More and more often Rome is a space contested by different visions of the city colliding into one another. In this picture the trees frame three and a half thousand years of history folded one atop the other: the obelisk dates from around 1400 BCE and was taken from Karnak at a time when Roman Emperors maintained an obsession with pilfering symbols of the former glory of the Egyptian empire, and eventually was re-erected in front of the Apostolic Palace of the Lateran, the Pope’s residence in Rome – no, he doesn’t officially reside in the Vatican. In front of both, a few hundred protestors hastily gathered after hearing the news of more Israeli impunity, illegally seizing vessels over 500 nautical miles from territorial waters which were bound to deliver aid to Gazans.

Since the mirage of the ceasefire, the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s attention has been diverted away from the facts on the ground in Gaza. Here are a few:

Gaza’s displaced population — around 90% of residents — is facing a severe public health crisis. Tens of thousands of cases of rodent-linked infections have been recorded this year, and the majority of displacement sites are reporting skin conditions like scabies and lice. These conditions are a direct result of the collapse of basic living conditions, and they are compounding an already catastrophic healthcare situation in which an estimated 300,000 people are chronically ill. Around 18,000 patients have been identified for medical evacuation but remain unable to leave.

The flow of aid into Gaza remains dangerously inadequate. Only around 100 to 230 trucks are entering daily, far below the 600 stipulated in ceasefire terms — and even below the 500 that entered each day before the war. Essential medicines and medical equipment are not getting through, and many goods are being blocked under broad “dual-use” classifications that critics say are unconvincing. The restrictions have covered everything from MRI diagnostic equipment to tent poles and generators needed by hundreds of thousands of displaced people sheltering along the southern coast.

The destruction of infrastructure has pushed the crisis further. Half a million people were officially declared to be experiencing famine in August 2025. Clean water is critically scarce, with the vast majority of Gaza’s water and sewage infrastructure destroyed. Water trucks have been fired upon and boreholes destroyed, leaving communities without safe water access. Unexploded ordnance meanwhile continues to pose a constant danger to civilians and aid convoys alike.

The Global Sumud Flotilla would barely scratch the surface, but their efforts are a response to the flagrant dereliction of internationally coordinated government action. So too are those who continue to turn up in numbers in the streets. It is against this backdrop that those few hundred people gathered in Rome — and why the image of them standing beneath three thousand years of accumulated power feels like more than a footnote.

Take a picture of Rome these days and you will more than likely capture a city full of contradictions: its dysfunction set against its wondrous relics, a memory replete with religion, with colonialism, with fallen empire, all squashed one against the other. The same city that absorbed the obelisks of pharaohs and the authority of emperors now hosts, however briefly, the voices of people who refuse the same old logic — that the powerful may take what they want, destroy what they choose, and starve who they please. The stones of Rome have witnessed every version of that argument. But more and more often, Rome’s present is being felt and heard on the street, flag in hand, the megaphone’s volume turned all the way up. The question, as it has always been, is whether this time the answer will be different.

The internet salivates over this kind of celebrity ‘take.’

Yes, declaring oneself in principle against ever sending or receiving a voicenote does seem to follow the ever-multiplying suite of new ways in which people present themselves and find expression in the world. Think of Dry January, or the proliferation of vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and lactose-free options you now find in the supermarket or on a restaurant menu.

We cater to an ever-growing checklist of dietary needs that would have been mind-bogglingly foreign to the way the silent majority moved through and consumed society, say, thirty years ago. And aside from brands seizing the opportunity to flood the market with more goods for more people to consume, I think this phenomenon is broadly a good one. It is a sign of a more inclusive society that we have arrived at a moment where people’s needs and principles are respected and catered for. But the antipathy towards voicenotes has a different quality — one that speaks to cultures and societies with a particular and precious conception of how time and communication nurture relationships.

To be clear, I understand the aversion. We live in an increasingly overwhelming period of media saturation. There is a paradox typical of our modern age: while we remain more interconnected than ever, we appear more fragmented — polarised politically and across the culture wars, yet simultaneously more anxious about the erosion of community and the bonds between neighbours, friends, and families. The promise that technology appeared to offer — from the printing press to the telegraph to the more recent emergence of the iPhone and now generative AI — of linear progress feels more and more like a Faustian pact in which something akin to our human souls is being sold off to a handful of Big Tech monopolies.

The scale of this transaction is astonishing. Since its arrival in 2009, WhatsApp is now used by 3.3 billion people across 180 countries and is available in 60 languages. Telegram has 1 billion users; iMessage, the dominant messenger app in the United States, 1.3 billion. By comparison, in 1900, Western Union recorded 63 million telegram messages transmitted in a single year.

The sheer volume of people communicating is historically unprecedented. Which naturally raises the question: what are the tools with which they communicate? Because while the overload of information beamed into a phone every day is contributing to greater anxiety, we must also recognise that there is enormous creativity to be found in the growing array of communicative languages available to us.

Back in the era of the brick phone, you were charged per text — sometimes 10p per message. The result was the evolution of abbreviated, curtailed language, with its own rules and vernacular. We know them all.

TLDR - check your voicenote privilege.

Today, the arrival of emojis, stickers, GIFs, memes, and reactions has swelled the ranks of this abbreviated vocabulary, pushing messaging towards new heights of postmodernity. Put simply, we have never had as many tools with which to express ourselves. And whilst I can understand a period of bewilderment and generational division as we constantly readjust to the latest thing — think punctuation smiley faces twenty years ago, or the irritatingly redundant ‘poke’ on Facebook, to Twitter’s 140-character limit and now the legion of memes at our disposal — I think we ought to look past that bewilderment and marvel at the inventiveness and speed with which we now communicate instantaneously across continents.

Means so much, means too much, much of a muchness.

Voicenotes, ironically enough, are a rare exception to all these novel forms of expressive communication. Ever since Edison’s phonograph, we have had ways of leaving oral records — you would come home and check whether there were any messages on your answering machine. With the waning of the landline and the explosion of mobile phone use, the voicemail became a relic of 1990s nostalgia. That is until WhatsApp combined both functions in 2013. From WhatsApp, Telegram, or iMessage, you can now communicate orally, visually, and textually in a single conversation. The tools are comprehensive; it is up to the user to choose.

So why, then, are people anti-voicenotes?

At first consideration, it has the character of modern Luddism — a blend of dismay, disdain, and anxiety at the deluge of compulsive media imagery. The screen’s artificial light, spreading artificial mistruths, peddling artificial intelligence, and selling artificial advertisements, all cascading to insinuate themselves into your past, present, and future life — this understandably provokes a kind of visceral revulsion. But the modern Luddite still uses these tools; they simply emphasise loudly, to anyone who will listen, that they do their best to switch off, striking some balance between doomscrolling and silent meditation. Nor does modern Luddism explain why the anti-voicenote sentiment is heard more acutely in certain cultures and not others.

A recent BBC article attempted to explain precisely this — why voicenotes have flourished globally, yet continue to struggle for traction in Britain. YouGov research reveals a striking picture: 63% of UK smartphone users have never sent a voicenote, while approaching half have never received one. Only 5% send them on a daily basis. The generational gap is real — one in eight 18-to-24-year-olds sends voicenotes daily — but the overall disposition remains one of mild distaste: just 16% of UK smartphone users say they like sending them, compared to 36% who actively dislike doing so.

The global picture could not be more different. Meta data shows that Brazilians send four times as many voicenotes as people in any other country. Voice messaging is widespread across Argentina, Brazil, Germany, India, and Spain, and WhatsApp penetration in Africa sits at 97% in Kenya, 96% in South Africa, and 95% in Nigeria — regions where voicenotes are not a feature but a primary mode of communication. Italy, too, is classified as a polychronic culture, and Italian voicenote usage is notably higher than its Northern European neighbours. The map of voicenote adoption, in other words, follows a cultural logic that has nothing to do with technological access and everything to do with attitudes towards time, speech, and the nature of relationships.

What this reveals is a cultural point about the intersection of communication, time, and what we consider a relationship to be worth. My own anecdotal evidence from living in London, Beirut, Rome, and Bogotá is a difference in the cultural conception of time itself.

In Northern European and American societies, time is conceived as monochronic — linear, finite, and by consequence a commodity. Time, after all, is money. These cultures were shaped by the factory clock of the Industrial Revolution. Before industrialisation, time was measured by how long a task took to complete — you worked until the job was done. Moving the masses onto the assembly line imposed a fixed schedule for the first time: shifts, punch clocks, and rigid hours. This was also the era of standardised time zones: before the railways, towns ran on local solar time; the need to coordinate trains across regions made uniform, measurable time a social and economic necessity. Educational institutions followed suit, training children to sit still, follow schedules, move between subjects on a bell, and treat time as a structured resource — producing, in essence, compliant monochronic workers. Max Weber saw a link between the rise of the industrial powerhouses of Northern Europe and America and Protestant values — diligence and punctuality undergirded by the moral weight of not ‘wasting’ time.

The rest of the world — what we broadly call the modern Global South — did not undergo the same structural transformation and inclined instead towards polychronic societies. Where monochronic cultures do one thing at a time in a planned, sequential order, polychronic cultures are characterised by spontaneity, simultaneity, and a more fluid approach to scheduling. In polychronic cultures, relationships take precedence over process; intuition over pure logic; the texture of an interaction over its punctuality. Italy is a telling example — industrialised, yes, but retaining a deeply polychronic social culture in which the quality of an exchange is considered inseparable from the time given to it.

It is here that the voicenote becomes something more than a convenience — it becomes emblematic of an entirely different conception of what communication is for. In a monochronic culture, a voicenote is an imposition: it arrives at an inconvenient moment, it cannot be skimmed, it demands your full and sequential attention, and it refuses to be efficiently processed alongside other tasks. It violates the sanctity of the schedule. In a polychronic culture, the same voicenote is the message: the warmth of the voice, the tone, the very fact that someone gave their time to reach out — these are not inefficiencies, or a burden, they are the point.

Mr Bean speaks out!

There is a further, final dimension to this, one which reaches beyond culture and into inclusion. In El Chocó, Colombia — one of the most biodiverse regions on earth and also one of its most historically neglected — illiteracy rates remain among the highest in the country, a direct legacy of decades of conflict, geographic isolation, and systemic under-investment in education. For communities here, the written word is not a neutral tool; it is one that has historically excluded them. Over here, voicenotes are a powerful instrument of inclusion, breaking down literacy barriers that might otherwise prevent someone from using a smartphone to communicate. For many locals, writing long messages in a standardised script is often slow, intimidating, or simply less comfortable. For Latin American communities historically marginalised from spaces like academia, where traditional archival techniques dominate, oral histories have always been a significant part of the culture — and the voicenote is simply their contemporary form.

To be anti-voicenote, then, is not merely a lifestyle preference or a dietary need. In certain corners of the world, it is a position of quiet privilege.

Being a stranger in a foreign land can sometimes lead to unusual and surprising perspectives. Living in Rome is to be surrounded by nostalgia — not so much for the ruins and echoes of antiquity, but for a way of life that traces its existence to just before the modern age: a liminal space, a brief prelude to the full onslaught of the scale and pressure of the twenty-first century. It must be said, it’s a myopic nostalgia, one that blearily omits the obvious flaws of being trapped in the stasis of the past. So, bear with me a minute.

We all know why we were attracted to smoking when we were young. It was cool. Those older than us did it; lighting up offered a gateway to shedding our infancy. How keen we were to grow up, how quickly being able to confidently buy that inoffensive — if illegal — packet of cigarettes in our early teens marked us as no longer children. Smoking brought us together, bound in a shared experience that was exciting to discover: which brands were cheaper, which were stronger, which burnt quicker. To become a smoker was a cultural rite of passage.

Before long, smoking morphed into gradations — new levels to accompany different stages of life. It was one thing to sneak a cigarette behind school and overpower the stink with deodorant. But that teenage ritual of mutiny was quickly outpaced by the arrival of university life and, with it, the economic weight of permanently skating the edge of your overdraft. The imagined maturity, the buzz of rebellion against the autocrats that were parents and teachers, the thrill of underage defiance — all of it vanished by the time we matriculated for our degrees. But smoking, like all great vices, always finds a way to claw out new justifications for further exploration, new practices through which to bind people in common cause.

And so, in the frugality of student life arrived the art of rolling. Now you could take your smoking further: new brands to discover, new grammages of tobacco to understand, and, most of all, an art form that demanded dexterity. Make no mistake — rolling is a craft. The delicacy with which you must pinch the right dose of baccy, measure it alongside a filter, balance both atop a flimsy skin of paper, then roll down, down, down, further than you think before clipping the underside and rolling smoothly back up to produce that straight, clean rollie you had in your mind’s eye.

The know-how, the tips and tricks were all part of this new level. Once again, we were bound together in a communal initiation. Smoking filled out the new spaces of our lives. It was the friend we reached for when we were cold in our damp student quarters; the thing that brought calm to the stress of exams; it quietened hunger and satisfied our appetites after the hazy fullness of dinner or the afterglow of sex. Rolling a cigarette gave you time to connect with a friend; asking for a lighter was an easy introduction to flirt with someone outside the library or in the smoking area.

But, alas, it couldn’t last. Rolling and smoking cigarettes always seemed destined to remain cuffed to the manacles of youth. By the time we were leaving university, friends were making grand proclamations about quitting “in a few years, down the line.” All good addicts comfort themselves with virtuous statements to soothe their vice. Our gambler’s promise was to invent a deadline: “I’ll quit by twenty-five.” And when twenty-five came and went, by thirty.

Smoking in our mid and later twenties was steadily worn down by the weight of one state intervention after another. In the UK, we had already missed the boat on smoking indoors — banned in 2007. A year later came the large health warnings: cold-faced babies, flaccid phalluses, putrid arteries — all in a feeble attempt to dissuade our teenage minds from getting started. By 2015, no shop could openly display tobacco, and two years later manufacturers were prohibited from showing their brands. Gone were the days of comparing Camel Blues to Marlboro Reds, of picking and choosing between liquorice papers or the classic green Rizla+. Now, choosing to smoke was harder, the vibrancy of vice stripped away and anonymised, your tobacco and papers wrapped in dull grey packaging, hidden behind a dull grey counter.

Not satisfied with rendering the act of buying cigarettes mutely uninteresting, the state went after the smoker’s wallet. Prices shot up and up. As students, we could buy five grams of yellow-and-green Amber Leaf for a fiver — a three-in-one of baccy, filter and skins. Today, the minimum quantity is thirty grams, setting you back £26. The old and trusted association between being skint yet still able to hold onto a cigarette was torn up in a state-imposed cost-of-smoking crisis. And whereas smoking once managed to reinvent itself with each generation, now the market itself had to evolve. With the direction of evolution so clearly stamped — the Neanderthal smoker facing extinction — the manufacturers birthed a new species: homo vapien.

A liquid heated to produce vapour rather than smoke, and which, while filled with nicotine, could neatly sidestep all the regulations imposed on traditional tobacco giants. Advertising and branding were back. Vape design brought the unlikely marriage of candy-store colours and Silicon Valley sleekness. Smokers-turned-vapers puffed away on cosplay Apple AirPods and exhaled the sickly-sweet scent of supersmoothies.

That’s the story, more or less, in the UK — and mostly across Europe. But in Italy, or rather in Rome, the smoker still holds on. Here there seems to be a window into a brief moment before the onslaught of price hikes and beige packaging. Tobacco is still affordable, brands are still displayed, and while health warnings exist, they remain unchanged. Vapes and their owners exist too but remain thankfully a rump minority.

There are meteorological factors as well. Smoking has been banned indoors for twenty years, but the social life of Rome unfolds outdoors — on terraces, in piazzas — such that the cigarette feels comfortable and confident in its continued existence.

The Italian smoker is, undeniably, cooler than the British one. Where the Brits learnt to roll with steadfast proficiency, the Romans took it a step further with the finesse of the backroll: turn the paper around, roll inside-out, and finish by neatly tearing off the leftover millimetre. Every Roman smoker does it.

Smoking here still seems to evolve with life itself. Italy remains a society that celebrates its older generations far more than any other country I’ve lived in. You see it daily: an older woman enters a shop, elegant but hunched, her face carved in wrinkles softened by careful make-up that beautifies her age rather than disguising it. The suggestion of smoking is already present and confirmed when she speaks. Hers is the smoker’s voice — vocal cords fumigated through decades of practice, a once smooth tone harrowed down and turned gravelly and rich. Listening to that voice evokes nostalgia. Italy is full of such voices, gifted later in life by the cigarette.

If there is a link between smoking and a culture that honours its elders, it is not direct. But there is something to be said for Italy’s older generation being unafraid of the cultural current emanating from the United States — that unhealthy obsession with youth and cosmetic perfection. Before Hollywood stars poured their wealth into surgery, they first banished the cigarette. Yet whenever you gain something new, you also lose something old. Look at the calibre of Hollywood’s most potent voices and you see what we’ve lost: Richard Burton, Lauren Bacall, Orson Welles, James Earl Jones, Katharine Hepburn — all smokers whose voices rasped with authority. Today’s surgically smooth A-listers cannot muster quite the same gravitas.

Of course, I don’t mean to ignore the health concerns. The statistics are stark: around 90,000 people die each year because of smoking in Italy — more than alcohol, drugs, road accidents, murders, and suicides combined. And while regulation in the UK has pushed smoking rates down to around twelve percent, in Italy, where branding and price remain looser, roughly a quarter of the population still lights up. From a public-health perspective, there’s no defending this. Yet culture rarely moves in step with medicine, and something of value is often lost in the trade.

Perhaps that loss is what we should pause to consider. In driving smoking out of our public lives, we have also eroded the small, ritualistic spaces that once bound people together — the pauses outside a bar, the shared lighter, the fleeting conversation between strangers. In their place has come a new addiction, less tactile but no less consuming: the endless scroll, the dopamine drip of the screen. The cigarette may have dulled our lungs, but the phone dulls our minds.

And so, Italy’s tolerance of smoking feels, in its way, like a tolerance of imperfection itself — a willingness to let life show its cracks and its stains. The smoker’s rasping voice, the lined face, the visible passage of time: these are reminders that to live fully is to wear one’s years openly. Where the young elsewhere trade nicotine for narcissism, smoke for the selfie, Italy still leaves room for the human flaw, for the crooked beauty of ageing unfiltered. In defending the smoker, perhaps what we’re really defending is the idea that life, like a good cigarette, is meant to be shared, savoured, and allowed to burn all the way down to its very end.

Then we had André Villas-Boas at the helm. Fans currently bemoaning Rosenior’s appointment as the least deserving in Premier League history would do well to remember the fiasco of AVB’s brief tenure. Abramovich had him pinned as a mini-Mourinho and, except for the utter lack of charisma, tactical nous, man-management skills, and Shakespearean press performances, he may well have been right — they did at least both hold Portuguese passports.

That performance in Naples was the last straw. Villas-Boas got the boot, and assistant and fan-favourite Roberto Di Matteo stepped up, guiding us to a miraculous 4–1 victory at home. Ivanović loitered in space to sweep home Drogba’s low drive across the six-yard box and win it. Ecstasy. In 2012, somehow, we went on and on and all the way to Munich to beat Bayern in their own backyard on penalties.

You never forget your first, as they say, and Chelsea fans these days are often found daydreaming about that run. I was seventeen then, in my final year of sixth form, and despite my school being the building next to Stamford Bridge, I’d never really been into football. But being a teenage boy without even the mildest pretence of supporting a team would be a bit like trying to claim to be a Jewish atheist in Belfast during the Troubles. You’ve got to have a confession of one sort or another. So whenever asked the equivalent question — Protestant or Catholic? — I’d answer: yeah, Chelsea.

That year, though, I really did get religious. Those two legs against Naples were my Damascene moment. And to fend off any accusations of glory-hunting, I’d invite a bookie to dust off the odds of Chelsea becoming champions after that first-leg defeat. They must have been astronomical. The route to victory embodied whatever truth there is behind the clichés of the Chelsea way: we like to win first; how we win matters less. If we can’t win, we should at least be hard to beat. A solid defence, a gritty mentality, and a charismatic striker with a habit of scoring in finals — that was the formula fourteen years ago. See how easy it is to fall into clichés?

Oh, how different we are now. Who would have thought a change in ownership could send such seismic reverberations through a club — its culture and even the way it plays football? On the pitch, Chelsea under BlueCo — a consortium of billionaires and private equity — have embraced a style befitting the current obsession with tactics and metrics. Players are measured to within an inch of their lives to maximise their “great expectations”: xG, xA, x-metres-run-into-space-squared, ad nauseam.

Off the pitch, it’s an uncanny valley of market-based assessments. Chelsea players almost appear human. They have names like Reece James and Enzo Fernández. But from the vantage point of BlueCo’s accounting department, they are more legible as stock options — investments to be bought and traded at the right moment. The squad is young — the youngest in the Premier League — youth guaranteeing enough time to see whether assets yield an adequate return. Fans fall in love with players for what they bring to the pitch: a tackle to rouse the stadium, a drop of the shoulder to dart into the box. But when every pass, sprint and shot is logged elsewhere, fed into a valuation formula, the romance curdles.

And as if one club governed by financiers’ logic weren’t enough, BlueCo’s model is one of shared ownership. A year after buying Chelsea, they acquired RC Strasbourg. Despite claims that the two clubs are distinct projects, the reality is obvious. Racing is a feeder club, its interest in winning Ligue 1 secondary to producing assets that may or may not be absorbed into Chelsea’s balance sheet. Even the manager is a plaything. Liam Rosenior is probably a very nice if boring person. But it is his position at the end of puppet strings — dangled beneath BlueCo’s green-greedy fingers — that deepens the fans’ disenchantment.

Bizarrely, the whole post-2022 spectacle has induced many of the Chelsea faithful towards unfashionable views on Russian oligarchs. It’s a contradictory emotion. No club suffered more from the Russo-phobia that followed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Abramovich was hit particularly hard. No one outside Chelsea ever liked his money or the way he splashed it in the early 2000s, but he left behind the world’s envy in the women’s team, a stellar academy, and a generation of ecstatic memories. After selling the club, Abramovich didn’t retreat to a yacht; he actively mediated between Russia and Ukraine — and for his trouble was poisoned alongside two Ukrainian negotiators in March 2022. I struggle to name many football owners who put in a comparable shift.

As much as the English game railed against Abramovich in 2003, his arrival marked the Premier League’s new financial epoch. First the Russians, then the Gulf states — and now? At Chelsea, the Americans. Across the league, wealth flows through sponsorships, media deals and image rights, much of it from across the Atlantic. If Trump were to invade Greenland — or plausibly Gibraltar, given the way his mind wander — would we expect a similar wave of Americaphobia, asset seizures and sanctions? I doubt it.

So, is it déjà vu? Chelsea is still owned by the rich, and football remains defined by money. We’ve swapped a Russian peacemaker for American accountants. Both throw money at the club; only one seemed to galvanise it towards sustained victory. Fourteen years ago, after that evening in Naples, glory felt impossibly distant — and yet it arrived. Today it feels distant again. And despite the apathy that has cooled my youthful religious fervour, I still whisper the same five-word prayer before every game, and I’ll whisper it again tomorrow:

God, I hope we win.

The demonstration was occasioned by a rallying cry: a call to gather in public assembly and fill the street in front of Spintime, an occupied building. There, in front of a makeshift platform, around 2,000 Romans gathered to listen, organise, and inspire one another in defence against the threat of sgombero - eviction. Saturday the 10th was never likely to spill into violence, but it could function as a dress rehearsal should the eviction be carried out.

Lo sgombero

“Abbiamo dato il via a una guerra contro le occupazioni abusive.”

“We have launched a war against illegal occupations,” translates Giorgia Meloni’s position in February 2023. Two months into her premiership, the declaration marked the clear intention of far-right coalition between her Fratelli d’Italia and Matteo Salvini’s Lega. The battle lines were clearly drawn. On one side stood a government eager to flex its law-and-order credentials; on the other, a constellation of occupied spaces - some 91 in total - spread across the peninsula.

The success of this crusade would be overseen by Matteo Piantedosi, Minister of the Interior. With Meloni’s blessing, Piantedosi has been hard at work, coordinating with prefectures across the country to plan the largest evictions.

Only in the last six months has tangible progress been made. In August last year, and again in December, armed carabinieri cleared the historic, 50-year-old Leoncavallo in Milan and Askatasuna in Turin, despite attempts by protesters to prevent it. From the vantage point of Spintime’s occupants, this gathering momentum has induced a palpable anxiety: they may well be next.

Flexing law and order credentials at Leoncavallo last summer.

Occupazioni abusive or CSOA?

Squat or self-managed social centre? The distinction lies at the heart of the eviction campaign and the political philosophies underpinning it. Italy’s occupied spaces have a distinctive and traceable history.

They emerged from the Circoli del proletariato giovanile - Youth Proletariat Circles - in Milan in the mid-1970s, as part of the Autonomia movement.* This current challenged traditional politics on both left and right and embraced direct action: reclaiming cultural goods such as cinema tickets, demanding access to leisure and “luxuries,” and occupying public spaces. These occupations took place in sites of varied provenance - deconsecrated churches, disused factories, farmhouses, empty cinemas - and were populated by the “youth proletariat”: workers, the unemployed or precariously employed, and students. Leoncavallo, a 3,600-square-metre empty warehouse, was first occupied in 1975.

Leoncavallo when the first site was occupied.

Italy in the 1970s and 1980s was undergoing a familiar set of economic and cultural transformations that fuelled this radicalism. The hazy glow of the post-war boom had worn off. Economic expansion had not produced prosperity for all. Italy could boast the fifth-largest economy in the world, but this masked the deindustrialisation of traditional metropolitan areas and mass layoffs. The Fiat 500 - an icon of Italian growth - went out of production in 1975. Unemployment rose from 4 per cent to double digits over the following five years and hovered around 13 per cent through much of the late 1980s and into the mid-1990s.

This was also an era of profound cultural change. The student protests of 1968 were felt in Italy as strongly as in France or the UK. A growing feminist movement developed alongside a rising consumer culture that prized the individual over the collective.

Above all, however, these were the anni di piombo: a twenty-year period of far-left and far-right violence. In 1974, Piazza della Loggia in Brescia was bombed; four years later, Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades; and in 1980 the neo-fascist Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR) bombed Bologna’s central train station, killing 80 people.

Street clashes, kidnappings, bombs, student protests, women marching, workers agitating - these were the conditions from which fresh radical ideas emerged, seeking to reorganise social life and respond to unmet needs on the margins of a chaotic, violent, and fragmented society. The occupied spaces became a palliative to the social erosion visible across Italy’s urban peripheries. Where municipalities failed - or forgot - to provide, occupations offered community-led services: canteens, libraries, clinics, studios, nightclubs, and kindergartens.

Lo tsunami

October 12th, 2013. At the corner of Via Santa Croce in Gerusalemme and Via Statilia stood a large, empty office building. It had housed INPDAP - the National Institute of Social Security and Assistance for Public Administration - until the institute was abolished in 2012 and merged into INPS, the National Social Security Institute. With the building vacated, legal ownership passed to the Investire SGR real-estate fund.

Six months prior April 6^th had entered the folklore of Roman occupation history as the day of the tsunami. A coalition of housing-rights movements coordinated a wave of occupations, moving quickly across multiple properties to overwhelm and confuse the police response. They targeted former offices, unsold housing, a decommissioned health clinic, and empty student dormitories. By day’s end, nine buildings had been successfully occupied. Inspired and informed by the tactics of that day, half a year later a group successfully occupied the former INPDAP offices and turned them into Spintime.

As in the 1970s, the radicalism of this action was shaped by the economic and social precarity of the moment. Rome in 2013 was living through the aftershocks of the eurozone and sovereign-debt crises. National unemployment was around 12–13 per cent, while in Lazio youth unemployment was cited around 40 per cent. Economic insecurity was widespread, with growing numbers of families slipping into poverty or near-poverty as stable employment contracted and household incomes fell. While systematic citywide homelessness counts were limited, Caritas Rome assisted approximately 55,000 people that year - a figure often used as a proxy for the scale of housing distress.

By the end of April 6th, some 3,000 people claimed occupancy in one of the nine buildings.

Cantiere di rigenerazione urbana – Spintime today

Nearly thirteen years on, Spintime’s exterior appears largely unchanged. It remains an ugly, anonymous structure - precisely the kind of building one would expect to house bureaucratic social-security administration. The windows are grimy; its most notable feature is a large red gate marking the entrance.

Designed for bureaucratic anonymity.

Despite its origins as an occupation, Spintime’s inhabitants describe it as a cantiere di rigenerazione urbana - an urban regeneration project - intended to move beyond the negative connotations of squatting.

The six-storey building now houses around 135 families, roughly 400 people in total, from 27 different countries. It was for them that the building was first occupied, and around them a dense network of initiatives has developed.

Enter Spintime today and you encounter far more than the community services imagined in the 1970s: after-school programmes, art and writing workshops, graphic design and woodworking studios, an auditorium, a legal clinic, a Christian charity distribution centre, barbers, tailors, a camera obscura, the headquarters of Scomodo magazine, and - where I volunteer - an osteria. Its story was told in the award-winning 2021 documentary Spin Time. Che fatica la democrazia! and featured at last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale.

A glimpse of all the activities ongoing.

Faced with the threat of eviction, the mood is a mix of anxiety and disbelief. If only the politicians could see what has been built. Amid worn floors and dirty stairwells, through arduous self-organisation, something tangible has taken shape. It seems unimaginable that all of this could be erased. And yet Leoncavallo and Askatasuna thought the same. For the far right, legality begins and ends with property ownership.

Public or private property?

Since 2004, the building housing Spintime has been caught up in one of the most consequential yet least visible transformations of public property in Italy. Under the Berlusconi government, then economy minister Giulio Tremonti oversaw the securitisation of former INPDAP offices, selling them into a financial vehicle to raise immediate cash. The buyer was Investire SGR, manager of the Fondo Immobiliare Pubblico (FIP), a closed-end real-estate fund into which this building was placed. A public asset became a portfolio entry, governed by financial timelines rather than social need.

Those timelines matter. The FIP fund was originally due to expire in 2025, requiring asset liquidation. Investire has since obtained an extension to 2027. The reasons remain undisclosed, but the logic is transparent: it is not yet profitable to sell. The extension buys time - to restructure the portfolio and extract greater value later.

Despite sustained pressure and despite the Municipality of Rome explicitly including Spintime in its housing and strategic-living plans, Investire has refused to negotiate, claiming it does not deal with “criminals.” The contradiction is stark. Who acts more irresponsibly: a community that has housed families and restored a long-abandoned building to public life, or a fund that keeps a former public asset empty while waiting for optimal market conditions?

Around the fire, surrounded by the flames, there are spaces that make you want to live. Do you dream things that come true?

Simple politics

In 2023, Spintime came close to salvation. Centre-left mayor Roberto Gualtieri proposed that the municipality purchase the building and incorporate it into the public-housing system, following the model used to regularise the Porto Fluviale occupation in 2021. The proposal met fierce opposition from Fratelli d’Italia councillors, notably Federico Rocca, who launched a legal challenge accusing the city of legitimising illegality and misusing public funds.

Behind Rocca’s outrage lies a simpler ideological story. His political formation is inseparable from the post-fascist youth ecosystem that sustained fascist culture throughout the 1990s. Rocca passed through Gioventù Europea, Alleanza Nazionale, and Azione Giovani - organisations that preserved fascist networks and practices while laundering them into institutional respectability. Azione Giovani, AN’s youth wing and a key site of Meloni’s own political formation, was deeply embedded in school and university politics, organising occupations, counter-demonstrations, and frequent street confrontations while promoting an aggressively nationalist, anti-immigration worldview.

Together, these organisations allowed fascism to survive the 1990s not as explicit doctrine, but as social practice - reproduced through youth socialisation, territorial control, and symbolic provocation. Rocca’s trajectory places him squarely within that milieu, where the transition from street politics to institutional power represented not a break with fascism, but one of its most successful adaptations.

Meloni’s need for easy victories

Spintime - housing the marginalised and migrants, welcoming trade unions, student movements, and Christian aid groups - stands in implicit opposition to the order imagined by a recrudescent far right. Fratelli d’Italia swept to power in 2022 following the collapse of Mario Draghi’s technocratic government. Three and a half years on, what successes can Meloni point to? International media have been remarkably indulgent, publishing puff piece after puff piece praising her supposed dynamism and stability.

The reality is less flattering. Growth for 2025 is forecast at just 0.9 per cent. Homelessness still affects around 100,000 people nationwide, with roughly 20,000 in Rome. Three million Italians live in absolute poverty, while “new poverties” linked to precarious employment and weak protections continue to expand.

The populist playbook is familiar: deflect from failure by identifying enemies. Squatters illegally housing migrants serve this purpose well. For a party with fascist roots in need of symbolic victories, Spintime is an ideal target. Yet an eviction would produce ugly images: 400 inhabitants, including the elderly and infants, forcibly removed. The spectacle may yet give pause.

Un nuovo mondo è già possibile e necessario

Above Spintime’s red gate reads: A new world is already possible and necessary. What is striking about the arguments against Spintime is how little they engage with reality on the ground. The language is blunt and flattening: legality versus illegality, squatters versus citizens, order versus chaos. There is no history, no accounting for the state’s retreat from housing provision, no curiosity about what fills the void when public property is abandoned and financialised.

Behind the ominous red gate resides people who live and build models for community.

Rome itself tells a different story. It is a city built through negotiated exceptions and informal adaptations. Entire neighbourhoods exist because legality followed life, not the reverse. Spintime is not an anomaly but a continuation of this history - a response to scarcity, neglect, and the mismatch between housing need and supply.

Back at Manzoni and Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, the police drift away from the bar, the demonstrators disperse, the tape is peeled back, and traffic resumes. The building remains. Inside, families cook dinner, children do homework, volunteers prepare food, meetings are held, lives continue. Whether this everyday normality will be recognised as something worth preserving - or erased in the name of selective legality - remains an open question. What is certain is that the fate of Spintime is no longer just about one building. It is a test of what kind of city Rome intends to be, and whom it chooses to make room for.

I went into the dentist to book the hygienist; I left with more conspiracy than I had anticipated upon entry. I am particularly susceptible to stainage from the usual delicious suspects - coffee, red wine, turmeric, et al.

I remember the semi-privatised days when it cost you thirty-two quid and the dentist did the whole shebang. There’s nothing like an early appointment to wake you up: that bright spotlight; dental professionals gazing into your black-and-red abyss; one shouldering a mini-hose to suction up the saliva, the other balefully bearing arms to scrape, stab, and jab. (I do a great impression of this ordeal.) It is surely the stuff of nightmares.

They don’t even bother to say relax, because it’s objectively a disquieting - if not distressing - experience. I mean, take the tongue: not often an anatomical part that requires conscious brainpower, but in the dentist’s dungeon it temporarily transforms into a fugitive on the run. What is it supposed to do when the thin, gleaming instruments begin to poke about? It’s impossible not to think about it, but the minute you do, this massive, lolling hunk of flesh is gripped by panic, never more unsure of its place in the universe. Where on earth do you put it? There is no quiet corner to tuck itself away amid this awful, volunteered-for dental blitzkrieg. Wherever you presuppose might be helpful to these mouth butchers winds up being the worst spot possible.

In any case, as you can see, I don’t waste too much energy thinking about this sort of thing - but a few serious questions did come to mind, and one in particular I would like to share with you today.

How much crossover is there from dentist to chief torturer?

I suspect quite a lot more than is publicised, and that the elision from one to the other requires very little adjustment. Take the tools, for instance. Were I inclined toward a more anxious predisposition, I might notice the similarities between those used in dentistry and those deployed in refined interrogation techniques, as the Gestapo liked to call them. Press the wrong button on that suction hose and I bet it begins to waterboard.

Exhibit A, below, for your viewing pleasure.

Exhibit A: Cryer Elevator Set of 2

A side-by-side comparison - and honestly, I can’t much distinguish one from the other. How many different forceps are really necessary to deal with a bit of toothache and stainage? And notice the names of the instruments; they barely attempt to conceal their ulterior purpose. Scalpel? Probe explorer? Cryer elevator? As if my yelps weren’t already elevated enough. It all feels rather on the nose.

Then there’s the set decoration. The technical name for the blinding spotlight over the dentist’s rack is a ‘curing light’- a euphemism if ever there was one.

Exhibit B below: spot the difference.

If there is ever a global shortage of LED bulbs, I can guarantee torturers and dentists will encounter one another at the same crisis conference.

By way of pre-emptively disproving any of you, dear readers, who suspect this Substack of joking (I solemnly swear to uphold the utmost standards of seriousness herewith, thereof, et al.), I leave you with this article from DentalNews.au: Dictator Bashar al-Assad’s Dentist: He Was a Syrian Torturer Too, which details how:

“Former detainees recount being subjected to heinous acts of cruelty, often under the guise of medical procedures. In some cases, Dr [name redacted] allegedly used dental tools as instruments of torture, exacerbating physical agony to extract confessions or intimidate prisoners.”

So, the next time you lean back and are instructed to “open wide,” you would do well to bear this in mind.

Perhaps we should all take greater exception to the banality of evil we encounter every time we wince our way into the dentist’s lair. Or, at the very least, we might take pride in the knowledge that surviving such an ordeal requires Mandela-level fortitude, if not quite his patience.

And if nothing else, I hope this modest meditation offers you renewed resolve the next time the torturer’s receptionist attempts to bully you into biannual check-ups. Six months, was it? No, thank you very much. You leave instead your tongue blissfully free again to roam and tend to your vulnerable teeth — cleaned or tortured? Up to you to decide.

I have never considered clowning a hobby, nor have I ever done much theatre or stand-up comedy. But a stranger at a Christmas party persuaded me it could be fun, so I signed up for a clowning workshop.

At the heart of these workshops was learning how to be funny through play. Each day began with simple games designed to get us into a relaxed, playful state, paving the way to accessing something deeper. More than flexing our funny bones, though, the essential task was learning to let go of embarrassment.

One exercise involved a person leaving the room while another dragged a chair into the middle of the floor and posed with it - perhaps lying underneath it, arms stretched out to the side. The person outside would then re-enter, and the rest of the group would guide them using applause to recreate the pose exactly.

At first, it was easy. You would walk towards the chair and receive loud clapping. Then, as you tried to sit down instead of lying underneath it, the applause would die away. You stand up; your feet poke under the chair to a smattering of hands. You focus on your arms, extending them in a circle in front of you. You think it must be the shape of your arms, so you sit down again. Silence.

The pressure begins to mount. Even though you know the rules, you can’t help but focus on the politely encouraging faces in front of you - encouraging, perhaps, but resolutely unapplauding. Time stretches unkindly on. Embarrassment and awkwardness turn into desperation for the slightest motion resembling a demi-clap. You convince yourself you are doing fifty different things as you touch, stroke, and pat the contours of the chair in fifty different places, when in truth you are doing the same thing over and over again.

Without realising it, you fall down the rabbit hole, unable or unwilling to pull yourself out, calm your mind, accept the silence, and try something genuinely different. When you finally guide your body to lie supine under the chair and extend your arm, the rapture of applause releases a part of yourself you have not had to face for a very long time.

As adults, we forget that one of the privileges of maturity is the ability to choose not to place ourselves in uncomfortable situations. The embarrassment of inadequacy becomes a dusty imprint from our school years. As children and teenagers, unfamiliar and difficult situations were imposed on us. By adulthood, we believe we know who we are, what we are good at, and what we are not.

We become conscious of our emotional energy and work to conserve it, justifying how precious our reserves are in a world that feels increasingly exhausting and frightening. The pursuit of the new - especially the uncomfortable or challenging new - becomes something we quietly sidestep in favour of the familiar.

There, in the workshop, in front of strangers, we were exercising a part of ourselves that had long been tucked away: the part that feels the sting of inadequacy. Of course, the intention was not to make us fail, but to draw our attention to what failure feels like. How did inadequacy register in the body? What behaviours accompanied it? Why did this particular sensation surface?

Our clowning teacher called it staying in the flop.

Another exercise required four of us to line up with our backs to the rest of the class. When our number was called, we had to spin on the spot and blurt out something - anything: a gasp, a trill, an inhale or exhale. The key was impulse: thoughtless, automatic action, free of pre-planning or self-editing.

The challenge was slowing our racing minds. Each of us instinctively tried to pre-empt the moment with imagined gags - I’ll spin and wave my arms like a cowboy shouting yee-haw. Right - about as funny as it reads here. So, you tried to suppress the thought, only to find it stuck there, solid as concrete. I resorted to holding a single banal three-letter word in my mind on repeat, desperately attempting to clear space while listening to my fellow spinners squeak, grunt, and squawk.

Once we spun and blurted, the flop arrived in the moment that followed. Whatever reaction greeted us - from mutely passive to politely amused - we had to stay where we were. We had to remain present in the aftermath of our failed attempt to generate laughter.

Think of a time you have tried to be funny: a story that stumbles at the pub, a joke misremembered so the punchline dangles meekly. How quickly did you try to move things on, to brush past the awkwardness? Why on earth would you linger?

Instead, we were instructed to stay firm. To feel inadequacy, pass through the body. Failure, flopping - whatever you choose to call it - has physical and psychological attributes. Your skin warms, the hair on your neck prickles, your extremities sweat. You feel heavy. Your mind oscillates between scanning the impassive faces in front of you and scrambling for a way out, for something - anything - to do next, how even to hold this clumsy container of unfunny flesh bound up by unfunny bones you used to call your body.

Only once our teacher, the brilliant Marny, judged that we had sufficiently familiarised ourselves with flopping did we move on. We learned complicité with fellow clowns, culminating in a final exercise of presenting The Greatest Show on Earth. Somewhere in the playful chaos I laughed a great deal, and once or twice my stranger impulses - including holding up a Boots only to vomit into my imaginary condom balaclava - even earned a cackle in return.

Here, laughter felt like liberation.

In her book Animal Joy, the analyst Nuar Alsadir explores how both clowning and psychoanalysis - in radically different ways - create pathways to the unconscious. Each offers access to the unsocialised self. From infancy, we learn behaviours that ensure social survival. We internalise the belief that blending in is safer than standing out, that whatever draws attention might also invite danger. We build scaffolding from manners, protocol, and self-monitoring, often without realising it.

Children, by contrast, inhabit a world of unfiltered spontaneity. Often children speak in tones half nonsense, half wise precisely because they are unconstrained by the scaffolding of adult conventions. Growing up is, of course, necessary. But if there is a trick to life, it may lie in retaining some of that unencumbered freedom - supported by an adult’s strength and caution, but not crushed beneath it.

In clowning, it felt as though I had found part of the answer. To find one’s inner clown is to reconnect with a freer layer of the unconscious. To clown is to practise unlocking vulnerability repeatedly, to grow comfortable sharing it with others. Laughter loosened adult armour. It slackened the straitjacket of social norms.

Across these workshops, I began to see how this experience reshaped my understanding of community.

For much of my twenties, my idea of community was shaped by the political currents of the time. Identity politics, first articulated in the 1970s and ascendant in the last decade, taught us to attune ourselves to structures of inequality and privilege: class, race, gender, sexuality, education, geography. The language of safe space emerged to describe environments in which marginalised people could gather, protected from harm, and find solidarity.

These aims were, in many cases, emancipatory. Identity politics offered a necessary corrective to universalist politics that ignored lived inequality. Yet something counterintuitive unfolded alongside them. Over time, its emphasis on protection and categorisation subtly altered the emotional architecture of community itself. Safety became the organising principle, and space its primary tool.

As new communities formed, they often became siloed from one another. What began as a means of protecting the marginalised increasingly functioned as a mechanism of separation. Communities defined themselves by the harms they sought to avoid rather than the futures they wished to build. Political disagreement became moral threat; discomfort was recoded as danger.

In her book, Minority Rule, Ash Sarkar wrote about how identity politics, in practice, inhibited coalition-building on the left by foregrounding difference over shared interest. One could find oneself 85 per cent aligned with another person and still feel the remaining 15 per cent justified distance.

At the same time, politics increasingly mingled with personal experience. Our collective vocabulary expanded to include depression, anxiety, ADHD, trauma, neurodivergence. Therapy culture has boomed. The language of protection - triggers, boundaries, space - migrated from the consulting room into everyday life. Space came to signify safety: emotional, psychological, political.

Over time, this emphasis on space warped my understanding of community. Political and personal principles intermingled to a point where it was difficult to understand where one began and the other ended. Community became something organised around distance rather than proximity, around self-protection rather than mutual exposure. Taking space was rebranded as healing; withdrawal mistaken for maturity. What was framed as strength often resembled an inability to tolerate discomfort while remaining present.

Humans, however, are hardwired for closeness. Bonds are forged not in distance but in proximity - in the shared endurance of awkwardness, vulnerability, and friction.

The clowning workshops reframed this for me entirely. By accessing the unsocialised self, clowning exposed the fragility of the facades we build. Standing vulnerable in front of others, we learned not to retreat from discomfort but to stay with it. Laughter emerged not from cleverness or performance, but from recognising ourselves in one another’s flops.

Community, I realised, is not sustained by insulation from discomfort, but by our willingness to endure it together. In laughing, playing, and failing in front of one another, we were not made safer - we were made closer.

Finally, someone is calling out BBC Panorama for what it is – a misleading, duplicitous, hoodwinking crook of a news program. I will be personally contributing to DJT’s righteous crusade with evidence from the Italian peninsula of Panorama’s historic wrongdoing.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, below you will find the two-and-a-half-minute BBC Panorama documentary, narrated by the serial mendicant, Richard Dimbleby. The date is April 1st, 1957, and the video expounds on the spaghetti harvest on the southern hills of Switzerland’s Alps, in Ticino. With his decades of broadcasting experience, Dimbleby authoritatively lays out the process of growing spaghetti on trees - yes, you read that right: on trees - and how Italian and Southern Swiss communities harvest this annually.

In the interest of intellectual honesty - since discovering this story, I have spent considerable energy and time interviewing Italian contadini until I was conclusively satisfied that, much like money, spaghetti does not, in fact, grow on trees.

In 1957, with the memory of wartime rationing still fresh, more than eight million license-fee-paying Brits tuned in to watch. The next day, hundreds of the hopeful and naïve telephoned Broadcasting House, eager for more information on how a spaghetti tree might be planted in their garden or whether the crop was suitable for the English soil. The BBC switchboard operator’s response: “Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best!”

Members of the Jury, this was a cruel mockery of the BBC’s mission to inform, educate, and entertain. But unlike with Tim Davie and Deborah Turness today, in 1957, no heads rolled. Michael Peacock, the executive producer responsible for this spurious spaghetti story, carved out a long and unillustrious career, rising to become a BBC Controller in the 1960s and creating programs like Match of the Day. He, then, is to blame for the later arrival of radical extremist, Gary Lineker, polluting our screens.

The one billion dollars that DJT is suing the BBC for is simply not enough. Never back down—double down! We must not forget April 1st, 1957, when Panorama did far worse than merely splice together two excitable clips of the American President. BBC’s Panorama knowingly, willingly, and wilfully produced a false piece of news broadcasting that hoodwinked an entire nation, the full trauma of which is yet to be fully understood.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, I recommend that Trump double the amount he is suing for - to two billion. The first billion is to be paid in the usual green banknotes, but the second, as a token of true contrition, is to be paid in one billion strands of spaghetti - cooked or dry, it does not matter. This shall be distributed to each household as the smallest act of truth and reconciliation.

Only then will I be ready to tune in again and trust in the impartiality of the BBC.

The Vatican’s political veto: how the Church shaped Italy’s IVF laws

Despite IVF’s reproductive revolution, the technology has been impeded in Italy. While IVF clinics initially began operations unregulated in the 1980s and 1990s, Catholic conservative hegemony, emanating from the Vatican, was soon enough to stifle the proliferation of IVF across the Italian peninsula. In 1987, in its declaration Donum Vitae, the Vatican condemned IVF as ‘morally unacceptable’—a stance maintained by the late Pope Francis.

Within Italian politics, assisted reproduction—including IVF, embryo freezing, sperm and egg donation, and surrogacy—was regulated in 2004 with Law 40. The legislation limited IVF to heterosexual couples and banned other forms of assisted reproduction. It was passed by a right-wing coalition comprising the Catholic-leaning Unione dei Democratici Cristiani e di Centro (UDC), the Alleanza Nazionale (AN), and the Lega Nord, presided over by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. It was a piece of legislation bearing the clear stamp of Vatican lobbying and has stood as one example among many of the Church’s role in influencing the politics that govern women’s choices over their bodies.

The hypocrite’s oath: the Church’s grip on Italian healthcare

Culturally, too, the Vatican carries enormous weight and power. The Church’s position within communities across Italy has meant that it often delivers many basic health services. Sexual health, for instance—from HPV vaccinations to STI check-ups and prescriptions—is often handled in Catholic-affiliated medical facilities. There is no doubt that these facilities do essential frontline work, but there are limitations to medical services delivered under the auspices of religious practices. For all the good they do, they operate within a cultural backdrop that prioritizes religious dogma, undermining a woman’s ability to choose for herself what to do with her body. For instance, 70% of doctors profess the Catholic faith and are therefore conscientiously inclined to object to a woman requesting information about or access to abortion.

No country for old women

The consequences of the Church’s cultural and political influence are twofold for women. First, their overall biological health. Ample studies have found material impacts on women’s health over the course of their lives. The lack of a uniform, evidence-based approach to health policy has resulted in enormous disparities and unequal access to essential healthcare services—a situation that disproportionately affects women. The result, in short, is that women in Italy live longer than men but spend more years in poor health.

Second, there is the interrelationship between quality of life and the societal expectations placed on women. Take parental leave: maternity leave for women is five months, with 80% of their salary covered—the lowest in Western Europe (the exception being Spain, where parental leave is split equally at four months for both parents, with 100% salary coverage). Italian fathers, meanwhile, get a meager ten days at full pay—the lowest in Western Europe.

For same-sex couples, the story is even grimmer. While Italy recognized civil unions in 2016, same-sex marriage is banned, as are same-sex adoption and surrogacy. Parental leave, therefore, does not exist for them, as they are not legally recognized as parents. The nucleus of the family remains a man and woman wedlocked in heterosexual, heteronormative harmony—a dogmatic view of social values prescribed by the Vatican, whose weight continues to bear heavily on Italian life. In his first address as Pope, Robert Prevost reiterated the sanctity of the family, whose building block is ‘the stable union between a man and a woman.’

The Vatican’s demographic paradox: empty cradles and an aging nation

As with all dogmatic impositions, however, there are obvious problems. The long alliance in Italy between religious and political conservatives may have led to numerous victories protecting their vision of the family and women’s role in it, but these have not produced economic prosperity or curbed the demographic crisis facing Italy. With half the population shackled by traditional values that prefer them to stay at home, it is unsurprising that there is a huge stigma around mothers returning to work after taking leave. Thirty percent of women leave their jobs after having a child, compared to just three percent of men. Should they choose to re-enter the workforce, Italian mothers face a 27% lower hiring rate than women without children. The idealization of motherhood is reflected in myriad other statistics, but the simple conclusion is that Italian women face the triple burden of unstable jobs, unpaid care work, and wage discrimination.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that these economic hardships are doing little to produce bigger families, despite the Church’s extolling of motherhood’s virtues. Births are at their lowest in Italian history, with projections that the population will fall by five million by 2050. This is the central piece of a demographic aging puzzle that also includes the second-highest median age in Europe and a high burden of pensioners per working person (57:100). Demographic crises are on the rise across Europe, but in Italy, the causes are more intimately connected to the cultural attitudes fostered by the Catholic Church and conservative lobby toward the family, women, and motherhood.

A new Pope, same old problems: more hollow than hallow

It is from this vantage point that the recent developments in the Vatican and its politics ring hollow. Millions tuned in to observe the pomp and pageantry of Pope Francis’s funeral. Attention lingered on St. Peter’s Square, with added excitement following the hype of the movie Conclave. Finally, Robert Prevost emerged on the balcony as the new Pope Leo XIV—the first American in history. Media pundits pontificated on the meaning of this choice. Was there a connection between his years spent in rural Peru and the favour he had garnered from his South American predecessor? Could the speed of the two-day conclave be interpreted as a sign of unity and consensus among the Church’s 133 cardinals? And what were the geopolitical implications of his American roots? Would they satisfy the Catholic lobby in the United States, or would his selection antagonize the religious fundamentalism of the MAGA movement?

Prevost now leads a community of one billion Catholics worldwide. The questions surrounding the direction of his leadership will be important. But just a couple of miles down the road, my friend won’t be paying much attention. As things stand, unable to access IVF in Italy, she must expend thought, energy, and resources on circumventing cultural norms and medical practices that deny her control over her own body. She is one of countless Italian women—perhaps facing different circumstances but united in the cultural cause of those circumstances. She must reckon with a difficult choice that has been made for her by an Italian society scarred by the Vatican’s insidious influence—scars known by two simple and all-too-common names: misogyny and sexism.

Pier and I met six years ago in Beirut. I was working in a development consultancy firm led by Lebanese activists while he was working for an international business magazine. After we both left Lebanon, our professional trajectories seemed to switch. I worked in business journalism while he went down the path of international development. This path has seen him work across Africa, in Mozambique, Burkina Faso and currently in Zambia.

We spoke just at the moment Trump obliteration of USAID was announced and, although Pier does not work directly for USAID, such are the ramifications of the cuts to international aid that the development sector in Zambia has been affected.

In this conversation we explore how he got into the industry, his awareness of what are the shortfalls of international aid and the potential for greater decentralisation. We also touch on the legacies of colonialism and the types of privilege you engage with as a European working in Africa.

Happy listening!

Spencer had just begun what promised to be a stellar career in one of USAID’s main contractors. Then Trump and Musk took their DOGE chainsaw to the international development sector.

With the rug pulled out from under his feet so abruptly last month, Spencer was kind enough to provide his invaluable perspective on what the implications are, for him and his would-be colleagues – a whole cadre who would be working in international development - now scrambling to find new jobs, and what it means for the US’s soft power on the international stage.

This will be one conversation in a series on the international development sector, with people working at different points in the delivery chain.

Happy listening.

In this second part we get a sense of how he thinks his way through brand identity, the gear shift in content creation - its impact on competition in London’s food scene and finally, the various crises the industry is tackling currently.

Smoke and Salt’s Insta

[Left: Aaron Webster. Right: Remi Williams - previous episode here]

It is all too easy to romanticise the world of cheffing. Whether it is nostalgia for our grandmother’s cooking or the damned genius in the kitchen our shared cultural psyche reserves a special place for the world of food. What I love about this conversation with Aaron is how much he throws the fairytale out of the window.

Aaron’s experience getting into the cheffing world is fairly typical: catering college, followed by a placement at a Michelin starred restaurant, teaming up with Remi and then founding Smoke and Salt.

We discuss the details of what exactly that entails. It will be useful to anyone thinking about getting into cheffing and paints a cautionary tale of what to expect.

For anyone curious about the studies mentioned in the podcast you can find them here and here.

Smoke and Salt’s insta

Part II will follow in another couple of weeks.

Happy Listening.

Despite the growing urgency of the climate crisis, appetite for ambitious green investments remains low. Austerity is still Europe’s default response to economic uncertainty, but the continent can no longer afford the environmental cost of climate budget cuts. Can the EU change its ways and steer Europe towards a greener and more just future?

2024 was the hottest year ever recorded. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, it was also the first calendar year reaching more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. As temperatures grew, cataclysmic wildfires burned on all corners of the planet, from the US and Canada to Australia, Greece, Spain and Portugal.

And yet, the resolve for effective climate action remains woefully inadequate. COP29 in Baku ended with rich countries pledging an annual 300 billion dollars to the global fight against climate change. Developing countries, which had requested over a trillion dollars, say the agreed sum is too low and condemn it as an insult. To put things into perspective, different institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Goldman Sachs, and the Climate Policy Initiative put the cost of reaching net-zero emissions in the coming years in the tens of trillions.

In Europe, the world’s fastest-warming continent and increasingly a site of extreme weather events, the need for a greener economy has become more evident than ever in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing energy insecurity. Former Italian premier Mario Draghi made decarbonisation a centrepiece of his long-awaited report on Europe’s economic competitiveness. Still, the appetite for ambitious climate investments is not growing at the same rate as the frequency and scale of the climate crisis. But why is that?

Inevitably, the answer lies in politics. Within the European Union, climate investment is hampered by an economic orthodoxy which tilts towards austerity. This structural obstacle to meaningful climate action has been compounded in recent years by growing right-wing opposition to climate policies, which threatens the implementation of Europe’s green agenda.

From Paris to Berlin, governments are prioritising defence spending and cutting red tape for corporations over climate action, and the results of the recent German federal elections will only worsen this trend. CDU/CSU, the party that finished first in the vote, has openly expressed concern about the impact of climate policy on businesses and led a call to roll back several EU green regulations. In addition, The European People’s Party (EPP) – the biggest force in the European Parliament, of which CDU/CSU is a member – has pushed to water down the EU deforestation law to appease the far-right. Amidst this anti-green politicking, what is too often overlooked is that climate austerity and the growing “greenlash” are closely related.

The first echoes of austerity

The shortcomings of the European fiscal framework started to become visible in the aftermath of the 2009 eurozone crisis. The bloc was going through one of its major economic and social upheavals, with peripheral member states being particularly affected by the budgetary restrictions imposed on public finances. The EU fiscal and economic framework, one of the union’s most debated structures, was emerging as a major culprit of austerity.

Dating back to the 1992 ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, which included fiscal rules limiting headline deficit to 3 per cent and debt to 60 per cent of member states’ gross domestic product (GDP), the core of Europe’s fiscal framework has changed very little in the past years despite significant shifts in the macroeconomic landscape of the Union. It was a fiscal system that was typical of the prevailing economic ideas of the day, prioritising austerity over public investments.

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the EU remained captive to the faulty design of the Maastricht Treaty and so arrived at a false diagnosis of the problem. Austerity, as political economist Mark Blyth​​ described it, is the deliberate deflation of domestic wages and prices through cuts to public spending. In Europe, this fiscal obedience proved fateful as, far from reducing debts, many member states’ debt levels rose sharply. The consequences particularly affected countries in ​​Southern Europe – Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, pejoratively called the “PIGS”.

The EU’s misguided response to the crisis was politically organised through a system of loans entailing strong conditionality. Some would go as far as to say that the Maastricht Treaty and its rigid criteria impose straightjackets on member states every time they exceed those parameters, thus creating a vicious circle of austerity – “austerity by default”. In other words, European fiscal rules were flawed at the start as they are grounded in a neoliberal framework that seeks to keep “wasteful” states in check. 

Climate blind spots

As austerity was being rolled out, the effects of climate change were becomingincreasingly tangible. In the face of EU-imposed fiscal constraints, many member states prioritised reducing deficits over investments in climate resilience and adaptation. Climate-related initiatives and infrastructure projects were delayed or cancelled due to budget constraints. 

In the aftermath of the Greek financial crisis and for the years that followed, austerity measures severely impacted the country’s public services, and thus its environmental funding and capacity to implement climate resilience initiatives. ​Many crucial initiatives, including waste management systems and flood defences, faced significant cutbacks. This left communities increasingly vulnerable to climate-related disasters, exacerbating existing environmental degradation. Between 2016 and 2020, spending directed to the Greek Forest Guard was reduced significantly, and thousands of firefighters were made redundant. Such neglect became glaringly evident as Greece faced extreme weather events, with wildfires in Evia, Athens, and the Peloponnese being ignited by extreme heatwaves. Meanwhile, thousands of firefighters in the country continue to face precarious conditions, which has led to protests in the capital Athens.

In Spain, authorities froze public sector wages and halted recruitment following the eurozone crisis, ​​allowing only a small number of workers to be replaced. This directly affected the environmental sector, as the Ministry of Environment saw its funding slashed and its workforce reduced by 7 per cent between 2009 and 2011. Budget cuts also forced freezes on key environmental initiatives, prompting a drastic review of Spain’s significant expenditure on renewable energy and suspending energy subsidies in January 2012, which effectively closed feed-in tariffs for solar, wind, and other renewables. This move disrupted Spain’s renewable energy sector, which had been heavily reliant on these incentives, leading to significant setbacks in both private investment and the sector’s employment opportunities. Energy poverty was also a byproduct of such measures, with households facing energy deprivation and adding up to pre-existing levels of inequalities.

A boon for the far right

The rigidity of the EU’s fiscal rules had unintended but predictable political consequences. The austerity of the 2010s helped pave the way for a wave of far-right populism. Across Europe, new brands of populists leveraged fears within the electorate. Anxieties around economic recession, job insecurity, and housing were tied to the migration “crisis”. The governments that had embraced austerity programmes and failed to distribute the costs of structural adjustments equitably among social groups fell victim to their own politics, creating fertile ground for the far right to capitalise on social rage and rising Euroscepticism.

“The tragedy of the European fiscal rules”, as economic journalist Wolfgang Munchau writes, “is that the Left invented them”. Austerity was not different: it was mainly liberal and social democratic parties in Europe which endorsed or implemented these measures, often under pressure from EU institutions and international lenders. Being committed to the logic of fiscal austerity, the centre-left was unable to answer the growing weight of crude arguments from the extreme right (and the extreme left, though these groups were far less successful).

This became evident early on in France, with fire-brand Marine Le Pen from far-right Rassemblement National twice making it to the Presidential run-off. The extreme right also surged in Italy, first with the success of Lega’s Matteo Salvini’s, and then with Giorgia Meloni’s triumph with the neo-fascist party Fratelli D’Italia. In the UK, Nigel Farage orchestrated the watershed Brexit referendum, causing the Conservative Party to careen ever more towards the right. And in Germany, neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland (AFD), became the largest opposition party by 2017, only four years after it was formed (and is now the second-biggest party in the Bundestag following its historic performance in federal elections in February). In just a few years, a European Union caught in the straitjacket of its own fiscal rules led to the far-right moving from the fringes and into the spotlight across the continent.

Today, right-wing movements are increasingly challenging Europe’s climate agenda, often framing climate policies as an elite-driven imposition on ordinary citizens. ​These parties claim that climate measures are unaffordable and prioritise elites over the needs of the general public. By dismissing or outright denying climate change, they appeal to segments of the population concerned about rising costs, particularly in rural and working-class communities.​

There is another way

Against this backdrop of austerity, a brief moment of hope seemed to emerge ​from ​the ​Covid-19 ​pandemic. ​​In 2020, ​EU leaders and member states decided in favour of common debt issuance. Economic policy had nothing to do with this decision; it was squarely the by-product of a sudden stop imposed on the global economy. Europe had to come back as a competitive and forward-moving, united bloc.

The result: The EU’s Recovery Fund, officially known as NextGenerationEU (NGEU), a temporary recovery instrument amounting to800 billion euros in grants and loans to support member states. Crucially, member states were required to submit recovery and resilience plans aligned with EU priorities, including by spending around 40 per cent of the recovery fund on climate measures. Lauded as a significant step in the bloc’s history towards fiscal solidarity, the NGEU seemed to herald a change of direction.

Alongside this unprecedented macroeconomic shift, something equally rare happened in 2020: CO2 emissions dropped as well. As Andreas Malm and Wim Carton write in Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, COVID-19 could do more for the environment than all the social movements which marched in the streets of Europe.

This pivotal moment signalled a new approach to fiscal policy; one that not only acknowledged the uneven impact of economic crises across member states but also embraced investments in public health and sustainability.

And yet, five years later, the spectre of austerity is still haunting the EU. The new economic governance framework, which came into force in April 2024, will force most member states to implement budget cuts. Surveillance mechanisms will continue to monitor member states’ expenditure deviations through what is called the “control account.” In addition to the expenditure agreed upon with the Commission and the Council, countries cannot deviate more than 0.3 or 0.6 percentage points of GDP annually or cumulatively. If they fail, a first warning will be issued – austerity by default. 

But while in the years of the Eurozone crisis the impact of austerity on climate politics was largely unnoticed, now the stakes are much higher and impossible to ignore. Today’s challenges demand proactive investment rather than fiscal retrenchment, with progressive forces now finding themselves waging a dual battle: confronting the escalating climate crisis while tackling a return of austerity, which in turn feeds far-right propaganda.

The return of austerity is easy to detect. In France, in spite of the political chaos which brought an end to the premiership of Michel Barnier after two brief months, the impact of economic orthodoxy on climate policies was clear. In his first address, the short-lived prime minister made oblique references to the need to do more with less across the entire economy. Of Barnier’s hour-long speech, a mere five minutes was dedicated to climate issues. Further fuelling environmentalists’ concerns were comments critical of wind turbines, a valuable asset to the energy transition but a longtime bête noire for the far right in France. In another concession to the extreme right, he promised to review the Zero Net Land Take regulation (ZAN), which emerged from a Citizens’ Convention for Climate, with the aim of limiting the consumption of natural, agricultural, or forest land. The chaotic churn of recent French political developments demonstrates how easily neoliberal orthodoxy will doff its cap in the direction of those further on the right. 

Meanwhile, In Germany, the chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz has promised to weaken green policy, claiming it has gone too far. By repeatedly expressing concern for the state of the economy, which he says was exacerbated by his predecessor’s excessive environmentalism, Merz has pandered to the country’s industrial leaders as well as the anti-climate party AfD. He has also promised to decouple the ministry of the economy from that of the environment, currently held by the Greens. The reason? Germany cannot afford unnecessary red tape and green investments. Another sovereign debt crisis, Merz argues, is looming large and the answer is a new round of austerity – cutting, among other things, unemployment benefits and social spending.

The cost of cutting climate funds

Similar stories are playing out across Europe, with economic priorities pushing climate action to the wings​. Without sufficient financial support for vulnerable communities, the far right may once again exploit economic hardship and resentment toward political elites. Just as the austerity measures imposed after the 2008 financial crisis created “winners and losers”, a new wave of climate austerity risks repeating the same dynamics.

The experience of the gilets jaunes (‘yellow vests’) movement in France serves as a reminder that strategies centred solely on discouraging the use of fossil fuels and increasing carbon prices for consumers can encounter strong popular resistance, undermining the overarching goals of sustainability and climate transition.

With insufficient investments in green infrastructure, social protection programmes, and adaptive strategies, working-class and rural communities are bearing the brunt of the economic costs – fuel taxes, farming regulations, and the phasing out of polluting industries – without seeing the benefits of green policies. Far-right parties have been quick to frame these climate measures as evidence of EU elites betraying ordinary Europeans, stoking fears of economic hardship and regional decline.

As a result, the far right made sweeping gains in last year’s European parliamentary elections, becoming a major force and a significant obstacle to climate policies. Last month, Jordan Bardella, the president of Rassemblement National and the chair of the Patriots for Europe Group even called on right-wing forces in the EU parliament to come together to end the European Green Deal (EGD).

Launched in 2019, the EGD set the bold target of reducing emissions by 55 per cent by 2030, but many of its measures and appendices revolve around competitiveness and growth, without clear references to social protection or quality jobs for those who are meant to make the transition happen. Moreover, it promised to mobilize a trillion euros during this decade, but today, that sum looks implausible if not outright impossible.

The road ahead

The new legislative cycle will likely see an intensified struggle over the EU’s climate policies. With populist forces framing green initiatives as elitist and out of touch with economic realities, the Green Deal’s success depends on addressing inequities and ensuring that the green transition tangibly benefits all Europeans, leaving no one behind. Without this, mounting resistance could undermine Europe’s climate ambitions and its broader socio-economic cohesion.

With Donald Trump’s return to power, Europe’s far right now has an important trans-Atlantic ally. Among the first executive orders that Trump issued after his inauguration was to immediately withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Accords and to halt over 300 billion dollars in green infrastructure projects. From Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico to France’s Marine Le Pen and the UK’s Nigel Farage, European far-right leaders are busy cosying up to the American President and taking lessons from his populist playbook – with climate action foremost among their policy targets.

In the European Parliament, we will regularly see far-right MEPs rising to their feet to denounce “costly” climate action, finding increasing support in the centre-right and right-wing parties. To defeat them, the EU will need to move away from the austerity model that enabled right-wing populism to surge in the first place, and start rebuilding and refunding welfare states to incorporate green policies The imperative is to deliver the green transition in a speedy manner, with robust social security schemes capable of buffering the political consequences of climate austerity. From now on, every fiscal, social and economic policy should be an environmental one.

Political and economic circumstances change, but the climate emergency does not. It only gets worse – unless we are ready to do something about it.

You can find some of his work on google scholar.

And I love these photos of him working away in the lab.

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She follows Jorge Rojas, the brief director of the Administrative Department of the Presidency (DAPRE), and the Minister of Culture, Arts, and Knowledge, Juan David Correa, who resigned since Wednesday. The source of discontent among several heavyweights of the government's leftist wing was the appointment of Armando Benedetti as Chief of Staff, a politician surrounded by controversy, with multiple investigations against him from cocaine addiction and accusations of gender violence in more than one instance. Petro has closed ranks in his defence, despite the discomfort and resignations.

A principled resignation

“Son casi 20 años de militancia política en el progresismo. Presidente, como feminista y como mujer, yo no me puedo sentar en esta mesa de Gabinete, de nuestro proyecto progresista, con Armando Benedett.i”

"It's almost 20 years of political activism in progressivism. President, as a feminist and as a woman, I cannot sit on this Cabinet, of our progressive project, with Armando Benedetti."

It was a powerful moment from a principled politician, made all the more surprising because Muhamad had been a stalwart by Petro’s side over more than a decade. The Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development has raised its profile since Petro came to power, and she has shone brightly in an unstable Cabinet. Until now, she was one of only three ministers from the original team who have survived after two and a half years of government—alongside the Minister of Labour and the Minister of Defence. She had already served as secretary of the same portfolio when Petro was mayor of Bogotá between 2012 and 2015.

Her two- and half-year tenure as Minister has been praised, earning international recognition. She was profiled in Forbes and awarded Women of the Decade by the international organisation, Women Economic Forum.

A socio-ecological transition

I met and interviewed her two years in March 2023, six months into her new job. She was impressive and explained clearly her dual environmental ambitions: domestic and international.

Domestically, Muhamad laid out the link between Colombia’s rich biodiversity and the peace process. Colombia has an immense and varied geography with almost every ecosystem represented; from sierras, deserts, a pacific and Caribbean coastline and the Amazon rainforest which covers over 40% of the country’s territory.

The Minister pointed out that the areas in which biodegradation is most critical, overlap with those territories most impacted by violence and civil war over the past decades. She put forward the idea of a socio-ecological transition where consolidation of the peace process was integrated alongside sustainable development.

The jury is still out on how successful an idea a socio-ecological transition has been. Muhamad can point to the historic milestone of reporting the lowest annual deforestation figures for 2023 since records began, with less than 80,000 hectares deforested. Experts agree that the conservation of Amazonian ecosystems is crucial, among many other things, for regulating the climate and water supply in the Andean region of Colombia.

Not totally peaceful

However, while the ecological record of Petro’s government can be praised, finding a comparable achievement in Petro’s ‘total peace’ policy is more difficult. As the name suggests, the pursuit of ‘total peace’ has focused on engaging in peace talks with rebel factions, paramilitary groups, and urban armed organizations still active in the country has been a cornerstone of Petro's administration. The legal foundation for these negotiations was established through a law signed by Petro on November 4, 2022, which empowered the government to broker peace agreements with rebel groups and negotiate justice arrangements with high-impact organized crime networks.

Two and half years into this process, the administration has successfully curbed the escalation of political violence that had plagued the country since 2019. However, this reduction in violence has largely been driven by a decrease in hostilities between security forces and armed groups. While this has brought some respite, it has also inadvertently fuelled territorial expansion and intensified violent competition among armed factions vying for control over illicit activities. Only two weeks ago, at the end of January, The National Liberation Army (ELN) launched its attack on a rival rebel faction last Thursday as it sought to purge the lawless Catatumbo region of competitors. At least 80 have been killed and 40,000 displaced by the violence. From this angle, tying the peace process to sustainability project, remains a lofty ambition.

However, it is on the international stage that Muhamad’s environmentalism, and Petro’s for that matter, has shone brightest.

COPing on the big stage

As Colombia’s representative at COP27 in Egypt and COP28 in the UAE, Muhamad has acted as a reference point for the Global South, tabling the more radical proposals. Back in 2023 in our interview, Muhamad put forward the straightforward appeal of climate financing – negotiate a multilateral agreement to reduce developing economies’ foreign debt by 10% in exchange for carbon offsetting and redirect that the extra cash into climate mitigation and adaptation at home. While this argument is far from sound - carbon offsetting is beset with problems – the acceleration of the climate catastrophe witnessed around the world, makes the case to rethink the global financial system more and more compelling. And it might just be Muhamad’s legacy.

Her biggest moment on the international stage came recently. In her capacity as Minister, she hosted the massive United Nations Conference on Biodiversity, COP16, in Cali last October and November under the slogan "making peace with nature," highly relevant in a country seeking to turn the page on violence.

In Cali, several issues of great interest to Colombia were agreed upon, such as establishing indigenous peoples and local communities as a permanent advisory group to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and acknowledging the ancestral knowledge of Afro-descendant communities. However, after two weeks of negotiations, COP16 was adjourned, with discussions on unresolved matters—including financial mechanisms—set to continue later this month in Rome.

Muhamad was also supposed to preside over these sessions, but her role in the final stretch of the complex diplomatic negotiations is now in limbo. Should she see through this final task and succeed in reaching an agreement on climate finance, she will end a remarkable two and half years in post as Minister on a high note.

Benedetti blackmail?

Back to Petro’s latest gaff. His appointment of Armando Benedetti has elicited numerous rumours that Benedetti holds key information that could throw Petro under the bus. Outspoken, explosive, investigated for corruption, and accused of gender-based violence, Benedetti was key to Petro's rise to power.

As a congressman, Benedetti supported former President Álvaro Uribe, the leading figure of Colombia's right-wing, and his successor Juan Manuel Santos. In 2022, Petro appointed him as his campaign manager as part of a strategy to gain power with the backing of traditional political sectors.

After the inauguration, Benedetti was named ambassador to Venezuela. But in a dramatic turn, he became a thorn in the government's side when the National Electoral Council (CNE) included him in an investigation for alleged violations of campaign spending limits during the presidential race. Around that time in the summer of 2023, the press leaked some of his phone conversations with Petro's right-hand woman, Laura Sarabia, in which he insulted her and assured her that if she told the truth, "everyone" would go to prison - "Ahora sí te estoy amenazando hijueputa. A ti y al Presidente." “Now, yes, I am threatening you, you son of bitch. You and the President.”

Eighteen months later and Benedetti is appointed Chief of Staff after Petro’s fourth cabinet reshuffle in two and half years (or one every seven months). The sight of him sat serenely next to Petro in the televised session of Ministers has led many to believe that Benedetti must have explosive information he is using as leverage. So long as Benedetti stays in place it will be difficult to shake off such rumours.

Power tends to corrupt…

When Petro won the 2022 campaign it was a historic moment. Never had a politician of socialist colours won the Colombian presidency. Part of his success was in convincing the electorate that he was clear of the corruption and backdoor skulduggery so common in Colombian politics. With Benedetti in post, that argument seems hollow.

Susanah Muhamad represented an able lieutenant with a scrupulous track record as activist and politician. Now Petro’s support and defence of Benedetti has forced Muhamad into a corner from where she felt forced to make a principled stand and resign. In Colombia’s one-term system, Petro is unable to stand again at the next election. It remains to be seen who his successor might be. Many presumed Muhamad’s records put her in pole position. At the price of promoting Benedetti, Petro may have unwittingly and prematurely prevented her star from rising to the highest office.

We wind our way to talking about the money side of things to what success looks like both outside the restaurant and within the mind of Remi as the chef and owner.

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⁠Smoke and Salt⁠

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It felt fantastic returning after five years to talk to Remi about his experiences getting into the industry and the journey to creating Smoke and Salt. We also chatted about wider themes around structural racism, taste and identity in cooking.

You can find Remi’s social here and Smoke and Salt’s details here.

Here’s Aaron (left) and Remi (right).

Photo credit: Tom Hampson - https://www.tomhampsonphotography.com/

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We cover the trajectory for teachers in England and the recent turmoil around the strikes.

In the next few, weeks I'll be publishing discussions with a teacher, a nuclear scientist and a chef with many more to follow.