Thank God for Sydney Sweeney

Russia’s elites are running scared

In the early 2000s, Russia’s elite partied like royalty, says Kate de Pury in 1843. Glossy magazines covered lavish events where ministers and oligarchs downed vintage champagne and were treated to exclusive performances by Western pop stars. At the St Petersburg forum – the “Russian Davos” – politicians and technocrats would retire to the city’s imperial palaces to scoff black caviar with foreign business leaders. Today, those same elites are “reclusive and fearful”. They were “scarcely visible” at this year’s St Petersburg forum, venturing out of the VIP zone only to attend Vladimir Putin’s panel. Some have even moved to the countryside. The reason for this is simple: they can “scent changes in the air”.

Until recently, Russia’s top tier was essentially a “honeycomb” of interlinked clans surrounding Putin: the oligarchs; the cronies from his St Petersburg days; the much-feared siloviki, his old muckers from the security services. But the war in Ukraine has shaken up this system. Today, the Russian president values one thing above all else: people’s ability to “help him win the war”. Top politicians and business tycoons have scrambled to prove their patriotism, in some cases by surrendering assets – the state has seized $50bn worth of private holdings since 2022. Those scapegoated for the war’s failures are finding that, unlike before the conflict, there is “nothing to cushion their fall”. The few siloviki who have the president’s ear keep files on everyone else, and if they find something “juicy” – such as links to the West – they’re sure to tell him. Hence why the elites are keeping themselves to themselves. Until they know “who’s in, who’s out and who might be informing on them”, socialising or networking isn’t worth the risk.

😘🇷🇺 Another change is that Putin is appointing family members to positions of power. Anna Tsivilova, who is widely reported to be the president’s cousin, is a deputy minister at the defence department and one of the Ukraine war’s “most recognisable representatives”. Katerina Tikhonova, who is thought to be Putin’s daughter, plays an increasingly prominent role at the St Petersburg forum.

“Like something crafted by a boozed-up Norse God”

You only have to drive five minutes from the Faroe Islands’ “windy, stomach-churning” airport, says Sean Thomas in The Spectator, before the landscape “twists into legend”. Scenery alternates between Lord of the Rings (“but more menacing”) and something crafted by a boozed-up Norse God. Nightmarish single-track tunnels give way to “dramatic buttes” crumbling into the Atlantic. Mad farmers plough near-vertical slopes, and waterfalls spray joyously from enormous cliffs, dissolving into the lacy surf 300 yards below. The land feels tormented, as if the sky and the sea endured a bitter divorce and the cliffs are their jagged, furious children. But the people are oddly rich, thanks to fish, and the architecture is a compelling melange of chic Nordic modernism, American suburbia and a historic core of wood and turf, cobbles and fishing nets.

The islanders, possibly out of boredom, are “not afraid of strong flavours”. In a whaleman’s cottage with a grass roof, I am served sea urchin toast – “puréed orange gonads carefully piped onto a tiny brioche soaked in soy”. It sounds like something that’s been dreamt up in a sadist’s lab, but it’s divine – better than anything I ate on a recent week in a posh bit of France. Next is Greenlandic snow crab, drizzled in butter infused with burnt onion. “It is the platonic ideal of crab.” One evening, dining with Andor the fisherman – who looks like he could wrangle a shark with his bare hands – I am given beer, schnapps, potato soup, delicious salmon, and “fermented sheep meat”. This local delicacy, ræst kjøt, is basically mutton left to “rot politely” in a shed for two months. “You will never forget it, no matter how much you try.”

Labour has forgotten that politics is a fight

This Labour government is becoming defined by its inability to argue, says Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. Keir Starmer and his ministers are so “constitutionally incapable” of picking sides or making enemies that there’s not a single group they’re prepared to trade blows with. Not bankers, not private equity barons, not even “obstreperous trade unionists”. After racking my brains, the Downing Street shitlist amounts to: “Jeremy Corbyn, Michelle Mone, bats and newts.” It’s why the party cannot discern “Starmerism” and why the PM’s speeches are such “utter blancmange”. And with the budget due next month, this is about to become more damaging, “perhaps even fatal”.

If, as seems almost certain, the government breaks its election promise not to hike income tax, national insurance or VAT, it needs to get out there and start “making arguments”. They should have spent months – years even – arguing that the public realm needs investment, reminding voters that the average British worker is currently taxed less than counterparts in most of western Europe, and explaining how exactly they’re going to fix a broken country. Instead, “nothing” – and that vacuum is being filled by Reform and the Tories banging on about a lying government (“fair”) and a fiscal crisis (“nonsense”). Labour has forgotten that, in its essence, “politics is a fight”. Think of Tony Blair’s battle with his own party over scrapping the overtly socialist language of Clause IV from Labour’s constitution. Think of Gordon Brown painstakingly softening up the public for a penny on taxes to pay for the NHS, and of George Osborne fighting for spending cuts for years. And then look at this government, “leaving the door to No 10 flapping wide open” because it’s too feeble to fight.

🏠🙄 One of Labour’s biggest problems, says Chris Blackhurst in The Independent, is that for all its talk of wanting more growth, the government seems determined to alienate the very people who can help them achieve that. The rumoured new “mansion tax”, for example, would drive yet more rich taxpayers abroad while doing hardly anything to plug the “yawning gap” in the public finances. Even Rachel Reeves’s old boss at the Bank of England, Mervyn King, has said the strategy is not “coherent”.