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What’s the buzz? The Nordics have plenty of decent mid-range hotels, but relatively few knockout five-star establishments. Former triple Olympic gold medallist Samppa Lajunen wants to change that in Helsinki with his Hotel Maria, an attempt to plug what he sees as a gap in the high-end luxury market in the Finnish capital. A one-time specialist in Nordic combined (a discipline that involves cross-country skiing and ski jumping) and now a fund manager and developer, Lajunen claims that top-level sports and hotels both rest on the idea of “high goals, all details in place, and no compromises”. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine may have put paid to plans to attract high-rollers from Russia, but the hotel has been gradually opening up and expanding into four separate buildings throughout this year.

Location, location, location: It may be located in the heart of Helsinki, only a few hundred metres from the sea, main railway station and Senate Square, but the hotel sits on a surprisingly quiet side street, Mariankatu, in the Kruununhaka neighbourhood. The main building is one the Finnish army used from 1885 to house military officers and even snipers, and some of the suites have the narrow windows they once looked out of. Most sights in the Finnish capital are in easy walking distance.

Checking in: The yellow colonnaded facade is suitably imposing, but as soon as you pass the doorman into the interior there are Nordic cool vibes. The reception is well lit, with three cascading art deco chandeliers, conveying a sense of ice and snow that is especially suitable in a city where a frigid wind often blows off the sea. The welcome is warmer than the decor, but is equally Finnish in its efficiency. A few questions, a swipe of the credit card, even some low-key Finnish humour, and check-in was complete. A porter was soon whisking my bag off to my room.

The colours throughout the hotel are light and subtle, plenty of ivory and beige thanks to head designer Jana Sasko. Finns may normally be humble folk, but Lajunen’s three gold medals take pride of place in a display cabinet. Brass and gold effects abound — such as the inlays in the entrance’s marble floor and the curvy front desk. It’s clearly aiming to project a sense of luxury, but the relaxed type.

There are 117 bedrooms, of which no fewer than 38 are suites, and beige, light grey, and marble again predominate. A surprisingly intuitive iPad is used to control the lights, sound system and even the curtains but there are also manual switches.

What to do? If there is one thing Finland does better than anywhere else, it is sauna. The hotel spa offers both sauna and steam room, and a choice of how to cool off again — a compact plunge pool or an old-fashioned bucket with a chain pull. It took me some courage but soon provided an invigorating start to the day.

There is also a small pool for swimming, two warmer pools, and a Jacuzzi. I relaxed so much there was no time to use the fitness gym or wellness studio, let alone the ballroom.

What about the food? Lilja, the Maria’s main restaurant, is its pitch at a Nordic ingredients meets French-style fine dining concept that is so popular in the region. My meal suggested it is coming close to the Michelin star standard the team so obviously covet, the food delicate, delicious, and occasionally unusual. The latter is particularly true of my starter of persimmon, well balanced with a fresh ricotta, some crunch from almonds, and a subtle aniseed taste. It was followed by a decadent chicken confit and truffled potatoes.

Breakfast in a light and open dining room includes delights such as Nordic kimchi, cold smoked reindeer from Lapland and Finnish cheese, but also an à la carte menu with the omnipresent avocado toast and eggs royale.

Other guests? The war in Ukraine hasn’t just robbed the Maria of Russians but also of plenty of Asians that Finnair, the country’s flag carrier, had hoped to attract with shorter flight times to Europe by flying over Russia (Moscow has rescinded that right). So the hotel is more focused on European and American guests; business people and wealthy tourists mostly.

The damage: Double rooms including breakfast start from €350; suites run from €529 to as much as €6,000 per night.

Richard Milne is the FT’s Nordic and Baltic bureau chief. He was a guest of the Hotel Maria (hotelmaria.fi)

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BRITS planning to send Christmas cards have been warned to stock up ahead of a major price change in just hours.

Royal Mail has confirmed first-class stamps will go up in price tomorrow.

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The stamps will rise for standard letters by 30p from £1.35 to £1.65 – the second hike in a year and a 22% increase.

First-class stamps for large letters will go up from £2.10 to £2.60 – a 24% rise.

However, you can beat the hike somewhat by stocking up on stamps now so you don’t need to buy new ones come Christmas.

Martin Lewis previously said: “For years, every time stamps go up in price I’ve suggested people stock up and bulk-buy in advance.

“Provided the stamp doesn’t have a price on it and instead just says the postage class, it’s still valid after the hike.

“So you may as well stock up now, even if it’s just for Christmas cards for the next few Christmases.”

Royal Mail said it had tried to keep any price hikes on stamps as low as possible in the face of inflation and slumping demand.

It also cited the costs associated with maintaining the Universal Service Obligation for deliveries six days a week.

But Ofcom said Royal Mail could be allowed to drop Saturday deliveries for second class letters under an overhaul of the service.

Under plans being considered, second class deliveries would not be made on Saturdays and would only be on alternate weekdays.

But delivery times would remain unchanged at up to three working days.

Ofcom said no decision had been made and it continues to review the changes.

The regulator aims to publish a consultation in early 2025 and make a decision in the summer of next year.

Royal Mail has urged the Government and Ofcom to review its obligations.

The firm argues that it is no longer workable or cost-effective, given the decline in number of letter volumes being posted.

The delivery giant has previously said volumes have fallen from 20billion in 2004/5 to around 6.7billion in 2023/4.

The average household now receives four letters a week compared to 14 a decade ago.

What is rising?

Royal Mail previously raised the price of first class stamps from £1.10 to £1.25 last October, before hiking them again in April.

Right now, a first class stamp costs £1.35, which covers the delivery of letters up to 100g.

Historically, the cost of stamps has steadily increased over the years, reflecting inflation and operational costs. For example, in 2000, a First Class stamp was priced at 41p.

A second class stamp is currently priced at 85p and also covers letters up to 100g. The cost of second-class stamps isn’t rising from October 7.

The stamps can be bought individually if you buy it at a Post Office counter.

Otherwise, you can typically buy them in sets of multiple stamps.

The first class service typically delivers your post the next working day, including Saturdays, while the second class service usually delivers within 2-3 working days, also including Saturdays.

For larger letters, the cost of a first class stamp is £2.10 for items up to 100g, and a second class stamp for the same weight is £1.55.

Parcel delivery prices vary based on size and weight, starting from £3.69 for small parcels.

Additional services include the “signed for” option, which requires a signature upon delivery and adds an extra level of security.

The cost for first class signed for is £3.05, and for second class Signed for, it is £2.55.

The “special delivery” service guarantees next-day delivery by 1pm with compensation cover, with prices starting from £7.95.

Royal Mail periodically reviews and adjusts stamp prices, so it is advisable to check the latest rates on their official website or at your local Post Office.

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‘Complicated’

‘Substantial economic benefits’

What is freedom and why does it matter? Timothy Snyder’s answer is that “freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values. This is not because freedom is the one good thing to which all others must bow. It is because freedom is the condition in which the good things can flow within us and among us.”

This sounds abstract. But it is not. Snyder knows how precious and fragile freedom is because he has studied and, in Ukraine, even seen what happens to people when brutes take it away.

A professor at Yale, Snyder is one of the foremost historians of central and eastern Europe. Among his many books are Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — which explains how those monsters fed upon each other — and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which tells us where we might be heading.

Snyder is no ivory tower academic. He seeks to make the world a better place via his books and his Substack, which is notably clear-eyed on the neo-fascism of Donald Trump’s Republican party.

His knowledge of tyranny is invaluable in analysing freedom. But Snyder’s book goes well beyond history. He discusses the thought of Edith Stein, a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and died in Auschwitz. He quotes the French philosopher Simone Weil, the dissidents Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, and the leading critic of Karl Marx, Leszek Kolakowski, He includes his own experiences from his home in Ohio to his studies in central and eastern Europe, teaching in an American prison and being in Ukraine during Russia’s genocidal war. All this makes On Freedom intellectually rich, yet personal.

Unpredictability is evidently a form of freedom. Free people must be able to do and think what they wish, not just what governments want

The book starts from a passionate conviction that freedom is not negative — and so defined by the absence of external constraints — but positive, and so defined by what we are able to do. The latter, in turn, depends on what we get from others. For Snyder, then, the capacity to recognise others as beings like ourselves is the foundation of freedom. Without that, we will treat others as objects, not subjects, and finish up with tyranny.

Thus, he argues, “We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government.” Politically, freedom means democracy. A democracy of equal citizens is incompatible with an oligarchy protected by “negative freedom”. If, as in the US today, the law says that money is speech and corporations are people, it creates a plutocracy, “Freedom” then becomes a synonym for privilege.

What do these points mean in practice? Snyder’s answer is that “The connection between freedom as a principle and freedom as a practice are the five forms of freedom”. These are “sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.”

Together, these “forms” make those of us lucky enough to live in liberal democracies free members of a free society. As a child of refugees from Hitler who grew up during the cold war, I know what this means, as does Snyder. Notably, all of these forms depend on actions by others. They cannot be achieved by individuals on their own.

As Snyder notes, “Babies who are left alone learn nothing.” Children cannot acquire the personality and knowledge needed to be a free member of a free society on their own. Their achievement of individual sovereignty depends on what others do. But the ability of adults to act freely also depends on the honesty and competence of the judges, policemen, public servants and all those who pay their taxes and do vital jobs.

Unpredictability is evidently a form of freedom. Free people must be able to do and think what they wish, not just what governments want. That is what tyrannies seek to prevent. They want to make people predictable. The digital screen, argues Snyder, seeks to achieve the same outcome.

Mobility is the challenge for mature people, says Snyder. A free society should indeed be a mobile one. But, he emphasises, mobility includes social mobility. A hereditary oligarchy is the opposite of such mobility.

This drives Snyder’s hostility to negative freedom — the idea that one is free once one is liberated from restrictions imposed by governments. This perspective is solipsistic and so “antisocial”. In the US, he argues, the “elevation of negative freedom in the 1980s set a political tone that lasted deep into the twenty-first century”. The purpose of government was “not to create the conditions of freedom for all but to remove barriers in order to help the wealthy consolidate their gains.”

Moreover, “The more concentrated the wealth became, the more constrained was the discussion — until, in effect, the word freedom in American English came to mean little more than the privilege of wealthy Americans not to pay taxes, the power of a few oligarchs to shape the discourse, and the unequal application of criminal law.”

Truthfulness is not an archaism or an eccentricity but a necessity for life and a source of freedom

Snyder condemns the populism offered by Trump as “sadopopulism”. True populism, he argues, “offers some redistribution, something to the people from the state; sadopopulism offers only the spectacle of others being still more deprived.”

Factuality is fundamental: neither an individual nor a collective can make decisions without information. “Truthfulness”, argues Snyder, “is not an archaism or an eccentricity but a necessity for life and a source of freedom.” Deliberate lies of the kind that Trump and JD Vance have been telling about the consumption of pets by Haitian immigrants in Ohio make a mockery of democracy and so of freedom. Vladimir Putin is today’s master of such lies.

Values may differ, but if politics is to work at all, there needs to be some agreement on the facts. Here the difficulty, Snyder notes, is not just manipulative politicians but digital media. The advertising revenue needed to support journalism, especially local journalism, has been swallowed by digital behemoths. Investigative journalism has largely disappeared, and politics drowns in a tidal wave of conspiracies and lies.

Not least, argues Snyder, there must be solidarity. This follows from his most fundamental proposition that I am free because others are free. This is what makes the bonds of citizenship, on which freedom depends, work. If I am better off than others, I have an obligation to pay the taxes on which the freedom of others depends. This is the argument for sharing of the costs of bringing up children and of maintaining the health of all. At the limits, it means fighting in the defence of one’s country’s freedoms, as Ukrainians are doing. As Snyder insists: “Morally, logically, and politically, there is no freedom without solidarity.”

On Freedom fails fully to recognise that competitive markets are both a form — and a source — of freedom. Yet Snyder is not hostile to markets. On the contrary, he rightly insists that “Markets are indispensable, and they help us to do many things well. But it is up to people to decide which things those are and under which parameters markets best serve freedom.”

Snyder is right about what is most important. He understands that freedom means choosing among competing values and accepting disagreement, while respecting the democratic rules over how it is managed. But freedom does not mean giving the wealthy the right to buy elections or the powerful the right to tear up the votes of people they dislike. Freedom is a precious gift. We have to defend it.

On Freedom by Timothy Snyder Bodley Head £25, 368 pages

Martin Wolf is the FT’s chief economics commentator

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Former cabinet secretary Lord O’Donnell has said the position of top civil servant is “massively underpaid”.

He is involved in the recruitment process for the £200,000-a-year role, following Simon Case’s decision to step down on health grounds.

Lord O’Donnell, who held the post between 2005 and 2011, told the BBC the “incredibly demanding job” should have a higher salary.

The cabinet secretary is the UK’s most senior civil servant.

The job involves advising the prime minister, leading implementation of the government’s policies and managing other high-level civil servants.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The Westminster Hour, Lord O’Donnell described the position as a “huge job”.

He said: “It’s massively underpaid in my view – given I’ve been paid a lot more since, to do a lot less.”

Lord O’Donnell served as cabinet secretary under three prime ministers. He was promoted to the post under Tony Blair in 2005, and he remained in the role for Gordon Brown’s premiership between 2007 and 2010.

He stepped down in 2011, under the David Cameron-led coalition government.

Recruitment is under way to replace the current cabinet secretary, Simon Case, who has said he will step down by the end of the year.

Announcing his resignation, Mr Case said he had been undergoing medical treatment for a “neurological condition” for the past 18 months.

He stressed that his resignation was “solely to do with health and nothing to do with anything else”.

Lord O’Donnell said whoever replaces Mr Case will need to have a “good relationship” with the prime minister’s chief of staff, Sue Gray.

“Sue knows the civil service backwards,” he said. “That should be one of the easiest parts of the job, I would say.”

Ms Gray, previously a senior civil servant herself, was at the centre of a row over her own salary in September, after the BBC revealed she is paid £170,000 a year.

This is more than the prime minister, who earns £166,786.

THOUSANDS of households could still be eligible for the £300 Winter Fuel Payment even if they do not claim Pension Credit.

The Winter Fuel Payment is a state benefit paid once a year to pensioners to help cover the cost of heating during colder months.

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The handout was previously available to everyone aged above 66 and helped with high energy bills.

But Chancellor Rachel Reeves revealed earlier this year the cash would only be given to retirees on pension credit, or other means-tested benefits.

To meet the criteria for Pension Credit you must have a weekly income which falls below around £218 if you are single.

If you live with a partner and you are both state pension age then your weekly income must fall below around £350.

It is thought around 800,000 pensioners meet the criteria for pension credit and have not applied.

So it is always worth checking your eligibility to see if you have a chance.

However, the top-up is not the only way to qualify for the Winter Fuel Payment.

For example, older Brtis who are living in a different country can still get the £300 cash boost.

This is because of a loophole in the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, which sets out the rights of British expats living in European countries.

Citizens who meet the criteria can claim a Winter Fuel Payment (WFP) if they move to an eligible country before December 31, 2020.

To be eligible, citizens must also:

• Have been born before September 23, 1958
• Be receiving a benefit paid by the UK, such as a State Pension
• Have a genuine and sufficient link to the UK, such as having lived or worked in the UK, or having family in the UK
• Receive a qualifying means-tested benefit from the country they live in

You will need to claim Winter Fuel Payment even if you have got it before. The payment is not made automatically when you live abroad.

The eligible countries you can live in and claim are:

• Austria
• Belgium
• Bulgaria
• Croatia
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Estonia
• Finland
• Germany
• Hungary
• Iceland
• Ireland
• Italy
• Latvia
• Liechtenstein
• Lithuania
• Luxembourg
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Poland
• Romania
• Slovakia
• Slovenia
• Sweden
• Switzerland

If you live abroad and want to apply for the Winter Fuel Payment you can find out more about submitting your application by clicking the link here.

Other ways to meet the criteria

A partner below the state pension age may also be eligible for the £300 payment if they live with a partner who is over state pension age and they jointly claim benefits. These include:

• Universal Credit
• income-related Employment and Support Allowance (ESA)
• income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA)
• Income Support
• Child Tax Credit
• Working Tax Credit

So for example, if you are 65 and your partner is 66 and you both claim benefits, your partner will be eligible for the Winter Fuel Payment.

If you do not have a partner and still claim any of the above benefits you could still be entitled to the Winter Fuel Payment.

If you want to check your eligibility then it is worth checking out our article here.

You can also find free-to-use online benefits calculators to work out what you’re entitled to.

For example, Age UK has an online calculator which helps you work out what benefits you could be entitled to including the Winter Fuel Payment and Pension Credit.

According to the site, it takes 10 minutes to complete and you will need the following information:

• Your savings
• Your income, including your partner’s if you have one
• Any benefits or pensions you’re already claiming, including anyone you’re living with.

The calculator is free to use and confidential.

Help at hand

The Sun has launched a ­Winter Fuel SOS campaign to help thousands of pensioners worried about their energy bills.

We want to hear from you by phone or email — and it’s fine if you are calling or messaging on behalf of a friend or relative.

Our panel includes former ­pensions minister Sir Steve Webb, pensions expert Baroness Ros ­Altmann and consumer champion Martyn James.

They will be joined by The Sun’s Head of Consumer Tara Evans and Sun Savers Editor Lana ­Clements.

And even if you aren’t eligible for the payment, our team will be ­sharing tips on how to switch energy providers and save money, get help if you’re in debt or simply need to save this winter.

Your cases will be considered by our panel, who will aim to give you advice within one week of your call or email.