£30 roasts, Michelin stars… has the gastropub lost the plot?

Walk into The Unruly Pig in Suffolk and you’ll find electric pink walls, pig-themed art and a dish involving liver parfait that locals can recite like a prayer. At The Coach in Marlow, draught beer flows beside a treasure chest of kids’ toys and baked potato “tonnato”. The Star Inn at Harome serves Yorkshire puddings to fifth-generation farmers who park their Massey Fergusons next to Lamborghinis. And at The Hand and Flowers, you can get a duck pie that costs more than a round in your local Wetherspoon – and still feel like you’re in your mate’s front room.

This is the modern gastropub. Thirty years after the term was coined, it’s still the place we go to eat well without enduring the sanctimony of fine dining. But with prices climbing and the lines between pub and restaurant increasingly being blurred, one question lingers over the bar: have we reached peak gastropub?

The term “gastropub” first appeared in 1991, when The Eagle in Clerkenwell decided to serve restaurant-level food without ditching its ale taps and barstools. It was a neat concept at the time: a middle ground between the fusty boozer and the starched-tableclothed restaurant. By 2009, the Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs list had launched, further legitimising the movement and providing an annual barometer for the best pub cooking in the country. By 2012, it had earned a place in the dictionary.

What even is a gastropub in an age when nearly every pub serves decent grub? The lines have blurred. These days, any pub with a blackboard menu and a pork belly special wears the badge. Where once a ploughman’s was enough, now there’s “market fish with fennel pollen”. Napkins are folded, wine is decanted, and the question of what makes a pub a pub has become something of a national identity crisis.

“It becomes a restaurant when you can’t pop in for a pint,” says Tom de Keyser of The Hand and Flowers (Tom Kerridge’s place in Marlow, two Michelin stars and No 32 on Estrella Damm’s list). Sarah Hayward, head chef at The Coach (No 29 and down the road from Kerridge), admits, “We can try to escape the fact that we are generally known as a restaurant even though we distinguish ourselves as a pub.” But she insists it’s still a proper pub: no tablecloths, Sky Sports on in the background, great local beers.

“There’s pretty blurry lines on that score these days,” says Dave Wall of The Unruly Pig, which was crowned this year’s top gastropub in the country. “But there is one thing that I always think distinguishes, and that should be laid-back, unstuffy and relaxed service. And of course, you should always be able to get a cold pint.”

To imagine that pubs only discovered food in the 1990s is to forget the joy of a good steak and ale pie or a fish finger sandwich after a long walk. Chefs remember those early meals fondly.

“The warmth, energy and hospitality of the room, alongside a very refined version of a banging pie and mash,” says De Keyser, recalling his first truly great pub meal.

Andrew Pern, of The Star Inn at Harome, which ranked No 3 in the country, harks back to the 1970s, eating with his family at The Wheatsheaf in Egton: “I remember savouring their venison casserole, trout with toasted almonds and steak with stilton sauce.” By the 1990s, he was eating lobster thermidor and chateaubriand at North Yorkshire pubs like The Angel at Hetton, a “forefather of great food in pubs”.

Gastropubs didn’t appear out of nowhere: they emerged because the public’s expectations evolved. A generation raised on Ready Steady Cook and Saturday Kitchen didn’t want soggy chips with their pint. They wanted duck pie and rhubarb soufflé. Chefs responded.

“I couldn’t wait to anglicise these French classic dishes and give them a northern twist,” says Pern, who sees The Star Inn as an “English auberge-style inn”. That instinct to elevate without alienating is why the best gastropubs continue to thrive.

It also helped when Michelin started paying attention. The Stagg Inn in Herefordshire became the first pub to be awarded a Michelin star in 2001. Kerridge’s Hand and Flowers followed, becoming the first to hold two. It nudged the gastropub from a plucky upstart into the realm of serious cuisine.

There are plenty of explanations. Rising costs. Tighter margins. Utility bills that would make a utility company blush. A shortfall of chefs. A national staff crisis. But perhaps the most quietly revolutionary moment came in 2007: the smoking ban.

“I think a real catalyst for the growth of the gastropub industry in the UK was when the smoking ban came into place,” says Wall. “The culture of the ‘boozer’ definitely changed after that, and the popularity of ‘going for a pint’ declined.”

Add to that the decline in alcohol consumption, especially among younger people, and you get a simple truth: the pub had to evolve or die. Food wasn’t a gimmick. It was a life raft.

No one walks into a gastropub today expecting to pay £2 for a pint (those were the days). But the backlash to pub pricing has been especially vocal in recent years, with pints closer to £7, Sunday roasts north of £30 and fish and chips approaching fine dining territory.

“Unfortunately, prices have gone up, yes,” says De Keyser. “However, this is down to the cost of living and produce going up… If anything, I don’t believe pubs charge enough in relation to the rising tax, staff, ingredient and utility costs that they have to consistently manoeuvre around.”

Wall puts it bluntly: “Smaller businesses and independents have taken battering after battering on their profitability over the past few years… Inflation of prices is an absolute reality because the government has provided the industry with absolutely no choice.”

But these pubs aren’t unaware. They’re offering value where they can. “We offer an ever-changing seasonal set lunch menu, classics menu and house menu,” says De Keyser. “These three menus at different price points keep the pub accessible to all.”

At The Coach, Hayward offers a £15 set lunch mid-week. At The Unruly Pig, there’s a “Tasting Thursday” menu for £49 and a “Social Sunday” one. At The Star Inn, there’s a loyalty card giving 20 per cent off to regulars and locals.

So yes, a pie may now cost more than a tenner. But you’ll get impeccable service, a menu cooked with care and a pub that still knows your name.

The best ones still feel lived-in. That’s the word chefs use again and again. And not just in the nostalgic, smoke-stained sense.

At The Star Inn, you might see someone in waxed tweed playing dominoes by the bar while the Six Nations blares on the TV. There are cricket team photos on the wall. The ploughman’s is still on the menu.

“We have had lords, ladies, filmstars and even royalty rubbing shoulders with fifth-generation farmers,” says Pern. “Nobody bats an eyelid. We consider this a very democratic pub.” Turns out the dress code for democracy is wellies or a tiara – whichever is closer to hand.

The Coach has Sky Sports, a kids’ treasure chest and a regular guest who’s 101. “We even know which seats our regulars favour in the restaurant,” says Hayward.

“We know our regulars’ names, and they know ours,” says Wall. “We will always treat them as our most valued guests.”

The food may be refined, but the spirit remains the same: all are welcome, pint or no pint.

If anything, the gastropub has never been more necessary. A business model based on pints alone doesn’t cut it anymore. But the fear is that as more pubs go the way of celeriac remoulade and dashi-glazed carrots, the character will be stripped away.

De Keyser isn’t worried. “The gastropub will never peak,” he says. “Even though hospitality is massively feeling the squeeze at the moment, we will keep rising and attacking.”

And maybe that’s the answer. The gastropub isn’t an endpoint. It’s a continuation. A pub, after all, has always been a shape-shifter. What matters is not what’s on the plate, but how you feel while eating it.

They’ve been declared dead. They’ve been called the future of British food. They’ve been accused of gentrifying the local… and of saving it.

The truth is, the best gastropubs are doing something quite remarkable: being both a local and a destination. A restaurant and a refuge. A place where you can have a triple-cooked chip or a triple-layered conversation.

The point isn’t whether the gastropub has peaked. The point is that they’ve kept the pub alive – pint, pie and all.

Southampton’s relegation is a disaster that offers a stark warning

A couple of hours after Southampton’s fate was sealed, a manager talked about having the worst season in history. It wasn’t Ivan Juric, either, but Ruben Amorim, with his gift for smiling exaggeration. Although, earlier in the week, candid Croatian Juric had said: “I don’t want it to be that we are the worst team in the history of Premier League.”

If everyone needs an ambition, it is a particularly undignified one. Relegated at record pace, mathematically gone with seven games to go, the drama in Southampton’s season rests on their attempts to equal or better Derby’s historic low of 11 points. It all seems to depend on a trip to Ruud van Nistelrooy’s Leicester. They will go there without Juric, sacked for either hopeless results or an honest appraisal of their demise.

If demotion was sealed by defeat to Tottenham on Sunday, it merely confirmed the inevitable. Perhaps, given the struggles of promoted teams, Southampton were down when they beat Leeds in last season’s play-off final. They almost certainly were after their first nine games produced a lone point. The symbolic moment of their season came at the start: facing Newcastle’s 10 men, dominating possession, goalkeeper Alex McCarthy, ordered to do something he cannot, passed to Alexander Isak and Joelinton scored.

Outside Hampshire, Southampton’s season may be remembered for the failure of an idea, the obvious outcome when misguided idealism collided with brutal reality. When it mattered, before they were cast adrift, before Juric discovered they were beyond rescuing, they were like Vincent Kompany’s Burnley in overdrive.

In 16 games before Russell Martin was sacked, Southampton made 11 errors that directly led to goals (and others that did not). Jurgen Klopp once called gegenpressing the best playmaker: opponents instead realised Southampton could create chances for them. The Premier League is hard enough for the weaker sides without donating goal after goal.

Before promotion, Martin felt his management would be more suited to the Premier League, given fewer games and more time on the training ground. He later concluded his players were not good enough for his style of football. Many another had already worked that out, some with the sense the manager was not either.

With his stubbornness backfiring, Martin became an inadvertent advertisement for pragmatism: idealism without sufficient competence brought a fiasco. Southampton should have either sacked Martin in the glow of promotion, showing the realism to look for someone better equipped for the task and allowing him to go with plenty of sympathy and his reputation at its highest, or forced him to remain in charge all season. Promotion was a fine achievement, the £100m or so from television revenue was invaluable, but he has been the architect of an atrocious campaign.

When Martin was dismissed, it was with five points from 16 games, the direction of travel clear. If Juric’s return of four from 14 was still worse, if he was also in the grip of delusion, he suffered from joining without realising the situation was irretrievable.

Not since Edward Smith boarded the Titanic in 1912 has anyone taken charge of as much of a sinking ship in Southampton; Juric did not notice the size of the holes until it was too late. Having previously accepted the Roma job after crowd favourite Daniele de Rossi was suddenly fired, the Croatian needs to show the capacity to dodge hospital passes in future.

Juric made some odd decisions – such as picking midfielder Joe Aribo in defence – but he constructed fine gameplans at Old Trafford and Anfield. Southampton led at both, albeit in vain; it was part of a pattern where they lost 25 points from winning positions, pointing again to a lack of pragmatism, nerve, defensive solidity and strength in depth. Juric’s departure, even before the season finished, merely brought things forward. He was collateral damage from a calamitous campaign, having suffered so many defeats he could not start next season with a clean slate with either players or fans.

Juric’s bluntness may have ushered him to the exit, but Southampton ought to learn a lesson or two from a direct talker. On Sunday, Juric spoke of “mistakes the club has made in the last three or four years”. Or, to put it another way, under Sport Republic’s ownership, this is their second ignominious, expensive relegation. In one respect, the first was the worst – spending £160m with an established Premier League club.

“Recruitment is everything in football,” said Juric. Southampton spent £100m this season for 10 points. Their squad was unbalanced, with far too many centre-backs, lacking physicality in some areas, particularly midfield, and lacking quality in others. Ben Brereton Diaz will go down as a bad buy, Maxwel Cornet a weird loan. They should not have signed Ryan Fraser, just as Martin should not have kept Jack Stephens as captain.

Although the league table suggests otherwise, they might actually have half of a good team. Now, they will lose them. The luckless Aaron Ramsdale’s best saves came in losses, and he needs a safe haven in mid-table to spare him another relegation. Tyler Dibling will not bring them the £100m they are allegedly asking for, but he has talent. The gifted Matheus Fernandes has not really settled in the area, Kyle Walker-Peters is out of contract and Southampton are still lumbered with some of the 2022-23 signings – Kamaldeen Sulemana, for one, seems sure to eye the exit.

Juric’s valedictory words included the warning that there are “huge problems in lots of situations”. But there could also be the conditions to win games next season. In the loaned-out Adam Armstrong and Cameron Archer, they have the genre of player too good for the Championship and not good enough for the Premier League. Maybe promotion specialist Taylor Harwood-Bellis will be ignored by Premier League clubs. Perhaps Flynn Downes will be at a level when he can again excel.

All of which would require the right manager. If Sheffield Wednesday make the former Southampton coach Danny Rohl available, he might be ideal. For now, Saints have a second interim spell under Simon Rusk. The low-profile caretaker secured a 0-0 draw at Fulham in December, simply because no one gave a silly goal away, and that offered a vision of a sliding-doors scenario.

A less self-destructive brand of football could have been more productive. Southampton would probably have always gone down, but not this embarrassingly. Amid relegation and recrimination, the Saints ought to rue the way this has felt so needless, so predictable, the disaster everyone else foresaw.

Paddington Bear statue will return to town that ‘loves him so dearly’

A statue of Paddington bear that was destroyed by vandals is set to be fully repaired.

Officials in Newbury, Berkshire, said the move will bring the bear: “Back to the town that loves him so dearly.”

The statue, a tribute to Paddington author Michael Bond who was born in the town, was damaged on 2 March.

Two Royal Air Force engineers, Daniel Heath and William Lawrence, both 22 and stationed at RAF Odiham, were responsible for the damage.

The pair appeared at Reading Magistrates’ Court following the incident, where they admitted to breaking the statue after a night out, even making off with a piece of it.

The court, acknowledging the cultural significance of the statue to Newbury, ordered Heath and Lawrence to pay £2,725 each towards the repair costs.

They also received 12-month community orders. The restoration will see the beloved bear returned to his rightful place in the town.

Ben Beardmore-Gray, marketing manager at Newbury Business Improvement District (BID), said: “When the damage was caused, it was a bit of a shock to all of us.

“Newbury is quite a quiet town. Crime here is not particularly extreme.

“For something so visible to happen – it caught us all off guard.”

“We’ve been working very hard behind the scenes for five weeks, basically, to bring Paddington back to the town that loves him so dearly, and we’re delighted that we can announce he’s back on Wednesday.”

CCTV footage played to the court showed the men approaching the Paddington Bear statue late at night before ripping the bear off its bench and walking away with it.

District judge Sam Goozee condemned Heath and Lawrence’s actions, calling them “the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for”.

As part of the unveiling, children are being encouraged to write a letter welcoming Paddington back to the town.

The repaired and repainted statue will be unveiled in a ceremony on Wednesday at 11.30am on Northbrook Street, Newbury.

Health workers to be sent door-to-door in bid to tackle sickness rates

Health workers will be sent door-to-door under drastic new NHS plans to tackle sickness rates across England, according to reports.

A community health worker will be allocated 120 homes to visit every month to see if help is needed under plans set to be rolled out in June, The Daily Telegraph reports.

Health secretary Wes Streeting said trials of the scheme showed “encouraging signs” in slashing the number of heavy NHS users which he called “frequent flyers” of A&E departments.

A pilot scheme in Westminster, London, showed a dramatic 10 per cent drop in hospital admissions over a year, The Daily Telegraph reports.

“We’re seeing some really encouraging signs about what can happen if you’ve got the right care in the right place at the right time,” Mr Streeting said.

The scheme, set to be rolled out in 25 parts of England, is part of Mr Streeting’s 10-year plan for the NHS, which could also see younger people directed to pharmacy care using the NHS app, leaving GPs to devote their time to sicker and older patients.

The health secretary said a modernised version of the health service’s phone app could mean the NHS could “do a much better and faster job of making sure patients get the right care at the right time in the right place”.

He told the i newspaper: “If you are someone who tends to be younger, fitter, healthier, you probably won’t need to see the same GP every time you are going in for something.”

In March, it was announced that NHS England would be abolished and the service would be brought into the control of ministers.

The changes marked a reversal of a 2012 shake-up of the NHS under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, which the Government said created “burdensome” layers of bureaucracy without any clear lines of accountability.

The plan will focus on the “three shifts” the Government say are needed, including moving NHS services towards more community-based care, preventing people getting ill in the first place and better use of digital technology.

Mr Streeting also repeated his belief that the NHS is “ not all about money”.

He said that “you can’t just keep on pouring ever increasing amounts of taxpayers’ money into a system that is not set up to deliver best use of that money and best care for patients and that’s why the system needs to change”.

Johnson and Sunak may have to give evidence at Manston inquiry

Former prime ministers, home secretaries and senior civil servants could be called to testify in an ongoing inquiry into unlawful conditions at a migrant processing centre.

A newly-released Home Office brief has revealed the potential scope of the inquiry into the overcrowding crisis at Manston detention centre in the autumn of 2022.

Incidents at Manston included a death in custody, unlawful detention of adults and children, and Home Office officials charged with conspiracy to steal and misconduct in public office, the document outlines.

The briefing document, marked officially sensitive, has been made public after an application by The Independent, The Guardian and the BBC to a High Court Judge.

It was prepared for home secretary Yvette Cooper a few weeks after Labour won the general election in July last year.

Ms Cooper was told that “the investigation of the conditions at Manston will probably be reputationally damaging for the Home Office”.

More than 18,000 people arrived on small boats to the UK between August and November 2022, with almost all of them being detained and held at Manston. People were forced to sleep on damp and mouldy wooden flooring without adequate bedding, denied warm clothing and footwear and unable to access clean clothes, according to separate legal submissions.

The site opened as a processing centre in February 2022, with small-boat migrants meant to be held there for short periods after arriving in the UK to undergo checks.

They would then be moved into Home Office asylum accommodation, most likely a hotel. The site was meant to have capacity for between 1,000 and 1,600 people, with migrants staying there for under 14 hours, but by 31 October 2022 there were around 4,000 people at Manston.

Migrants were held at the site for far too long, an official inspection found, with one family reportedly held for 32 days.

Diphtheria also spread at the base, and one migrant 31-year-old Hussein Haseeb Ahmed died in hospital on 19 November after contracting the disease. The medical cause of death was un-ascertained but an inquest heard that he had been suffering from breathlessness, a fever and drowsiness.

An independent inquiry into the crisis has been set up, chaired by Sophie Cartwright KC, to investigate what went wrong.

The internal brief also lists a number of allegations that were raised with the Home Office about the worrying conditions at Manston, a former military base in Kent, including misfeasance in public office, breaches of the European Convention of Human Rights, breaches of the duty to safeguard children, and breaches of planning permission, safety, fire, and food safety regulations.

Phones were unlawfully seized from residents, and property and money was confiscated and never returned, according to concerns flagged to the Home Office in October and November 2022.

The brief identifies key individuals who will likely be called up to the inquiry, which was launched in March this year. These include three former home secretaries, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Grant Shapps, as well as five former immigration ministers, the Home Office’s most senior civil servant Matthew Rycroft at the time, other senior civil servants, and a litany of officials from immigration enforcement, border force, asylum and private offices.

The brief, drawn up by the legal director at the Home Office, also lists Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, and Ben Wallace as ministers who will likely be asked to give evidence about how their decision making impacted the crisis at Manston in 2022.

Charlotte Khan, Head of Advocacy and Public Affairs at Care4Calais said: “This is a damning charge list, and speaks to the scale of the scandal that ensued at Manston in late 2022.

“Reputational damage should be the least of the Home Office’s worries. People who were unlawfully held at Manston have long told us about the inhumane conditions they were kept under, but this briefing makes it clear that three senior Conservative politicians are in the dock for overseeing the unlawful detention of people, including children, alleged human rights breaches, and a death in custody.

“This was no way to treat fellow humans, and those in power at the time must be held accountable for the decisions made under their watch. The Inquiry must serve justice for those subjected to this cruelty at Manston.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The home secretary acted on the advice she was given to establish an independent inquiry into events at the Manston short-term holding facility between June and November 2022, in line with the commitments made by her predecessors, and on the terms agreed through the subsequent legal process.

“That inquiry will now proceed and we are supporting it fully, but it would be inappropriate to comment further whilst it is ongoing.”

The global event bringing fresh energy to planet-positive solutions

As we navigate significant environmental and social challenges, the return of ChangeNOW, the world’s biggest expo of solutions for the planet, is much needed to reinvigorate climate action. The 2025 edition, which will take place from April 24th to 26th, will host 140 countries, 40,000 attendees, 10,000 companies and 1,200 investors.

Visionary leaders, established businesses and start-ups alike will gather to showcase over 1,000 sustainable solutions and groundbreaking innovations in key sectors such as clean energy, biodiversity, sustainable cities and the circular economy.

The ChangeNOW 2025 summit will be held at the iconic Grand Palais in Paris, a nod to the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement. Reuniting for the occasion will be guest speakers Mary Robinson, the former (and first female) president of Ireland, Laurent Fabius, former French prime minister, Patricia Espinosa, former UN climate chief and diplomat and Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, leading climate scientist and professor – all of whom were in the French capital a decade earlier to help shape the Paris Agreement at COP21.

There may have been obvious setbacks to environmental policy around the world of late, the United States’ recent withdrawal from the Paris Agreement being a notable one. However ChangeNOW 2025 intends to reaffirm the spirit of Paris, while serving as a catalyst for progress ahead of COP30 and the United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC). “Ten years after COP21, ChangeNOW is where leaders and changemakers converge to accelerate the ecological and social transition,” states Santiago Lefebvre, founder and president of ChangeNOW. “Thousands of solutions will be showcased demonstrating that meaningful progress is within reach.”

His message of positive climate action will be supported by a multitude of world famous faces who will be in attendance at the auspicious event. Natalie Portman, Academy award-winning actress, director, author, activist, and producer; Captain Paul Watson, Founder of Sea Shepherd and Ocean Conservationist; Hannah Jones, CEO of The Earthshot Prize and Olympic champion boxer and gender equality advocate Imane Khelif are just a few of the names set to appear at ChangeNOW 2025.

With over 500 speakers and 250 conference sessions exploring climate action, biodiversity protection, resource management, and social inclusion, ChangeNOW 2025 will also hear the insights of acclaimed corporate leaders from Accor, Bouygues, Henkel, Lidl, Nexans, and Saint-Gobain, who will explain how businesses can be the ones to drive real change.

And the event will not only be an opportunity for global policymakers to discuss next steps in climate action, it will also be a platform for nations to showcase local innovations through their country pavilions. Expect impactful solutions from countries including South Africa, The Netherlands, and Ukraine – demonstrating international collaboration on the topic of climate.

In addition to the packed program of speakers, workshops, exhibits and networking opportunities, ChangeNOW 2025 will host the Impact Job Fair on Saturday, 26 April, with over 150 recruiters and training organisations offering in excess of 600 roles. Dedicated to the public and young professionals, the interactive workshops, educational activities, and career opportunities in sustainable sectors on offer aim to inspire the next generation of changemakers.

The summit will also present the annual Women for Change conference and the accompanying portrait exhibition, which showcases 25 women who are set to have a significant positive impact on their communities, countries or on a global scale over the next 10 years. Created in 2021, the Women for Change initiative aims to platform and provide opportunities for women who are leading change around the world but require further recognition or investment to continue their work. The annual flagship event, which takes place on the afternoon of April 24th, offers women the chance to discuss new ideas, network with likeminded people, and also acquire funding to help solidify their leadership, and amplify their impact.

Step outside the Grand Palais and take a few steps to the Port des Champs Elysées, on the bank of the Seine, where the The Water Odyssey village awaits. One of the event’s standout features, the immersive 1,000 m² exhibition is open to the public and highlights solutions to maritime and river sustainability challenges – offering a mix of conferences, interactive displays, and sensory experiences to engage all ages.

For three days, ChangeNOW will transform Paris into the global capital of impact, bringing together policymakers, entrepreneurs, investors, and the public in the pursuit of sustainable progress.

Book your ChangeNOW 2025 ticket here

Trump has made China appear a beacon of free trade

The Chinese Communist Party, apostle of free trade. In a strange new world, that was the strangest thing, as shares crashed in reaction to President Donald Trump’s opening salvo of tariffs in a global trade war.

“The market has spoken,” said the foreign ministry spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, writing in English on Facebook – which is, by the way, banned in China. No double standards there, then. Beijing can always keep a straight face when it matters.

Politically, the Chinese government can scarcely believe its luck. It has stepped forward as a voice of reason and stability in a chorus of discord to promote the false narrative that it has been a model of good behaviour since it joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on 11 December 2001, a date that seems destined to live in the textbooks as the peak of globalisation.

The Trump tariffs “are a typical act of unilateral bullying”, complained a spokesperson for China’s Commerce Ministry.

“This approach disregards the balance of interests achieved through years of multilateral trade negotiations and ignores the fact that the US has long gained substantial profits from international trade,” the spokesperson added.

The official news agency, Xinhua, said the tariffs were “a weapon to suppress China’s economy and trade” and told the United States to stop undermining “the legitimate development rights of the Chinese people”.

It would be a mistake to write off Chinese rhetoric. The regime of Xi Jinping is serious and its actions speak louder than words.

Clue: China has listed “legitimate development rights” as one of its “red lines” in dealing with the US. The term is code for the export-led economic model which has propelled the country to the rank of second largest economy on earth since it joined the WTO.

Understand that and you understand that for China this is existential. There could be no greater contrast to the whirlwind in Washington than the disciplined, efficiently executed responses announced by Beijing in nine statements outlining reprisals that went beyond mere numbers.

Xi himself did not deign to speak publicly, let alone do anything as vulgar as posting on social media in capital letters. The Chinese public would have thought it beneath his dignity.

Untroubled by such niceties, Trump swiftly posted to his followers online that “CHINA PLAYED IT WRONG, THEY PANICKED.”

With all due respect to the American president, that is exactly what they did not do. The Xi hit list is ominous because it is well-planned and researched. The “Red Emperor” rules a mandarin class of sophisticated operators who do nothing else but study China’s opponents using every intelligence tool at their disposal.

The easy part for China was to impose reciprocal 34 per cent tariffs on all American imports from 10 April. It also suspended six American firms from exporting to China, launched anti-dumping actions in the medical sector and targeted the US giant DuPont with a probe into potential monopoly practices.

The hard part showed just how thoroughly the Chinese had done their work. No penguin islands or weird mathematics here. They banned the export of “dual use” items, which could have military or civilian applications, to 16 US firms, all in the technology sector.

Their key move was to put export controls on seven rare earth elements “to safeguard national security”. It’s on the public record that some of these are vital to US weapons systems.

The list of rare earths included terbium, which is used to enhance the properties of specialised magnets used in guidance systems, satellites and radar. The magnets are integral to the state-of-the-art F-35 fighter, Predator drones, cruise missiles and nuclear submarines.

Then there’s dysprosium, a rare-earth element of which China controls nearly all the world’s supply. It is used to make high-grade magnets that work in super-heated conditions and is found in the newest semiconductors. Other rare earths on the list are vital to jet engine turbine blades. All will now require special export licences.

China and America are thus in a new kind of war over technology and artificial intelligence. Both Joe Biden and Trump tried to choke the supply of advanced semiconductors to Chinese manufacturers, while China is seeking to choke the supply of raw materials to America’s tech champions.

It’s not hard to see how dangerous this could get. The founder of free-trading modern Singapore, the late Lee Kuan Yew, once told me in an interview that “World War Two was caused because of empires and protectionism”.

He recalled that in the 1940s an oil embargo on Imperial Japan pushed its military leaders into war and he warned that if the West tried to isolate China economically “that is bound to lead to conflict”.

Lee was talking in the 1990s, when China stood on the threshold of globalisation. It joined the WTO only after hard-fought talks. But Charlene Barshevsky, who sealed the deal for the United States, later lamented that the Americans failed to use the WTO to punish Beijing when it broke the rules.

That created the belief that appeasement and elite inertia condemned the American working class to decline, the foundation story of Trump’s movement to Make America Great Again. So it is some irony that the Chinese have just filed a formal complaint about Trump’s tariffs – with the World Trade Organisation.

Michael Sheridan, longtime foreign correspondent and diplomatic editor of The Independent, is the author of The Red Emperor published by Headline Press at £25

The US president must stop his ‘Trump Slump’ becoming a global one

Most shocks in capital markets are, by definition, unexpected. They sometimes derive purely from some almost random-seeming shift in market sentiment, albeit with more deep-set fundamental factors at work. The Great Crash of 1929 and the stock market crash of October 1987 – Black Monday – fall neatly into that category.

Others are more clearly understood in real time, but still a shock: the global financial crisis of 2008 is comprehensible from a distance, albeit famously seen as a “black swan” event. Still others are more purely external – Arab nations imposing an oil curfew after the Yom Kippur war in 1973; or whatever bat, pangolin or Chinese lab assistant was responsible for the coronavirus getting loose.

The Trump tariff crash of 2025 is an altogether unusual affair – one of the few such catastrophes to befall the savings and livelihoods of millions of people caused by the stubbornness of one man.

Because it is Donald Trump – and he alone – who is responsible not only for the substance of his reckless shutdown of US trade with the rest of the world, but the deeply flawed design of the tariff schedules, the practically unprecedented suddenness of their introduction, and the incomprehensible rationale for the policy. Certainly, Mr Trump made no secret of his love for – “the most beautiful word” – tariffs.

But the scale and incompetence that has been attached to his attack on trade has stunned and appalled the world. Worse even than that, it has left people confused.

At one point over the weekend, serious analysts were suggesting that Mr Trump actually intended for the markets to crash. In most cases, this was not a product of the over-conspiratorial minds of the Trump cultists, but because the president himself had reposted a story on social media suggesting that he was “Purposely CRASHING The Market”. A White House spokesperson had to state that the president did not, in fact, deliberately wipe some $8 trillion off the world’s stock markets – another unwelcome precedent set by this president.

The question then arises: “What does Mr Trump think he is doing?” The answer is that no one knows, not even the president.

Some, including the president himself in his unorthodox Rose Garden presentation and his secretary for commerce, Howard Lutnick, suggest that it is all about reindustrialising the United States and generating “trillions” of long-term tax revenues. In his address to workers at Jaguar Land Rover on Monday, Sir Keir Starmer admitted that tariffs are “a huge challenge for our future, and the global economic consequences could be profound”.

Less than comfortingly, Mr Trump compares what he’s putting the previously healthy American economy through to a patient undergoing an operation. Others, occasionally also including the president himself, suggest it is merely another of his brilliant negotiating tactics, and point excitedly to the response of nations such as Vietnam, Israel and Argentina offering zero-tariff deals with America – but which would therefore yield zero returns for the proposed new US “External Revenue Service”.

Put simply, it is a matter of “Tariffs bad – uncertainty even worse”. Businesses and households cannot plan in such an environment, and that means that investment will be frozen for weeks, if not months, and a recession becomes ever more likely.

That is one imminent danger. Another is the way that the market contagion has spread from industrial and resources stocks to the banks, with the obvious worry that the trade recession will soon be joined by its evil twin, a credit crunch. As confidence drains from the world economy, companies are nervous about investing, banks are reluctant to lend, and savers will turn to safer havens than equities. Historically, such security was offered by the United States dollar; now, perhaps, not so much.

One of the great ironies in Mr Trump’s plan to boost the American economy is that, within a fairly short time, he will have plunged it into such a slump that he will need to take emergency measures to rescue it – tax cuts, and increasing the US budget deficit to pay for it. The Federal Reserve may find it has no alternative but to cut interest rates – usually a welcome move, but in this case merely proof of the disaster the Trump administration is inflicting on its people.

The net result may be stagflation: above-target increases while economic activity stagnates. It is analogous to what a combination of the Brexit shock and the reckless Truss experiment that crashed the UK economy in 2022 would do. It is that bad.

What can the authorities, including in the United States, do to prevent a slump? Unlike in 2008 and 2020, for example, in most Western economies, there is far less scope for borrowing at sustainable interest rates to support the economy.

In 2008, when Gordon Brown was prime minister and had to nationalise most of the British banking sector, the UK national debt-to-GDP ratio stood at about 36 per cent. By the time Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were faced with closing down the economy in 2020, it was 85 per cent. It now stands at 95 per cent, and trending higher.

If the present chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has barely enough fiscal headroom to keep to her fiscal rules, she will have to find some convincing explanations about the much more onerous costs of nursing Britain through what we may soon be calling “the Trump Slump”. That, of course, is not even accounting for the real cost of deterring Vladimir Putin and helping to defend Europe (that being another direct consequence of Mr Trump’s election).

Much the best move, and one still hoped for, is that Mr Trump accepts the manifold and genuine offers of constructive negotiations he’s had from world leaders, declares an early “victory” for his tactics, and announces a 90-day moratorium during which new, freer trade deals can be reached across the world.

It would be good news for all. The markets would calm, American voters would no longer fear opening their pension fund statements, and Mr Trump might turn his mess into a miracle of trade liberalisation.

The dangers if President Trump does press on with his mercantilist “medicine” for America are too gruesome to contemplate. At times such as this, what else is there other than optimism?