Yet next year, it looks like there won’t be a Food Lovers Festival in Malton. Nor will the town continue to host its monthly specialist food market. The annual Malton 10k — a running event with gourmet snack stations — is also off. Most gallingly of all, there will be no Christmas market in Malton this December, depriving the town’s traders of one of their most important weekends of the year. And all this was announced when traders were already deep into preparations, leaving them little time to make alternative arrangements.

The decision to cancel (almost) all food-related events in the food capital of Yorkshire comes down to one entity: the Fitzwilliam Estate, which owns more than 60% of Malton’s commercial property. The Estate is controlled by Tom Naylor-Leyland. Malton has been in his family since 1713, although it is only a tiny portion of a vast portfolio which also includes the 15,000-acre Wentworth estate, Milton Hall, in Cambridgeshire, and the 17th-century Nantclwyd Hall in Denbighshire. Nonetheless, until recently, it was a portion in which he took a special interest. It was Naylor-Leyland who decided Malton should become a foodie destination; now, apparently, he has decided that should change.

Back in the 2000s, Malton was a typical small British town, fading away as its younger population constantly flowed away to where the jobs were. But Naylor-Leyland saw potential: Yorkshire food was celebrated elsewhere in the country, so why not capitalize on the place it comes from? The estate invested heavily in food businesses, and many producers relocated to Malton to take advantage of the thriving scene. Now those same producers have been hung out to dry by the local aristocrat. The loss of the festival is a particular blow, one local trader (who asked to remain anonymous because he’s a tenant of the estate) tells me: not only did this account for a significant proportion of his takings, but it also brought new people to the town.

“I don’t think this will immediately put people out of business, or if it does, that business was in trouble anyway,” he says. “But what I can’t account for is the slow grind of people not coming to Malton. Without the festival, Malton will end up like any other Yorkshire town.”

For the producers who’ve been drawn in over the last 13 years by Naylor-Leyland’s promises and are now locked into leases, it’s a betrayal, and one made worse by the way the news was delivered: “All local businesses found out through the press and local gossip groups, and there’s no clarity or sense. We still don’t know for sure what’s happening.”

In a statement, the Fitzwilliam Estate (which did not respond to a request for comment for this article) claimed it had done its best to contact all affected businesses, and blamed the cancellation on “rising operating costs”, despite the fact that the last filed accounts show an increase in net assets from 2023 to 2024. But confusingly, the Estate went on to imply that the move away from markets was strategic: “Whilst the events bring welcome footfall and promotion for the town, this is often felt at peaks during the year, as opposed to all-year-round. We are dedicated to making Malton a go-to destination and thriving rural community where businesses can flourish year-round.”

This is, bluntly, nonsensical. The food industry is highly seasonal, and particularly for luxury goods, the lead-in to Christmas is where the profits come from. Producers rely on the feasts to get them through the leaner times. The idea of consumers thoughtfully spreading their posh food budget across the entire year, rather than blowing through it all during Advent, is a bizarre fantasy. The Estate cannot possibly be serious about this.

But the Estate doesn’t need to be serious. Malton is its possession, and it can do as it pleases. Naylor-Leyland has cheerfully played the part of the enthusiastic dilettante, saying in one interview: “I never studied accounting — I probably should have. But if you look at it only that way, you would struggle. You have to connect with people and bring them along with you.” It’s just bad luck for everyone who “connected” with him up till now that he’s decided not to “bring them along” any further.

Besides, Naylor-Leyland appears to have other priorities these days. Though his Instagram is @tominmalton, he hasn’t posted about the town since May this year. Instead, his attention is focused on a very different enterprise: his wife Alice Naylor-Leyland’s “tablescaping” and interiors company, Mrs. Alice, which recently launched in the US.
(Tom Naylor-Leyland is the second-biggest shareholder in Mrs. Alice after his wife, and a director of the company; in her own social media, she likes to refer to him as “Mr Alice”. )

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On Alice Naylor-Leyland’s Instagram, Malton is never mentioned at all. The couple and their children live in a big pile in Cambridgeshire, and own a flat in Chelsea. Alice Naylor-Leyland has also alluded in interviews to a family home in Wales (“stunning”) and her father’s house in the Bahamas (“heaven on earth!”), but apparently the food capital of Yorkshire has never captured her imagination. In fact, she doesn’t seem very interested in food at all: she’s much more enthused by all the non-edible things you can lay out for dinner guests.

Tablescaping, according to Alice Naylor-Leyland, is an “art”. “For my table decor, I am really inspired by the seasons,” she has said. “I use whatever I can find in my garden and then layer with complementary colors and textures.” Luckily for mere plebs who don’t have access to the flora of multiple estates, there is another way to tablescape: buy a £200 box of tat from Mrs. Alice to ensure your guests know you’ve made an effort. Is a dinner party even a dinner party without a Joy of Autumn Decoration set featuring, among other things, three kinds of velvet mushroom and a set of “owlettes”? And while you’re stocking up, don’t forget to pick up Mr. & Mrs. Fall Squirrel (£28) and Tomasina the Turkey (£32 the pair) to complete your look.

What’s most notable here isn’t the fact that adult women are being convinced to buy what are, effectively, overpriced toys you can’t even play with; it’s that the marketing is all US-centric. Brits don’t have “fall”, we have autumn. But then Brits, on the whole, are resistant to this kind of flannel from the upper classes: we know that someone with a houseful of heirlooms isn’t really “inspired” by a polymer pumpkin.

It’s the Americans who are suckers for this stuff: according to a recent interview in The Telegraph, the US accounts for 65% of Mrs Alice’s sales. In the states, continued the breathless copy, “she’s regarded as a Martha Stewart for the Instagram age”. It’s silly to politicize a set of beaded velvet mushrooms (£66), but Mrs. Alice is surely just the ticket for the MAGA elite and those who aspire to join it: conspicuous consumption with the taste stripped out, hinting at a fantasy of elevated WASP origins.

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Alongside the article, there was a picture of Alice Naylor-Leyland dressed in a lavish green ballgown standing next to a table heaving with coordinated knick-knacks, in the grounds of Bath’s Prior Park. “I’m unashamedly into the frills and the fun of dressing up,” she trilled to the journalist. “But then, you’ve got one shot at this life. Why hold back?” It’s an image of purest Marie Antoinette: the noblewoman playing at pastoralism. Meanwhile her family estate’s subjects are left facing an uncertain future thanks to the Fitzwilliam Estate’s act of caprice.

It is bizarre to think that in modern Britain, practically a whole town can be handed down as an inheritance, then reshaped according to the landowner’s whim — and abruptly palmed off when those whims change. But under the skin of modernity, this remains a deeply feudal nation, and Malton is paying the price of that truth. The town has been treated like a table to be “scaped”: tinkered with until it made a pleasing showcase for its owner’s wealth, then bundled back into its box. “The town has been treated as a plaything of the rich and landed gentry,” says the trader I speak to. “He’s done with us, and we need to work out how to pick up the pieces.”

Mrs. Alice sells Americans the dream of gracious British country living, while her husband guts the business model that for 13 years has enabled actual country-dwellers to make a living. It is cruel, but it should not be surprising. Tom Naylor-Leyland was able to present himself as a caring “steward” to Malton, when he should always have properly been described as its owner. Strip away the gentle euphemisms from Britain’s unequal society, and the injustice of it all becomes as crassly obvious as a gold glitter pheasant in the middle of your table.

Our fascination encompasses both the frivolous and the fundamental, from the avid consumption of television home make-over shows to the bitter frustration of young and middle-aged people who are priced out of the property market. And the naming of Johnson’s fiancée, Carrie Symonds, as “Carrie-Antoinette” is a more profound echo than many Twitter wits realise.

Marie-Antoinette, like Symonds after her, was entranced by the possibilities of interior design, and indulged her passion to the full in the Petit Trianon — her Versailles “folly”— as well as in the Chateau itself. She went so far as to commission a model rural village at the Petit Trianon, with 12 cottages clad in artfully distressed stucco to look like aged and cracked brickwork, concealing elegant comfort within. Similar flights of fancy were in vogue on the estates of her admiring aristocratic friends. The rumblings of popular discontent at the extravagance seemed churlish to them. “All that fuss about a Swiss village!” pronounced the Baronne d’Oberkirch after her visit.

“The cost is totally out of control, she’s buying gold wallpaper!” It could so easily have been Louis XVI complaining about his wife; but it is Boris Johnson fretting to aides about the lavish redecoration of his flat in Downing Street in 2021. Reportedly, the cost lies somewhere between £85,000 and £200,000 — small beer by Marie-Antoinette’s standards.

An anonymous “friend” told the newspapers that “Carrie has exquisite taste”. One might well ask why, if that is the case, Carrie had to pay such an exorbitant sum to the interior designer Lulu Lytle to choose wallpaper and sofas for her, rather than simply doing it herself. But that is to misunderstand the language of the milieu in which Symonds moves, or aspires to move. There, “taste” means the ability to select the correct interior designer.

That much Marie-Antoinette would certainly have understood. The problem was, however, that Marie-Antoinette’s eye-watering expenditure on interiors and fashions stood in stark contrast to the tightening circumstances of the French people. As David Garrioch notes in his book The Making of Revolutionary Paris, between the periods of 1726-41 and 1771-89 wages in Paris rose by about 17%, but the prices of necessities went up by 62%. Rents in Paris rose by 130-140%. Parisians generally were getting poorer: “the percentage of Parisians able to leave something to their children diminished across the century: an increasing proportion left only debts.”

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Today, our Prime Minister is meant to be a public servant, yet Boris’s premiership carries a growing whiff of divine right. It grew stronger on Tuesday, amid one of those telling juxtapositions that politics has a way of casting up. Even as the war of Johnson’s wallpaper hogged the headlines, another wall-covering made a more modest and tragic story. It lay in the news that the Commons had voted down a House of Lords amendment which would have protected leaseholders from being forced to meet the exorbitant expense of making their homes safe in the aftermath of the Grenfell fire.

The cause of that inferno, which left 72 people dead, was unsafe external cladding. And homeowners in similarly affected buildings — below the 18m height which qualifies for government help — can now be held liable for the cost of altering cladding which was never their fault in the first place. Often at the lower end of the income scale, they now find themselves facing bills upwards of £25,000, and in some cases as much as £100,000.

Without the necessary repairs, which so many can little afford, these residents’ homes are both potentially dangerous and unsellable. Their dream of owning property — which Margaret Thatcher once nurtured so effectively among working-class and lower-middle-class voters — has turned to an inescapable nightmare. And the decision to abandon these property-owners to their fate has been taken by the Conservative Party under the leadership of Boris Johnson.

Nor are they the only voters in dire straits. We have not yet reckoned on the degree of economic devastation caused by the Covid pandemic, but it seems clear that a significant proportion of those who were already struggling are now sinking. A Resolution Foundation survey in January found that household spending decreased among the highest-earning families with children since the onset of Covid-19, but increased almost as noticeably among the lowest-earning ones. As the health effects of the pandemic begin to ease, the social cost will become ever more glaring.

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The Electoral Commission investigation into the Number 11 redecoration will play out against this backdrop. It will unfurl partly as entertainment — the whole country now yearns to gawp at the ridiculously expensive refurbishment — and partly as fodder for genuine outrage. Although Johnson is the one officially in charge, or supposed to be, there is already a powerful element of cherchez la femme, just as there was in the late 18^th century, when Marie-Antoinette was routinely depicted as a spendthrift, libidinous schemer who ran rings round her hapless husband. In her later years that was increasingly unfair, and the feverish libels against her were often malicious and untrue, but the die had been cast.

King Louis XVI, however, once mistakenly imagined that popular devotion to the French monarchy was unassailable, just as Boris believes himself perpetually lovable simply for being Boris. He dislikes being held to the rules by which others are routinely judged. But it’s the brazen contrasts that infuriate people in the end. The cladding and the wallpaper. The hardship and the profligacy. In at-risk flats across the country “ordinary, hard-working people” — the kind many Tories once considered their natural electorate — are being driven to financial desperation by the cost of fixing life-threatening construction flaws that they played no part in creating.

Not only did their Prime Minister break his earlier promise to support them, but his political energies are entirely focused elsewhere: on preposterous expenses which he seemingly sought to palm off on party donors.

I’m not sure he sees it yet, but the walls are closing in.

You didn’t really think the French Revolution was a force for good, did you? As if. All the great political woes of the modern era — Communism, Fascism, and its German bier and swastika variant, Nazism — have their tangled, bitter beginnings in the storming of the Bastille. The French Revolution was the taproot of Tyranny in our time. No French Revolution, no Marx, no Hitler. Voila!

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The French Revolution began in 1789 as an Enlightenment experiment. In 1793, however, the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, tried to turn France into a Rousseauian theme park — where the people were sans private possessions and sans self-interest, but were suborned to the state (“the general will”) — by destroying the rich. The Jacobins also wanted to export the ‘benedictions’ of Revolution via the barrel of a cannon. 

Sound familiar? Yes, it is the same millenarian collectivist philosophy of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama Bin Laden. The accompanying praxis was, and is, murder. Mass murder. As Robespierre so delightfully put it: “We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with them…Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.” Before 1793, Europe  was no stranger to violence, but not until the French Revolution was murder used systematically to erase a designated internal enemy from its existence. The Jacobin’s mass firing squads anticipated absolutely the Nazis’ Einsatzgruppen.

The Jacobins desired “Year One,” a cheerless utopia in which individual freedom was rescinded in the name of the commune, and where the people were dosed daily with propaganda to rid them of their vices — such as the desire to own a home of their own (“Property is theft!”), to possess freedom of thought or to enjoy a private life. The Jacobins and their descendant mini-mes, in their thirst and thrust for absolute power, have disavowed all ordinary amusements. Hence the purist, monkish public image cultivated by Robespierre, Hitler, Mao, et al.

It could have been so different. In June 1791 Louis XVI was about to flee Paris in a fast carriage; at the last moment, MarieAntoinette (and her voluminous baggage) insisted on accompanying him, rather than travelling separately. Uxorious to the nth degree, the king agreed. Consequently, they took the big and literal slow coach instead of the speedy light one — and were intercepted by revolutionaries a mere 25 miles from the safety of the Belgian border. The royal couple were then returned to Paris to be shortened by Madame Guillotine.

But in a parallel universe, there exist Les Annals Alternatives de la France and they tell of Europe’s avoidance of the nightmare of tyranny: the right, fast route taken. The relevant extract follows.

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On the night of 20/21 June 1791 in the Tuileries Palace, Louis XVI  patted his powdered wig and said to the queen: “Don’t be daft, ma petite chou, one valise only! Vite!” Their light coach sped from Paris, to meet loyal soldiers, who escorted the royal family over the border into Belgium. The king, who was a realiste, understood there was only one power that could truly aid him. Thus he swallowed his pride and sailed across La Manche to perfidious Albion, where he was welcomed with wide arms and pawky eyes.

From Britain, Louis XVI sowed discord in France, and eventually reinvaded successfully in 1794. But there was a cost: to pay for his fomenting of counter-revolution he hocked Louisiana and other French properties to Britain. With France disengaged from North America, Britain  had the whip hand over the uppity colonials and won the War of 1812, controlling all of North America into the late 21st Century (latterly on a Canadian “member of Empire” model, rather than direct rule). Britain henceforth not only ruled the waves (having sequestered the French fleet): it ruled half of terra firma. 

Louis XVI reinstalled himself as a reforming monarch and the Revolution stalled, spluttered and died. Louis, a convinced Catholic, retained strong support from the powerful and fiercely anti-revolutionary Church, while his encouragement of legislative self-government separated the mass of revolutionaries from the Jacobin hardliners. Thus, he commanded majority support. However, bound to the Church as the new France was, it made stony ground for science, and France’s Industrial Revolution was henceforth a stuttering affair similar to that of its southern neighbour, Spain. (Britain, meanwhile, boomed.)

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The “proto-communists” of the Revolution did not disappear entirely: their creed was taken up by an obscure German PhD student called Karl Marx. However, he failed to find a following outside students in the newer universities and “polytechnics”. Moderate socialism, however, became a mass force, under the banner “Reform not Revolution!” Indeed, this became the mantra of the entire of Europe. “Ink not Blood!” was another popular slogan. 

The definitive termination of the revolutionary mindset in France itself came with Louis XVI’s exiling of “The 500″ (the principal leaders of the Revolution) to the island of  New Caledonia where, deprived of vin rouge and tobacco, the scarlet and the black, they withered and died. Louis’s political adroitness — the exile was torture which appeared to be clemency — was compared to that of Machiavelli’s Prince.

Inevitably, monarchist France, isolated and enfeebled militarily, produced no sturm und drang reaction in its Germanic neighbours, who failed to proceed beyond a loose federation of Ruritanians. (Essentially, there was nothing for them to unite against; as the saying goes, no grit, no oyster.) “Romanticism” achieved a certain following in Germanic coffee houses and bierkellers. But no more than that.

In a cause célèbre one such Romantic, Adolf Hitler, fell off his ladder in 1967 while daubing anti-Jewish slogans on the walls of the Reichstag. His 30-person strong National Socialist Party claimed he was pushed by agents of the Rothschild banking dynasty. The pathologist’s report determined that Herr Hitler had suffered an aneurism, which was accepted by the house painter’s lover, Bruno, 72.

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Curiously, despite its diminished standing in Europe, there were two spheres in which France led the continent post-Restoration, these being philosophy and music. With the planet dominated by three centuries of the British political model of safely safely pragmatism, French philosophes continually engaged with what 20th Century Parisian academic Jean-Paul Sartre termed “The Ennui of Anglicisation” in his book Critique de la raison Britannique. (In his suicide note Sartre declared “The British Way is So Boring I Revolt by Self-Murder”; a number of other philosophes imitated him, including the Marxist adherent Louis Althusser, who strangled himself with his wife’s stocking.)

To the disappointment — and contempt — of the philosophes, the people showed no inclination to either rise in rebellion or to self-annihilate. Latent hankerings for the excitement of revolution in This Most Boring of All Possible Worlds (see Jacques Derrida, Writing and Indifference, 1962) were ultimately diverted into “pop rock”, the ultimate Anglo-Saxon cultural victory. And so French entertainer Johnny Hallyday became the biggest-selling singer on the planet in the second half of the 20th century, after re-releasing all his songs in English.