When Keir Starmer was in opposition, says Aaron Bastani in UnHerd, he tried to cast Labour as “the party of public probity”. That claim looks “downright absurd” in light of the Epstein-Mandelson revelations, which could become “the country’s most seismic political scandal since the Profumo Affair”. But in truth, the rot started a long time ago – back, not coincidentally, when Peter Mandelson’s New Labour were in their pomp. It was Tony Blair’s polling supremo Philip Gould who concluded that the post-industrial working class wanted washing machines, not ideals or utopias. And discarded alongside the ideological refuse of the 20th century was “any belief in an ethical life”.

The reason Mandelson was so relaxed about briefing Epstein on the inner workings of government is that for him and his comrades, the truth is always subordinate to the needs of the moment. The same went for sexing up dossiers to provide a pretext for illegal and unpopular wars, and for exchanging cash for honours. It’s no accident that Jonathan Powell, formerly Tony Blair’s chief of staff and now Starmer’s national security adviser, wrote a book titled The New Machiavelli. Rather than government being an instrument to achieve a particular vision – social democracy, national renewal, free markets – it became an end in itself. This in turn gave rise to one of the “ugliest pathologies” in modern public life: that if politics was about technique rather than morality, then how you behaved, and the consequences of any dodgy behaviour, didn’t matter. The end always justified the means. Understand this, and the actions of not just Mandelson but also Blair and Alastair Campbell become much easier to understand. “This was politics, at its worst, at the end of history.” Of course its inheritors are going down in flames.

It’s bad news from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs this week, says Douglas Murray in The Spectator. According to reports from the bureaucrats in charge of rural life, the countryside is too much of a “white environment” and is principally enjoyed by the “white middle class”. Our natural landscapes risk becoming “irrelevant”, they say, unless they can become more multicultural. I wasn’t aware that it was the job of nature to be “relevant”. Are the fields and hedgerows meant to change and adapt to the zeitgeist? I’d have thought not. In fact, if you want to witness a rapidly changing environment, there are any number of city centres I can recommend. Personally, I go to the country precisely to witness something “unchanging, steadfast and even eternal”.

The 2020 Netflix drama The Queen’s Gambit, about a woman who becomes the world’s best chess player, is “fiction from first to last”, says Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. But there really is a woman who rose very close to the top of the male-dominated game, and Netflix has now, “finally”, made a documentary about her. Her name is Judit Polgár, and she is the youngest of three Hungarian sisters who became part of an experiment conducted by their educational psychologist father, László, to prove that “genius” could be taught. László and his wife had the girls home-schooled with chess as the sole subject, hiring tutors who worked in three shifts a day, morning to night. “There was no relaxation, no weekends,” says Judit. “I started my training at the age of five and every day was work.”

The experiment succeeded. Susan, the eldest sister, became the strongest female player in the world. Sofia, the middle sibling, triumphed over a top-class male field at a 1989 tournament in Rome. And Judit was the best of the three. At her peak, in her late twenties, she was the world’s eighth highest-ranked player, male or female. Before her, “no woman had even got into the top 200”. In 2002 she achieved one of her greatest ambitions: winning a game, on her 15th attempt, against Garry Kasparov. László, a “grim and unsmiling” man, was pleased with her achievements but characteristically disappointed she hadn’t made it to the very top. “To be number one,” he says, “she would have had to work three or four hours a day more.”

♟️🤣 I first played Judit at her family’s “small damp apartment” in Budapest in 1988, when she was 12. She played with her back to the board, and “I stared at her ponytails while she remorselessly annihilated me”. At her 2024 chess festival, I was a member of one of eight teams she played against simultaneously. At one point our group came up with a “fiendish little trap”, and we tried to hide our excitement as Judit approached our board. She looked at us, then at the board. She immediately spotted our trap – of course she did – and laughed: “Such innocent faces!”

Watch Queen of Chess on Netflix here.