The joys of ageing naturally

Why socialism could make a comeback

Everyone’s heard that old joke, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal: if you’re not a socialist when you’re 20, you don’t have a heart; if you’re still a socialist at 40, you don’t have a brain. But the lure of socialism has strengthened in recent years. This is in part because memories of the Cold War are fading. Back then, the standard-bearer for the ideology was the Soviet Union, “a prison colony for very poorly remunerated serfs”. Today, the faces of socialism are not “crusty old trade union leaders with bad breath”; they’re the likes of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “30-somethings from New York whom you might not mind matching with on a dating site”. Another factor is the mainstreaming of far-left ideology in higher education, which is spitting out 22-year-olds with “silly yet corrosive” views on things like intersectionality and decolonisation.

Yet this may only be the start. In the past, we could at least rely on the “relentless economic logic of capitalism” to change people’s minds. Now the evidence is mounting that AI will wipe out white-collar jobs at a much faster rate than other kinds of work. A study published last month by Microsoft found that the 40 jobs most at risk from the technology include financial analysts, management analysts and public-relations specialists. All that expensive education, and naff-all to show for it. Heck, it’s “enough to make Marxism-Leninism start to make sense”. All this seems likely to cement the “great political inversion of the past 50 years”: the educated elites shifting left and the people without a college degree moving right. And if you think young people are bad now, imagine what they’ll be like “when they actually have something to complain about”.

💸😢 My hope is if Mamdani does win the NYC mayoral election, says George Will in The Washington Post, he’ll become “America’s François Mitterrand”. The French president was elected in 1981 promising a “rupture with capitalism”, and implemented sweeping nationalisations, higher taxes on investors, and so on. And it was a disaster. In 1982, he had to pivot to austerity, conceding that he couldn’t continue to “crush” France’s wealth creators – setting back socialism for “several generations”.

The motorsport pin-up who walked her pet tigers around Belgravia

Lady Sarah Aspinall, who died earlier this summer aged 80, was a saucer-eyed beauty “in the Twiggy mould” who modelled mini dresses for Mary Quant, says The Daily Telegraph. Known familiarly as Sally, she married racing driver Piers Courage in 1966, and they became the “pin-ups of motorsport” – car-maker Charles Lucas described them as “something out of F Scott Fitzgerald”. After Courage died in a racing accident in 1970, Sally was asked out by John Aspinall, who owned a casino and a zoo, and who kept tigers and Himalayan bears at his Belgravia home. “I needed a woman,” he recalled. “I looked in my telephone book to see who I knew… I saw Sally’s name and knew that Piers had just been killed in a Formula One race, so I asked her out to lunch.”

In the first year of their marriage, she reared three baby gorillas, a tigress cub and a litter of wolves. She would walk their tigers around Belgravia at night, only once experiencing a biting incident – provoked, she said, by “wearing a coat that my big tiger didn’t like”. In 1972, John sold his casino to funnel money into his “zoo empire”. When they were ruined by the stock market crash the following year, Sally sold her jewellery to keep the animals in feed, and by 1991 there were more than 1,000 in the menagerie. “We went bust several times,” Sally once said. “John took the view that objects and pictures were for the good times, and in the bad times, they went.”

The 12-year-old being groomed to run North Korea

Kim Jong-un introduced his daughter to the world in November 2022 with a show of “affection and menace”, say Pablo Robles and Choe Sang-Hun in The New York Times: “holding her hand in front of an intercontinental ballistic missile”. Since then, Kim Ju-ae, who is thought to be just 12, has featured more and more prominently alongside her father at official events: state banquets; military parades, meetings with foreign dignitaries. Her manner has become noticeably more refined – she even claps differently – and her clothes are more formal. When she joined her dad to inspect a new agricultural complex last year, state media described them as “great persons of guidance” – an honorific previously reserved for only North Korea’s leader and his “designated successor”.

If Kim Ju-ae really is being groomed to succeed her father, as South Korean intelligence agencies suspect, we know very little about her. She is thought to have at least one and possibly two siblings. North Korea’s citizens don’t even know her name – state media refers to her only as the “most beloved”, “respected” or “dear” daughter of the leader. (The West knows what she’s called because the retired NBA star Dennis Rodman met the Kim family during a bizarre visit to the country in 2013.) Analysts say 41-year-old Kim probably wants to prepare a successor in part to avoid the mistake his father made – it was only after Kim Jong-il suffered a stroke in 2008 that his son was unveiled as the “heir apparent”, leading to initial scepticism that the younger man was up to the job. And Kim’s lifestyle doesn’t exactly lend itself to longevity. He weighs around 22 stone; smokes, eats and drinks heavily; and often stays up into the early hours surfing the internet, “where he likes to browse weapons sites”.