There’s no one better to set the scene.

The best political reporter in Britain returns to the Dishcast to discuss the election on July 4. Tim has been a chief political commentator at The Sunday Times since 2014, after serving eight years as political editor. His first two books, All Out War and Fall Out, are indispensable to understanding the politics of Brexit, and his new book is No Way Out: Brexit: From the Backstop to Boris.

You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on the fall of Rishi Sunak, and Nigel Farage entering the “clusterfuck,” as Tim puts it — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: 14 years of Tory power; George Osborne’s austerity; Boris the cosmopolitan liberal Tory; how he screwed up Brexit; his common touch overshadowed by breaking his own Covid rules; deep spending during the pandemic; his bromance with Zelensky; vowing to cut migration but legislating mass, unskilled migration; Theresa May unable to right the ship; the Liz Truss disaster; her naive libertarianism and supply-side shock therapy; Rishi Sunak sweeping in from a smoke-filled room; coming in as a technocratic problem-solver but lacking the political skill; surrounded by Yes Men and “surprisingly brittle”; his rolling series of campaign blunders this month — starting with his election announcement in the pouring rain; the D-Day disaster; Nigel Farage entering the “clusterfuck” and splitting the Tory base; losing all his previous seven races for Parliament; how Reform will get one, maybe two seats; how Farage is close with Trump and “more jovial”; how Farage had to backtrack on Putin ; why Keir Starmer is not proposing radical change (like Thatcher did); how he’s touting “stability” and “competence”; his policy is thin; my reflections on befriending and debating Keir during our school days; how he was a class-war leftist in his youth, with swagger; the depth of his ambition (even more than Rishi); how he outmaneuvered Jeremy Corbyn and distanced the party from anti-Semitism; the Cass Review; China policy; Blairism; how old party allegiances are mostly gone; and how July 4 could see the worst election loss since 1906.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Erick Erickson on the left’s spiritual crisis, Anne Applebaum on autocrats, Lionel Shriver on her new novel, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty, Van Jones, and Stephen Fry! Send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

On Michael Oakeshott — the subject of last week’s episode with Elizabeth Corey — a listener writes:

Thank you and Elizabeth so much for that extraordinary conversation. It was just utterly brimming with wisdom and love of life.

Here’s a clip from last week:

Another wants more of Oakeshott:

Your 2021 column, “Religion and the Decline of Democracy,” found me at the right time, and I’ve been thinking of it ever since it appeared. You caused me to fall into a pretty deep Oakeshott rabbit hole. In the process, I discovered that you were/are an Oakeshott scholar, and that “the deadliness of doing” is an idea you have long pondered.

It’s also prompted me to pull out an old prayer rope, and I’m planning to haunt a church about a block from my office. Oh, and I decided to resign from a part-time job, which at this point is mainly just doing — a lifelong tendency/pathology of mine: I do, therefore I am.

I would like to read and learn more about Oakeshott. Could you please suggest some practical reading?

Start with the essays. Then the last third of On Human Conduct. Another writes:

Michael Oakeshott is supposed to have said that “a good university just needs three things: serious intelligent people, a library, and a cafeteria. All the rest is imposed by society.” This view was relayed in a seminar at the LSE in the early 1990s, and I never found a citation or anything similar. Since you are one of the few experts on Michael Oakeshott, have you come across it? Does it ring true?

I do think that it is a very elegant way of thinking about higher education, and thus also about the need for curiosity, debate, talking to each other, and an open-ended endeavour, rather than an institution that seeks to forge (or even impose) a kind of morality.

I don’t know about that quote. Sadly I never got to study with him. Here’s a guest recommendation for a future pod:

Hello from a Dish subscriber going on two years. I recently read Kevin Williamson’s 2019 book, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics. He quotes Michael Oakeshott numerous times, so it made me wonder if you would ever engage him on the Dishcast?

Good idea. Another rec:

I’d like to suggest Andrew Solomon for the podcast. He’s written two incredibly accomplished and much-praised books that have won national awards. The first is The Noonday Demon, on depression. He’s researched it and lived it and suffered greatly from it. The second is Far From the Tree, about the challenges faced by the parents of exceptional children with special needs: deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, schizophrenia, autism, prodigies, children conceived in rape, kids who become criminals, transgender. I think you’d have an illuminating conversation with him, especially on the trans issues that some teens and parents are dealing with right now.

Once I recover from occasionally being confused with him, sure. Another listener is catching up on episodes:

I just listened to Jeffrey Rosen and Kara Swisher back to back. You know what, you have too many people on who you’ve known in the past and considered buddies. You also spend too much time on the internet — its history, its impact, its iterations. I thought it reached the ridiculous with Swisher.

Jeffrey Rosen proved to be much more interesting than I would have expected, and I’m glad you had him on. There was some intellectual gravity there that I appreciated.

A reader looks to the looming election across the Pond:

It certainly looks like the UK tabloid headlines on July 5 will be something along the lines of: “Tories Hit By Perfect Starm.” Actually this is quite worrisome to me, since when one looks at prior election results, it appears that when the UK goes left, the US goes right (and vice versa).

Nevertheless, Rishi is scaring sheep, getting grief on a call-in radio program for eating candy when so many cannot get dental care appointments, and now getting backstabbed by compulsive gamblers in his party (similar to insider trading here in the States). I fully expect him to be blamed for making babies cry at some point before the July 4 election! It’s so absolutely sad for him that it’s laughable. And it’s not far-fetched to think that at this point he’s outright trying to lose so that he can pack up and move to California, as commentators have stated.

Another reader looks to politics stateside:

I appreciated your piece on Douthat’s interview with JD Vance — a richly deserved takedown of his disgraceful apologetics for Trump’s authoritarian behavior. While you were right to focus on his defense of Trump’s behavior after the 2020 election, there were two other aspects of Vance’s position that I found breathtaking and merit criticism.

One was the incoherence of his economics. He wants wages for workers to rise, but what effect does he think that will have on prices? It’s a recipe for permanent inflation. This is true of all economically nationalist proposals to re-shore manufacturing, supply chains, etc. They may well be defensible on policy grounds, because the benefits may outweigh the costs, but could we please not pretend that there won’t be any costs — which is simply to repeat the mistake of outsourcing so many American jobs from the other direction. Lowering the cost of production by shipping jobs overseas was great for American consumers, who reaped the benefits of lower prices, but it was terrible for the producers who lost their jobs. Paying higher costs of production to recreate those jobs will reverse the distribution of costs and benefits.

And let us dwell for a moment on Vance’s declaration that replacing most workers at McDonald’s with kiosks while paying the few workers who remain higher wages will be a win-win — innovation plus higher wages. He sounds, dare I say it, like a member of the Business Roundtable. Er, what about the workers who got replaced by kiosks? Might they not feel like the workers whose jobs got shipped to China, whose interests Vance claims to represent?

The other part was his suggestion that the “feelings” of Trump’s supporters that the election was stolen deserve some deference. He sounded exactly like those woke college students he hates, who argue that their feelings mustn’t be hurt. Now, I am not one of those who argues that feelings don’t matter, because I think we should try to respect others’ feelings when we can so as to avoid being jerks, but I also don’t think that people’s feelings (including mine) are the only thing that deserve consideration or should dictate one’s view of reality. Additional evidence is required, and Trump’s supporters don’t have it.

Our reader thread on IVF continues from the dissents on the main page:

As a mother of two beautiful children born through the miracle of IVF, and the owner of more frozen blastocysts — more than I even care to say — I want to thank you for your column. While I think you are wrong in your extreme conclusion, those frozen blastocysts do weigh on my heart, and many people have entirely avoided having this conversation with me at all. Your brave, explicit argument has helped me clarify my own thinking on the question of what to do with these extra “embryos” — so the main thing I want to say is thank you.

But I have a few points of correction and/or clarification (which bring me to some follow-up questions):

• A blastocyst in a petri dish is not a fetus — in fact, it is not even an embryo. And without a womb, it has no chance of becoming an embryo. (In your prior writing on the Dish blog about stem-cell research, you were more careful about this distinction.) An implanted blastocyst becomes an embryo; and then (around nine weeks) a fetus; and then (around 40 weeks) a baby. A baby breathes, which is a step that none of the prior forms of development have. Thus, frozen blastocysts are more akin to seeds (in sexual plants) or spores (in asexual fungi). Seeds and spores are stored, eaten, planted, disbursed, and “discarded” liberally without ethical concerns (that is not to say that animal or human seeds should be treated the same). Are avocado pits alive?


• With the exception of sex selection (illegal in the UK and should probably be so here, IMO), and with some rare cases where doctors have, controversially, helped parents screen the genetic similarity to existing ailing children, parents are not choosing the embryos to implant, as your writing suggests. Rather, healthcare professionals select the blastocyst(s) that are most suitable for transfer. They often do this without any genetic testing. Where testing is available — either due to medical conditions in the parents or the ability to pay out of pocket — genetic reports are used to select transfer candidates because the hormones that support the transfer can sustain genetically abnormal pregnancies that nature (or discerning parents) would otherwise terminate. Indeed, fetuses conceived through IVF receive the same genetic testing (and option to terminate) that parents of traditionally conceived children do. Would you allow parents of a child with genetic defects to terminate a wanted fetus based on your position on abortion?


• Creating extra blastocysts is a common, but not necessary, component of IVF. Many people undergo so-called “fresh transfers” and never freeze a blastocyst at all.


• Or, some people transfer the only blastocyst that is frozen (since waiting for the body to start a new cycle after egg retrieval often improves the chances of successful implantation of the blastocyst). This is still IVF, without extra fertilization, but in many cases with more general anesthesia for hopeful mothers (or egg donors or surrogates). Your arguments do not suggest that you think IVF is evil, but rather that one common aspect of it is. Am I missing something?


• Currently, IVF is about two percent of children born in the US. I wonder how your opinion would change if it were to become 10 percent or 30 percent or, godforbid, 90 percent?

To your argument itself:

You seem to think life begins at conception (and personhood at the point of legal abortion?) — which is just fine, but your vocabulary and your examples get sloppy on this point. For example, Sophie’s Choice is not a choice between frozen unknown (and unknowable) cellular matter; it is a choice between embodied, known, and breathing children — all with the rights and protections of the laws of their land. For me, human life requires breath. A human that is not breathing is dead (I think this is irrefutable) — or not yet alive, since breath is the action that distinguishes a fetus or a stillborn from a healthy baby. So, for me, my frozen blastocysts are not alive, as you write, but are simply conceived children, fertilized eggs, seeds.

I have tended to think of my “seeds” as genetic assets: a medicine created from my own cells that have allowed me to give birth — twice — and a tool that could one day even restore the health of one of my children or another human being through stem-cell therapies, or to advance science more broadly. In this view, I anticipate that creating extra genetic tools like my frozen blastocysts for family healthcare will become common practice in the future — even for couples who do not need (or elect) to use IVF to conceive. Perhaps one day this will even be viewed as a national or species-wide effort to save for the future, as plant seed banks already are. But, it is certainly true that human seeds are special, and perhaps such a practice should be discouraged or avoided — or banned altogether, as you seem to suggest.

I found myself reading and rereading your article this weekend, sometimes nodding along, sometimes squinting my eyes in angry painful rejection of your writing. Of course, all I needed was to hear my children laugh to simply know in a place deep in my belly that they are right and good — despite the whispers I hear from their possible siblings.

But let’s imagine those possible siblings did exist — that they were breathing, young children who each actively need my help and love to live. And let’s imagine that lava from an out-of-control volcano is coming for us, and the only choice to survive is to create lily pads out of the bodies of our group, of our family, to reach the cool, safe ocean. I would take any number of those siblings and personally flop their beautiful laughing faces (as well as my own) into the lava to save one or two.

And if another enemy rises, and we need to fight for protection, I would do what so many men and women have done: send off some of my sons and daughters to unthinkable horrors and their likely untimely demise to protect the others. Is that evil?

Such a beautiful, honest and open email. I have nothing to add. But I think defining humans as only human when breathing is too big a stretch. I also do not favor banning IVF, and maybe I should have made that more explicit. The column was not a case for that. It was a case for airing a discomfort and anxiety that I feel, as my reader does, need to be confronted. Another reader:

This is a fantastic piece on IVF, thank you! I would like to respond to this quote on surrogacy: “all the relevant parties are quite clearly acting with full awareness and agency in engaging in it.” I would argue that the most relevant party in this whole process, the child, has no awareness or agency, and he or she stands to lose the most because of it.

A child has an attachment to the woman whose womb he is carried in for nine months, regardless of if she is his biological mother or not. The term “primal wound” is used to describe the severing of a relationship between a mother and the child she gives up for adoption. Adoption makes the best of a broken situation, but surrogacy creates a broken situation — a “primal wound” — to fulfill the wishes of the adult.

There is a whole host of problems with surrogacy: the commodification of women’s bodies comes to mind, also the idea that some babies are for mommy to keep and some are for her to sell. But the most horrific is intentionally creating a generation of children knowing they will not be raised by their mothers. Surrogacy is about what the adult wants, not what a child wants — and more importantly, needs. There are plenty of beautiful children out there already suffering the hurt of not having a mother, for so many reasons. Why not put the children first and care for them, instead of ourselves?

On a personal note, I am the sister of an adoptee. I would be the last to say it is an easy solution. It is painful, and messy. New babies are not as quick to adopt, since everyone wants one, and an older child is not often as “cute” or amenable. We are more familiar now with the particular hardships of adoption. Surrogacy masquerades as a lovely, harm-free option, but I’m afraid in a generation or two we will be reaping the consequences.

Another reader addresses adoption of a different sort:

I found your discussion about IVF interesting. I discussed it with my husband and like he usually does, had thoughts. It sounded like your answer is to ban it, but there could be other options:

1. Allow just one egg to be fertilized at a time. That’s generally what happens naturally. If the embryo doesn’t implant or get carried to a full term, you get to try again. So no embryos are frozen.


2. If there needs to be more than one and some are frozen, put a time limit on how long they can be kept frozen. If the parents conceive and have the children they want, those frozen embryos could be put up for adoption. I’m not sure how that would work, but I figure there are people who have worked with adoptive parents who can figure out something. I have a younger cousin who paid god-only-knows how much to adopt a child from Russia. My guess is that she might have been amenable to adopting an embryo and carry a pregnancy to term.

It’s very difficult to finesse this, according to my reading. But yes, the worries can be better mitigated. On the court question, a lawyer writes:

You wrote, “The subject is fresh again. Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled in February that IVF was illegal under a 1872 state law that allowed parents to sue over the wrongful death of a minor child.” With respect, that is a huge misrepresentation of what actually happened in this case and what the judges actually decided.

This case was really about negligence, and what duty of care that people should expect when handling something like frozen embryos. Specifically, the claim was that a person at the IVF center was walking around and found the embryos unguarded. This person reached into the liquid nitrogen (?!) and took out the embryos, freeze-burning his hands in the process. Surprised, the person dropped the embryos on the ground and destroyed them.

The parents sued under Alabama’s Wrongful Death Act. Each state’s is a little different, and Alabama’s had added language that made it clear that the statute applied to an unborn child. (This was the result of a case brought when a pregnant woman was injured and the fetus she was carrying died. She sued and the legislature amended the law to include unborn children.)

If you would ask any person on the street, “An IVF center left out some embryos and let a random person destroy them. Should the IVF center owe anything to the parents?” The answer would be absolutely yes, especially because the law said that someone would be liable for doing such a thing.

The spin that the Alabama courts “banned IVF” was the result of slanted reporting and credulous readers repeating a click-bait headline. There would have been no case at all if the IVF center had simply exercised the regular and reasonable diligence that you would hope any medical facility would exercise.

Another looks to the politics of IVF:

We’ve already seen Republican AGs go after women for miscarriages. And if you don’t think we’re on the slippery slope, Louisiana just passed a law making the commonly safe abortion medications controlled substances. The Right to Life movement has set its sights on Plan B, trying to redefine it as an abortifacient, when it does no such thing because it prevents egg implantation — again, redefining the reproductive cycle at the moment of fertilization while ignoring all of the biological steps that must occur for the egg to develop into a human along the way. If you don’t think Republican AGs and the RTL movement won’t find creative ways to criminalize lost IVF embryos, think again.

Will conservatives insist that couples with frozen eggs/embryos, under court order or speciously written laws, be given the choice to implant those eggs and force women to carry them to term or face prosecution for discarding the unwanted embryos? Or pay hefty fines and jail time for refusing to un-freeze those embryos and use them as the state intends them to be?

As time rolls on, especially here in the Deep South, we’ll see a continued push by conservatives and the RTL movement to circumscribe the rights of women to such a degree that the state is fully in charge of their reproductive rights in the name of “saving the unborn.” The RTL movement isn’t about “life” so much as it’s a pro-birth movement, because these same conservatives will turn around and cast those children onto the garbage pile of humanity if it costs the state coffers one red cent to ensure children have access to healthcare, food, and education. After all, those kids need to boot-strap themselves into self-sufficiency once they’re out of the womb.

One more email for the week, in an effort to cheer me up:

Hi Andrew! I know you’re not the biggest fan of the Progress chevron intruding into the Pride flag, or the proliferation of flags in general. But I’ve been looking for something I could pitch outside my home to celebrate gay pride while clearly distancing myself from wokeness, and I came up with this:

Just call me Nancy Ross. It’s the first rainbow flag I’ve looked at in years that’s made me feel more pride than shame. Thank you for giving me a bit of sane and “virtually normal” gay community for decades now. Happy Gay Pride & Happy Independence Day!

Well, it sure is better than the one now representing the “omnicause”. But there was nothing that wrong about the old rainbow flag, even though it remains a bit cringe.

Have a great July 4.

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