her dead in bed. “Many days, I still don’t believe this has happened,” says Wendy, too devastated to return to her job with a car finance firm. “I feel like I’m sleepwalking through life. There are no words to adequately describe this. I just feel this deep sense of loss: my daughter has gone. She deserved so much better. I miss her every day, every moment.”

A talented athlete — she earned the prized black belt aged 11 — Reese started struggling when she became a teenager. This coincided with Covid, which cancelled all sport and social activities just as she was transitioning from her cosy middle school to a much bigger high school. She did not adapt well to online classes, felt lonely, then began hanging around outdoors with some new friends and smoking weed in a nearby park. One day she fell sick — and when Wendy took her to the doctor, her daughter confided to her mother that she had been taking “Dillies”, an opioid painkiller more potent than heroin.

By the time of her death, Reese had already gone through the cruel cycle of experimentation, addiction, treatment and then relapse. “She was the last child you would expect to pass in this way,” says Wendy. “She lived in a good community, had a stable family, went to a good school, excelled at sport.” Yet Reese’s story is far from unique in this prosperous corner of Canada. Here, health authorities have revealed an astonishing fact: fatal overdoses from illicit drugs are now the leading cause of death for young people aged 10-18 in British Columbia, overtaking motoring accidents and suicide. And the vast majority of the fatalities here involve fentanyl, a highly-potent opioid that is often cut into other drugs by dealers.

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There are many reasons why people use such illicit substances — from blotting out trauma through to boredom, experimentation and peer pressure. But, as Wendy says so poignantly, “You don’t get to make mistakes with fentanyl.”

I first saw how fentanyl carved through societies when reporting from Dayton, Ohio in 2017. A police officer told me he had never seen an overdose victim before the start of that decade, yet in our four hours together we witnessed a dozen such incidents on his patch. At the end of our patrol we found a pair of middle-aged users slumped like corpses in their car outside a dealer’s house, the impact of fentanyl so instant that one syringe lay between the woman’s legs and another on the dashboard. She was brought back to life; her partner was less lucky.

Fentanyl, long used by doctors as a legal painkiller, is liked by dealers since it is many times more potent than morphine so they can smuggle in small quantities yet drive up profits per kilo tenfold. Counterfeit pills are made by the Mexican cartels with chemicals imported from Wuhan in China. It gives a powerful hit, so some users actively seek it out, while laced into other drugs from cocaine to crystal meth it delivers more kick and can foster addiction. But the fluctuations in purity make it potentially deadly. When I asked one former user what it is like to overdose on fentanyl, he said he had no idea since it happens so fast — then you either wake up or die. The risks are so unpredictable that in one US case, two teenage girls at a party split what they thought to be a prescription opioid pill; one died, the other survived.

Meanwhile, the Taliban’s clampdown on heroin production in Afghanistan has meant similar synthetic drugs are arriving in Europe such as nitazenes, which can be many times stronger than fentanyl. “It’s terrifying since it feels like we are looking down the barrel of the catastrophe seen in the US and Canada but no one is doing anything about it,” said Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst at the UK-based Transform Drug Policy Foundation.

In the US, where drug fatalities keep on rising grimly, fentanyl has driven the surge in accidental overdoses, despite falling illicit drug use by middle- and high-school students. An average of 22 adolescents aged between 14 and 18 died each week in 2022 as street drugs become deadlier, the third largest cause of paediatric deaths after firearm-related injuries and motoring accidents. But over the border, in Western Canada, it is now the leading cause of death for all ages — from children aged 10 right up to adults of 60, according to federal health officials.

Across the country, 5% of all overdose hospitalisations are children and teenagers. In Vancouver, the epicentre of this crisis, the toll of frighteningly young fentanyl deaths includes Logan Williams, a 16-year-old actor who starred in several television shows. “It was not an overdose but a poisoning,” said his mother Marlyse, 52, sales manager for a dental products firm.

She scrolls through pictures and videos of her son as she tells me about his short life, often wiping away tears. The images of Logan are heart-breaking: smiling at the camera as a young child; filming on the set of The Flash television series; laughing happily as he leaps off a boat into water while on a holiday in Switzerland. “There are no words to describe the emptiness in my heart. Nothing makes it feel better. Nothing.”

Later she drives me to the city’s Downtown Eastside, lined with dozens of citizens who live, use drugs and often die on the streets. “Look at them — it’s so sad,” she says as we drive past the disturbing scenes of misery. “Each one of them is someone’s child, living like this.” She points at one man, spread-eagled on the pavement in pouring rain with an orange towel draped over his head. “Look — you can’t even tell if he is dead or alive.” Then, she adds quietly: “This could have been Logan’s fate, spending years like this… I will never know since he didn’t get the chance to grow up.”

Marlyse calls herself a conservative, accuses China of deliberately targeting North America with fentanyl and wants harsher laws for people selling toxic drugs, such as the dealer who not only killed her son but also five other people under the age of 20. “This is drug-induced homicide in my opinion since drug dealers are no longer dealing drugs, they are dealing death,” she said, adding that almost nine in 10 street drugs sold in Vancouver contain fentanyl. One couple she knows through a grief group she helps run lost their 13-year-old son, who took what he thought was a Xanax pill. “In the morning when they went to wake him up for school, he was dead in his bed.”

Yet, as Marlyse says, these are urgent health issues confronting the nation’s youth. She is open to ideas such as vending machines offering test strips and clean drugs, comparing their society’s hesitant response to the drug epidemic with how officials and politicians reacted so fast and firmly to Covid. “The death toll keeps on rising and I don’t have all the answers on how to fix it or even know if it is fixable. I can only tell you that addiction can hit any family: rich, poor, black, white, two-parent households, single parent… it doesn’t matter. Fentanyl is a game changer. It can be one pill, one time and the result is death. Our youth must be the number-one priority in this pandemic with a multi-faceted approach from education and fighting the stigma through to science-based, long-term treatment.”

Logan died while waiting to get into treatment, compounding the tragedy. Above all, like every bereaved parent to whom I spoke, she wants to end the stigma around drug use that drives people to hide problems. “I know of grandparents who come to our grief group and they’ve never told anyone else how their grandkids died since they’re so ashamed,” she said.

Debra Bailey lost her 21-year-old daughter, Ola, two days before Christmas. She had hidden her heroin addiction from family and friends. Debra is a leading member of Moms Stop The Harm, a group of families pushing for an end to the failed war on drugs with evidence-based reform, prevention and treatment policies. She argues that the state should provide safe drugs. “The only way to save lives is to replace the fentanyl with a safer supply for people with substance abuse issues, then maybe they can get a handle on their problems. We can’t stop the fentanyl and the cartels are not going to make it safe.”

This corner of Canada is already pushing such harm-reduction policies. Possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use was decriminalised last year following the introduction of safe consumption rooms and drug-testing facilities — in stark contrast with Britain, which accounts for almost one-third of overdose deaths in Europe yet remains hooked on prohibition. Many of the Canadian advances have followed court rulings, such as the recent verdict in a case taken by nurses that banning the use of illicit drugs in public places infringed on the constitutional rights of users.

Now, the debate is over state supply of safe drugs after two members of the Drug User Liberation Front were arrested for running a “compassion club” that offered “rigorously tested cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine, at cost, to users”. But there is pushback on the Right with Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, ahead in the polls before next year’s federal election, arguing safe supply of opioids leads to addictive drugs trickling into the community, fuelling problems rather than treatment and recovery. Police also claim that some opiate pills obtained through harm-reduction programmes have been sold on by criminal gangs.

Backers of the “compassion club” counter that, during the 13 months of its operation, there were no overdoses among 43 participants, who were able to stabilise their lives. But even the most radical drug campaigners accept the need for controls on use by children, as shown with legalisation of cannabis in 2018 designed to restrict access for young people. A recent health study of British Columbia adolescents, however, found an increase in younger children using drugs at 12 — the same age as Logan Williams when he started smoking cannabis. “We are failing this generation of kids and we are not brave enough to change what we are doing,” says Emily Jenkins, a nursing professor and expert on mental health and substance use at the University of British Columbia.

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Jenkins argues there is insufficient evidence-based guidance for schools, so many still preach abstinence instead of harm-reduction advice. She adds, though, that deaths are concentrated among children with difficult life circumstances, many of whom have been through the child welfare system. “There is some experimentation and some are doing drugs for fun. But in Canada we rank in the bottom third of industrialised nations for child poverty with nearly one in five kids not having access to basic necessities of life. When paired with wider social problems such as family breakdowns, housing problems and racism, you can imagine some feel a deep sense of hopelessness.”

The crisis ranges widely across the community. As I leave the professor’s office, she introduces me to her research manager, who tells me that her twin 19-year-old daughters had three friends who died from drug overdoses. “The youngest was 15. One had come here alone at 14 from China. It is terrifying,” she said.

But why are such significant numbers of children using powerful drugs at these young ages? The anthropologist Danya Fast has spent 15 years talking to young Vancouvans about it. She has followed about 20 youngsters closely and half of them have died from overdoses. “I’ve heard so many times they started using at 11, 12, 13,” she said. “These are our most vulnerable kids, experiencing instability and tensions many of us will never experience in our lives. But they are also still kids.”

Fast, an assistant professor at UBC’s department of medicine, has just published The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver. She says self-medication is part of the story of their substance abuse — but it is not just about blocking out trauma. For many, it is also a search for fun and meaning in life. “It fills the time, alleviates their boredom, opens up possibilities when there aren’t a lot around for them. Boredom for these young people is almost painful, a deeply confusing state of mind. But drugs are the one thing they can have, for a few moments at least.”

She believes society should do everything possible to keep these children alive. “There needs to be room for more youth self-determination on drugs — and that’s scary,” she says. “But do we really want to hold on to the idea that young people don’t use drugs and abstinence is the only way forward when it is so clearly failing? We need to give them places to go for fun and meaning but also for non-judgemental help, where they can talk openly about drug use if they want. Then they might live to make that decision to try treatment. Eventually they might be ready to detox, to slow down. But if we just offer abstinence and treatment, they think older people don’t listen to them and disengage. Then they can end up using fentanyl in a basement somewhere in the most risky situations.”

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Guy Felicella proves addicts can escape even the most crushing circumstances. He grew up in a comfortable middle-class household with a father who ran hair salons and owned race horses — but behind the front door there was alcoholism, domestic violence and a lack of love, fuelling feelings of isolation, resentment and sadness. He played around at school, was written off as a “dumb” kid, then ran away aged 12 and began using cannabis and LSD. “I felt like ending my life but then I found something wonderful — I found drugs and they gave me the ability to numb myself and to forget,” he says. “When you live in an unpredictable house, it gives you something predictable since I knew what would happen if I took drugs.”

This was the start of two dark decades of addiction, homelessness and prison, with 55 convictions related to drug use. “It was physically, medically and mentally draining. You sleep rough, you live rough, the health consequences are terrible. You are always on alert — from other users, from the police — trying to protect yourself while the public look at you like you are discarded rubbish, incorrigible, a loser criminal scumbag.”

Guy didn’t overdose until 2012, after fentanyl arrived on the scene. Then it happened six times until, in February 2013, he woke up to a nurse telling him that she loved him as a fellow human being. “I burst into tears because I knew that I was going to die if I did not manage to stop. I’d tried more than 50 times. But this time I managed to get off drugs — although I didn’t feel better until I had loads of therapy to understand the issues in my head.”

Now he is happily married with three children and speaks to schools about his experiences, arguing that drug users are not inherently bad people. “Just Say No has never worked — you must have proper education. But I don’t tell kids how to run their lives. They’d laugh at me if I did. All I can do is tell them the story of my life and say that if you do fall down the hole, there is hope because you can make a comeback at any age when you accept reality.”

Guy is a reminder that most people addicted to drugs do stop using them. He argues passionately that, however unpalatable the idea might sound, the crisis will intensify and fatalities keep mounting unless we regulate supply of drugs. “It will still not be safe to take them but at least users will know exactly what they are consuming,” he says, adding that in his view this issue exposes wider societal problems. “We live in a world that creates addiction: they want you to gamble, they want you to use technology, they want you to buy processed food. Our society is all about getting people hooked on things — but then we blame them when they use drugs and end up losing their lives.”

As Wendy Chisholm tells me, engulfed in her terrible grief, the best answer to this problem would be to stop the flow of toxic drugs, but history has proved this to be impossible. “I think this issue is like a freight train that no one really knows how to stop,” she says. Then she drives off to briefly spend time with her daughter. “I visit her grave every day — sometimes for 10 minutes, sometimes for an hour, maybe to rearrange the flowers or just to talk to her,” she says, wistfully. “It’s the only way I can care for my daughter nowadays.”

For Edinburgh University officials are stifling my efforts to help find the truth about the origins of Covid-19 in order to protect one of their top academics, who finds himself a central figure in a furore of worldwide significance. It might seem a long way from Wuhan, where the pandemic erupted at some point in 2019, to Scotland’s genteel capital. But at the core of debate over the birth of a strange coronavirus stands an evolutionary biologist called Andrew Rambaut. This influential professor, among the world’s most cited scientists, is accused of playing a key role in efforts by a cabal of prominent experts to suppress the idea Covid might be linked to risky research carried out inside a Chinese laboratory.

Science, of course, depends on data, evidence and unfettered debate. And tracking down Covid’s origins could help protect the planet from future pandemics; it might even have implications for the global tussle between autocracy and democracy. But it seems clear now there was an alarming cover-up led by the heads of major American and British research funding bodies — and the emails exchanged between Rambaut and other leading players might shed light on what else went on behind the scenes.

Edinburgh University boasts a “culture of openness” on its website. But it rejected my requests under the Freedom of Information Act to access these emails on the basis that such a move might affect their professor’s health and safety. After 27 months — and following my appeal to Scotland’s Information Commissioner — the university admitted finally it held the information that I sought. However, it declined still to release it into the public domain, and rebuffed similar requests on the same grounds from US Right to Know, a public health campaign group that has winkled out significant information on these issues using similar tactics.

So in the absence of their evidence, let us examine some of the existing data. After all, as Conan Doyle once wrote to explain how dodgy theories can get bolstered to mask the truth, “there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact”. There are at least 10,000 cities on our planet. And yet, Covid emerged in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan. This sprawling city is hundreds of miles from the nearest colonies of wild bats with similar coronaviruses, found in the tropical caves of southern China, so the location surprised even Shi “Bat Woman” Zhengli, their leading expert on such diseases. She is based at Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s most important bio-security laboratory and the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia. It had known safety concerns. And it was conducting risky research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice in low-level biosafety conditions.

Other labs in the city were also carrying out cutting-edge scientific work. So it did not take the forensic genius of a great detective to suspect the emergence of Sars-CoV-2 — the strain of virus that causes Covid-19 — could possibly be tied to research in the city. Especially when this new disease had a feature not seen on more than 200 similar types of coronavirus called a furin cleavage site, which allows its spike protein to bind effectively to cells in many human tissues.

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Maintaining on an open mind regarding all possible scenarios the available data might indicate should not have been controversial. This is, after all, the basis of science. Yet from start of the pandemic, a few prominent scientists, led by the bossses of the most important research funding bodies in Britain and the US, publicly dismissed fears Covid might be linked to a Wuhan lab. This led the suggestion to be scorned as “conspiracy theory”, condemned by patsy journalists, and even dismissed by some people as racist.

Among these experts was Rambaut, who ran the online site that first published the Sars-CoV-2 genome after it was leaked by a brave Chinese scientist in early 2020 in tandem with their mutual friend Eddie Holmes, a Sydney-based British virologist. Before the pandemic, both men were critics of the sort of “misguided” virus-hunting carried out by Wuhan scientists such as Shi in those bat caves of southern China. Some of this work was carried out with Western partners, especially the controversial British scientist Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance group that was backed by US taxpayers.

Yet in mid-March 2020 — just 11 weeks after Taiwan tipped off the World Health Organisation about a weird new disease in Wuhan, and six weeks after the body had declared Covid to be an international emergency — Rambaut and Holmes were among five authors of a commentary in Nature Medicine hastily stating that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This unequivocal statement — entitled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” — was arguably the most influential scientific document published in the pandemic. It was even cited in the White House by Anthony Fauci. And it was singled out to me for its significance by Sir Jeremy Farrar, the former head of the Wellcome Trust who was appointed as the WHO’s Chief Scientist last year.

It has since been revealed through leaks, investigations, books and a barrage of freedom of information requests that these two scientific leaders, along with the head of the biggest US science funding body, were involved in covertly drafting this statement (although strangely not credited). And it emerged that some of these scientists privately feared the possibility of a laboratory link even as they drafted the paper condemning such ideas. Farrar himself had complained to Francis Collins, then the head of the US National Institutes of Health, which helped fund some research in Wuhan, about the “Wild West” biosecurity at labs in the central Chinese city. Private messages released though a Congressional inquiry — detailing “super secret” discussions between Rambaut and three fellow authors of the “proximal origins” statement — further exposed concerns that Covid might be tied to scientific research, along with concerning signs of pressure from “higher ups” to squash such a stance.

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One admitted the lab escape theory was “so friggin’ likely” based on work carried out in Wuhan and molecular data — leading Rambaut to say that their discussion of the idea “shows how plausible it is”. In February 2020 he wrote: “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff… I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good. The truth is never going to come out (if escape is the truth).”

Rambaut also said that “once you lose the market as the origin, all bets are off” — a reference to the theory that the virus originated with an infected animal in a food market, ruled out three months later by the Chinese authorities. The Edinburgh academic also wrote about “the shit show” if “anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release”, arguing they should say “given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process”.

Such discrepancies between the private views of prominent experts and their public positions, published in prestigious journals with commercial ties to China, fuel fears that powerful scientists — whether trying to appease China or mask Western funding ties to risky research — duped the world by trying to stifle debate. Needless to say, this has been firmly denied by those involved. Rambaut, however, also used social media to debunk the “Mojiang miners theory”. This suggests Sars-Cov-2 might be tied to three miners who died from a respiratory disease, similar to Covid 19, that they caught while clearing bat droppings in a cave network in south China. The trio were infected in an abandoned copper mine where scientists from Wuhan sampled RaTG13, the closest known relative of Sars-Cov-2.

Having been looking into these issues since early 2020, I requested Rambaut’s email discussions with Farrar, Fauci, Holmes and Danish evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen in relation to that controversial Nature Medicine document. I had made an earlier effort to obtain emails between these experts through Whitehall and Sir Patrick Vallance, then the government’s chief scientific adviser, but this resulted in release of a batch of documents so heavily redacted that they were almost worthless. So I sought Rambaut’s emails with Vallance, too, on this issue.

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This was far from a journalistic fishing exercise — as proven by evidence that has emerged elsewhere from other FOI requests. These include US Right to Know’s exposure of how Daszak had secretly organised another notorious statement published in The Lancet early in the pandemic that condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin” and ridiculously praised Beijing for “rapid, open and transparent” sharing of data. It was signed by 27 experts, including Farrar and two Wellcome Trust colleagues.

Daszak also authored a $14.2 million funding request to the Pentagon’s research arm for a study supposedly “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses” that suggested the insertion of “human-specific cleavage sites”. US Right to Know found last month that he envisaged much of this controversial gain-of-function work being carried out in Wuhan — although Ralph Baric, his partner on this project, admitted they might grow viruses in such low-level biosecurity that US researchers “will likely freak out”. The initial 2018 proposal was rejected since it could “put local communities at risk” — but clearly there were plans afoot for precisely the sort of high-risk work in Wuhan that could have led to the pandemic.

We still do not know the definitive answer to the riddle of Covid’s origins. But we do know China’s Communist dictatorship covered up the emergence of a deadly new virus with disastrous consequences, silencing medical whistleblowers and burying crucial data that could have saved lives. We know that two major US intelligence agencies feared the virus leaked from a lab. We heard housing minister Michael Gove tell the Covid inquiry “there is a significant body of judgement” that believes coronavirus “was man-made”. Meanwhile no sustainable evidence has emerged to prove the claims of zoonotic transmission, despite desperate efforts to link animals such as pangolins and raccoon dogs to the spread of a bat disease into humans.

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Curiously, Edinburgh University admitted last year to being over-reliant on Chinese funding with more than 7,500 students coming from Asian superpower, compared with 11,000 from England. Two months ago, Civitas think tank accused it of taking £12 million in five years from bodies with ties to China’s military — revealed through freedom of interest requests. Such sources of finance are not unusual at our universities, sadly, but it would be disturbing if such links were the real reason why this prestigious institution does not want to release important documents that might embarrass Beijing.

It rebuffed my request in an eight-page letter from its legal chief that even had the gall to argue that Rambaut had already published his views on Covid origins in that contentious Nature Medicine article “accessed over five and half million times”. The letter — ironically delayed for months by Covid’s impact on working practices — ruled that disclosure of their professor’s emails might “endanger the physical or mental health or safety of an individual” following “threatening behaviour against several academics in this narrow field”. Like many journalists, I am aware of the unsettling nature of abuse and threats. Such treatment is unacceptable for any scientist, however famous or controversial. But it should be pointed out that it is the shameful behaviour of some of science’s leading lights that turned this into such a toxic debate, which became all the more poisonous after becoming entangled in tribal politics amid disingenuous talk of conspiracy theories.

Science, like academia and journalism, should not be undermined by hiding of key information. Data, facts and evidence should be shared, not shackled or suppressed in a democracy — especially if they might cast light on the worst public health disaster for a century.

For electricity has arrived in Bondo. Three turbines were installed in a micro-hydro scheme exploiting the fertile region’s rainfall. And the impact has been life-changing for the 1,800 homes so far connected to a mini-grid. Children can study after dark, so now have a better chance of passing the exams for secondary school rather than having to leave aged 11. Drugs and food can be stored in fridges, so villagers do not have to make the 12-mile trek to the hospital and can produce batches of food or drinks to sell at market. Cooking the evening meal is three times quicker — and far less destructive to the environment — without the need to collect firewood.

One group of women giggled when I asked if they had televisions and watched football in their homes. “Before, our husbands would say they were going off to watch football when they were really walking out with other women. Now they can no long claim they are going off for football,” Bertha told me. The senior chief told me they had never dreamed of having energy supplied to the villages, with a dozen maize mills, many small enterprises, schools, shops and churches also connected to the grid. “When you move around Bondo you see happy people — and that’s because of electricity.”

Yet the big surprise in Bondo is not simply the supply of energy to such an isolated community, in a country where only one in eight citizens has access to grid electricity and on a continent where almost half the 1.2 billion population still lack this life-changing supply. The real eye-opener is the stack of 32 computers inside the concrete pump shed. This innovative mini-grid — located more than two hours from Malawi’s second city of Blantyre along bumpy roads and tracks that can become impassable in a torrential downpour — is mining Bitcoin to fund its operation.

It is a smart idea. The computers used to create valuable new Bitcoin tokens and validate transactions consume around the same amount of energy as a medium-sized country such as Sweden would generate. Hence the stinging critique of how this cryptocurrency wastes the planet’s precious resources. This initiative flips that narrative by using Bitcoin mining to fund energy in parts of Africa that are too poor or remote to merit connection to grids, but which do have plentiful supplies of potential power sources. Mining soaks up the excess energy of these renewable plants. And this delivers not just electricity but a powerful jolt to to drive development in the local economy.

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The concept comes from a Kenyan firm, Gridless, set up in 2022, whose backers include Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. There are four other sites in Kenya and Zambia and plans for scores more across the continent. Its aim is to demonstrate how Africa could play a central role in countering the conventional belief that Bitcoin, now 15 years old, is used simply for risky speculation and dodgy transactions. Instead, it backs those who claim it will lead to more inclusive financial systems as it usurps the control of dysfunctional governments and manipulative central banks.

It will also release the community from reliance on foreign handouts to survive. The Bondo power plants were built by Mount Mulanje Conservation Trust, a local group trying to protect the mountain region’s unique bio-diversity, and were initially supported by finance from aid and development agencies — but now Bitcoin covers the running costs. This offers a commercial incentive that does not rely on altruism or subsidies to deliver power to remote regions, while exploiting energy waste at times of low use such as overnight.

Malawi, one of the world’s poorest nations, provides a powerful case study in the failures of aid. As former development minister Rory Stewart said in a lecture at Yale, Britain gave £4.5billion over half a century to this southern African country corroded by corruption and bad governance, yet it ended up “if anything, poorer than it was when we started”.

“Bitcoin can prevent Bondo becoming the sort of white elephant that you see across Africa, built by aid groups and then abandoned,” said Erik Hersman, chief executive of Gridless. He admits that he is “not a big fan” of the sector. “They come in with low-cost loans and grants to finance all these schemes that they say will pay their way in 30 years but the sums never add up. This is a new way to finance development.”

Malawi also demonstrates another reason why there is rising interest in Bitcoin in Africa: people are seeking a safer home for their cash than local currencies. Prices rose sharply after its currency was devalued two months ago by 44% against the US dollar — the second decrease in value of the kwacha in 18 months. Many African countries on the continent have suffered also from catastrophic inflation, while official currency conversion rates can be significantly lower than street rates.

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One Kenyan entrepreneur told me she turned to the cryptocurrency after seeing her savings constantly eroded even in a country with lower than average inflation for the continent. “I was trying to save to buy a house but kept finding my sums declining. I wanted more stability so tried Bitcoin, and then found it had other uses,” said Marcel Lorraine, founder of Bitcoin DADA. Her clients include a trader of alternative health products in a Nairobi street market, who found it much cheaper to use than changing currencies after being introduced to it by a Nigerian customer and is now hoping it will provide a stable platform for building her business to obtain a shop.

While Warren Buffet dismissed Bitcoin as “probably rat poison squared” and the economist Paul Krugman has compared it to a Ponzi scam fuelled by libertarian fantasies and “technobabble”, devotees see it as a liberating force due to the decentralised design created by its mysterious and pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, has even applied to launch a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund that may open up the market to the US wealth management industry.

Certainly Bitcoin, for all its fluctuations, can seem comparatively reliable if you live in Africa — or indeed many other parts of the planet, from Argentina to Lebanon. “This is what I have seen everywhere,” said Peter McCormack, who travels the world for a Bitcoin podcast. “Here is an alternative to gold and property for a middle class that has some money and patience, but is seeing expenses and costs rise while savings decline in value. And a strong middle class helps build a strong economy by driving consumer spending, reducing reliance on the state and driving innovation and entrepreneurship.”

Bitcoin has also become a helpful tool for activists and journalists in dictatorships, since it makes it far harder to track funds. In Togo, a West African state run by one despotic family since 1967, it is used to channel cash to opposition and civil society leaders despite the freezing of bank accounts. Bitcoin has been instrumental in delivering donations to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation in Russia and the pro-democracy movements in Belarus and Myanmar.

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Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation and author of a book arguing that Bitcoin offers freedom from archaic monetary systems and political strife, believes the cryptocurrency is especially exciting for Africans, since they suffer “all kinds of financial repression”. He points out there are 45 currencies on the continent — with 15 still controlled by France — with high transaction fees on conversion deals that are largely processed by Western firms with heavily-fluctuating rates. “Bitcoin provides an escape and an alternative for Africans while its use is less limited than some people think,” he says. “Entrepreneurs there have figured out how people without the internet can use Bitcoin, which is frankly remarkable.”

This agility is typical of the technological innovation exploding across Africa, driven by a young, rapidly growing and increasingly well-educated population. “The beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that it is a bottom-up technology and its adoption has been genuine at all levels,” said one key figure at the second African Bitcoin Conference in Ghana at the end of last year.

Only time will tell if Satoshi’s invention will turn out to be a bubble with bad consequences or, as optimists believe, a driver of profound change in the world. The fraud conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried, who ran one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, and admission of money-laundering by the boss of another major exchange has hurt the reputation of cryptocurrencies for many in the West. But Bitcoin certainly seems to offer something positive in societies scarred by autocracy, colonialism, military coups and woeful governance — as seen with those computers in a concrete shed in rural Malawi turning water into streams of cash to fund electricity.

Kim watched in horror as people on both banks poked the corpses with poles until they burst and sank beneath its waters, rather than bother to retrieve them. Then came the pivotal event in his life. A stick-thin child — a boy of about seven, malnourished and driven by grinding hunger to cross the swirling river despite the bodies — begged him for help. “I fell to my knees, crying so many tears, and promised God to devote my life to helping these people,” said Kim.

The nightmare he witnessed on his volunteer church mission at the turn of the century could not be more different from the portrait painted by his grandfather. Growing up in a small South Korean fishing village, Kim was frequently regaled with tales of the beautiful mountains, rivers and women seen in the north before their country was sliced in half following the Second World War. Three decades later, this romantic image had been shattered.

After his epiphany, Kim became a Christian pastor and devoted himself and his Caleb Mission to saving North Korean citizens from the clutches of the Hermit Kingdom. When we met earlier this year, I asked how many people he has helped to flee using his clandestine routes that rely on bribery, smugglers, subterfuge and safe houses. “1,008,” he replied with a smile.

This, despite the fact that anyone caught escaping North Korea risks torture, public execution or being sent to a slave labour camp for life with their entire family. Now his work is being highlighted in Beyond Utopia, a gripping new documentary that features astonishing footage of one family’s flight to freedom shot on their mobile phones. At one point, the mother, hiding beside her weeping young daughters after crossing a border river, is shown on a video call pleading for salvation. “Please help us live,” she begs him. Later, this family of five, which includes a grandmother aged 83, are seen dodging officials and wearily scrambling through the mountains, rivers and jungles of four nations to safety in South Korea. They all carried suicide pills to swallow if caught.

During our conversation, Kim described the people he is still trying to save. These include one woman in her 20s who crossed the border five years ago, but was traded to a Chinese man who twice made her pregnant, then sold both the babies. He has also been told of bounty hunters murdering North Koreans hiding in China to harvest body parts, such as kidneys and hearts, for sale to hospitals. Six years ago, he rescued two teenage girls whos a broker was threatening to sell into the organ market, taking them into his own home to raise them alongside his own daughter. Other rescues include a teenage girl sold to a Chinese man in his sixties and a woman raped every night by a father and his two sons.  “I’ve heard so many horrible stories,” said Kim, 58. “When you hear such things your mind collapses.”

He started his underground railroad in 2000, after falling in love with Park Esther, an early defector who he met shortly after she crossed into China. A former army officer, she fled after her parents died from starvation. “It was through loving and talking to my wife that I discovered how hard life was for North Koreans and how difficult it was for them to find freedom,” said Kim.

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He spent months seeking out possible escape routes, eventually marrying her after  buying identity papers from a dead Chinese woman. Now, both are pastors, their dedication to the cause boosted by the tragic death of their son. “He passed away when he was seven,” he said. “We were distraught, crying all the time and even questioning God. But then we realised that our son was in heaven and we should dedicate our lives to making him proud by giving more love to defectors.”

Kim, whose rescues have taken him deep into sweltering jungles and on daring boat missions on the seas, stopped travelling to China 14 years ago due to the dangers of detection as state surveillance systems improved and his reputation grew. Incredibly, Kim claims just two of his group’s escape attempts have failed. The first followed a tip-off to Chinese police following a domestic argument in a safe house as they were rescuing seven orphans. Fortunately, the children were young enough to avoid serious trouble when they returned to North Korea. The second involved two women defectors with children born in China who were captured by Chinese officials after being detected by facial recognition technology while travelling across the country in 2019. “We do not know exactly what happened. Probably the kids were sent back to their fathers and the women sent back to North Korea. They might well have been sent to the gulag as punishment.”

This is a grim fate. One former guard told me how both officials and prisoners in a gulag had to watch two brothers being beheaded after they were caught in China as a warning not to flee — then all inmates were ordered to throw stones at the decapitated corpses. Even a short sentence in the slave labour camps that holds an estimated 200,000 people can be fatal. During her seven years working in a camp, the same guard witnessed routine killings, torture and rape of political prisoners. Former inmates have told me injured people being dumped to die in snow and rotting corpses left in piles beside their huts over winter.

The pandemic staunched the flow of those managing to escape, as Beijing’s “Zero Covid” policies heavily restricted movement in the country. Then, six months ago, new anti-spying laws made it harder for groups to operate in border regions. Meanwhile, North Korea responded to the virus by ramping up security in border areas. As a result, only 67 defectors made it to South Korea last year, compared with 1,047 in 2019 — and many are thought to be hiding in China, where activists fear up to 30,000 defectors may be stuck.

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Since the lifting of Beijing’s anti-Covid policies, Pastor Kim has restarted his underground railroad. Today, he is focusing his efforts on defectors trapped in China, such as one woman who had been sold aged 17 to a man nearly two decades her senior. “It is almost impossible to get people out of North Korea now,” he said. “We used to be able to bribe guards but now they put different departments there to watch over each other. On the Chinese side, there is military as well as police to keep guard.”

Hundreds of miles of new fortifications have also been built along the North Korean borders with China and Russia to stop smugglers, and guards have been ordered to shoot dead anyone entering security zones. Night-time bans have been imposed on road and rail travel near barbed-wire fencing or security facilities. One market trader told the BBC in June that even approaching the border river could now lead to harsh punishment, “so almost nobody is crossing”. Another man spoke of a spate of executions of people trying to defect. “We are stuck here waiting to die,” he said.

Beyond Utopia also shows the bid by another defector called Lee So-Yeon to help her son escape, an attempt that ends badly and leaves her looking broken. I found this deeply disturbing, having first met the same woman seven years ago in Seoul. She had shown me how she smuggled computer memory sticks into North Korea containing footage of female defectors accusing named high-ranking officials of sexual abuse and rape. This was her revenge for the widespread rape she witnessed while serving in the army — including by her own commander, who assaulted 30 women in her unit. “The videos tell them they will be subjected to punishment after reunification,” she told me. Although the government has cracked down on the illicit use of mobile phones, the pastor said they can still make contact with sources inside North Korea using Chinese smartphones close to the border. (I agreed not to disclose their methods.)

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Despite the difficulties and surging costs of escape — which have risen almost tenfold since the pandemic — Kim recently dispatched an aide to the border region, who sent up a drone mounted with cameras to search for any weak spots along the fences on both sides of the river. This aide told me that he had spent 10 years hiding in China after leaving his home town near the border. “I looked out to the place where I grew up but cannot go there and they cannot leave. It is so hard. It is impossible to describe such feelings,” he said. He then described how he is motivated by the hope of one day finding his young sister. “She crossed the border into China but I can’t find her. She may have been sold. I know that she is hiding or suffering somewhere in China.”

I have met many North Korean defectors over the past decade. Most have similar tales of tragedy and torn families. One man told me how his fiancé was beaten so badly by government goons after his escape that she was left unrecognisable, two of his uncles were tortured to death, and his teenage cousins were reduced to street begging. Small wonder many defectors are left traumatised — yet such is the indoctrination that, even as she flees, that family’s grandmother in Beyond Utopia is heard praising the ruling dynasty that dominated her eight decades on earth.

The Hermit Kingdom is a country that crushes humanity. “In North Korea you have no dreams, no hopes, no life,” said Timmy Kang, a restaurant owner who escaped in 2005. “Everything is controlled — it is horrible. Then in China our mothers, our fathers, our sisters and our brothers are hunted down like animals. This is why Pastor Kim is a hero to us.”Or, as one British film reviewer was moved to call him after seeing his exploits on celluloid, “the greatest man who ever lived”.

Zita took pride in joining the European Union two decades ago, seeing it as a symbol of Slovakia’s new freedom. But now she is frightened. “I want a better future for the next generation. But I fear we will go back to the old ways. I fear that democracy, everything is in danger.” She knew what it was like to grow up under communism, remembers the infamous Soviet invasion in 1968 and describes how entering the European Union was a symbol of overturning that regime. Now, Slovakia faces a similar crossroads, split over the Ukraine war, and forced to choose between supporting the EU-Nato alliance or Putin’s invasion.

It is a decision that has split Zita’s family. She tells me, through tears, how her family is split like the country by issues at core of this vote. She has fallen out with her sister who backed Moscow in the war with neighbouring Ukraine, while she assists a refugee from Bakhmut. Her distress as we talked in Topoľčany, a small town best known for its brewery, personifies the tensions ahead of an election in this small country.

A Nato member, little Slovakia is, at present, among Kyiv’s staunchest supporters, rushing to supply air-defence missiles and fighter jets at the beginning of the invasion. But as the war has progressed, the country has become a test-bed for Kremlin disinformation. The polls remain tight, with the progressives taking a narrow lead yesterday, but many still anticipate the election of a pro-Russian populist. And whichever way the result falls, this contest represents a major challenge to the European consensus on the Ukraine war — and a further inroad for the continent’s rampant radical-Right.

Robert Fico, leader of the Slovakian Social Democracy (Smer) party, is the moving force behind all this, and a politician who stretches pragmatism to its limit. He was born in Topoľčany, trained as a lawyer and joined the Communists. But, after leaving their successor party, Fico posed as a “Third Way” progressive centrist in the vein of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair at a time when Slovakia, led by an autocrat with connections to organised crime, was seen as Europe’s democratic laggard. This ushered him into power as prime minister and he ran the country for a decade. Then his second government collapsed in 2018, after mass protests following the murder of Ján Kuciak — a journalist investigating state corruption and government ties to the Italian mafia — and his fiancé Martina Kušnírová shook the capital.

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Five years on, Fico has shrugged off attempts to tie him to the contract killing and stands on the threshold of power, having reinvented himself as an ultra-populist. After blaming George Soros for his downfall, he then exploited the struggles of his successors to cope with the pandemic, inflation and soaring energy prices. Today, he rails against green measures and migrants, rants about the threat of LGBT “ideology” and regurgitates Putin’s propaganda. “The war in Ukraine didn’t start yesterday or last year. It began in 2014 when the Ukrainian Nazis and fascists started to murder Russian citizens in Donbas and Luhansk,” he told a cheering crowd in Topoľčany last month.

Fico’s platform opposes EU sanctions on Moscow, seeks to end Slovakia’s military aid for Ukraine and stop Kyiv from joining Nato, and pushes for a peace deal that would let Putin keep occupied land. One former defence minister calls him a “Trojan horse” for the Kremlin. Others suggest he is being aided by Viktor Orbán in neighbouring Hungary, and Fico has been heavily promoted on state media there, which is watched by Slovakia’s sizeable Hungarian minority. Many Slovaks are concerned the Smer leader might follow the same path as the pugnacious Hungarian populist. And he certainly admires Orbán, according to Aneta Vilagi, a political scientist at Comenius University. “They are good political friends who understand they can help each other out,” she told me. “It would be useful for Orbán to have a similar voice with the same policies in the EU and Nato, while for Fico this shows you can be a member of the EU without being a cheerleader for the West.”

She sees Fico — a former academic at her university — as a threat to democracy. Grigorij Meseznikov, president of the Institute for Public Affairs, a think tank in Bratislava, believes that he wants to reduce space for political competition. “His number two has said freedom and peace come from the east, war comes from the west. But his main motivation is to protect himself after being officially named in three criminal investigations. He wants to gain power to change the law enforcement procedures.”

The day after I arrived in Bratislava there was a vivid demonstration of the passions aroused in this election. Igor Matovič, another former prime minister, drove up to a Smer campaign event in a pick-up truck emblazoned with the slogan “we will not hand you over to the mafia”. His protest was aimed at Fico’s ally Robert Kalinak, a central figure in the 2018 scandal. Matovič, an anti-graft campaigner who won the subsequent election but proved ill-suited to government, shouted that the ex-interior minister was a mafioso as the pair traded punches and kicks. “They’ve dragged Slovak politics to a new low,” despaired one prominent liberal politician.

This unruly confrontation was the perfect illustration of the intense feelings Fico stirs up. “I have never voted for Fico and never will vote for him — he robbed the state,” said Lucas, 39, a travel agent I met in Bratislava’s Old Town. “I’m even thinking of moving out of Slovakia because the politics is terrible, the corruption is terrible, the government is terrible.” Another woman told me she did not want to have children under his leadership. “I feel very sad he is coming back,” said Katerina, 35, a former flight attendant. “Everything he says is a lie or just populism, picking on topics of no importance for our people. I worry about democracy and freedom. I think it is going to go worse than Hungary.”

It is common to hear cynicism about politicians and see divisions in democratic societies. In this post-Communist country, these have been compounded by the turnover of four prime ministers in four years, with one poll indicating fewer than half the population now view liberal democracy as good for the nation. “I don’t know who to vote for because I don’t think anyone in the election deserves to represent our country,” said one resident in Topoľčany. Another voter there put it more bluntly: “They’re all dickheads who don’t think about the country at all.”

But some voters regard Fico as the solution. A few grudgingly told me they would back him because he was more competent than his successors, despite the corruption. “I will not support him directly but will back another party that will be in coalition since there has been so much going wrong over the last few years,” said Peter, a driver, before adding ruefully that there seemed to be “a lot of sudden animosity among our people”. The only person I spoke to who sounded enthusiastic was Lubonir, 60, a member of Fico’s party. “I see problems everywhere. We need to build it back up.” When pressed, the warehouse worker echoed Fico, claiming that the war was not a European conflict since it was really being fought between Russia and the United States. “I support helping Ukraine but not with weapons,” he added.

It might seem strange to find this approach in a country that was invaded by Moscow within living memory (even if Putin did say helpfully earlier this month that “it was a mistake” to send tanks into Czechoslovakia). Lurking in the background, however, is the dark shadow of Russian disinformation, which began targeting Slovakia after the 2014 theft of Crimea and assault on Donbas. “We saw the aim: to manipulate public opinion,” said Dominika Hajdu, policy director at the Centre for Democracy and Resilience at Globsec, a Bratislava-based research group. “It started with Ukraine but developed to divide society over democracy, the West, Nato or the migration crisis. Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has again become the central and polarising issue.”

Hajdu said they had seen an eruption of online sites recycling Kremlin propaganda. Entrepreneurial locals saw an opportunity, whether paid directly by Moscow or from advertising revenues, which were thought to be worth up to €71,500 a month for the most popular sites. One contributor to a prominent channel was caught on camera being paid by a Russian defence attaché, who said: “I told Moscow you are a good guy, that you have many friends, the Slovak mafia.” Another contributor to the site who wrote under a Slovakian name was found to be Russian. In Crimea, a prominent Russian news outlet set up a Slovak-language site.

And beyond the Soviet Union, there is a lingering sentimental attachment to Moscow dating back to a 19^th-century pan-Slavic movement. One Globsec study in 2018 found that Slovaks were more likely than Czechs, Hungarians or Poles to look back favourably at the Soviet Union. Another revealed that half of them see the US as a security risk, a figure that has risen sharply in recent years. A poll taken across Eastern and Central Europe this year found only 40% of Slovaks blame Putin for the war, with one in four of them retaining a positive view of Russia’s despot, while half think either Ukraine or the West are “primarily responsible”.

“Slovakia is a big success for Russian propaganda with the Slovak audience very susceptible to its disinformation,” said Tomáš Strážay, director of the Slovak Foreign Policy Association. “They see Slovakia as a weak spot in Nato and Europe. Even in Hungary there is stronger support for Nato. Russia is using this opportunity.” Yet Strazay also blames domestic politicians for failing to promote liberal European values in a nation still building its statehood, saying that they simply see Brussels as “a cash machine” providing eight in every 10 euros of their public spending.

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The toxicity of debate has already led Slovakia’s first female president to opt out of re-election next year. Zuzana Čaputová, an environmental activist, strong supporter of Ukraine and the most trusted politician in the country, won the post in wake of the 2018 post-assassination protests. It is largely ceremonial but appoints top judges, oversees the armed forces and can veto laws passed by parliament. Three months ago, Čaputová said she would not run again after receiving death threats and worrying about her family. Last week she declared that she was suing Fico over his false claims that she is an “American agent” and Soros stooge. “Making someone a target with hateful lies has cost people’s lives already in Slovakia,” she said.

The schism over Ukraine is deep, but there are widely shared concerns over issues such as education, globalisation, governance and inequality that Fico exploits with skill. He is part of a continent-wide tide of anti-establishment populism on Left and Right that last year attracted almost one-in-three voters participating in elections. Yet he has provoked intense speculation among Western diplomats over his real aims. One predicted he would be “a thorn in the side for Nato”, joining “the awkward squad with Orbán”. This envoy added that there had been a belief in the West that Eastern and Central Europe were “safe and democratic” although the rule of law was still taking root in some nations. “Russia has seen this and knows they are in play.”

Much depends on the the number of parties reaching the 5% threshold needed to win seats, since this will determine the shape of any governing coalition. And if he wins, Fico might re-adopt his previous strategy of strong rhetoric against Brussels and Washington at home while soothing allies abroad. But one thing is for sure: the world has greatly changed from when he was last in office in 2018.

Before leaving Bratislava, I meet Meseznikov, the Russian-born and Jewish analyst who runs the Institute for Public Affairs. “Just look around us here in this square and you see a Western nation,” he said with a sweep of his arm. “We are in the happiest time in our history in our region. We live in free societies, the borders are open, we can travel, there is freedom, we are members of Nato and the EU. There is a stable life in an area that has seen so many battles, ethnic cleansing, really bad social conditions. Sure, there are problems, some groups of people do not enjoy such good lives, voters have seen chaotic government — but these are the best of times. Sadly, now we face Putin with his crazy and destructive ideas — and the ugly politics of Fico.” But the question to be answered on Saturday is: does Slovakia agree?

Enrique Tarrio spoke softly, talked freely and was not drinking alcohol as he was teetotal — despite insisting that his men-only group was little more than a laddish drinking club. Such claims seemed less convincing, however, as that night in November 2020 wore on. It began with amiable chat in a Washington bar — but it ended with the beating of a black woman by his band of far-Right thugs.

Yet it was easy to see why even Tarrio’s foes called him charismatic, with his ready smile and relaxed style. At one point, as we talked, I told him that his group reminded me of the hooligans that used to plague British football with their tribal violence in my childhood. He was intrigued. He fired off questions to me about their activities, listening intently as I explained how gangs of thugs in the Seventies and Eighties would attack fans supporting rival teams in the stands and streets surrounding stadiums after games.

Tarrio nodded. “Yeah, I think that’s what we are,” he said, flashing his big smile.

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Now, this leader of a gang of political hooligans has been given 22 years in prison for playing a central role in the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol building, which took place just a few weeks after our meeting. His is the longest sentence so far related to the lethal attack that has seen more than 1,100 people charged.

Despite being in Baltimore on that fateful day, barred from Washington due to an earlier arrest, Tarrio was deemed to be a “general” organising the assault, which took place as legislators were certifying President Biden’s election victory. He was convicted most seriously of seditious conspiracy, a little-used charge from the Civil War era, with the judge calling him the “ultimate leader of that conspiracy” and a man “motivated by revolutionary zeal”.

In court, Tarrio cut a pathetic figure in his orange prison jumpsuit as he pleaded for leniency, bleated about “the temperature rising” after Trump’s false claims about a stolen election, and apologised for the riot. “I am not a political zealot,” he declared. But on the day we met at The Dubliner, a pub offering “hearty Hibernian fare” in America’s capital, he revelled in his infamy and gang leadership.

Surrounded by boisterous lieutenants from across the country, he had come to Washington with 300 of his followers for the so-called “Million MAGA March” to protest the results of the presidential election. The convicted thief, former jailbird and “prolific” FBI informant had taken over the Proud Boys two years earlier. Then his profile soared after Trump was pushed to condemn white supremacists in a presidential debate, and responded by saying: “Proud Boys — stand back and stand by.”

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Several of his henchmen, drinking and munching burgers, also wore provocative T-shirts bearing slogans such as “I’d rather get Covid-19 than Biden-20” or claiming that General Pinochet — a military dictator whose death squads killed thousands of political opponents in Chile — “did nothing wrong”. Others were clad in the distinctive black Fred Perry shirts with yellow-edged collars, adopted by the group to the horror of the British company, which stopped selling them in the US and Canada. A couple displayed “RWDS” patches — standing for “Right Wing Death Squads” — as reportedly worn by an extremist who shot dead eight people in a Texas mall earlier this year.

Tarrio sold such incendiary paraphernalia from his Florida base. Yet he insisted the Proud Boys — widely seen as a bunch of racist and violent misogynists — were simply mischief makers. He argued the Left had lost its sense of humour as he told us how his group’s culture supposedly revolved around having fun, delighting in mockery of themselves and everyone else. The Afro-Cuban agitator denied they were racist, spoke of social justice, talked about his political ambitions and — after bragging about how Trump boosted their support — began outlining plans for a Proud Girls chapter.

This sounded interesting, given the group’s roots in rampant misogyny under his predecessor. He was the clear leader of their pack, demonstrated by the deference of his sidekicks. But just at that point a tall, bald, bearded and rather menacing man rushed up to our table and interrupted him, telling Tarrio that some Proud Boys were trapped in a restaurant by Antifa activists from the Left “throwing fucking explosives”.

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This character — who wore one of those RWDS patches — was Jeremy Bertino, vice president of the Proud Boys chapter in South Carolina. Later, he became the pivotal figure in securing Tarrio’s prosecution after turning on his former comrades in the hope of winning a softer sentence.

After making some calls to check out the situation, including one to a police officer later arrested for aiding the group’s activities, Tarrio polished off his burger and joked to Bertino that while he wanted a shower and some sleep, “you want to party”.

The police officer told Tarrio he was heading over to the restaurant at the centre of the confrontation, urging him “to make sure things don’t escalate”. This did not deter the Proud Boys leader. Instead, his group of about 18 men pulled on body armour, donned helmets and set off along the Washington streets ready for battle — joined by a beefy, pony-tailed Swedish bystander, who had bumped into them in the bar.

The men laughed and joked as they strolled along the streets, declaring that they were going to “beat shit out of Communists”. Even in this strongly liberal city, some people applauded them while others asked Tarrio to pose for selfies with them. After some minor skirmishes, the “prisoners” were freed. So as darkness fell, the group of extremists — fuelled on alcohol and pumping adrenaline — went searching for their foes in Antifa, yelling out intimidatory chants such as “Whose streets? Our streets”.

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Their numbers swelled as they marched toward a square near the White House. Trump supporters in red “Make America Great Again” hats thanked them profusely for their efforts. “We’re here to protect you,” responded a pompous Proud Boy. Yet there were also growing crowds protesting against them. One brave woman asked them to justify claims of a stolen election as she filmed their responses on a phone stuck in their faces, a mission that ended with a predictable torrent of abuse.

Tarrio had disappeared but just as some Proud Boys were starting to ask what had happened to their leader, he appeared on a scooter to give them a pep talk, urging them to stay calm and focused. “Hasta la vista, antifascista!” he shouted at another point.

The scenes were chaotic. There was pushing, shoving, and shouting from both sides. Teams of police blocked off side streets as the mood grew tense. “Let us do your job for you,” the Proud Boys told the cops, alluding to their supposed shared foes in Antifa. Then the fights broke out. People ran, punches were thrown. There were shouts, screams and nasty-sounding thuds.

The police cleared the crowd to reveal a middle-aged black woman lying on the ground with blood on her face. Beside her were a smashed phone and braided hair that had been ripped from her head. It was a grim sight. Officers helped the shaken-looking Antifa activist to her feet, protecting her from the mob. One man beside me, his face twisted in fury and loathing, was screaming: “Now you can see what it is like, you bitch. You fucking bitch. How does it feel, bitch?”

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This sort of uncontrolled tribal hostility felt wearingly familiar in the aftermath of that election, which stirred up deep divisions that were then inflamed by Trump’s narcissistic challenging of the result. The pro-Trump protest that day had been peaceful with thousands strolling in the sun under a sea of colourful flags and banners. Yet still I had watched amazed as an affable white-haired old woman suddenly unleashed a torrent of abuse when she spied a trio of Antifa activists, hiding for safety behind the police they sought to stop funding.

Reporting on that election, I spoke to many voters across the American divide. Most were friendly, open, and often eloquent when discussing their perspective — yet for all the familiarity of the chain stores and fast-food restaurants in the streets, it frequently felt like visiting different nations when these people talked about politics. Two days before the protest, I was in Richmond, Virginia, as rival militia brandishing sub-machine guns met an armoured car driven by the conspiracy theorists of InfoWars at a “Stop the Steal” rally. People spoke openly about the threat of civil war. So will a second bout between Biden and Trump further rip apart the bonds of this society?

The last I saw of Tarrio was when he headed home after meeting his men by the Washington Monument, clutching a bottle of water. One Proud Boy in a Pinochet T-shirt had a badly bruised face. Police later reported a stabbing and several arrests amid the melee. No one was laughing as the self-styled pranksters of the ultra-Right dispersed into the night.

Tarrio gave me an unsettling insight into a violent, hate-filled sub-culture bubbling away in the heart of American democracy. He was friendly and smart, someone who could have contributed much to society, yet took a delight in stirring up the hooligans, misogynists and racists that followed him and fell for his stunts.

Ultimately, he was a provocateur who used his charisma and flair for publicity to stir tensions. There were are valid questions about the length of his punishment. But he played with fire, fuelled an explosion — and now this 39-year-old man will spend many years behind bars reflecting on his foolishness. “I was my own worst enemy,” he admitted to the court in his bid for a softer sentence. Tarrio was right on this count. Yet as one defence lawyer stated, the ultimate architect of those toxic events that stained American democracy is running again for the presidency.

Albutt blasted their populist gimmicks, short-term stunts, botched spending cuts and the revolving door of 11 justice secretaries since the Tories took office in 2010, who “achieved nothing but decline” in the functioning of her sector. Her conclusion to the all-party group on penal affairs was stark: that politicians are failing inmates, staff and the wider public as they cram more and more people into “warehouses of despair, danger and degradation”.

It was a startlingly honest appraisal of how inadequate politicians played tribal games at the expense of a public service. As she ran through the failures of individual ministers, the Tories were, inevitably, at the receiving end. Yet she was scathing, too, about the Imprisonment for Public Protection regime, a callous legacy of New Labour that has left people with comparatively short sentences still behind bars 20 years later, despite the ditching of the policy more than a decade ago.

The core issue behind Albutt’s outburst is the soaring prison population, which has doubled since she was born 56 years ago. Our incarceration rates became the highest in Western Europe before the turn of the century, then kept on rising. Now we have 87,063 prisoners in England and Wales — and are predicted to hit 100,000 by the end of this decade. Each inmate costs an average of £47,000 a year, slightly more than the fees for Eton. Yet Albutt accused politicians of deceiving the public by promoting a myth that locking up more and more people for steadily longer terms makes society safer. “It’s a lie,” she said bluntly. “Prison does not work.”

Few voters really care about prisons, of course, nor will they shed any tears for convicts crammed into squalid cells. But we should heed Albutt’s warning as crime rises up the political agenda, both parties viewing it as an issue that could sway key voters in swing seats. The Government just delivered a raft of law and order pledges in its ‘crime week’, the latest in a series of dismal themed policy drives in a bid to win back support. Labour responded that ministers have lost control — a point underlined by the home secretary’s suggestion that police might like to tackle offences such as bike thefts and burglaries.

Yet while these politicians tussle to look tough, prisons expose how our democracy is floundering.  Sir Winston Churchill, who spent time in captivity during the Boer War, said treatment of criminals “is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country”. He argued forcefully against excessive use of sentencing, warning that it was hard to rehabilitate jailed convicts. He told the Commons during his brief time as home secretary “the first real principle which should guide anyone trying to establish a good system of prisons should be to prevent as many people as possible getting there at all”.

Westminster has failed to heed this advice. New Labour passed 28 criminal justice bills and put one new offence on the statute book for every day they were in office over 13 years. Then the Tories ramped up sentencing so that the average length of a prison sentence increased by 55% over the past decade. Austerity forced the police to spend more time picking up pieces of other crumbling public services such as mental health and social care, while the percentage of crimes leading to a charge crashed. Only days after Albutt spoke to parliament, the Met Police chief Mark Rowley said his officers would no longer attend mental health emergencies.

But these problems run deep in our society. We know, for instance, that many prisoners come from broken families or chaotic backgrounds. We know they often struggle with issues such as addiction, autism, illiteracy, mental illness or learning disabilities. The House of Commons Justice Committee found seven in 10 prisoners may have mental health needs and that these can worsen behind bars: these MPs admitted prison can be “inappropriate” and “inhumane” for those with most severe psychological problems.

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Nor does this swamped, unloved system curb reoffending. Short sentences are especially damaging with 55% of those locked up for less than 12 months reoffending. During his stint as prisons minister, Rory Stewart dared to admit: “The best way of protecting the public is to significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the under 12-month prison population, because people on community sentences are less likely to re-offend than people put in prison.” Yet only Scotland has introduced a presumption against use of such sentences.

If rehabilitation doesn’t work, how about deterrence? This was exposed as another myth by the Sentencing Council of England and Wales, which published a landmark review last year. The authors pointed out that few offenders knew much about sentencing policies while criminal acts tend to be spontaneous, often driven by anger, drink, drugs, or mental health episodes. “We note that some have argued it is time to accept that sentence severity has no effect on the level of crime in society,” the study concludes drily.

These findings reinforce those of the Transform Justice think tank, which looked at assaults on health workers and police officers. Despite the penalty for these nasty crimes quadrupling over four years,, the number of recorded offences actually rose. “Most victims want the person who harmed them not to harm them or other people again,” said director Penelope Gibbs. “They don’t necessarily want their day in court or retribution. Unfortunately, more prison is unlikely to meet the needs of victims or reduce crime. A government that really cared about cutting crime, rather than simply winning headlines would reduce imprisonment.”

In the United States, even many conservatives have come to see that it makes no sense to keep locking up damaged citizens, whether on fiscal, redemptive, or simply criminal justice terms.  The “Right-on-Crime” movement, placing an emphasis on rehabilitation over punishment, started out in Texas before sweeping the Republican Party after both main parties agreed that locking up more and more people was a costly failure. This goes to show that even in such a divided country politicians can reach across the tribal chasm and shift the terms of public debate, leading to a dramatic 25% decline in prison populations since 2009.

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As US advocates of reform have pointed out to me, it is far tougher to force people to change errant behaviour than simply to slam them into crowded cells. But Labour — driven again by Blairites — senses Tory vulnerability on crime and has stolen a lead on this issue in polls. The Tories by contrast think voters can be persuaded Labour is “soft” on crime under a former director of public prosecutions while latching onto an issue that unites both traditional Tories and new Red Wall recruits .

What makes this even more depressing is that an alternative approach has been proven to work in a nearby nation. Norway had even worse recidivism rates than Britain three decades ago, with seven in 10 prisoners reoffending within two years of release. It had a justice system like our own: built on the concept of deterrence with offenders given long sentences in grim institutions. But instead of blundering on with failure, their leaders boldly switched course. They were rewarded with the world’s lowest recidivism rate, which sees only one in five prisoners reoffending.

The key was to focus less on revenge and more on rehabilitation. Offenders lose their liberty but are given the chance to change their lives. Prisons tend to be small to break up violent cultures and dotted around the country to keep inmates close to their families. Cells are basic but have televisions, computers, fridges, and showers. They offer facilities such as yoga, saunas, music studios, tanning beds, fitness rooms, car workshops and cooking classes. Guards and prisoners enjoy barbecues and play sport together — and in some units, up to half the officers are women. Above all, there is an emphasis on study and work to develop skills in preparation for freedom — not abandonment in overcrowded cells.

Halden Prison, set in a forest 60 miles south of Oslo, has been labelled the most humane prison in the world although it is a maximum-security institution holding 250 men convicted of the worst crimes. It cost £138 million to build, winning a design award for its minimalist style and efforts to minimise stress. Inmates have appeared on reality television shows and released music under the label Criminal Records. There are no guns or barbed wire on display — although prisoners are still locked up in their rooms at night.

The legacy of such intense focus on rehabilitation is that Norway now has fewer than half the number of prisoners per capita as Britain. But Norway’s strategy is not just about treating prisoners well: it is about keeping people out of prison as far as possible. During its period of reform, prison sentences were reduced. Life sentences were abandoned with a 21 year maximum — although this can be extended in five-year increments if there is perceived danger.

Although the average cost per head of such prisons is significantly higher than our own, it is estimated that rehabilitated offenders save the state about £110,000 per person in terms of law enforcement costs and lower benefits. Crime comparisons are hard given differences in data collection, but the European Crime Index puts Norway comfortably in the top half of safest nations while the UK comes close to the bottom, just above Italy, Sweden and Belarus. Yet our leaders refuse to shift path, spending an immense £3.8bn to push another 20,000 people into more of these “warehouses of despair, danger and degredation”.

This failure by Westminster has a catastrophic impact on the rest of society. Politicians need to display some courage and admit that our prison system does not work, does not deter crime and does not provide value for money. “It’s really very simple,” said one prison warden in Norway. “Treat people like dirt and they’ll be dirt. Treat them like human beings and they’ll act like human beings.”

Bird is right about the need for faith in scientists as we hurtle into a technological revolution based on artificial intelligence — and indeed, to point out how their efforts depend on rigorous testing of theories with facts. Unfortunately, the behaviour of a few key scientific figures in the pandemic, seemingly desperate to appease China and protect their ties to high-risk research, has done the precise opposite.

This is, one prominent US biologist told me, “the biggest scientific scandal of our lifetime”, involving a deliberate attempt to suppress debate on a health catastrophe that killed almost 15 million people in two years. It revolves around a landmark commentary in Nature Medicine stating firmly that the five authors “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This was published in March 2020 — barely six weeks after the stumbling World Health Organization had declared an international emergency.

Now, hundreds of private messages between four of these five scientists, exchanged as they wrote and published this article, have emerged — and they are astonishing. The “super secret” discussions show this arrogant quartet boasting about success, misleading the media, sneering at journalists and making fun of other experts, even a world-renowned epidemiologist co-opted as the fifth author. They condemn China “for trying to rewrite what happened” and disclose Beijing sequenced the genome for SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes Covid — just before the rest of the world discovered from a Taiwanese tip-off that the disease had erupted in Wuhan.

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Most significantly, these discussions on Slack expose the quartet’s deep fears that Sars-CoV-2 could have been tied to laboratory research — along with overt signs of pressure from “higher ups” to squash such suggestions. Clearly these scientists were concerned the disease was engineered. They dismiss the well-worn theory about the virus arising in a Wuhan animal market on several occasions, one calling it a “red herring”. Yet they abruptly switched direction in public despite the lack of discernible new evidence. They carried on debating their suspicions in private after the article’s publication — even as they attacked claims about a possible lab leak in public and their statement was used to condemn such “conspiracy theories”.

“Let’s face it, unless there is a whistleblower from the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] who is going to defect and live in the West under a new identity we are NEVER going to know what happened in the lab,” wrote Eddie Holmes, a British virologist based in Australia with strong contacts in China, at one point a month after publication. “That’s my thinking too,” responded lead author Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist — although he admitted that he was “worried” US diplomatic cables showing concerns over biosecurity in Wuhan, which had been disclosed by The Washington Post, “might have something”.

It is hard to overstate the influence of this single article, accessed almost six million times and cited by 5,942 other specialist papers. The journal’s editor João Monteiro tweeted out a link saying: “Let’s put conspiracy theories about the origin of #SARSCoV2 to rest and help to stop spread of misinformation.” China’s ministry of foreign affairs welcomed its “evidence” — as did the Communist Party chief at WIV. It was highlighted in the White House by Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and adviser to several presidents. Sir Jeremy Farrar, now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, told me it was “the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus” more than one year later as he insisted “no scientific evidence I have seen to date points to outbreak linked to a laboratory”.

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It subsequently emerged through leaks and freedom of information requests that this pair, along with Francis Collins, head of the biggest US science funding body, were involved behind the scenes in the article. Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust, was tasked with hosting a teleconference on February 1 involving the five authors and six other experts including Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser until three months ago. After the call, Farrar confessed he was “50:50” on whether Covid came from a lab — and later was found to have told Collins that Wuhan engaged in “Wild West” research practices. His office admitted to me eventually, after a barrage of emails, that he helped “convene” the Nature Medicine authors.

As Vallance once wrote in another science journal, “inferences should be drawn from attempts to hide interactions”. Unfortunately, the lab leak theory was snarled in tribal politics after it was flagged by Donald Trump, creating a toxic climate for those of us probing the origins in the pandemic’s early days. Now, this article is at the centre of a House subcommittee investigation after Republicans summoned the two US-based authors — Andersen and Bob Garry, a microbiologist in New Orleans — to answer questions earlier this month on their deliberations. Afterwards, the cache of documents and messages were detected in the committee papers and on its website by members of Drastic, a group of independent researchers that has uncovered many key nuggets in this quest for the truth about a deadly disease.

Andersen set up what he called the “super secret” Slack group under the intriguing original name of “project-wuhan-engineering” with Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, on the day of the teleconference. Farrar, portrayed as a driving force behind the paper, urged everyone to keep their deliberations confidential in that first discussion. A few days later, he signed a letter with two Wellcome Trust colleagues in The Lancet journal hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later found to have been covertly organised by British scientist Peter Daszak, who runs a body that funnelled substantial US funding for research into bat coronaviruses to WIV.

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The Dane declared to his colleagues that the question they needed to answer was whether Covid emerged due to “evolution or engineering” since both were “really rather plausible” — as remains the case today. Andersen added that Garry would not want the virus to have arisen from “GOF escape” — a reference to controversial Gain of Function research, which boosts the infectivity of viruses and was banned for four years in the US. “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” he said.

The fact they were discussing the concept of a lab leak “shows how plausible it is”, added Rambaut the next day. But the Scottish-based expert urged them to change tack. “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need to be irrefutable evidence. My position is that natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but we have no evidence that that happened.”

Rambaut said revealingly that due to “the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes”. Andersen responded that he agreed this was “a very reasonable conclusion” despite hating “when politics is injected into science”. And this seemed to become their eventual template.

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Much of their subsequent discussion, interspersed with banter, is technical. They discuss RaTG13, the closest known relative to Sars-Cov-2 that was collected by scientists at WIV from a mine hundreds of miles from Wuhan and is linked to the deaths from a mysterious Covid-like respiratory virus of three miners clearing bat guano from a cave. They puzzle over the infamous furin cleavage site, which allows more efficient entry into human cells and is not found on similar types of coronaviruses. “Bob [Garry] said the insertion was the 1st thing he would add,” wrote Holmes. “Yeah,” responded Andersen. “The furin site would be the first thing to add for sure.”

Garry even explains at one point how easy it would be — even for a graduate student — to make such a virus by inserting a furin cleavage site into a bat virus such as RaTG13 in cell culture. “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF research we know is happening,” he adds.

Justin Kinney, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-founder of the advocacy group Biosafety Now, said he was struck by how strongly the Slack messages made the case for a laboratory origin for Covid. He pointed to a decade-old paper shared among the quartet detailing experiments on bovine coronaviruses, which found that when inserted in different human cells they developed a strikingly similar furin cleavage site. Kinney claims knowledge of this paper flew in the face of their claim in Nature Medicine that such cleavage sites had only been observed after prolonged experiments on avian flu. “Bovine coronavirus is much more closely related and this took place after minimal passage in cell culture,” he said.

The discussions show how Farrar strengthened one key phrase — and that the force of their entire argument was beefed up after an initial draft was rejected by Nature, a more prestigious journal. Last month, Garry admitted to a BBC podcast “maybe we went a little too far” by taking such a strident position. Kinney, who wants the paper to be retracted, believes they succumbed to the intensity of pressure from a variety of directions, including from funders with the cash and power to determine the future of their careers — and that this cover-up could have disastrous consequences for their profession. “Science must be honest,” he said. “The logic in the paper is so weak, the conflicts of interest are not revealed and it now seems clear that the authors did not fully believe their own claims.”

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Emails show the team consulted with Ron Fouchier, a Dutch scientist who pushed the boundaries of Gain of Function work with experiments on avian flu. “Molecular biologists like myself can generate perfect copies of viruses without leaving a trace,” he told them baldly. There is also mention of “intel” in the background — and at one point, members of the quartet accuse “Ron” of leaking details of their activities to a journalist.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of these revelations is how their private debate over the origins carried on after publication of their seismic statement. The March article stated that their “analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”. Yet Andersen wrote on 16 April that he was “still not fully convinced that no culture was involved”. When Holmes pushed back, warning such fears could lead to an end of Gain of Function research, the Danish biologist replied that the top bat researcher at WIV was carrying out “a lot of work that involved isolating and culturing SARS-like viruses in BSL 2” — a reference to the sort of low-level biosecurity comparable to that found in a dental surgery. He linked to four papers on this “concerning work”. And he said again the next day that “we can’t fully disprove [cell] culture… we also can’t fully rule out engineering”.

Later that month, this same scientist told a journalist that the odds of Covid’s accidental release in Wuhan were “a million to one”. And he told those politicians that after considering all the evidence, their group concluded that “culturing” — which can make a virus more infectious and better-adapted for human transmission — had not occurred since the virus most likely spilled over naturally from wildlife. “By the time we published our final version of Proximal Origin I no longer believed that a culturing scenario was plausible,” he stated in written evidence. The evidence now seems to challenge this pivotal claim to Congress.

Andersen claimed they reached this conclusion through scientific inquiry rather than under pressure from Fauci or other funders. Yet he told the others at the outset “it’s well above my pay grade to call the shots on a final conclusion”. The messages show that just before the paper was submitted for publication it was shared with Farrar and Collins, at the time heads of the two most significant funding bodies in Western science. They were “very happy”, reported back Holmes. Coincidentally, Andersen works at Scripps Research in California, a non-profit lab given $8.9 million for work on infectious disease outbreaks from the grant body headed by Collins five months after the statement’s publication — although he insisted to the Congressional subcommittee that this funding decision was agreed before the pandemic.

We still do not know for sure the origins of that destructive pandemic. But we do know it was an extraordinary coincidence that Covid emerged in the Chinese city containing the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia, a place with known safety concerns conducting high-risk research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice. We know China covered up the outbreak, hid key data, lied to other countries and refused to allow proper investigation. And we know that accidents and human error can occur during research. So as Andersen said to his pals, the possibility of some kind of lab incident was “friggin’ likely”.

It looks beyond doubt that Beijing’s cover-up was aided by an outrageous attempt to suppress global debate, led by the Western scientists we should have been able to trust to search for the truth and guide an unshackled debate based on hard facts. They were assisted by patsy politicians, supine journalists and complicit scientific publications. This murky affair appears to be the most terrible betrayal of science — and indeed of democracy — that was far darker and more disturbing than those sinister events that felled Oppenheimer seven decades ago.

When he won the Nobel Peace Prize with Frederik Willem de Klerk in 1993,  for demolishing apartheid and laying the foundations for a free society, Mandela talked movingly in his acceptance speech of how people inside and outside South Africa “had the nobility of spirit to stand in the path of tyranny” since they saw that “an injury to one is an injury to all”. He spoke about fighting for a world of democracy, freed from “the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees”.

How sad, then, to see the betrayal of this legacy by his party and protégé, Cyril Ramaphosa, who now runs the country as President. The African National Congress promised “a better life for all”, but instead seems terminally corrupt and incompetent, something symbolised by the power cuts lasting up to 16 hours a day, as winter looms in a country that is cursed by high crime rates, rampant inequality, raging unemployment, grinding poverty, and woeful schools. Meanwhile, its flailing leader, Ramaphosa, is doing his utmost to smooth the path of tyranny for Vladimir Putin.

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It is no wonder that, after three decades in power, the ANC is widely expected to lose its governing majority in next year’s election. Voters know that the party, founded 111 years ago to fight for rights of black Africans, is to blame for the energy crisis in the continent’s most industrialised nation, following years of mismanagement and theft. Typical was the $27 billion construction of two big coal-fired plants, where costs tripled under Jacob Zuma’s presidency as his cronies plundered the country and yet still failed to deliver their planned power due to delays and defects.

There is toxic talk on the Left of revolution sparked by the power shortages that are blamed for bankrupting businesses, water shortages, huge traffic jams, opportunistic robberies, rotting food, and even decomposing corpses in morgues. Last year, South Africans experienced more than twice as many power cuts than ever before, reducing the nation’s GDP by about 5%. This year has already been worse. Eskom, the state-owned electricity generator, is warning people to prepare for even more blackouts as the cold weather arrives.

Many voters hoped that Ramaphosa, a former trade union leader who became a rand billionaire after apartheid, might set the country on the right track after Zuma’s corrosive nine-year stint in office. Yet the outgoing chief executive of Eskom fled after surviving an attempt to poison him with cyanide in his coffee six months ago, then blamed ministers of covering up corruption by gangs stealing $50 million a month from the firm. But the president’s image was shredded by the “farmgate” scandal, in which he was accused of covering up the theft of between $580,000 and $5 million in foreign currency that had been hidden in sofa of his luxury game ranch. He acknowledged that the cash had been stolen and, having failed to inform the police, claimed it was payment for buffalos sold to a Sudanese businessman. He avoided impeachment due to the loyalty of his MPs.

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Even as the scandal broke last summer, Ramaphosa was calling on South Africa’s 60 million citizens to remember and respect Mandela’s legacy — pretty hypocritical given the stance he had taken on the Kremlin’s assault on democracy in Ukraine. Rather than “standing up to tyranny”, Ramaphosa posed as a peacemaker and leader of non-aligned nations seeking a solution to the conflict. South Africa abstained in votes on five key United Nations resolutions on the war, even in the shocked days after last year’s full-scale attack when more than half the continent’s 54 states voted to reaffirm Kyiv’s sovereignty and demand unconditional Russian withdrawal.

Pretoria’s stance contrasted sharply with Kenya’s astute critique of Putin’s “expansionism”, which condemned the dangers of trying to stoke the “embers of dead empires” with “new forms of domination and oppression”. The ANC government claims its refusal to condemn the attack is based on a long-held belief that conflicts should be resolved through negotiation — yet both Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, rightly condemned the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq for undermining democracy and setting a dangerous precedent. Ramaphosa, by contrast, is shifting South Africa closer to Moscow, infuriating other democracies even though Russia is of minor economic importance, accounting for less than one-hundredth of the value of trade with Europe alone.

First Ramaphosa echoed the Kremlin’s line by blaming Nato expansion for Putin’s attack, ignoring the desire of Ukrainians to determine their own future like South Africans. Then came 10 days of naval exercises with Moscow and Beijing, timed to cause maximum offence on the anniversary of Putin launching his full-scale invasion, complete with military vessels bearing the loathed pro-war “Z” symbol docking in Cape Town. “It is a slap in the face of our trading partners to be this clearly on the side of Russia on the anniversary,” said Kobus Marais, defence spokesman for the opposition Democratic Alliance. “We’re the useful idiots.”

Next came accusations from the United States that a sanctioned Russian ship clandestinely collected weapons under cover of darkness from a base near Cape Town six months ago. An investigation by the Financial Times found no signals coming from the vessel’s transponder over the dates of mooring, implying that it switched off the device that allows tracking of its position — although the ship was seen at the military site. Now South Africa, which denies the allegation, has responded by accusing the West of fuelling the conflict by providing military aid to Kyiv. And in the coming weeks, there are reports the government plans to change the law to enable Putin — a dictator wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court over genocidal child abductions — to attend an August summit of the BRICs economic bloc without being arrested.

So much for Ramaphosa’s protestations of neutrality. South Africa, sometimes seen as the de facto leader of sub-Saharan Africa, has slid steadily closer to the Kremlin over the past decade. ANC officials often refer to Moscow’s historic support for their liberation movement, admire Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric, and speak of Russia as “a friend”. The disgraced Zuma even wanted a Russian energy giant to build several nuclear plants in South Africa, which would have given the Kremlin a grip on the economy (and presumably offered hefty kickbacks).

Thirty-three years ago, Ramaphosa was beside Mandela as the anti-apartheid hero left prison and those powerful images of hope and optimism were broadcast around the globe. He even held the microphone as Madiba famously greeted the crowds “in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all”.Today, having made his fortune and reached the pinnacle of power, he is trampling over the idea of democracy with his support for a dictatorial regime trying to crush freedom in a neighbouring nation. As Mandela said, “to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others”.

So how strange to discover that this same man had previously warned that risky research was “intensifying” threats from “lab-enhanced viruses”. In fact, two years before the pandemic erupted, Daszak was involved in drafting a presentation about the dangers of engineered viruses being accidentally or even deliberately released into the world.

In this newly uncovered presentation, the scientist warned that “gain-of-function” research — which boosts the transmissibility of viruses — was “elevating the risk” that “deadly novel biological agents” could be released through accident or design. The document, demanding the urgent development of counter-measures, put such risk at the same level as natural spillover from the wild. It even focused on the specific threat from coronaviruses.

Yet after the pandemic erupted in Wuhan, Daszak headed the charge against those claiming the mysterious new disease might be potentially linked to research in the city, with even the British Medical Journal branding him the leader of the campaign to label such critics as conspiracy theorists.

Little wonder the disclosure of this document has provoked angry claims of hypocrisy. Richard Ebright, an expert on biosecurity and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told me it meant that Daszak and his allies have spent the past three years not telling the world the whole truth. The revelations, he said, underlined “the shocking recklessness” of funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan that was being carried out at a low-level biosecurity lab “with no protections beyond a pair of gloves, a lab coat and a hood”.

Today, Daszak is the $460,368-a-year president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based group that channelled US research funding to Wuhan Institute of Virology until the payments were exposed and terminated by President Trump in April 2020. The former Kingston University snail researcher responded with outrage, rounding on suggestions that research in Wuhan might have sparked the pandemic. Typical was a June 2020 article in The Guardian entitled “Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab” that insisted claims of “frankenviruses” made in labs were “the latest chapter in a tale of blame, misinformation and finger-pointing”.

Most infamously, he was the covert organiser of a statement in The Lancet journal that condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin” and absurdly praised China’s “rapid, open and transparent” sharing of data. Signed by 27 experts, the document helped to crush scientific, political and media debate on whether the new virus might have been manipulated or leaked from a laboratory. The journal was forced later to add a note clarifying Daszak’s “competing interests” and he was removed from heading up its own inquiry into the virus’ origins.

Yet the presentation for the launch of his Global Virome Project (GVP) suggested something very different: that the risks of lab leaks and gain-of-function research needed to be taken seriously. It was seeking $1.3 billion funding over 10 years to help end “the pandemic era” by identifying viruses with the “greatest potential to infect humans and their laboratory-enhanced variants so we can prepare for them before they jump to us”.

The GVP was chaired by the infectious diseases expert Dennis Carroll, another of the signatories to The Lancet statement. Daszak was the project’s director, secretary and treasurer and emails obtained through freedom of information requests demonstrate that he had helped draft the pitch document.

The 40 slides prepared for the 2017 presentation focus on “dual threats” posed by both natural emergence of diseases and the accidental or intentional release of “laboratory enhanced variants”. They warn that gain-of-function research is inflaming the danger of “illnesses and deaths” along with “mass hysteria and panic”. They propose a 10-year project to “develop countermeasures” and build a huge database of viruses to enable their “rapid detection of natural and laboratory-enhanced threats”.

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This presentation reflects sensible fears held by many sensible scientists. One page discloses plans for quick identification of engineered viruses. Another underlines the need to “rapidly recognise a lab-enhanced virus”. A third highlights the evidence of Sars-like coronaviruses in Yunnan — a tropical region of southern China where bats roost and scientists from Wuhan Institute of Virology went to collect their samples — while finding no signs of such infections in Wuhan itself.

A version of the slide deck came to light in an email exchange between Daszak and his GVP colleagues, obtained in a freedom of information request from US Right to Know, a public health campaign group. The full set was found by Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist and member of the Drastic group which challenged the science establishment’s narrative that Covid almost certainly spilled over naturally from animals.“When Daszak needed to protect his back,” says Demaneuf, “anybody who dares say exactly what he wrote in these slides was called a conspiracy theorist — or worse.”

Emails indicate that the GVP organisers also held discussions on their plans with Washington defence research agencies. Last month, FBI director Christopher Wray said his agency had “for quite some time assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident”. It is now backed by the Department of Energy, which oversees a network of laboratories engaged in advanced biology, although other US intelligence agencies disagree with their conclusion.

After the pandemic started, the GVP stalled. Three months ago, a federal watchdog accused US funding authorities and EcoHealth Alliance of “deficiencies” in their monitoring and oversight of the work conducted on coronavirus strains at Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak has collaborated on extensive field research in Yunnan and 17 scientific papers since 2005 with the laboratory’s leading bat coronavirus expert Shi Zhengli.

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Last month, EcoHealth Alliance boasted of winning fresh US grants to “identify” spillovers of bat coronaviruses in three other Asian nations by sampling thousands of bats and other mammals. “This will help identify the potential role of other wildlife as intermediate hosts in the transmission of bat CoVs — and may also help to shed light on the origins of SARS-CoV-2,” it claimed. The body did not respond to requests for comment on the GVP presentation.

Critics of virus hunting schemes argue that they present high risk while delivering few tangible benefits. A year-long investigation by The Washington Post concluded that such research could be placing the planet in greater danger of another pandemic, accusing the US of continuing to funnel big sums into overseas research despite insufficient oversight as regulation fails to keep pace with new technologies.There are thought to be thousands of biocontainment labs handling dangerous pathogens, although the precise number around the world is unknown.

Simon Wain-Hobson, the virologist who discovered the genetic blueprint of HIV, is among those wanting to see a ban on gain-of-function work.  He told me that Daszak’s presentation exposed the “fallacious logic” of suggesting engineered viruses could help to predict pandemics or assist production of preventative drugs and vaccines. “The science fiction goes on,” he said.

Here was a prominent figure dedicated to the role of science in solving global problems — even if he did display flashes of the egotism that led him to serve on the Sage advisory body during the pandemic and then quit to rush out a book lamenting other people’s failures.

“If we do revert to a lack of evidence, a lack of information — if we’re going back to the era where we’re just making policies up with no evidence behind them, the world is in a worse place. And we’re moving away from an era of sort of 20th, 21st-first century enlightenment to something darker,’ he concluded with a flourish. ‘We can’t let that happen.”

Who could argue with the need for evidence-based science and the unfettered flow of information to help make the world a better place? It was no surprise, however, Farrar chose The Guardian for his valedictory interview as he heads to Geneva for a new post as chief scientist of the World Health Organization. For this ensured there would be no challenging questions over his central — and profoundly anti-science — role in stifling debate on the pandemic origins and effectively pushing his own conspiracy, cooked up with a handful of influential colleagues, including Anthony Fauci in the US, which suggested any idea that Covid might have emerged from some kind of laboratory incident in Wuhan was crackers.

Never mind all the evidence that has emerged showing how members of a group of experts that Farrar marshalled to squash the lab-leak hypothesis harboured their own doubts over the disease emerging naturally, based on its location and unusual properties. Let alone his own initial fears on this vexatious issue — or indeed, his recently-revealed verdict on high-risk experiments on coronaviruses being carried out in low bio-security laboratories in Wuhan as “Wild West” research. Instead, his interviewer, a long-serving health reporter, dutifully told her readers that “Farrar’s position is that while it is likely to have come from animals, it is important to stay open-minded and gather evidence. Above all, we need transparency, he says.”

This is, sadly, typical of the pitiful reporting seen on this particular issue from The Guardian. Presumably this continuing failure is a legacy of the media group’s reaction to Donald Trump’s promotion of the possibility of a lab leak, a response shared with The New York Times. The Guardian, however, even allowed British scientist Peter Daszak to publish an article headlined “Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab” without disclosing his organisation’s financial and research links to Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) until forced into hasty clarification. Farrar, incidentally, promoted this risible piece on Twitter: “As always worth reading @PeterDaszak”.

Yet The Guardian was far from alone; almost all Western media failed in their duty to challenge powerful players and vested interests on the crucial issue of the pandemic origins. Patsy journalists churned out reports fed to them by prominent scientists that dismissed “conspiracy theories” about a possible lab leak, placing more faith in a brutally-repressive Chinese dictatorship than an elected US government. They kept pointing to an animal market in Wuhan as the most likely source of SARS-CoV-2, a theory dismissed even by the Chinese authorities and despite obvious flaws in this argument given earliest cases. Ultimately, much of the media ended up presenting a collective idea that there was settled consensus, sweeping aside the voices of bravely-dissenting scientists.

Farrar was at the centre of this deceptive web, spinning lines to impede unfettered debate on the origins of the biggest public health crisis for a century. Along with two of his Wellcome Trust colleagues, he joined 24 other scientists to sign a key letter in The Lancet journal sycophantically praising Chinese experts for their “rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data” and hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later discovered to have been covertly organised by Daszak, who had spent years working with his friend Shi Zhengli, the celebrated lead researcher into bat coronaviruses at WIV.

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Farrar also hosted a conference call on the first day of February 2020 at the behest of former presidential adviser Fauci. They were joined by Francis Collins, then head of the biggest US science funding body, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the British government’s chief scientific adviser, and at least 10 other experts. We know now that several taking part held concerns over the virus being engineered. Even after the call, Farrar admitted he was “50:50” on whether it came from a lab. Yet he oversaw the near-instant drafting by four participants and one other author of “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, another hugely-influential article published by Nature Medicine stating firmly that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.

Dr Robert Redfield, an eminent virologist who led the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when the outbreak began in 2020, has long feared Covid resulted from a lab leak. Now his suspicions are backed by two US intelligence agencies. FBI chief Christopher Wray admitted last week they have “for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident”. Yet Redfield told a congressional committee hearing into the virus’s origins this week that he was deliberately “sidelined” by the likes of Fauci and Farrar: “It was told to me that they wanted a single narrative, and that I obviously had a different point of view. Science has debate and they squashed any debate.”

Redfield’s written submission to the committee rightly argued that both theories on the origins “needed to be aggressively and thoroughly examined” — although his own view “indicates Covid-19 infections more likely were the result of an accidental lab leak than the result of a natural spillover event”. This conclusion, he explained, was “ based primarily on the biology of the virus itself, including its rapid high infectivity for human to human transmission… as well as a number of other important factors to include the unusual actions in and around Wuhan in the fall of 2019”.

Many other experts disagree. This is how science works: through the clash of ideas and rooting out of evidence to test theories. Yet Redfield told investigative journalist Paul Thacker last year that he believed Fauci and Collins used their political power in the scientific community to set the narrative and exclude dissident voices such as his own, using Farrar as “the front person”. He claimed The Lancet statement, as well as the Nature Medicine missive, “was orchestrated by Jeremy Farrar — I think under direction of Fauci and Collins, trying to nip any attempt to have an honest investigation of the pandemic’s origin”.

This is incredibly damning: these two documents were the most influential papers on the pandemic’s origins — accessed by millions, widely shared, heavily quoted and even used by social media to suppress publication of “conspiracies”. Meanwhile, Farrar pointed to the Nature Medicine statement when questioned on his belief that natural transmission was the most likely cause of the pandemic. “Jeremy’s belief is that the Nature Medicine research paper remains the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus to date,’ his spokeswoman told me in June 2021.

Prior to this week’s hearing, Republicans on the committee issued a sharp memo asking why Farrar’s work on the Nature Medicine paper — which his spokeswoman confessed to me he had helped to “convene” although it now emerges he made at least one edit to toughen its tone — was uncredited by the journal. A fair question. They also quoted an email from lead author Kristian Andersen dated February 8 — eight days after that secretive conference call — to German participant Christian Drosten, which admitted “our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory”.

Yet before the conference call, Anderson was “60-70%” convinced the virus came from a lab, according to Farrar’s book, alarmed by properties such as its receptor binding domain which “looked.. like a perfect key for entering human cells”, and the infamous furin cleavage site, which allows more efficient entry into human cells and is not found on similar types of coronaviruses.

Concerns have grown after it was discovered EcoHealth Alliance, the group run by Daszak that funnelled US funding to support research at WIV, sought a grant in 2018 from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency proposing to insert a furin cleavage site into SARS-like bat coronaviruses to assess their ability to infect cells. The bid was declined, due to the risks. Daszak insists the collaborators have not pursued the research to his knowledge. But who knows exactly what really went on in those Wuhan labs given the stonewalling of outside inquiries? They could have continued the work with other funds for all we know.

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Let me state again with absolute clarity: we do not know the pandemic’s cause. It might have been through natural transmission. Or it might be the legacy of some kind of unfortunate laboratory incident. There is no hard proof for either theory, despite intense efforts to find an intermediate species of animal that might have “amplified” a bat virus to spill over into humans. Yet it was foolish to ignore that SARS-CoV-2 erupted 1,000 kilometres from the closest colonies of wild bats with similar coronaviruses. And in a city that was home to China’s only maximum bio-security laboratory — especially when WIV held the biggest repository of bat viruses in Asia, had known safety concerns, suddenly took its virus databases offline weeks before the pandemic emerged, and was carrying out risky gain-of-function research to boost infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice.

Whatever the origins, it seems alarmingly clear that a group of influential scientists, empowered by holding the purse strings for research, set out to deliberately stifle debate over the birth of a pandemic that has caused such devastation — often while saying that we must “follow the science” and despite their own early concerns over risky research in Wuhan and the virus’s strange properties. They pushed the toxic notion that anyone asking valid questions was inflaming conspiracy theorists and backing “implausible” ideas — and were aided by weak politicians, supine journalists and complicit science journals. Such was the influence of these funding behemoths, they set the tone across Europe. This was the real Covid conspiracy.

We can only guess why they adopted such a stance, although I suspect it was through misguided desire to protect both science and some of their own reputations having backed gain-of-function research. Regardless, their stupidity risks harming their profession through sinister efforts to crush free debate, a doctrine that lies at the root of scientific advancement. Sadly, all those journalists who failed to do their job of challenging powerful players and vested interests have also undermined my own profession again. This should provoke soul-searching, especially on the Left, over allowing partisanship to override fearless interrogation of important issues.

We can, however, now see the reason for the shameful silence in Westminster and Whitehall following the furore over former health secretary Matt Hancock’s leaked WhatsApp messages. These reveal how the Government argued behind the scenes that the outbreak’s location was “entirely coincidental” and that any discussion of a possible lab leak risked “damaging national security”. So our bureaucrats, politicians and spooks put their desire to appease a Communist dictatorship in China above the global quest to discover the truth about the pandemic origins, which might help us to prevent subsequent health disasters. No wonder my Freedom of Information requests on this issue have been stymied in both London and Edinburgh.

These inquiries still have some distance to travel, although slowly but surely the truth is emerging. “Recently released unredacted email messages make it clear that in early 2020 science funding heads Fauci, Collins and Farrar were informed by Anderson and three others that the genome sequence of Sars-Cov-2 raised the possibility that it was a laboratory product. The funding agency heads told them this threatened “great potential harm to science and international harmony”. The four scientists, following their paymasters’ lead, published a commentary in a journal falsely affirming that science ruled out the possibility of laboratory origins. “This false narrative still colours discussion, having dominated the debate for a year,” said the biosafety expert Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University.

But this begs a question: how can Farrar, having corroded the brand of one of our nation’s finest institutions and played such a role in promoting this narrative, now be handed the influential role of chief scientist at the WHO? “In this context, the appointment is a major error,” says Ebright rightly. This is another disastrous own goal by a UN body that has performed so badly in the pandemic from the earliest days. This post, arguably the most influential scientific role in the world, has been given to a figure who was at the epicentre of spinning a web of deception that stifled scientific probing of the first global pandemic for a century. It suggests that we are sliding from an era of enlightenment to something darker — and as Farrar says, we can’t let this happen.

But we should not be too harsh on Sunak and Hunt, even if their supposed plans to turbocharge growth through harnessing of technology look skeletal. Prime ministers must pretend to have purpose while chancellors must talk up economic prospects by pushing back against tides of negativity. After the latest data showed Britain’s economy to be flatlining rather than contracting, Hunt insisted it was “more resilient than many feared”. But if you really want to see the sorry state of our economy and our nation’s struggles to adapt to the fast-changing world, take a look at one sector that is laden with national symbolism and long been a bellwether for our economic health.

This is the British car industry, a production hub reliant on sophisticated supply lines and a proven beacon of innovation. It is a sector that has shown an uncanny ability to reflect the zeitgeist through its rollercoaster ups and downs since the Second World War. It boomed after the birth of mass motoring, then crashed in spectacular style amid industrial strife, before its careful restoration with a woman driver at the wheel. Now it is being allowed to rot again, partly thanks to the stewardship of a glossy magazine’s former motoring columnist. Perhaps we should have been more alarmed by Boris Johnson’s cavalier approach to cars when we discovered he had racked up £4,000 in parking tickets for GQ.

Once it was the world’s second biggest, but now our shrivelling car sector has sunk to the fringe of the top 20, just behind Slovakia and one place ahead of Iran. Last year, we produced 775,014 cars. This was the fewest since 1956 — a time when an Austin A30 cost £529, a gallon of petrol was 22p (or four shillings and six pence in “old money”) and there were no motorways. There were only 3.3 million drivers, roughly one-tenth of the numbers cramming our roads today, some no doubt humming along to that year’s biggest hit by Pat Boone. Almost all their cars were made in this country by five makers — Nuffield/BMC, Ford, Rootes, Standard-Triumph and Vauxhall — and three of them were British-owned.

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By Ian Birrell

Britain also possessed a thriving collection of smaller-scale makers with more than 60 marques, such as Aston-Martin, Jaguar, Jensen, Lotus and Rolls-Royce — more than any other country. Think of the swinging Sixties and you might think of stylish Minis, an icon of British culture born in 1959 that was such a clever and distinctive design it was acclaimed as the most influential car of the 20th century after the Ford Model T. Or the gorgeous E-Type Jaguar, which even the great Enzo Ferrari acclaimed as “the most beautiful car ever made” after its launch in 1961.

Yet at start of that glitzy decade, barely a generation after the war’s end, our car production slid below Germany. Four years later, Daihatsu’s Compagno became the first Japanese car on sale in this country, and by the mid-Seventies — when, badly managed and beset by strikes, we had sunk to sixth place in the global league table as car manufacturers — it became a sorry totem for the disturbing decline of British industry. Post-imperial Britain seemed to be slumped in a gloomy haze of mediocrity, driving haplessly along the slippery road to nowhere. It felt like the whole country was in a slow-motion tailspin.

Nothing symbolised this pervasive sense of despair and dysfunction more than British Leyland. The conglomerate — which brought together brands such as Austin, Mini, Morris, Rover and Jaguar into one supposed national champion — was spared from bankruptcy in 1975 by nationalisation. It was infamous for poor management, dire industrial relations and toxic union firebrands such as Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson. The cars it churned out were often shoddy — just as Japan was ironing out flaws in its vehicles as an emerging industrial superpower. Even clunky but cheap Soviet-built Ladas started selling decently in Britain, a damning indictment of our own state-run behemoth. No wonder the floundering firm became the butt of jokes in Fawlty Towers.

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The car industry, like the wider economy, was salvaged during Margaret Thatcher’s controversial reign. She opened the nation’s doors to globalisation, sold off or shut down nationalised industries, brutally stripped away barriers to trade and slashed the power of union barons. But she was also sufficiently pragmatic to recognise the role of targeted state aid — as shown with her leading part in persuading Nissan to open its landmark plant in Sunderland by throwing in subsidies, lobbying both its boss and the Japanese prime minister to land the deal and then opening the site. Honda had already started production in Swindon on a site that once built Spitfire planes, Toyota soon followed suit in Derbyshire. The prime minister used their arrival to show that Britain was on the road to revival as a stable European base for industry.

This sparked a renaissance for Britain’s car industry that lasted three decades, with famous traditional marques often falling into foreign hands. When owners from overseas arrived to buy up dreary brands such as Rover, there was talk of betrayal and sell-out on both Left and Right. Yet car makers from Germany, India, Japan and the United States invested heavily, creating an impressive cluster of innovation that rippled through the economy. By 2015, Britain was the base for more manufacturers than anywhere else in Europe, with seven big carmakers, eight premium producers, nine bus builders and scores of niche manufacturers. Such was its importance that eight of the 11 Formula One teams were based in the country, many of them in a cluster around Oxford, to exploit the cutting-edge technology.

This success was led by exports, with sales abroad doubling in a decade, while the 160,000 workers — once infamous for the speed at which they downed tools — had become among the most productive car makers in Europe. Foreign owners skilfully exploited British heritage brands, such as the Minis I saw churned out at the celebrated Cowley car plant in Oxford following their revival by BMW. This was the place where almost a century earlier a former bicycle maker called William Morris had pioneered Britain’s use of Henry Ford’s mass production techniques. But Cowley had also gone on to reflect the industry’s turbulent history with six far-Left splinter groups fighting for shop floor supremacy in the dismal Seventies.

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When I visited a decade ago, however, it was a beacon of industrial modernity. ‘‘If we had not changed, we wouldn’t have had any jobs here,” said union convenor Chris Bond, a former member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. The high-tech plant had 513 robots in the body shop alone. It employed 3,700 “associates”, all clad in the same black jackets with MINI on the back — admittedly a fraction of the huge numbers working there before, but there had not been an industrial dispute for almost three decades and everyone received bonuses. I was struck when one woman told me she had previously worked in the NHS where “it felt far more like I was working on a production line”.

Since then, however, the industry’s decline has been precipitous, down 10% last year alone and more than halving since the country voted to leave the European Union in 2016. The UK is no longer a major player in the car industry; only yesterday, Ford announced plans to cut 1,300 jobs in the UK over the next three years. Nissans and Toyotas still roll off British production lines, but Honda has departed from Swindon after producing 3.7 million cars on the site, while Nissan ditched its promise to build the next X-Trail SUV in Sunderland. Elon Musk chose Berlin over Britain for his first Tesla factory in Europe. Five months ago, BMW added to the gloom by announcing the end of electric Mini production in Cowley, although it is continuing with petrol and diesel cars until they are banned from sale in seven years’ time.

Clearly Brexit has been a significant factor. Musk stated that the vote made it “too risky” to open his plant, as well as a research and development base, in Britain. Honda denied its closure decision was tied to the rupture with Brussels, but this is a highly complex industry that boomed off the back of the single European market driven so determinedly by Thatcher, with firms relying on Britain for skilled workers and looser labour regulations but on Europe for sales and many components. The crankshaft for one of those Minis I saw being built crossed the Channel three times before installation in Cowley. The slightest friction for such production techniques can be catastrophic for an industry reliant on low margins and high volumes.

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It is no coincidence that car production hit a two-decade high in 2016, when 80% of the vehicles were exported and more than half sold in European Union countries. Yet Brexit is just one of the problems facing the industry; it was also hit hard by China’s Covid lockdowns, which impacted supply chains and resulted in a chronic global shortage of semiconductors. And all this disruption came just as the industry was engulfed by a technological revolution, with rapid acceleration into the age of electrical vehicles.

In this brave new world of electric vehicles, assembly plants need batteries from giant production houses known as gigafactories. Ideally, these need to be located nearby since batteries are big and heavy. Yet Britain currently has only one Chinese-owned plant being built next to the Nissan factory in Sunderland. At least 35 are planned or under construction in the European Union, with three in Hungary alone. There was huge hype over Britishvolt, a £3.8 billion beacon of post-Brexit levelling up policies in Northumberland intended to deliver 300,000 battery packs a year. Johnson typically talked it up, claiming Britain would be a world leader in electric cars, “creating hundreds of thousands of jobs”. Then it ran out of money, the Government refused to bail it out, and it collapsed last month.

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Andy Palmer, former head of Aston Martin, told the BBC that its collapse was an “unmitigated disaster for the auto industry in the UK”, and he predicted firms would migrate to where batteries are being made. But to put Britishvolt’s demise in perspective, even this ambitious start-up was planned to deliver less than one-fifth of the capacity by 2030 anticipated from two plants in Germany — Tesla’s gigafactory in Berlin plus another being developed by a Chinese firm that is the world’s biggest electronic vehicle battery maker.

Now, think again about the Mini. The first electric version was built at Cowley plant three years ago, but soon all electric models of this British icon will be coming off production lines in Leipzig and eastern China. Last month also saw more troubling news: the pioneering new electric van maker Arrival is restructuring its business and cutting jobs here as it shifts production to North Carolina to take advantage of massive green subsidies being offered for firms buying clean commercial vehicles.

The last three Tory governments have all boasted that Britain will be a world leader in both green energy and electric vehicle manufacturing, seeing car production as a symbol once again of the country’s status in our post-Brexit world. Now we hear the latest prime minister bragging that he will turn the nation into a technology force. Yet behind all the hype and brash talk, one of our most important, innovative and efficient industries is moving abroad thanks to state inertia at a time of fast-moving change. Britain is stuck in the slow lane — and we seem to be ignoring the warning signs flashing on the dashboard before our eyes.

Britain has clung for so long to this weird comfort blanket, the risible idea that the rest of the world was looking with longing at a health system that has been in crisis for much of its 75-year history. For more than two decades I have argued that such blinkered worship of the NHS and deification of its staff was highly corrosive, since it frustrated reform, intimidated politicians and silenced criticism. The result has been a series of grotesque patient safety scandals — usually with agonising or fatal consequences affecting the most marginalised groups in society — and dire outcomes in many key areas, from cancer to infant mortality, compared with other rich nations.

Now the crisis has exploded, costing thousands more lives amid delays, strikes and staff shortages. Yet why is anyone surprised given the grim lack of reality that has swirled around the NHS for so long? I was a lonely voice pointing out the absurdity of Danny Boyle’s 20-minute homage to a flawed public service in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony with its dancing doctors and bouncing babies. Such misty-eyed myopia, especially prevalent on the Left, led to great excitement among devotees two years later when a US body ranked the NHS first among 11 health systems largely on grounds of access and efficiency. Yet even The Guardian report — headlined NHS comes top in healthcare survey — admitted that “the only serious black mark against the NHS was its poor record on keeping people alive”.

This failure to prevent needless deaths felt to me like a rather fundamental failing for a health service. It was confirmed by a damning inquiry by four respected think tanks to mark the NHS’s 70th birthday which found Britain had among the worst “amenable mortality” levels — when people die from potentially preventable conditions — among 18 similar nations. They pointed out how 117 out of every 100,000 Britons died avoidably in one year under study, compared with just 78 in best-performing France. This pivotal report also found Britain spending almost the average on health for rich nations. Since then, NHS England alone has seen its funding rise another £38bn.

My personal puncturing of the NHS mythology came with the birth of a daughter discovered to have profound disabilities and health concerns. This sent my family hurtling into the hell of its underbelly, glimpsing the arrogance, inertia, insensitivity and waste lurking beneath the sanctified image. I have never forgotten our first visit to Great Ormond Street and hearing a receptionist cheerily say “Didn’t anyone tell you — your appointment’s been cancelled?” to a desperately-worried young couple who had travelled down from the north-east with their tiny sick baby. Then came years of battling bureaucracy — answering the same questions over and over again — while witnessing blunders, fighting lethargy and dealing with medical egos.

As the parent of another disabled child told me after watching that risible Olympic spectacle, how sickening to endlessly hear mantras of praise for the NHS from people whose lives were not engulfed in a daily struggle against its inertia and ineptitude to protect the life of someone precious. Today, we do everything possible to keep my daughter out of hospital. Yet she has survived almost into her thirties despite a life-threatening condition thanks to my wife’s strength, the wonders of medicine and the support of many superb carers, doctors, nurses and therapists. We have seen both the best and the worst of our system over the years.

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The NHS problems have been glaringly obvious for years. It is an institution created after the Second World War and designed for a different era, focused on the fight against infant mortality, infectious disease and industrial injuries. It was built around big hospitals, dominant male consultants and demands of doctors; remember Nye Bevan’s infamous pledge to “stuff their mouths with gold” to overcome opposition to his socialised system. But many of the original battles are won, our population has aged, medicine advanced and society changed. The core concerns now are those linked to ageing or disability, often involving chronic conditions with co-morbidities, alongside an explosion of obesity and mental health problems being seen from an alarmingly early age.

These are the old, complex and chronically-sick patients soaking up more than two-thirds of health spending, not the higher-profile emergencies that the NHS usually handles so adroitly if people can find an ambulance. People such as my daughter — or my father, who died, aged 97, after his long decline with dementia. This has been recognised for years. There have been repeated demands for a shift from hospitals towards expanded community services that combine primary and secondary care services. Now Labour is reheating Lord Darzi’s proposal for London polyclinics and applying a version of it nationwide to unite GPs, diagnostics, therapists, community nursing and mental health teams under one roof — but he first raised this idea 15 years ago.

The harsh truth is that far from being the envy of the world, no one setting up a health system would adopt our current system. I know eastern European carers so horrified by the NHS that they fly home if needing to see a doctor or dentist. As a journalist investigating care, patient safety and mental health provision, I have written about too many disturbing, routine and fatal failings in the NHS heart. One government study sparked by Sara Ryan, a mother who became a campaigner after her teenage son died in terrible circumstances, found citizens with learning disabilities likely to die 26 years earlier than their peers — with medical errors involved in one in eight of the fatalities examined.

My exposés of the barbaric treatment of autistic people and citizens with learning disabilities, let down by a dysfunctional care system and stuffed into abusive detention in hideous psychiatric units for many years, led to five inquiries, endless promises of action, personal awards — but nothing changed. Other victims of NHS failures tend to be elderly people, as revealed most notoriously with the inquiry into hundreds of deaths in disgraceful conditions in two mid-Staffordshire hospitals, and female patients. “Our healthcare system disproportionately fails to listen to women and keep them safe”, admitted the Government last two years ago in response to three more horrific treatment scandals.

Now we face the question of how to salvage a health service that seems to have reached breaking point on so many fronts. Sadly, much of this debate remains glib, self-serving or stuck in the past. It is dominated by doctors, with constant calls for more cash and complaints about their pressures while they pose as protectors of the NHS. Yet we should not forget that when Tony Blair drove up health spending, much of the money was grabbed by GPs. A British Medical Association negotiator later said their salaries soared 60% in three years as he boasted how the Government let them drop out-of-hours cover in return for a small pay cut they considered “a bit of a laugh”. Few patients laugh today when struggling to access local practices. NHS data, however, shows the number of doctors has risen almost one-third over the past 12 years of supposed Tory “austerity”.

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By Ian Birrell

Cash is, of course, a significant factor in health care. Yet when I first began looking into these issues at the turn of this century, I was struck to see spending levels one-fifth higher per capita in Scotland than in England and close to the European average. There were, proportionately, almost one-third more consultants, nurses, general practitioners and acute beds than south of the border. But it also had longer waiting-lists, lengthening waiting times and death rates for big killers such as heart disease, cancer and strokes among the worst in developed nations — which even a Scottish Labour minister admitted to me was not all down to drink and poor diet.

Our leaders have failed spectacularly to rise to this critical national challenge. Politicians pander to medical unions on pay, to food industry lobbyists on obesity measures, and to local voters over threatened hospital closures. They call for “reform” or “modernisation”, yet offer ideas dismally small in scale — as symbolised by Rishi Sunak’s suggestion during the Tory leadership campaign of a £10 fine for missing a GP appointment to help cure the NHS. There are broadsides against managers, who comprise an unusually small slice of a health workforce in the NHS and are essential to its smooth running; indeed, hiring a few more might relieve frontline medics of some of the bureaucracy that soaks up too much of their time, especially if they have clinical experience. Now some commentators call for a switch to a social insurance model, but inevitably fail to explain how such a huge, disruptive reform might be achieved without bureaucratic and patient chaos.

Then there is the bogeyman of “privatisation”, a thorny issue that underscores the pitiful nature of debate. Private contractors, from GPs through to caterers, cleaners and technicians, exist across the NHS. In the year before Covid, they carried out half a million elective surgeries with highest patient approval ratings. One eye surgeon told me he could perform three times more cataract operations in his private work, freed from NHS bureaucracy and the need to chat so much with patients. At the same time, some repulsive profiteers have filled the gaping holes in psychiatric services, leading to sickening abuse, needless deaths and routinely-wasted resources. They expose complacent commissioning and gross regulatory failures.

There can be good and bad in any organisation, whether public or private, and we need to harness the best of both while protecting patients far better. I was struck when visiting Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon — briefly handed to a private firm before this unusually bold experiment was killed by political foes — to witness intriguing insights into innovation, procurement and staff empowerment. This 304-bed district hospital cut out £11m in costs over two years, which included a £3m saving by abandoning the NHS bulk purchasing system for supplies while also handing more financial responsibility to frontline staff. “You have to shake the system by challenging it,” said the doctor running the hospital, a former opponent of privatisation. “And you can only challenge it if you let fresh ideas come in.”

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The painful reality is a need to build on existing foundations. Yet we cannot keep pouring in an ever-greater share of state resources to a floundering institution. The Nuffield Trust pointed out last year that the department of health and social care’s budget has doubled as a share of GDP since Margaret Thatcher took office. By the end of this parliament, it will consume four in ten pounds of the Government’s daily spending. Partly this is down to substantial population growth and amazing medical advances. But the key issue is age. The proportion of our population over 85 has doubled in three decades while the share of citizenry in their early twenties shrunk more than one fifth. These older folks use ten times more hospital resources. Now throw in all those other issues such as the post-Covid rise in long-term sick, a near-doubling in obesity over three decades and how the fastest-rising demand for social care is coming from working age adults, often with chronic and complex conditions.

Such problems, faced also by almost all other wealthy nations, are immense. But they need to be tackled since they affect the economy and millions of families. I have suggested that our new monarch has his first royal commission to grapple with the issues. But my enthusiasm waned after seeing this week’s launch of The Times health commission — an interesting and laudable idea undermined by its familiar line-up of doctors, academics, businessmen, professors and policy wonks. No patient commissioners, let alone any of the campaigners who exposed safety scandals after suffering horrors. No one from the care sector. It even includes Dame Clare Gerada, president of the Royal College of GPs, who advises a lamentable private firm behind some of those abusive detentions, regulatory failures and fatalities but refuses to discuss her role or remuneration.

There is no simple panacea. But sticking plaster politics can no longer cover the festering wounds. So I would offer three key suggestions for discussion.

First, and most important, we must stop treating social care as a second-class public service. This intensifies pressures across the NHS, yet the problems are largely ignored except through the prism of elderly bed blockers and middle-class home owners forced to sell properties to fund elderly care. When Covid struck, real-term spending on social care was £300m lower than a decade earlier despite all those billions pumped into the hallowed NHS. Local authorities were among the biggest real victims of austerity. No wonder there are catastrophic and rising staff shortages — inflamed by Brexit, as I have seen with my family — because of the appalling low pay of carers, despite their vital role in society. Yet still some fat cat firms and private equity vultures are allowed to cream off millions into tax havens.

But it is not just about pay. It is, of course, shameful that people earn more stacking shelves in a supermarket than assisting other citizens to lead their most fulfilling lives. This must be rectified. Yet I know of care jobs going unfilled for months despite paying more than twice usual rates. The pandemic exposed society’s attitudes towards elderly and disabled people when thousands of old folks were discarded from hospitals to “protect the NHS”, then blanket “Do Not Resuscitate” orders were imposed without consultation. Britain lacks compassion for its most vulnerable citizens. The Government has finally started to funnel in a bit more cash, but this societal attitude has left the care system disintegrating and hard-working staff with shockingly low status.

Corrosion of the care system not only traps elderly patients in hospital, but it leaves many desperate people with unmet needs as 14,000 requests for help are rejected daily. So conditions deteriorate, stresses shatter families and ultimately spending ends up far higher. Consider this simple equation: a teenager with undetected or unsupported autism who ends up in a secure psychiatric unit can cost the NHS £13,000 a week and the average length of incarceration is more than five years. It would be so much cheaper and more humane to fund a functioning care system.

This links to another fundamental issue. The need to build community services adopting a more holistic approach is most pressing in mental health, where state failures, short-sighted cuts and consequent shrivelling of provision mean concerns — especially at the most serious end of the spectrum — often go untreated until they explode. Even children can wait up to three years to access services, which only fuels their anxieties and can have life-long consequences. We have ended up with a hollowed-out system that starts with overloaded GPs doling out too many drugs — and can end with people needlessly locked up in those hideously-expensive secure units that are horribly over-reliant on pharmaceutical and physical restraint.

Then, thirdly, there is the delicate issue of end-of-life care. I am opposed to euthanasia, not on moral or religious grounds but — having investigated its usage in Belgium — from fears over protection of vulnerable people and the inevitability that laws gradually become more permissive. After all, if permitted for physical pain, why not for mental suffering? I would far rather see hefty investment in our fantastic palliative care and hospices. But this is a valid debate on both ethical and financial grounds. It has been suggested in the US that one-quarter of health spending goes on people in their last year of life, although others argue the figure is lower. Certainly huge sums go to sustain patients in their fading twilight for a few more months.

The US doctor Atul Gawande has written movingly about the medicalisation of mortality and lack of dignity in death. Now this issue has been stirred up by the oncologist Ezekiel Emanuel, an adviser to two presidents, disclosing that he will reject all medical treatments from the age of 75. “Death is a loss,” he wrote. “But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss.” He argues that extending life through a barrage of treatments leaves many people in a deprived and often-lonely state as they decline, so his solution is to let nature take its course. This is a radical proposal. Yet some doctors privately say they would refuse many treatments they recommend for patients nearing the end of their time. Maybe we need to talk more about the best way to die as well as saving lives.

There are many other ways to improve the NHS. Technology is one obvious way to reduce the workload for medics and avoid mistakes. Although GPs have largely switched to effective digital records, many hospitals remain in the dark ages. Blair blew £12bn on a bungled attempt to integrate systems. When Jeremy Hunt became health secretary in 2012, the NHS was the world’s biggest buyer of fax machines so he pledged to make it paperless by 2018. Then his successor Matt Hancock failed in his own pledge to ban them by 2020. Some hospitals have several IT systems; such is the confusion, they rely on paper. It is claimed junior doctors can spend almost half their time on tasks that could be largely automated.

Last year, I reported on Estonia’s impressive embrace of digital government. This includes a fully-digitalised health service — ironically, based on Blair’s abandoned system. Any medic can instantly access a patient’s history anywhere, drugs get automatically cross-checked for safety — yet patients control their records. If they want to seek a second opinion, they can block a look at their initial diagnosis. And they can track treatment and spending in a system similar to the NHS, which helps reduce padding of bills and reminds them that every call, consultation or test has a cost. Peeter Ross, a radiologist and e-health expert, admitted there was resistance at first. “Doctors are trained to think they’re the experts who make decisions but this is patient data,” he said. “We must be equal partners. This works better for us all.”

This underlines the need for cultural change, increasingly recognised by many doctors, especially from younger generations — and this includes the urgent need to drive out a toxic culture of cover-up. The NHS should cherish, rather than crush, whistle-blowers raising concerns. Any system reliant on human beings will make mistakes, especially when under pressure. But it needs to learn the lessons to avoid subsequent grief and pain. This is recognised by the airline industry. But the NHS reaction is all too often to silence complainants, sweep concerns under the carpet and summon lawyers from fear of litigation. This can result in long, drawn out and distressing legal battles. The only beneficiaries are lawyers, who pocketed about one quarter of the £2.5bn spent by the NHS last year settling claims.

There are many other incremental ideas to help revive the NHS. But let us celebrate this moment as Labour finally accepts that the NHS is a flawed institution rather than a shining light of British exceptionalism. Reality is dawning in Westminster in response to the growing public and professional anxiety. We need to have honest discussions about how our country funds and runs our health and care systems — and who it serves. Some solutions are obvious, such as more effective use of technology and transparency. Others stray into the difficult terrain of payments, profits and even the meaning of life and death. One thing is clear, though: salvation for the NHS must revolve around patients, not just professionals.