ESTABLISHED 1828

Touching distance

S
ince the start of this year, cases of Covid-19 have been in decline. Hospital
admissions have fallen 80 per cent from the second wave’s peak. Deaths are down
85 per cent and cases down 90 per cent. Modelling from Bristol University says
that new cases are lower now than at any point since the summer — with the number of
new infections halving every week. The vaccination campaign continues to be a triumph,
with almost everyone in the at-risk groups covered. Britain now has one of the lowest
Covid rates in Europe.
Yet we still have one of the most stringent lockdowns in the developed world.
Weekly data from the OECD identifies Britain’s economy as one of the worst-hit, and
the damage is intensifying. Chancellor Rishi Sunak said this week that there is no money
to give nurses a 2 per cent pay rise. This would cost about £200 million: the same as a
single day of lockdown. But Boris Johnson has tied himself to a timetable for easing
lockdown and now seems constrained by it.
As so often in this pandemic, Nicola Sturgeon has been more canny. She did not wed
herself to a timetable so has been able to offer Scots a dividend from the UK-wide fall in
Covid rates. In Scotland, four people will be allowed to meet outside from this weekend.
This means (for example) that two siblings, living apart, could visit their parents to go for
a walk this Mothering Sunday. If anyone tried this on the other side of Hadrian’s Wall, it
would be illegal.
In England, parks are full of people who are breaking the law to go for a walk with
family and friends. Millions now live in Covid not-spots where the virus has all but
vanished. With excellent data gathered and published by the government, people can
easily find out what the risk is in their area and judge their behaviour accordingly —
which means that soon, the police are going to find themselves in an impossible position.
Last weekend, six men in their twenties were fined £200 for meeting up around a
campfire in Marlborough. It’s hard to think that the officers involved will have taken any
pleasure in this criminalisation of perfectly civil behaviour. Ken Marsh, chairman of the
Metropolitan Police Federation, said last week that the rules are no longer ‘manageable’,
adding: ‘Police don’t want to police this. We’ve had enough of this.’
 Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh recently told MPs that there was
not a single case in the world of a Covid outbreak linked to a crowded beach. Surely it
must be possible by now to work out the relative risks of various activities, by studying
what people were doing in the days leading to their developing the disease. Perhaps Matt
Hancock’s Covid phone app could help. Yet instead we are still bound by the kind of
blanket rules which were imposed in panic at the start of the first lockdown.
Johnson may feel unable to revise these rules, given the fuss he made about releasing
lockdown ‘no earlier than’ 21 June. The public has shown remarkable adherence to the
restrictions through the worst periods of this crisis, but to deny people social contact for
months on end is asking too much.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister could decriminalise minor breaches of the rules. This
would allow the police to concentrate on the major breaches, such as indoor parties or
potentially super-spreading events; it would encourage people to use their own judgment
as to what is and is not safe.
In a democracy, police cannot ultimately enforce laws for which there is no public
consent. To do so risks damaging the public co-operation on which the police depend.
Say a mother is recovering from a serious illness in lockdown and her friends club
together to help her with childcare: all involved would be breaking the law. Three friends
taking a walk together could be stopped by police.
This is clearly nonsensical. And the public know it. They are also aware that
lockdown rules have affected people in very different ways. If you live in a large house
with a large garden, and you have a professional career, with secure pay and pension,
lockdown has not been a great hardship. It is a very different matter if you are poor and
live alone in a small flat in a densely packed and highly policed urban area.
Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court Justice, put it well: some laws, he said,
invite breach. But why, then, give Covid rules the status of laws? It demeans the law, and
is unfair to the police. Far better to offer government guidance, ask the public to be
careful — and use their judgment.
‘Levelling up’ was supposed to be a signature policy of this government. Perhaps it
could begin by ceasing to persecute people who, after a long year of economic and social
hardship, have with good reason come to the conclusion that it is safe to resume a small
part of their former lives.
 PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK

Startseite

T he world was agog, some in tears, some in synchronised toe-curling, as the Duchess
of Sussex and her husband shared their sufferings with Oprah Winfrey. In America
17 million watched; in Britain 11 million. The Duchess spoke of Disney’s Little Mermaid;
seeing it, she had exclaimed: ‘Oh my God she falls in love with the prince and because of
that she loses her voice.’ She said that three days before her wedding at Windsor, she had
been married ‘in our backyard’, with just three of them, including the Archbishop of
Canterbury. She said she had considered suicide and that the royal family had taken her
passport, keys and driving licence. She said there had been ‘concerns and conversations
about how dark his [her son Archie’s] skin might be when he’s born’; Ms Winfrey later
said the remark was not made by the Queen or Duke of Edinburgh. Buckingham Palace
said: ‘The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning. While some
recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family
privately.’ Piers Morgan left ITV’s Good Morning Britain after 41,015 complaints were
made about his saying: ‘I don’t believe a word she said, Meghan Markle.’
C hildren returned to school. Secondary pupils were to be tested for coronavirus
three times in a fortnight and then at home. First-dose vaccinations totalled
21,796,278 by the beginning of the week, more than 40 per cent of the adult population.
The Foreign Secretary summoned a representative of the EU after Charles Michel, the
President of the European Council, wrongly claimed that Britain had an ‘outright ban’
on exports of vaccines. At dawn on 7 March, total UK deaths (within 28 days of testing
positive for coronavirus) stood at 124,419, including 1,542 in the past week, down by 34.1
per cent on the week before. Nightingale hospitals, set up since April, would close. BP
told office staff to work from home for two days a week even after the end of
restrictions. The government recommended a pay rise of 1 per cent for nurses and other
NHS workers; Sir Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England, said that before the
pandemic a 2.1 per cent rise had been assumed. The Duke of Edinburgh, 99, returned to
King Edward VII’s hospital after a heart procedure at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

L ord Frost, the minister responsible for relations with the EU, said that the UK
extension of a grace period on border checks between Britain and Northern Ireland
was legal. Greensill Capital went into administration; it had been the financial backer of
Sanjeev Gupta, whose Liberty Steel owns 12 plants in Britain. Deliveroo said it would
launch on the London Stock Exchange.

Abroad

T he total in the world who had died with coronavirus reached 2,601,476 by the
beginning of the week. In deaths per million, the Czech Republic, with 2,025,
overtook Belgium, with 1,913. Brazil, with 1,238 deaths per million, remained behind the
United States, with 1,616 per million. Fully vaccinated Americans were told they might
meet indoors. The US Senate approved a $1,900 billion coronavirus relief package, with
$1,400 to be sent to most Americans. US unemployment fell to 6.2 per cent. President
Joe Biden’s Alsatian dogs were removed from the White House after one, Major, bit a
security agent.

D uring his visit to Iraq, Pope Francis, aged 84, met Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani,
90, the Shia leader. He went to Ur, Abraham’s birthplace, and prayed in the rebuilt
church of the Immaculate Conception in Qaraqosh. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the
British-Iranian woman jailed in Iran on spying charges, had her ankle tag removed at the
end of her five-year sentence, but was told of a new court case against her scheduled for
Sunday.
n Beijing, the 3,000-strong National People’s Congress approved plans to restrict to
‘patriots’ candidacy for election to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. Microsoft

I blamed China for a hack on its servers to steal information from infectious disease
researchers, universities and defence contractors. In Myanmar, U Khin Maung Latt,
an official from the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, died in custody after being arrested at his
home. In demonstrations against the coup of 1 February, 38 people were killed on one
day. The European parliament voted to remove the immunity of Carles Puigdemont, the
Catalan nationalist whom Spain wants to extradite from Belgium. Switzerland voted by
51 per cent to 49 for a ban on face-coverings in public, including the niqab. CSH
 DIARY
Richard Dawkins

S afe spaces, diversity quotas, gender-neutral pronouns, culturally relative facts,

heteronormative hegemony. Are my right-on credentials right on enough? Am I
sufficiently penitent for being white, cis and male? Will I be cancelled or de-platformed
by the Pronoun Police? What is my woke-quotient? At least as far as science is
concerned, it’s a satisfactory zero. Science is not a patriarchal instrument of colonial
oppression. Nor is it a social construct. It’s simply true. Or at least truth is real and
science is the best way we have of finding it. ‘Alternative ways of knowing’ may be
consoling, they may be sincere, they may be quaint, they may have a poetic or mythic
beauty, but the one thing they are not is true. As well as being real, moreover, science
has a crystalline, poetic beauty of its own.

I’ ve just joined a new initiative set up to oppose postmodern metabaloney and bossy
woke bullying. Look up ‘Counterweight’ + ‘Helen Pluckrose’, its founder. She’s also
co-author of Cynical Theories, an excellent history and analysis of Francophoney
postmodernism and the pernicious influence of ‘theory’, drivelling out of the universities
into the culture at large. The book’s only fault is that, bending over backwards to be
scrupulously fair to its subject matter — queer theory, social justice theory etc, chapter
by thorough chapter — it can’t help inheriting some of the subject matter’s obscurantist
style. The result is not as stupefyingly boring as the original. Nevertheless, busy readers
might prefer to skip to the concluding pages of each chapter, where the pretentious
original is decisively skewered.

S trangely, when I have expressed hostility to woke nonsense, a significant reaction

from American readers has been: ‘Well, people like you brought it on yourselves.’
Mystified, I dug deeper. Apparently the permissible spectrum of opinion is so all-or-
none, so left-or-right, so yes-or-no that you can’t oppose both Trump and the loony left
simultaneously. I’m now nursing an urgent worry: President Joe Biden needs to go out of
his way to distance himself from this mental virus or he’ll play into the hands of the
Trumpers in the 2022 and 2024 elections.

T he Covid-19 virus causes so much misery and hardship, such terrible strain on
overworked doctors and nurses, I feel guilty admitting that lockdown suits me fine.
This week I find myself in the unusual position of putting to bed two new books at the
same time, plus the audio reading of an earlier book, Unweaving the Rainbow. Of the
new books, Flights of Fancy is about how animals and humans defy gravity and get off
the ground. The second, Books Do Furnish a Life, is a collection of book reviews,
forewords, afterwords, book-related writings in general. Some editorial voices were
raised against the Powellian title, on the grounds that it sounds retrospective. Fair point,
but if you can’t be retrospective when you’re rising 80, when can you?

H appily, there’s no rule against being prospective at the same time. Accordingly I’ve
just started work on my first novel. Provisionally called The Genetic Book of the
Dead, its scientist heroine reconstructs the genome of australopithecines. Will she
actually bring a new Lucy to life after three million years? The bulk of the novel, of
course, will explore the social, political, ethical, theological etc implications of such a
resurrection.

T his fiction business, it’s harder than I thought. How do you write convincing
dialogue? I’ve been re-reading several modern novelists, hoping to pick up tips.
Kingsley Amis has a pitch-perfect ear for how people actually talk, hesitate, interrupt
each other. Anthony Powell is losing me, just as he did the first time around — there’s
only so much I can take by way of name-dropping art connoisseurs, London literati and
their servants at luncheon. The funny bits are there, but are too few and far between.
The characters might merit such lengthy and detailed treatment if this were biography
and they were historically or otherwise interesting ‘persons’ (a recurrent Powell
affectation). To put it mildly, their conversations lack profundity. The opposite is true of
Aldous Huxley. His characters go on for page after page like fellows of All Souls,
delivering erudite, aphoristic lectures to each other. At least my characters talk science
to each other rather than philosophy. Maybe I’ll be disabused the hard way, but I like to
think that scientists’ chat over the lab bench is not completely uninteresting. And after
all, if anything can, it is science that will save the world.
BAROMETER

Good for the goose

The government indicated that it will ban foie gras, out of animal welfare concerns.
While it is often thought of as a French product, its origins have been traced back to
Egypt in 2500 bc — thanks to a bas-relief at the Necropolis of Saqqara outside the
ancient city of Memphis. The painting depicts workers holding geese around the
necks and feeding them — although there is no great sign of force being used.

Viewer discretion
ITV reported an audience of 11 million for Harry and Meghan’s interview with
Oprah Winfrey. In the US 17 million were said to have watched. What are the
previously most-viewed TV interviews (combined US and UK audiences)?
Michael Jackson, interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, 1993 | 90m
Monica Lewinsky, interviewed by Barbara Walters, 1999 | 70m
Richard Nixon, interviewed by David Frost, 1977 | 45m
Diana, Princess of Wales, interviewed by Martin Bashir, 1995 | 23m
Barack Obama, interviewed by Matt Lauer, 2009 | 22m

He who hesitates
Who is ‘vaccine hesitant’?
— 9% of all adults, according to the ONS. It is slightly higher among women, at 10%.
— 17% of 16- to 29-year-olds, falling to 1% of the over-70s.
— 44% of people who are black or black British.
— 16% of parents with young children.
— 7% of people in the least deprived areas.
— 16% in the most deprived areas.

Family fortunes
Prince Harry complained that he had been financially cut off by his family. How
many 36-year-olds are still financially dependent on their parents or other family
members?
— There isn’t much data after the age of 35, but the latest ONS families and
household survey finds 8% of men and 5% of women are still living with their
parents at 34. At age 30 it’s 17% of men and 8% of women.
— In America, a Merrill Lynch survey found 70% of 18- to 34-year-olds received
financial help from their parents over the past year and 58% couldn’t afford their
current lifestyle without it — while 64% said it was a ‘bad thing’ for 25- to 34-year-
olds still to be dependent on their parents.
— A study by the Pew Research Center in July found that 52% of 18- to 29-year-olds
in the US were living with their parents, up from 47% just before Covid and the
highest proportion ever recorded.
ANCIENT AND MODERN

Salmond’s revenge

Ancient Greeks were not slow to express their enthusiasm for taking
revenge. Observing the recent proceedings in the Scottish parliament, they would
probably have concluded that Alex Salmond was of like mind. But will that revenge
do him any good?
Plato made Socrates define ‘justice’ as ‘rendering to each man what he is owed’,
which another speaker amplified as ‘owing good to one’s friends and ill to one’s
enemies’, a sentiment repeated across Greek literature. As a result, pure enmity was
regarded as a perfectly good motive for revenge. The Greek orator Demosthenes
once justified bringing a case against a man for tax evasion by pointing out that his
opponent had once accused him (unsuccessfully) of killing his own father. Clearly he
expected the jurors to applaud the motive. All very Salmond: taking revenge on
personal political enemies within the SNP who, as he alleged, were conspiring against
him.
But what will it do for his reputation? The essayist Plutarch said that a statesman’s
reputation granted him ‘the trust which affords him an entrance into public affairs’,
and the more that trust was confirmed, the greater its yield ‘since the enjoyment of
confidence [in him] and his good repute afford him the means to do yet further and
greater good’. That confidence is also vital, said Plutarch, because ‘the good will of
the people is the only defence the statesman has’ (against those seeking, for example,
to replace or defame him).
The fact is that Salmond’s grounds for revenge are based not on his reputation and
good works but on the implications of a mishandled trial which, while it cleared him
of criminality, revealed he had been using his authority to take sexual advantage of
women serving under him — hardly the index of man of high principle in which ‘trust
and confidence’ can be placed. But does his action add up to a ‘greater good’? If he
succeeds in taking down Nicola Sturgeon, it will certainly seem so to him, and to
many others. Whether that will make him a Mr Valiant-for-Truth is quite another
matter.
.Peter Jones
 LETTERS

Spinning plates
Sir: Kate Andrews is right to highlight the looming risk of inflation (‘Rishi’s nightmare’,
6 March), but to say that the UK has known barely any inflation for almost a generation
misses a very painful point. It may be true for consumer prices. Low interest rates and
quantitative easing, along with other ill-advised stimuli, have caused huge inflation over
the past two decades in the single greatest expense throughout most working people’s
lives: the cost of housing. Along with rash promises such as the triple lock, it has been
responsible for a vast transfer of wealth from young to old, from the less well-off to the
more affluent, and unlike the 1970s and early 1980s, it has not been accompanied by
rampant wider inflation eroding the real-terms debt of mortgage-holders. This makes the
threat of interest rate rises all the more dangerous; it is not just the public purse which is
alarmingly indebted. As with all chancellors from Gordon Brown onwards, Rishi Sunak
seems intent on making matters worse, with his recent attempts to keep the plates
spinning with extended cuts to stamp duty, and taxpayer-backed 95 per cent mortgages.
David Brewis
Eton, Berkshire

Bad planning
Sir: There is now much talk about how the economy will bounce back and recover (‘The
Covid recovery Budget’, 6 March). My greatest fear is a further impetus to
housebuilding. The unprecedented building onslaught of the past ten years precipitated
by David Cameron’s much maligned (quite rightly) National Planning Policy Framework
hugely emasculated the planning defences, and is disfiguring our towns, villages and
countryside. To save further fields, councils allow high density developments. A
greenfield is replaced with an urban sprawl. No back gardens, no trees. Residents are
powerless, as indeed are councils, to halt this. The character of England is being lost.
Most bad policy can be reversed, but you can’t unbuild houses.
Stephen Horsfield
Haywards Heath, West Sussex
Safe hands of the SNP
Sir: I support Scottish independence, though not the SNP, and share your despondency
about the extent to which democracy has been besmirched (‘A democratic deficit’, 6
March). While I accept the democratic legitimacy of intervention by Westminster, which
you recommend, I fear it will do more to stir the very grievance that has amplified
support for the SNP. For the first time in a while, polls show the Scottish government’s
response to sexual harassment allegations has stunted its ascent and a Holyrood
majority, which seemed inevitable a few weeks ago, now hangs in the balance. As Nick
Ruane highlighted (Letters, 6 March), the domestic failings and democratic defiance of
the SNP are abundantly evident to the Scottish electorate. Therefore, I humbly submit
that the best response is to leave the SNP to its own devices and instead allow the
Scottish electorate to be the executioner in just seven weeks’ time.
Ewan Gurr
Dundee

What Chips heard

Sir: In Craig Brown’s very entertaining review of Chips Channon’s Diaries(Books, 6
March), we learn how the new HM Edward VII jumped up at dinner, crying: ‘I want to
pump shit.’ Since the subsequent royal event, shared by the keen diarist through an open
door, consisted only of passing water, we must surmise that either Chips or his editor
were ignorant of the urinary expression ‘pump ship’. It is still common among naval and
yachting types. I suppose we should be grateful that the late temporary monarch didn’t
say ‘point Percy at the porcelain’.
Libby Purves
Suffolk

Gesturing at cars
Sir: Further to Mary Wakefield’s article (‘Reinventing the wheel’, 6 March) on the
attempted transformation of London into a cyclists’ paradise, the expansion of London’s
Ultra Low Emission Zone this year accelerates the disposal of thousands of serviceable
cars owned by inhabitants of the suburbs. This diktat takes no account of the increase in
emissions from replacing existing vehicles with new, and the cost of replacement falls
almost entirely on lower income households. Two other points: only 7 per cent of carbon
emissions in Europe are from cars, and emissions during manufacture make an all-
electric car carbon-neutral only after about 60,000 miles. Why do we put up with such
gesture politics?
Peter Harrison
London SW13

On yer bike
Sir: I find it an irritation that the authorities who urge us to ‘get on our bikes’ never seem
to consider that some of us cannot ride one, having never learned how. I cannot ride a
bike. My father thought it was dangerous so he paid for riding lessons instead. After all, a
pony has a leg at each corner.
Dr M.C. Moore
Sutton Heath, Suffolk

Overblown operas
Sir: In her review of Luigi Rossi’s opera Il palazzo incanto (Arts, 6 March), Alexandra
Coghlan refers to the 40-strong band employed for the Dijon Opera production as being
‘typical of its time’ (1642) in Roman opera. In fact the typical instrumental forces for
Roman (and indeed Venetian) opera of the period — given in a palazzo, since Rome had
no public opera house until the Teatro Tordidona opened in 1671 — was about a quarter
of that number.
The truth is that Leonardo Garcia Alarcón, the conductor of the Dijon production, has
long been notorious for his grotesquely inflated editions of Baroque operas and
oratorios, versions that make Beecham’s colourful and liberally populated Messiah look
positively restrained.
Brian Robins
East Knoyle, Wiltshire
 THE SPECTATOR'S NOTES
Charles Moore

I have been slow in the uptake. When I saw the Duchess of Sussex complain in her
interview clips about how her son had not been given a title and then move on to the
alleged racism of an alleged speculation by an unnamed but probably royal person about
the possible skin colour of the child she was expecting, I did not immediately see the
connection. The full interview makes it clear. Meghan is saying that Archie was not
allowed to be a prince because of his skin colour. Oprah: ‘Do you think it’s because of his
race?’ Meghan: ‘We have in tandem the conversation of “He won’t be given security,
he’s not going to be given a title” and also concerns and conversations about how dark
his skin might be when he’s born… if that’s the assumption you’re making, I think that
feels like a pretty safe one.’ Leave aside whether what she said was true (which, for
slightly involved reasons about princely titles, and also for reasons of common sense and
common decency, it cannot have been). Consider the import. Meghan is creating what
will soon become a social media dogma that her son is really a prince but has been
denied his title because of royal racism. Obviously, even the imaginative Duchess cannot
claim that Archie is heir to the throne in preference to the established three-generation
line of Charles, William and young George. But she might hope to disrupt the monarchy
by doing something like what Diana attempted when she said that her former husband
should not be King and the throne should pass directly to her elder son. Untitled Archie
becomes the prince over the water. For this myth to grow, no further facts are needed
and no factual disproofs will avail. As the prince in exile, he will be recognised, Meghan
may hope, by people of colour everywhere. An Arthur for Africa — or a Prester John —
he will one day come into his rightful kingdom. And she will be his Igraine. As she also
told Oprah, ‘The most important title I will ever have is Mom.’

A nother interesting question the Duchess prompted is: ‘When did she and Harry
actually get married?’ She said, and Harry appeared to confirm, that ‘You know,
three days before our wedding, we got married’. As she remembered it: ‘We called the
Archbishop, and we just said, “Look, this thing, this spectacle is for the world, but we
want our union between us”. So, like, the vows that we have framed in our room are just
the two of us in our backyard with the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ Harry: ‘Just the three
of us.’ If it really was only the three of them, then they were not, in law, married. Anyone
getting legally married in England needs witnesses, as well as the person officiating.
Reading this, I remembered noticing at the time an oddity in the ceremony at St
George’s, Windsor. It was without the usual ‘just cause or impediment’ bit allowing
objectors to speak or ever afterwards ‘hold their peace’. Was the ceremony actually a
marriage, I wondered, or a mere service of blessing, like that given to Charles and
Camilla in the same chapel, after their registry office wedding? If the Sussexes were
married neither in St George’s nor in their Palace ‘backyard’, were they legally married
at all? It is surprisingly hard to find out, although all marriages are public legal facts. At
last, I reached the Special Licences section of the Faculty Office of the Archbishop of
Canterbury: a special licence was issued for the marriage in St George’s, they told me.
(And no, the service does not have to include ‘just cause and impediment’, so long as due
diligence has been done.) So the Duchess is mistaken. What sort of rite took place in that
Kensington backyard can be fully explained only by the Archbishop; and he is not
saying.

T revor Phillips, who has thought so long and hard about race issues, emails me about
how much more thoughtful the interview could have been: ‘A genuinely interesting
question about race would have been to ask the couple whether they had discussed
Harry’s own past behaviour and remarks. It would’ve been a big positive for them to talk
candidly about how they got past that history, and possibly an injunction for people to be
generous.’ Yes, Harry could have helped young white men trying to tiptoe through this
minefield. But Trevor adds: ‘That’s assuming that Meghan actually knows about his past
life — she seems remarkably ill-informed about the family she married into, even though
it is the most famous and widely reported clan in history.’

I n Simon Heffer’s edition of Chips Channon’s diaries (see last week’s Notes), Chips
goes, in 1935, to see a ‘charming and simple’ play about Queen Victoria. It has to be
performed privately because the Lord Chamberlain, in those days in charge of what
theatres could show, had forbidden, says Heffer, ‘any representation of a monarch on the
stage until a century after his or her succession’. Nothing about Victoria before 1937,
therefore. How envious the present Queen must feel. Under that rule, she would have
been protected from a torrent of rubbish until 2052.
n Tuesday, I was asked to appear on BBC Newsnight to talk about the Sussexes’
interview. When told it would be presented by Emily Maitlis, I declined, on the

O grounds that ever since her political speech against Dominic Cummings on the
programme last year, I have had no confidence in her fairness. Sure enough, she
spoke on the programme that night of ‘the sense of the attempted suicide’ of the Duchess
of Sussex — though Meghan had mentioned only ‘suicidal thoughts’. At the time, my
little gesture seemed rather pointless, so I was pleased to read in the next day’s papers
that Ofcom has at last decided that the Maitlis diatribe against Cummings ‘had the
potential to be perceived by some viewers as an expression of her personal view on a
matter of major political controversy’. Hardly a bold rebuke, but a start.
 JAMES FORSYTH

The shifting sands of Scotland

E
very politician likes to say that they don’t pay attention to opinion polls. In my
experience, this is almost universally untrue. Those who sail in an ocean of public
opinion want to know which way the wind is blowing. The most recent polls show
the wind is in the Tories’ sails at the moment: the YouGov post-Budget survey indicated
a 13-point Tory lead. But in Scotland for the past year, polls have consistently shown
majority support for independence. That’s now changing.
Nicola Sturgeon can’t claim she doesn’t pay attention to the polls; she has too often
commented on ones showing independence ahead. After roughly 20 polls in a row put
independence in the lead, the Nationalists started to claim that independence was the
‘settled will’ of the Scottish people.
The Nationalists want to try to create a sense of inevitability about Scottish
independence. They would like a second referendum to feel like a confirmatory vote
rather than a national contest, which is why they used to talk about not holding a vote
until support for independence polled at 60 per cent. But in the absence of that, 20-odd
polls showing independence at 50 per cent or more seemed enough. That sense has been
shaken by these recent results, which at the very least have disrupted the Nationalists’
narrative and boosted Unionist morale. ‘There’s no settled will of the Scottish people,’
one Unionist tells me. ‘It is fluid and fractious.’
Ahead of the Holyrood elections in May, it is important to keep this shift in the polls
in perspective. As one figure involved in the government’s effort to save the Union
concedes, the results come after Sturgeon ‘couldn’t have had worst press, we couldn’t
have had a better story’, referring to the Alex Salmond inquiry and the vaccine rollout.
Despite this, the poll which asked about voting intentions for the May elections still
showed the SNP winning a majority in the Scottish parliament, albeit of only one seat. It
would still be a remarkable achievement if the SNP won an overall majority in an
electoral system devised to try to stop any party from doing so and after 14 years in
office.
But now it is clear that there is nothing inevitable about a Nationalist majority.
Sturgeon doesn’t have the total command of the Scottish political stage that she recently
enjoyed and faces a slightly better opposition than she did then. Both the Scottish Tories
and Scottish Labour have jettisoned their underperforming leaders — Jackson Carlaw
and Richard Leonard — and replaced them with younger, more appealing figures,
Douglas Ross and Anas Sarwar. Sarwar, the new Labour leader, looks like a possible
future First Minister in a way that the last five holders of his post simply did not. At the
same time, the whiff of sleaze around the SNP is growing stronger. Not only are the
Sturgeon and Salmond factions duking it out over who is telling the truth, but the party’s
chief whip at Westminster, Patrick Grady, has stepped down following sexual harassment
allegations.
In the next few weeks the SNP administration in Edinburgh will publish a bill
designed to allow them to hold an independence referendum. This is a bit of red meat for
their activists, designed to persuade them to overlook what was unearthed by the
Salmond inquiry and focus on the wider goal of independence. We can expect the SNP to
promise to push on even if Westminster refuses to give its consent (there can be no legal
referendum without the UK parliament’s approval). But this tactic cuts both ways. To
voters who are unsure if they want another independence referendum straight away, it
provides a reason to deny Sturgeon a majority.
Boris Johnson can respond to this by saying he will flat-out refuse to authorise
another referendum. If he did, it would play into the Nationalists’ hands. A fight over
whether Scotland is allowed to have a vote on independence would suit them. It would
be far better for the government to ignore it or simply point out that it is a strange
priority at a time when Covid restrictions still mean that Scots cannot leave their local
authority area.
If there were to be no SNP majority in May, Scottish politics would start to feel very
different. An outright SNP victory has been assumed by so many for so long that even a
pro-independence majority combined with the Green vote would feel like a setback. It
would undoubtedly weaken Sturgeon’s standing in her party and raise questions about
her ability — and desire — to carry on. This would be significant, because much of the
recent rise in support for independence has been down to her personal appeal. The Yes
side is much weaker without her.
Sturgeon’s own standing has been damaged by the Salmond inquiry. According to a
recent poll, only 35 per cent of voters believe she has been entirely honest about the
whole business — which is, if anything, generous given that she forgot about a key
meeting. The fact that documents are having to be dragged out of the Scottish
government by the parliament and that, oddly, there seems to be no minutes of a crucial
meeting add to the sense that the government isn’t being straight. The investigating
committee complained on Tuesday that it was ‘extremely frustrated’ by the Scottish
government’s approach to handing over evidence. More than 60 per cent of voters think
Sturgeon should resign if a separate investigation into whether she broke the ministerial
code (being conducted by James Hamilton, a former Irish director of public
prosecutions) concludes that she did. His findings are expected this month.
Last year was difficult for the Union. As one Scottish Tory admits: ‘For the whole of
2020, even people in my party felt Nicola was having a better Covid crisis than Boris.’
But there are signs that the vaccine rollout is helping the Unionist cause, while some of
the sheen is coming off Sturgeon.
Even if the SNP don’t win a Holyrood majority in May, the UK government must not
fall back into its old complacency about the Union. ‘After the last referendum, we
reverted to type,’ warns one Whitehall hand. ‘We can’t do that again.’ The challenge for
Unionists is to make the case anew so that Scottish independence goes back to being as
remote a prospect as it was a generation ago.

‘‘Blood-coloured carpets would be practical.’’

 ROD LIDDLE

There’s no ‘my’ in truth

C
aroline Rose Giuliani, the daughter of the former mayor of New York, Rudy,
has been talking to the press about one of her hobbies. Apparently she likes
nothing more than playing the role of a ‘unicorn’ — the third partner in a sexual
liaison. She explained: ‘Finding the strength to explore these more complicated,
passionate aspects of my personality became the key to harnessing my voice and creative
spark, which in turn helped me better cope with depression, anxiety, and the lingering
cognitive effects of adolescent anorexia.’ This is a fascinating approach to curing eating
disorders, I think. Caroline’s dad, if you remember, is unable to tuck his shirt into his
trousers without lying down on a bed and obtaining assistance from a young lady. They
are a very interesting family.
Incidentally, I had often wondered why the Scottish national animal is a unicorn,
seeing as it has even less basis in reality than their aspirations for an independent
currency. But having learned via Caroline the other meaning of the word, and watched
the various SNP scandals unfold, I now understand. They are all at it like knives, up
there — every hour that God sends.
Reading Caroline’s explanation for why she likes to go out shagging strangers, you
are immediately beckoned into the modern American psyche. Such epic, almost heroic,
self-obsession and narcissism, plus pretentiousness and a healthy side order of acquired
victimhood. And the overriding message: I will do what I want and you will not judge
me. Au contraire, Caroline — over here, in the UK, we will, because we’re like that and
come at the story from a different perspective.
The USA is the least communalistic and most individualistic nation of any on Earth.
It is written into their Declaration of Independence that an individual’s right to the
pursuit of happiness trumps, if I can use the word, every other consideration. It is all a
little alien to us over here, which is one reason why we tend to find Meghan Markle a
repulsive creature. What the ghastly Oprah Winfrey and indeed Hillary Clinton do not
understand is that if there was any resentment towards Meghan in the UK, it was not
because she is of mixed race, but because she is American and behaves like a caricature
of a particularly stupid American. The colour of her skin matters not a jot: it is the
noisome ordure which spews out of her mouth on a daily basis that grates. Again, the
narcissism and self-obsession and the acquired victimhood, the vapid and banal attempts
at self-justification.
The American insistence on the primacy of the individual also explains Meghan’s
different interpretation of two words which we, over here, think we understand clearly:
‘duty’ and ‘truth’. When her idiot husband was told he would not be getting back his
honorary military ranks, the two of them (i.e. Meghan) released an emetic statement to
the press suggesting that there were many ways one might perform one’s duties. No.
Duty is something imposed and involves self-sacrifice, discipline and obedience. It does
not mean doing what the hell you like, which is what the two of them have done. But if
you are a country which doubts the validity of a communal ethos of ‘duty’, then
Meghan’s standpoint is one you may well arrive at, especially if you are not terribly
bright.
Similarly, Markle was asked about ‘her’ truth. People don’t have their own truth.
There is truth and there is falsehood, and there’s an end to it. But once more, the native
ideology devolves the concept of truth down to the individual level, regardless of
whether it is truth at all. It is from America that we have imported the morally and
rationally bereft progressive ideology that insists that if people feel they have been
victimised, then they have been. And that everybody can be whatever they want to be,
regardless of the facts. Elevate the individual — beyond reason, beyond government,
beyond God — and this is what you get: a D-list sleb who married well thinking she has
been victimised and is in possession of a ‘truth’ which runs counter to the truth.
The cultural divide broadens still further when we consider Oprah Winfrey, one of
America’s greatest mysteries. But boy, does she have hauteur and dominion. It is very
difficult for us to understand why the Yanks so revere the woman. She is an appalling
interviewer, seemingly utterly incurious, every question submitted for approval and the
answers rehearsed over and over again. Ill-informed, incapable of asking an interesting
question, always slightly more regal than whoever it is she is interviewing. There is no
intellect on display, just a perpetual desire to paddle about in the shallows, or indeed
barely skim the surface, of the subjects before her. But then she subscribes to the same
inane ideology — that Meghan Markle has a truth that is equally valid to the truth, and
who is she to question that validity? Anti-journalism. It was rumoured she might one day
run for office. I think she’d be perfect for the east and west coast voters, a conduit of
witless acceptance of every meaningless liberal shibboleth to which those deluded people
subscribe.
So — who asked about Archie’s skin colour, then? Not naming the supposed
miscreant was another act of self-indulgence and cowardice from Meghan and Harry.
Besmirch the entire royal family by not providing a name. My suspicion is that most of
the royals were just anxious to know if Archie was going to be a ginger. That’s ‘my’ truth,
and I’m sticking to it. Please, America — do one thing for your old ally. Shepherd these
two grasping halfwits into total obscurity.

‘‘If it’s Harry I’m in a meeting.’’

 MATTHEW PARRIS

To the moon – and back

I
have just applied to fly around the moon. My chances of being selected are slim, but
is it impossible? Hopefully the explosion of Elon Musk’s test rocket shortly after
landing in Texas last week may have winnowed down the competition for a place on
Yusaku Maezawa’s flight to the moon and back, scheduled for 2023.
That Texas landing was in fact a success, proving it’s possible for a rocket of this size
to launch and return intact: third time lucky, the first two rockets tested having exploded
on impact. This one blew up too, but after safely landing, and what the report described
as a ‘rapid, unscheduled disassembly’ was a glitch unrelated to the landing technology: so
I’m confident Musk can sort out these teething problems in the two years left before my
hoped-for journey.
I should explain. Before that billionaire, engineer, Tesla CEO and dreamer, Elon
Musk, rockets had historically been single-use disposable items. Musk founded SpaceX
with a vision to change this. ‘The cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a
factor of a hundred,’ he said in 2015. ‘That really is the fundamental breakthrough
needed to revolutionise access to space.’ His Falcon 9 rocket has become a major
commercial success. Now this Texan test proves technology can land a big rocket upright
just next to the launchpad.
Today, Nasa contracts SpaceX to resupply the International Space Station with food,
science projects and recently (for the first time) with astronauts. Musk’s motivation
seems ultimately not money but a belief in a better future. ‘If you get up in the morning
and think the future is going to be better,’ he says, ‘it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.’
His dream is for humanity to become multiplanetary: not through a romantic longing for
adventure holidays, but for the betterment of our species. Here on Earth we are not a
great deal safer than the dinosaurs. Mother Nature could do it to us or we could do it to
ourselves, but our search for Planet B should be driven not because we’re too lazy to
control climate change on Earth, but to gain more control of our destiny.
After that Texan test, we are Columbus with a seaworthy vessel capable of carrying
enough supplies to get us a mile offshore and back again. What’s next? Something
bigger. This is SpaceX’s new Starship rocket, currently in the early stages of testing. But
to keep up the momentum, Musk understands a different sphere from that inhabited by
government scientists: the world of business. He knows the importance of profit for the
ultimate success of his interplanetary dream.
This is where Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa comes in. There was surely a
meeting of minds. Both men understand money; both search for meaning; both are
invested in an idea of humanity, and both understand the potency of stunts. The former
musician, then fashion entrepreneur and now art collector has paid an undisclosed sum
for all nine seats on the first commercial trip on SpaceX’s Starship: a seven-day return-
trip around the moon. Perhaps appealing to Musk’s more philosophical side, Maezawa
wants passengers of a creative bent — with no payment necessary. ‘First of all, whatever
activity you are into, by going in space, I hope that you can push its envelope, to help
other people and greater society in some way.’
I’m no painter or musician. But if I have a minor creative talent, it would be with
words: with argument, explanation, description and report. When last week I first read of
Maezawa’s offer, my initial ‘I should apply!’ was meant humorously. Then I realised I
was not joking. Well, why not? Musk is partly South African in his origins, and so am I:
two of Theresa May’s dreaded ‘citizens of the world’ who in our lives so far have seen
much of our planet. But to see it from outer space! To fly around that silver lamp in the
night sky that lit so many of my African nights in childhood, to see the dark side, to
describe the experience, and to return! How could such a prospect fail to draw me?
Aged 50, I dropped out for five months to experience the Antarctic winter on one of
the world’s most remote islands, Kerguelen — Captain Cook called it Desolation Island.
Never for a second have I regretted the decision. As the great hull of the ship I was
boarding to take me across the Southern Ocean loomed above me, my pulse raced.
What, then, if it were a rocket? Oh boy!
So I applied. Within days came an email: ‘Dear Matthew Parris, Thank you for pre-
registering as a candidate for the dearMoon crew… You will receive an email about the
selection process sometime after 15 March, 2021. We thank you for your patience and
understanding.’ Attached was a picture of my face inside a space suit, with the Union
Flag on my lapel. What hardly started as serious now keeps me awake with both
excitement and trepidation.
All very silly, I realise. It surely won’t happen. Hundreds of thousands have applied.
And I’m no young artist, but a super-annuated if fit 71-year-old hack. But they say
Yusaku Maezawa seeks diversity, and perhaps age has its place on the diversity agenda.
Besides, the oldest among us will have the least to lose.
If I’m ever invited on to Desert Island Discs, a song to which I shall give pride of
place is (from G&S’s Mikado) Yum-Yum’s hymn to two great celestial orbs with whom
she claims fellow feeling, the sun and moon. Both Sullivan’s music and Gilbert’s lyrics
are thrilling. My favourite lines describe:
 … that placid dame,
The Moon’s Celestial Highness.
There’s not a trace upon her face
Of diffidence or shyness.
Ah, pray make no mistake,
We are not shy.
We’re very wide awake,
The moon and I.

Ah well. I can dream, can’t I? People do buy lottery tickets.

‘‘Dr Seuss is too offensive — so I’ll read you the Chips Channon diaries.’’
 LIONEL SHRIVER

The West has lost its moral high ground

I
nternational travellers running the gauntlet of English airports must already test
negative for Covid before the flight, and on return to the UK get tested again before
boarding, fill out a locator form, quarantine for ten days and test negative twice
more. But that’s not enough oppression for Boris Johnson’s government. As of this
week, outbound intrepids have also to fill out ‘declaration forms’ explaining why their
trip is essential. Not doing so is a criminal offence.
This new hoop to jump is obnoxious on a host of levels. The declaration form came in
on the very day the first few lockdown restrictions were eased, with hospitalisations and
deaths dramatically down and more than a third of the adult population vaccinated.
Recall how last summer’s mask mandate was levied right when infections were at their
nadir. The message is clear: ‘Don’t believe for a minute this horror show is over. We’ve
assumed total control over your lives down to the nittiest of gritties, and we’re not giving
it up.’ According to gov.uk, we would-be passengers ‘may’ bring supporting documents
to justify our wanderlust; the deliberately vague language implies that the decision to
allow us to fly will rely on police caprice. Still more bureaucracy will further cripple the
airline industry. And the purpose of the form-filling is intimidation. If we’re at all shaky
about whether the purpose of our journey qualifies us for release from HMP UK, the
intention is to frighten us out of the notion.
I wish this were a non-sequitur: I just finished Kai Strittmatter’s We Have Been
Harmonised; Life in China’s Surveillance State. It’s a sobering read. Strittmatter notes the
many ways in which the West naively or cynically plays into the Chinese Communist
party’s hands, most conspicuously with the ‘betrayal of democratic values’ and a failure
to live up to the West’s ‘own ideals’. The author cites Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as
examples of the US ‘using the same police state tactics as the regimes it always
condemned’. But although this 2019 publication’s 2020 paperback has been updated to
include the emergence of Covid, the distinguished journalist misses a trick. Liberal
democracies do indeed ape the very policies that make China seem such a forbidding,
dystopian place to live, but a glaring example is absent.
 Like much of the West, Britain has navigated this pandemic with heavy-handed state
coercion: threats of ten-year imprisonment for not filling in a form properly, fines of
£10,000 for organising a protest of any sort, arbitrary arrest and police harassment for
sitting on a park bench or walking a dog in the wilderness. Whatever is not expressly
permitted is forbidden. It’s the state’s business whether we hold our mother’s hand. Rule
is by decree; rare parliamentary approval of still more draconian restrictions is a rubber
stamp. Dissenting scientific opinion is suppressed, sledgehammer-subtle propaganda
goons from hoardings and broadcast media almost exclusively recapitulate government
messaging. The public is encouraged to shop recalcitrant neighbours and relatives to the
authorities. Does this sound like somewhere else you know of? Like Covid itself,
lockdowns were exported from China, then espoused by the World Health Organisation,
a once reputable institution now largely captured by China as well.
There were other routes to managing this disease. Reliable, benevolent advice,
financial support for at-risk age groups, sequestration of Covid patients in healthcare
settings — methods that pandemic prepared-ness studies already commended. Instead,
most of the West abandoned once-sacrosanct principles on a dime, and democratic
governments fell over themselves in their eagerness to copy not only one another, but
China. In so doing, our politicians have demoted our civil rights to privileges — ever
provisional, readily revoked, restored only if we’re terribly good, like children hoping for
presents from Santa. So-called rights — to free movement, free association, free speech
— now resemble the ‘social credits’ Chinese AI apps award for paying your bills and
refraining from jaywalking. Thus the West kisses goodbye its last few square inches of
moral high ground. Under stress, the West is demonstrably as authoritarian as the CCP.
The supreme ideals of harmonyand safetyare peas in a pod.
What’s especially unnerving about the ever more efficient, all-seeing and all-
controlling CCP is the purely mechanical vision of civilisation that constitutes this trend’s
natural end point. What’s a society for? To work smoothly and frictionlessly, like a
coffee-table widget? To ensure all citizens help the contraption function, like securely
tightened screws? Science fiction has long capitalised on the westerner’s instinctive
horror of a social machine that works too well. Our competing vision has traditionally
entailed an element of disorder. Western liberty allows for creativity and even, quietly,
the breaking of rules. It’s a burden, granted, but in the West the purpose of our lives is
for us each to determine. Altruism is a choice.
As China exalts tranquillity and obedience — harmony — we now exalt public
health. For the past year, we’ve nobly made personal sacrifices for the perceived well-
being of the whole. Meanwhile, all other values have taken a backseat: friendship, family,
curiosity and adventure, art. But health as a value is mechanical. Some advisers of the
Johnson government actually want not only mask mandates but social distancing to
remain in effect for the foreseeable. That would indefinitely eliminate ‘household
mixing’, otherwise known as having a life; an audience for sports, cinema, music, lectures
and all other live performance; festivals of every stripe; financially viable restaurants and
pubs; shared religious observance and extended family celebrations of Christmas, Easter,
Passover or Eid; crowded weddings, funerals, baby showers and graduations. But who
cares? Barring non-Covid calamity, we would be well. Our individual bodies would
physically function, even as the larger body politic would continue to sicken.
The retired Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption observed mournfully last
week that constraints on the state are mere conventions. But a state can do anything,
really. And now the British state has done anything. Ask the Chinese (or George
Orwell): totalitarianism reliably masquerades as patriotism. Submitting to an authority
who knows better is always for our own good.
 ANY OTHER BUSINESS | MARTIN VANDER WEYER

Spacs and the City: if London won’t, Amsterdam will

This column generally takes a sceptical view of financial novelties and gimmicks. So my
antennae have twitched in recent days at frequent mentions of Spacs, or ‘Special Purpose
Acquisition Companies’, which are the latest plaything of Wall Street and could be about
to go large over here. Also known as a ‘blank cheque’ company, a Spac is a stockmarket-
listed cash shell that raises money with a view to merging with a real — usually hi-tech,
often relatively early-stage — business seeking a fast route to listed status. Hundreds of
Spacs have been created in the US since the craze began last year, many with celebrity
names — sports stars, astronauts, rappers — attached to win attention.
On the positive side, Spacs have drawn more than $70 billion so far this year towards
investment in high-growth companies while offering retail investors the opportunity to
back propositions that might previously have been reserved for professional venture
capitalists. On the negative, Spacs have also been turned into a fee fountain for
investment banks, hedge funds and ‘sponsors’ involved in launching them — and targets
for short-sellers who see trouble ahead. Doubters say it’s all just another exploitation of
the madness of crowds disguised by high talk about ‘democratisation of finance’ — and
that, as so often, it’s the small investors who will get hurt.
So should we welcome Spacs in the City, where they’re currently deterred by the
Financial Conduct Authority? I refer you to Lord Hill’s ‘UK Listing Review’, published
last week and praised in the Chancellor’s Budget speech, which argues that Spacs look
set to become popular for UK and European companies as alternatives to conventional
IPOs, and that if London doesn’t offer them a home, Amsterdam will.
Hill’s thrust — with which I’m broadly in sympathy — is that to compete globally
from outside the EU, London needs a more dynamic regulatory regime that’s capable of
accommodating new evolutions of finance, with appropriate safeguards, whether we like
them or not. But in the case of Spacs, I’ll be curious to see if the bubble bursts before the
FCA has time to open the door.

Troubled BT
 Back in 2018 I received so many readers’ complaints about poor service from BT and
its Openreach broadband arm that I sent a dossier to the group’s about-to-depart chief
executive, Gavin Patterson — whose office responded by trying to solve all the
individual problems. When Patterson’s successor Philip Jansen arrived, it would be fair
to say the number of anti-BT rants in my inbox subsided but also that the new regime
seemed more concerned about shareholder value than customer satisfaction: how and
when to sell off a chunk of Openreach, which is worth more than BT itself, and what to
do about a steady five-year fall in BT’s share price.
Now, despite major regulatory and capital spending issues plus a large pension deficit
in his pending tray, the abrasive Jansen has found time to force the resignation of his
well-respected chairman, Jan du Plessis. The truth is that the privatised giant’s central
legacy role in UK telecoms is a continuing problem rather than a driver of progress and
the company itself looks permanently dysfunctional. A directive from the regulator
Ofcom to hasten full separation of Openreach might be a first step to sorting it out.

Hedge your bet

The Scottish Mortgage investment trust run by Baillie Gifford was mentioned here in
mid-January as a well-run vehicle for investors seeking ‘global spread plus stakes in the
US tech-stock surge’. Its price rose another 15 per cent over the following month as
punters continued to pile in, but dropped dramatically last week, back to where it was in
the autumn — though that was still double where it stood a year ago. What’s going on?
Underlying the fall is a sell-off of high-growth tech stocks by big investors switching
to lower-tech ‘cyclical recovery’ plays and others who are jumpy about inflation
prospects, which are also unsettling bond markets. But our trusts expert Jonathan Davis
tells me SMT did well to halve its huge holding in Tesla (hottest of tech stock rockets)
last month, that its managers’ avowedly long-term approach remains sound, and that its
shares now look ‘massively oversold’. So he’s watching for a bounce that may indeed
have already begun, but adds: ‘As with any stock that has temporarily run hot on flows of
dumb money, prudent investors would be wise to hedge their risk, in this case with a
holding in a UK value trust such as Temple Bar or Aberforth Smaller Companies — the
yings to SMT’s yang.’

Dog-friendliness
I’ve just buried my lovely old golden retriever Douglas, so I hope you’ll forgive this
obituary item. Two strands of thought occur. The first is advice for the hospitality trade
when it reopens: attract a new crowd of customers by being as dog-friendly as the
French, who welcome even hairy retrievers into their hotels and restaurants while the
British sniffily exclude them. Some of my happiest episodes with Douglas were overnight
stays in delightful places such as the Croix D’Or at Avranches, the Auberge du Val au
Cesne near Étretat and Les Orangeries at Lussac-les-Châteaux, all worth the detour
when that’s possible again. But they won’t be the same without him.
Secondly, advice for would-be puppy buyers. During lockdown, prices have almost
tripled, particularly for small, decorative breeds; dognapping is rampant and sanctuaries
are full of growing pups that new owners couldn’t cope with. Overall, it’s a market that
looks as unhealthy as bitcoin and you’d expect me, on normal form, to tell you to avoid
it. On the contrary: in terms of well-being, a cheerful canine companion — even at an
inflated price — offers a richer long-term return than any comparable lifestyle
investment. As we always say here, do your own research; but in this case, buy and hold.
 Telling tales
Harry and Meghan’s brand of revenge
FREDDY GRAY

R
emember the Heads Together campaign? It was back in 2017. Prince William,
his wife Kate and his brother Prince Harry, who’d recently begun dating a
conspicuously woke actress called Meghan Markle, launched a charitable
endeavour to raise awareness about mental health. The princes gave interviews in which
they ‘opened up’ about their struggles. Such public emoting made fuddy-duddy
monarchists nervous, yet a new generation of royal PR operatives and suck-ups saw the
future. The royals were appealing to a younger audience, cleverly rebranding the
monarchy for a new age in which it is OK to not be OK. Move over, stiff-lipped oldies,
the Windsors were moving on.
Then Harry married Meghan, the brothers fell out, and everyone went crazy. Fast
forward to spring 2021, the middle of a global pandemic, and Harry and Meghan are in
California, gassing to Oprah Winfrey about ‘their journey’. They’re whingeing about how
the monarchy has let them down, how they’ve been silenced and victimised. Standing in
a coop with Oprah, among the chickens she and hen-pecked Harry rescued from a
battery farm, Meghan is quite seriously comparing herself to the Little Mermaid, the
Disney cartoon character: ‘She falls in love with the prince and because of that she loses
her voice. But in the end she gets her voice back.’
Harry and Meghan’s parade of self-pity is maddening — that’s the point. People like
watching the incredibly privileged talk about how difficult their lives are. And once
famous people start treating television appearances as counselling sessions, they can’t
stop. That’s how Hollywood rolls. Harry and Meghan may be insanely annoying, but in a
world in which celebrity and therapy are king, their logic is infallible. Their Oprah tell-all
is a natural endpoint to Prince William’s Heads Together heart-to-heart with Lady Gaga.
Except, of course, it’s not the end, because Harry and Meghan are now their own self-
perpetuating media brand, a transatlantic rival to the House of Windsor’s PR machine.
We’ll be hearing plenty more from them.
What clearly happened is that at some point between 2017 and Megxit in January
2020, somebody in the belly of ‘The Firm’ decided that the oversharing was a bit much.
Perhaps it was one of these murkily powerful figures to whom Meghan kept alluding on
Sunday night, the ugly baddies of her fairytale. At any rate, William and Kate duly
reined in the displays of self-reflection and focused on public duties. Meghan and Harry
appear to have had other ideas. Meghan is a Hollywood person: on screen emotion is her
modus operandi. Harry, meanwhile, seems besotted with his wife — and believes his
mother was killed not by a drunk driver, but by a cruel Establishment and a wicked
tabloid press.
It was sad to hear Harry talk in platitudes about his fear of ‘history repeating itself’
because Meghan had contemplated suicide. The irony is that he is repeating his mother’s
story by imitating her bids for public empathy and celebrity status outside the royal
cocoon. The saddest truth is that history does repeat itself — first as tragedy, then as
farce, then in a reality television loop. It’s not just Diana. Royals have, in fact, been
broadcasting their emotions for at least several decades. In 1996 Sarah, Duchess of York,
gave an interview to none other than Oprah Winfrey, in which, very much like Meghan
and Harry, she talked about the horridness of the media and how she couldn’t abide by
the monarchy’s rules because she and Diana were ‘like rivers, we learn more, we want to
go round the next bend’. In 2002, Prince Charles confessed in a speech that he was ‘one
of those people who feel very strongly and deeply about things… I have come to realise
that my entire life so far has been motivated by a desire to heal.’ And last year — who
could forget? — Prince Andrew told us his pesky habit of being ‘too honourable’ made
him carry on hanging out with the billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Each time, we all pretend that these revelations are a shocking first and that the walls
of Windsor’s omertà have finally been breached. That’s another fairytale. In the mass
media age, periodic psychodramas actually sustain the monarchy’s mystique. If it were all
ribbon-cutting and stiff ceremonies we’d switch off.
Meghan and Harry could be different, however. They are disruptive and postmodern
in ways that previous royal rebels could not be. Harry and Meghan know that, thanks to
social media, they can be the message and the medium. They intend to be ‘content
creators’ with their own podcasts and Netflix shows, through their foundation Archewell.
Imagine the dread in Clarence House the next time an Archewell production drops
online.
There’s also a religious aspect. The royal family is still institutionally wedded to the
Church of England. Yet Harry and Meghan are disciples of the New Millennial Church
of Social Justice, aka wokeness, which is a far more potent force. To the woke millennial
mind, old-fashioned Christian notions of truth are anathema. How you feel is what’s real.
That’s why none of Harry and Meghan’s admirers object to her implausible claim that
the couple were married three days before their public wedding in ‘our backyard with
the Archbishop of Canterbury’. That would have been illegal, of course, and almost
certainly did not happen. Ditto Harry’s claim that he likes taking his son Archie on bike
rides, ‘which is something I was never able to do when I was young’. Never mind the
photographic evidence of little Harry on his bike with Charles and Diana. If he feels he
never went cycling with his parents as a boy, who are you to say otherwise?
Most potent of all is the racial stuff. Meghan is mixed race. That means, in the public
court of political correctness, her claims of racist discrimination at the hands of the old
white royal family are accepted without question. It doesn’t matter if she and Harry
won’t say who said what or when. The context in which some dastardly royal talked
about their baby’s skin colour is irrelevant. Meghan and Harry say it was racist so it was.
Harry said he wasn’t ‘comfortable’ discussing the details. And that’s that.
They now stand established as a rival powerhouse, full of ambition — and willing to
send the odd missile over the Atlantic. In saying that she’d been driven close to suicide
and suffered racist treatment at the hands of a powerful royal family, Meghan has turned
herself into a cause. Politicians have duly rallied around. President Joe Biden, through
his press secretary, said it took ‘courage’ for Meghan to admit her torment. Hillary
Clinton said it was ‘heartbreaking’ that Meghan was not ‘fully embraced’. Standing in a
playground in east London, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said ‘the issues Meghan
has raised are really serious issues… we have to take [them], I think, very, very
seriously’. The Queen has responded with a short statement saying that ‘recollections
may vary’ and that the matter will be addressed ‘privately’. The pundit Piers Morgan
dared to challenge Meghan’s account. His bosses at ITV reportedly demanded that he
apologise, after receiving a complaint from the duchess herself. So Morgan quit.
Scenting blood, activists are now demanding that the royal family atones for its sins.
A co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, Opal Tometi, has called for a
‘boycott’ of the monarchy, though she didn’t explain what that might entail. Maybe the
Duke and Duchess of Sussex have some ideas.
It’s interesting, though, that Meghan and Harry went to such lengths to praise the
Queen — even as they trashed the institution she has led for seven decades. The young
couple understands the concept of global brands, if nothing else. They know that public
perceptions of Elizabeth II are overwhelmingly positive across the world. What Harry
and Meghan haven’t figured out is why. It should be obvious: for an extraordinarily long
time, the Queen’s mental state has been a private matter. She has always kept her
feelings to herself and thus preserved at least the semblance of monarchical dignity. The
trouble is, her progeny have not. Après elle, le déluge.
 In defence of Meghan
The unfair demonisation of a duchess
TANYA GOLD

T
he words pouring on Meghan’s head are written for a witch, because that is the
natural progress of the story. The royal family are our national myth and
sacrifice: our small flesh gods, without whom we would have to have a serious
political system requiring serious engagement, instead of which we have this. Interlopers
are sanctified if they comply and demonised if they don’t. It is a sort of trial by ordeal,
it’s-a-royal-knockout — how much can you take? All interlopers get it — Prince Philip
was once considered a dangerous moderniser — but the women have it worse. Sir
Timothy Laurence might wonder where his made-up feud with his brother-in-law is. I
have worked on a tabloid and I can tell you: he isn’t pretty enough.
Harry is called ungrateful for the interview with Oprah, but not much worse. His
small personal failings — teenage drug use, Nazi uniforms — are not dwelled on because
he’s one of us. The woman is the true cause of evil, and she must be punished: this witch
who stole our prince. This narrative is repulsive because it assumes ownership of a
person. Weren’t we there for him when his mother died? Oh yes, and how he wished we
hadn’t been. Even so, pretending to be Harry’s mum while really being a middle-aged
female journalist for the purposes of chiding him is an evergreen, and gruesome, genre.
Now they have Meghan to feast on, and the generic complaint was always: she looks very
pleased with herself, the woman who stole our prince! That a professional soldier with
access to the loveliest possible women is unlikely to be kidnapped by a former actress
and sometimes calligrapher — what, did she drug him? — has escaped them.
We know now that she wasn’t pleased with herself. She was so unhappy she became
ill. It’s not normal to accuse women who say they are suicidal of lying, unless they are a
royal duchess. It is not normal to accuse a biracial woman who says she was the victim of
racism of lying, unless they are a royal duchess. Royalty is a dehumanising state. They
are supposed to revel in it, as if it is not a grotesque intrusion but a lifelong Ferrero
Rocher advert that the viewer, when minded, can throw chips at.
The specific objections to Meghan are all stylistic. What can appear desperately
insincere to British people is, in America, good manners. Meghan is the middle-class
only daughter of a marriage between a lighting director and a former make-up artist. It is
insinuated that she is self-seeking, when she is merely ambitious — and why not? Her
charm and her striving brought her a long way until they crashed into the impossible
demands of British royalty and their mad acolytes. Middle-class Americans tell each
other they look beautiful when they don’t. When they are being polite, they sound like
they work in hotel management. If they seem too groomed for British eyes that, again, is
good manners. For the British, it is trying too hard, a nauseating convention that protects
aristocratic power.
I would not wear earrings from the king of Saudi Arabia and call myself a feminist,
but he would not give them to me. I would not wear a $200,000 dress, but I am a hack,
and I don’t need one.
There is no woman in Harry’s intimate circle, or family, who does not have access to
such things. Last week it was reported that the Queen has accepted gifts of horses from
the ruler of Dubai, currently busy imprisoning his own daughters, whom he had abducted
and has now drugged, and I hear barely a ripple on that. Tiara-gate and flower-girl-gate
received substantially more press, like war crimes.
The response to the interview has proved Meghan’s point for her. Life in the royal
family was intolerable. She flipped a finger at our shabby fairytale and abandoned us.
We behave like children in return.
 In the mix
Why is it racist to wonder what skin colour your child will have?
ANIL BHOYRUL

[iStock]

M
aybe I missed something here. Or maybe I am just completely naive. But why
is it racist to ponder what the skin colour of a new baby will be?
According to most of the American and British media, post the Harry and
Meghan interview, it absolutely is racist. It’s horrendous. Evil. Bigoted. Especially so in
the US (a country where barely over 10 per cent of the married population is actually
inter-racial). But these are generally the views of people who don’t actually know what
they are talking about. Because they are not part of, or in the slightest bit close to, an
inter-racial couple.
So first the obvious declaration of interest: I was born in Mauritius. I look Asian. Or
brown if you prefer. My wife was born in Slovenia. She is white and blonde.
Yes, it is an unusual match. Our respective families are the most open–minded groups
of people you could ever meet, however. Never a hint of racism on either side. But have
we discussed the skin colours of my kids, since long before they were born? You bet we
have, and still do.
Before my son Joe popped out 11 years ago, my late mother enquired endlessly what
the different colour options were. She went further than the mystery ‘racist’ royal,
suggesting that a darker version of brown would be better, as the kid would be more
likely to follow the Hindu religion (that of our side of the family).
My wife’s family — who could not have been more welcoming to the first brown face
that ever entered their remote village in eastern Europe — were hoping for a ‘whiter’
result, thinking that made it more likely he would follow Christianity.
I joined in with all this. We had endless family discussions, usually over countless
bottles of wine. It was all a great guessing game, and a damn good laugh. I had a side bet
running with some friends on what exact colour Joe would be. I guess that makes me
racist too.
Joe, as it turned out, came out on the whiter side of white. My mother adored him,
and promptly joined in the plans for his christening. ‘Second one will be a bit more
brown I hope,’ she told me. But her hopes were further dashed when my daughter Evita
appeared three years later, also looking ‘a little bit whiter’ than she imagined. She came
to that christening too.
Things finally became more balanced in 2013 when our third child, Savannah, was
born, definitely on the brown side of brown. My mother was thrilled. I lost another bet.
My in-laws found it all very amusing and confusing, before we all went to a Hindu temple
together.
And guess what my close friends did? Exactly what I would have done: made several
lurid suggestions about there being no way I could be the father. ‘The colours don’t add
up,’ they told me.
My kids often point out that within our own family, the five of us are all completely
different skin colours. They think it’s really cool, and even cooler to talk about it. For
them, it is a source of positive fascination. When it comes to race and religion, they want
to know more, learn more, embrace more. At my daughter’s birthday party in February
last year in Bolivia (where we live for some of the year), the guests included an
indigenous Indian, a black Brazilian and a Bolivian of Japanese ancestry. Many
languages, many colours, many questions and many laughs. Did one of the parents go
online to see who matched which Dulux paint colour scheme? Yes, guilty as charged.
And that makes them racist? Come on. Get real.
Context is everything. Nobody actually has a clue what the context of the rogue royal
remark was regarding Meghan and Harry’s unborn baby. We probably never will. But
you know what? My kids understand context. My wife does. My in-laws and my friends
do. So did my mother. But if you look at everything in black and white, then by my count
there are a lot of racists in this story. Me. My wife. My mother. My in-laws. My close
friends. The guests at the birthday party. We should all be cancelled.
Or maybe we should accept the inconvenient truth, which is that none of my friends
or relatives is in the slightest bit racist, and that most of us interracial folk like to have a
good laugh at our own expense.
 Infernal censorship
How Dante fell foul of the Chinese Communist party
IAN THOMSON

[iStock]

M
y book on Dante Alighieri was due to come out in Chinese translation later
this year, but first I had to consent to sizeable cuts. Even by the standards of
other authoritarian states the Beijing censors struck me as overzealous. It
seems odd that the medieval Italian poet could cause such unease among modern-day
totalitarians. A sanitised Chinese communist version of my book did not sit well with the
700th anniversary of Dante’s death in 1321, and in the end I withheld permission.
The cuts were the work of Beijing’s blandly named Institute for World Religions. The
institute undertakes ‘book cleansing’ operations on behalf of the state. No book can be
published legally in China today without being vetted. In their solemn appraisal the
censors insisted that all references to Islam be removed. Why?
 Dante inflicts a punishment so grotesque on the Prophet Muhammad in Canto 28 of
the Inferno that Muslims might well protest. The Prophet’s body is split from end to end
so that his entrails dangle out amid excrement; he is punished as a ‘sower of discord’.
Beijing is not known to be tolerant of China’s 22 million-strong Muslim minority; why
then were the censors so unhappy with my 20 pages on Dante’s less than flattering
portrayal of Islam?
The reason is that even hostile interpretations of Islam are discouraged today in Xi
Jinping’s China. Thus the censors removed from my book a colour-plate illustration of
Giovanni da Modena’s 15th-century fresco depicting Muhammad’s graphic mortification
by a bat-winged devil creature. The Last Judgment fresco, inspired by Dante, continues a
tradition of medieval allegorical books and poems which portrayed Muslims as
renegades from Christianity. (In 2002, alarmingly, there was an Islamist plot to blow up
the Bologna cathedral where the fresco is displayed.) Muhammad’s physical sundering
by Dante is certainly gruesome. Yet Chinese Dante scholars and translators (according
to a Chinese friend of mine in Beijing) have never made much of the connection between
the Inferno and Islam. Now suddenly they do.
Also censored were 15 pages on Dante and Martin Luther. Dante is often viewed as a
pioneer of the Reformation (he condemned a number of popes to hell, after all). In
China, though, any talk of his proto–Lutheran intransigence is deemed potentially
‘harmful to public morality’, and not permitted. Less clear to me was why sections on the
rivalry between the Guelfs and Ghibellines were taken out. Not even Dante understood
why these Italian dynasties fought so bitterly and long. (‘Exeunt Guelfs and Ghibellines,
still fighting’, runs a line in a Max Beerbohm’s spoof play Savonarola Brown.)
Censorship intensified across the board in China after 2012 when Xi became the
General Secretary of the Communist party. Xi was shaped by the Cultural Revolution of
1966-76, when ‘problem citizens’ were shut away in reformatories and sometimes had
their vocal chords surgically severed (like the traitors trapped in ice in Canto 34 of the
Inferno, they had no right to speak). Ludicrously, internet images of Winnie-the-Pooh
were blocked in 2017 when the red-shirted bear’s appearance was compared to that of
the portly Xi. Brokeback Mountain and other foreign films that deviate from the party
line on homosexuality are banned.
Homosexuals and others who have sinned ‘against nature’ are consigned by Dante to
the seventh circle of hell in the Inferno. Among these poor doomed souls is the 13th-
century humanist and diehard Guelf Brunetto Latini, Dante’s old tutor. Latini cuts an
oddly dignified figure as he wanders the afterlife in penury and exile. At some level
Dante identified with him. Sin is often ambiguous and many-faceted in Dante (the sinner
may have virtues as well as faults). However, ambiguities of this sort have no place in a
regime that views even Winnie-the-Pooh as a hazard, and knows only black and white.
Latini’s name was expunged from my book entirely.
 China’s rigorous and often absurd censorship is even more disconcerting when
China’s diplomats successfully apply it beyond their country’s borders. This week,
following pressure from the Chinese consulate in Hamburg, the German publishing
house Carlsen pulped copies of a children’s book that dared to suggest the coronavirus
originated in Wuhan. The destruction of A Corona Rainbow for Anna and Moritz is no
small victory for Beijing in its campaign to deflect blame for the pandemic.
My own experience of censorship was a distasteful affair, that ran counter to China’s
vaunted transition to the free market. In a carefully worded letter to me, the Chinese
publisher apologised for the whole tedious business (‘We are very sorry for this strange
publication procedure in our country’) but if the deletions demanded by the Institute for
World Religions were not made, there could be no book. Bizarrely, much of what the
Institute asked me to remove already exists in footnotes and annotations to the five
Chinese-language versions of Dante’s Inferno currently available. So why bother? The
Institute’s word was final; I felt I had no choice but to tell the censors where to stick their
deletions. There ought to be a special place in hell for them.

‘‘That’s disappointing — I was expecting an increase of 1 per cent.’’

Greta Scacchi and Ian Thomson’s video film of Dante is broadcast by the Italian
Cultural Institute on 25 March — Dante Day.
 Letter from Japan
PHILIP PATRICK

T
okyo
This week was the tenth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake,
the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the country. It, along with the
tsunami it triggered, claimed an estimated 19,000 lives. I was walking in the Shibuya
district of Tokyo when the quake knocked me off my feet. I recall being first puzzled
(why am I falling?); then awestruck, as I glanced up at a thin concrete ‘pencil’ building
swaying gently like a flower in the breeze. Two women on a balcony seemed to be,
bizarrely, unaccountably, laughing. Then I became aware of a man running towards me,
gesticulating frantically and, oddly for Japan, swearing. When the tremors passed, I
picked myself up and noticed his hard hat, overalls and expression of wonder mingled
with relief. I looked up and realised I had been walking under the scaffolding he was
working on. One loose bolt and it would have entombed me. We stared at each other in
silence, and then went our separate ways. I’ve always regretted that I didn’t thank him
and his crew for their workmanship.
 Talking of debts of gratitude, someone who ought to be remembered is Masao
Yoshida, engineer in charge of the Fukushima nuclear plant, which was rocked by the
quake and flooded by the tsunami. After three hydrogen blasts the management in
Tokyo ordered staff to abandon the facility. Yoshida, knowing this would be disastrous,
went behind the backs of his superiors and contacted then prime minister Naoto Kan,
who fortuitously, and rarely for a politician, had some knowledge of engineering. With
Kan’s approval, Yoshida and a small crew stayed and continued to pump seawater into
the reactor, cooling it, but rendering it inoperable. They exposed themselves to massive
amounts of radiation in the process. This initiative prevented further explosions and
probably saved many lives. Defying the stereotype of the robotically obedient company
man, Yoshida was a straight-talking maverick from Osaka, whose inhabitants are
renowned for their single-mindedness and suspicion of lofty Tokyo (think Newcastle’s
relationship to London, or Glasgow’s to Edinburgh). He gave one interview and then
quietly retired. He died of oesophageal cancer in 2013 aged 58. He has never received
any official recognition, and all he got from his company TEPCO was a verbal reprimand
for disobedience.
The regeneration of the devastated areas was supposed to be celebrated in the 2020
Olympics, which were dubbed the ‘recovery games’. This landed badly with locals who
feel the ‘recovery’ is far from complete, particularly when it emerged that the spin was an
afterthought, concocted when it became apparent that regional venues were needed to
supplement those in Tokyo. The story typifies the murkiness that has characterised the
project. The games were awarded in controversial circumstances, after it emerged that
fees for ‘consulting services’ had ended up in suspicious bank accounts. This led to the
resignation of Tsunekazu Takeda, aristocratic head of the Olympic Committee. Then
there was the misrepresentation of the summer climate: in the bid materials, it was
described as ‘ideal for athletes to perform at their best’. In fact, it’s brutal and potentially
dangerous. The spiralling budget risked bankrupting the city, leading to broken promises
such as the air-conditioning system in the Olympic stadium being quietly cancelled,
rendering it a concrete sun-trap. And last month, just when the project needed a PR
boost, the former PM Yoshiro Mori, head of the organising committee, said that women
members should have their speaking time limited in a discussion on gender diversity. The
media awarded him the first gold medal of the games (for sexism), and the hashtag ‘Mori
please resign’ (note the delightful Japanese courtesy) began trending. He duly complied,
soon after the sponsors joined the pile-on.
Will the games go ahead this year? The feeling is that they will, though overseas
spectators will be banned. However, my contact on the periphery of events admits that
any worsening of the Covid situation would be it; and, upon a cancellation, the entire
Japanese cabinet would resign. But do the Japanese public still care? Did they ever? A
poll in January found 80 per cent favoured a further postponement or cancellation. Even
pre-pandemic, evidence of enthusiasm was hard to find. In 2019 the public broadcaster
NHK produced a marathon (47-episode) Olympic drama in the primetime Sunday night
slot. Idaten got the fewest viewers in the slot’s history.
If NHK’s Olympic cheerleading struck the wrong note, it deserves a modicum of
praise for its Covid coverage: not so much the editorial line, which features the same
churn of uncontextualised statistics as its progenitor the BBC, but for the calm and
dignified tone. Despite a relatively low death toll, there have been periodic reports of
overwhelmed hospitals in Tokyo, but these never come with dramatic ICU footage
overlaid with graven commentary. Government messaging is similarly restrained, never
hectoring or emotionally manipulative. Scary ‘Look him in the eyes’ posters wouldn’t be
acceptable here, and not just because of the cultural taboo on maintaining eye contact.
Generally in this pandemic the Japanese have been treated as adults, and trusted to
make their own decisions. It reflects a solidly constructed, self-regulating society, and a
people all too familiar with disasters both natural and man-made. There may be
aftershocks, but Japan looks likely to emerge from Covid not only relatively unscathed,
but largely unaltered.
 Poles apart
Why the Polish community doesn’t want the vaccine
OLENKA HAMILTON

Getty Images

T
here is a joke going around Poland at the moment which encapsulates the
national character perfectly. A German is told he has to have the Covid vaccine.
He is uncertain. ‘It’s an order,’ the doctor says, and so he agrees. A British man
is told the same. He wavers. ‘Do it for Queen and country,’ the doctor says. He agrees. A
French man is told ‘It’s the fashionable thing to do’, and he agrees, too. Finally, a Pole
has his turn. The doctor says: ‘You’re Polish, you definitely won’t take the vaccine.’ The
Pole replies: ‘Don’t tell me what I think. Give me that vaccine!’
Anyone who knows Poles (I’m half Polish, so I do) will find it unsurprising that they
are sceptical about the vaccine. A poll by Kantar in December found that 47 per cent of
Poles in Poland were more afraid of side effects from the jab than of the virus itself.
Poland is second only to Russia on the list of countries that are most suspicious of the
vaccine, according to a survey for Nature.
The Polish government has been worrying about this for years. Its research shows the
number of people with non-medical reasons for refusing vaccines has grown tenfold since
2010, and the proportion of children being vaccinated against measles is in danger of
falling below the 95 per cent threshold required for herd immunity. This is despite the
fact that childhood vaccines are compulsory in Poland, a policy that drives people to the
street in protest.
Vaccine hesitancy is equally prevalent among Polish people living in Britain, and
given that their population here is thought to be around 900,000, it could be a serious
threat to the government’s vaccine programme if a significant number of them avoid
having the jab. There has already been much discussion about how to persuade Britain’s
BAME communities to take the vaccine. But Eastern Europeans (of which Britain’s
Poles make up around half) have been named as the second most likely community not
to have the Covid vaccine in recent UK studies.
The Polish embassy in London says it has already started working with government-
funded marketing agencies to organise educational programmes for Poles across the UK
to try to address what it admits is a serious problem. ‘The fear and resistance comes from
a lack of knowledge about vaccines, poor English in many cases, as well as the large
amount of disinformation in Polish on the internet about vaccines,’ a Polish embassy
official told me, though she also mentioned that the embassy has had some success
persuading Polish ex-servicemen in London care homes to have the jab.
Large sections of Britain’s Polish community live isolated from the UK media. They
watch Polish television, keep in touch with family and friends and share scare stories
about the vaccines: that they are made with human embryos, leave women infertile or
even put electronic chips into the brain. Poles are wary of pharmaceutical companies
such as Pfizer, and fear that the vaccine was created in too short a space of time and has
not undergone sufficient testing.
To understand the Polish mentality, it is important to look at what the country has
been through over the past two centuries — most of which it spent under malevolent
foreign domination. As the saying goes, too much history and not enough geography.
Poland was once divided up between Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary, and then
wiped off the map. Germans arrived in 1939, followed by Russians who terrorised Poles
for the next 45 years. Poles have spent the best part of two and a half centuries literally
fighting for the right to exist.
A distrust of governments, the media, large corporations and especially big pharma is
now embedded in the Polish DNA. It is every man for himself in Poland. Tell a Pole to
take the vaccine and his instinct will be to think you are trying to swindle or even kill
him, and so he will do the exact opposite. Poles have learnt to be defensive over the
years.
Wiktor Moszczynski, an author and social activist who helps run the Federation of
Poles in Great Britain, says that a well-funded vaccine information campaign is needed
in the Polish language — similar to that being conducted throughout Britain’s BAME
communities. Without one, he says, the result could be catastrophic. ‘We could find that,
after the initial vaccination programme in the UK finishes in July, a significant amount of
Polish residents had failed to immunise themselves or their families. That could leave
them and other members of the Polish community open to suspicion as likely carriers of
the Covid infection. That could lead to an increase in anti-Polish feeling in the popular
press.’
A Facebook group run by the organisation British Poles has more than 100,000
followers — and if you visit it you will get a sense of how tough a crowd these Poles are.
There will be as many as 600 comments on any post relating to the Covid jab, far more
than on any other topic, and most are anti-vaccine. ‘Let them [the British] keep
vaccinating themselves. There’ll be more of the world left for us,’ says one. ‘So many
people have died from the vaccine,’ says another.
The problem isn’t just ignorance or lack of information. There is also resistance to
Covid vaccines among better-educated, English-speaking Poles, including medics. A
Facebook group titled Poles in the NHS is surprisingly heated. ‘I have refused. Why?
Because I have allergies and I am trying for a baby,’ writes one person. ‘We are living
through a great medical experiment,’ writes another. ‘Reading these comments, I cannot
believe this is a group for healthcare workers,’ replies one pro-vaccine voice.
Dr Wieslaw Czynowski, a surgeon practising in Warsaw, tells me his problem is with
the idea of vaccinating a nation against a virus which ‘in the most part cures itself’. A few
years ago, a survey of almost 900 Polish doctors found only 5 per cent saying they’d even
take the flu vaccine. Most said they would not recommend it to their patients.
All of this may sound baffling to many Brits. This is perhaps down to a longer
democratic tradition, or an unusually high level of trust between the NHS, the
government and the public. But Poles have a very different history and far deeper
misgivings about the vaccine. Far more needs to be done to convince them of its benefits.
‘‘I’m beginning to think our diversity policy has gone a little too far.’’
 Stranger than fiction
How I’d write Covid: The Thriller
SEAN THOMAS

L
ike 98.3 per cent of humanity, I’ve spent the past 12 months reading dubiously
precise statistics, staring listlessly into space for hours on end, and, most
poignantly, wondering if I am an extra in a movie about a pandemic. This last
intuition only worsened when I watched Contagion — the 2011 Kate Winslet/Gwyneth
Paltrow pandemic movie — and it felt like I was simply watching the TV news (again),
right down to the scenes of giant stadiums ominously filled with empty hospital beds.
The sensation that I am living through a real-life thriller is particularly acute for me,
because that’s what I do: write thrillers. I used to write globe-spanning, Dan Brown-
esque airport thrillers under the name Tom Knox; recently I have investigated my
feminine side, and I now write grip-lit domestic noir thrillers — mainly about sensitive
people trapped on drizzly islands — under the nom de plume S.K. Tremayne.
 In short, I have a lot of experience writing thrillers, and with some success, so I know
what makes a good one: what will sell, and what will not. And the primary criterion for a
successful thriller is a gripping and believable plot.
When I say believable I mean this: logical within its own world. Your thriller can be
set on Neptune, in a colony of iguanas who adore chocolate — that’s not a problem. But
every event has to follow plausibly from what came before, and wild coincidences are
absolutely forbidden. If you shove in a major coincidence, e.g. the king of the Neptune
iguanas hurls his three-ton creme egg out of the window and just happens to squash the
villainous insectoid chocolate-stealer from Mars, readers will do the same: they will
throw your book out of the window.
It’s this primary rule about thriller–plotting— no coincidences! — which got me
thinking about Covid-19 as a human story, and as a plausible thriller. Because recently
the story of Covid-19 took a narrative turn which was so outrageously absurd and badly
scripted it had me reaching for the delete key.
The incident was the visit by the World Health Organisation to China, to finally
unearth the origins of the virus Sars-CoV-2. As we all know, far too well, the virus
premiered in the Chinese city of Wuhan, possibly in the animal-selling ‘wet market’, or
thereabouts, and it likely came from bats. Wuhan has ever since been a particular focus
of attention — and suspicion, because it also hosts a laboratory examining very similar
viruses.
It was therefore with some anticipation that the world tuned in to hear the WHO’s
verdict. Which turned out to be: ‘It is extremely unlikely that the laboratory’s work is
behind the outbreak that struck the city at the end of 2019.’ And that, pretty much, was
that. Asked why it had reached that verdict, the WHO replied that it couldn’t find any
research on this new virus at the lab.
Now, call me Captain Sceptical, but China is run by a regime which, as I write, is
allegedly committing genocide on its Muslim population and crushing human rights in
Hong Kong. I therefore believe it is, to say the least, capable of concealing a few folders
behind the sofa, thus preventing the discovery of any embarrassing ‘research’. Moreover,
given that the WHO is so cowed by China that its officials can’t bring themselves to say
the word ‘Taiwan’ in TV interviews, I wonder if WHO investigators even got inside the
lab. Indeed, if this were a comedy, my script would go something like this:

China accompanies the WHO to the lab. China points at closed door.
China: Look.
WHO: Is that door always closed, making it very hard for viruses to escape?
China: Yes.
WHO: Great. Shall we grab lunch?
 However, this is not a comedy, this is a thriller (tragically), and here is where I can
apply my thriller-writing rules to the WHO’s narrative. And my conclusion is: it sucks. If
I took this proposed plot twist to my editor, she would laugh me out of the room, while
saying: ‘So, you’re telling me there is a globally unique, level four Institute of Virology in
this city, Wuhan, and it is specifically investigating novel bat corona-viruses, and it is just
a few miles from the wet market, where a novel bat coronavirus miraculously jumped
into humans, and you’re claiming there is no connection? You think readers will buy
that? Go away and do another draft!’
In other words, the WHO’s story doesn’t ring true. It fails Ockham’s Razor. It is way
too much of a coincidence: the lab, the market, and the bats — bats which, by the by,
come from distant Yunnan, not anywhere near Wuhan (a city whose wet market does
not, in fact, sell bats). This may be why the WHO reportedly now has doubts about
‘publishing’ some of its ‘interim’ findings: whatever that really means, given that it has
already broadcast these findings worldwide.
So how would I write Covid-19: The Thriller, if I were in charge? Like this. Let’s say
China is planning its rise to global hegemony. As the nation ascends, it starts looking
nervily at America, which seems minded to elect a mad president at some point, the kind
of guy who might lob nukes over Taiwan.
China needs to defend itself. It starts research into bioweapons. It takes a great
interest in bats as they are a major source of nasty viruses. After a few years, Chinese
scientists discover a novel bat coronavirus which has distinct, unusual features: it is highly
contagious, it is ten times as lethal as flu, it wafts through the air into eyes, noses and
mouths, it spreads asymptomatically. Handily, if this virus is ever debuted on the world
stage, it will impact individualistic, liberty-loving western nations much worse than rule-
following, Sars-aware, mask–wearing Asian societies.
The gleeful scientists take their bioweapon to Beijing. There, they are given
enormous medals, and told: now develop a vaccine, so when this virus is launched, we
can also be the global saviour, supplanting a stricken America. The world will come
begging for our medicine. China will triumph.
We all know how my thriller ends. The happy scientists go home to Wuhan. They
have a big celebration in the lab, they drink a crate of Tsingtao beer, and someone gets
so hammered he unknowingly spills infectious bat blood on his pretty secretary. She then
goes straight to the local wet market to buy a duck for supper: bingo, the virus is
launched too soon, before the vaccine is ready, and so 2020 unfolds, in all its horror.
Now, this is fiction. I do not necessarily believe this is what actually happened.
However, I do know this: my story makes more sense, and is more plausible, than
anything the World Health Organisation is telling us.
‘‘We met on the internet.’’
 Mean girls
The return of the bitch is long overdue
JULIE BURCHILL

Getty Images

A
s I watched the Duchess of Sussex give her extended acceptance speech for
Best Performance As A Victim — played as a cross between Bambi and Beth
from Little Women — my overwhelming feeling was of disappointment.
Readers may recall that I once wrote long and loopy love letters to her in this very
magazine, embarrassing in their unctuousness — ‘Meghan Markle has rescued her
prince!’ — but I went off her when her bid for secular sainthood started. The allegations
of tiara tantrums brought me fresh hope. Could it be that behind that innocent face, all
damp eyes and trembling lips, lurked a superannuated Mean Girl? She’d have made such
a good one. And we bitches could use the recruits.
Looking back, I don’t blame myself for growing up to be a bitch. It was my parents’
fault for letting me spend wet weekends watching all those Golden Age Hollywood films,
usually starring Barbara Stanwyck or Bette Davis, and culminating in The Women, the
1939 sparkling cyanide of a comedy by George Cukor. At one point Joan Crawford, as a
shop girl cutting a swathe through the married men of a higher social circle, rounds on
their spouses and informs them: ‘There’s a name for you ladies — but it isn’t used in high
society, outside of a kennel.’ Even the 12-year-old me knew what she meant.
Then there was glam rock. When I wasn’t mainlining Hollywood, I was staggering
around in silver platformed boots at the local teenybopper disco to songs like ‘The Bitch
is Back’ (Elton John) and ‘Queen Bitch’ (David Bowie) absolutely delighted that men
could be bitches, too. The following morning I would lurk in my purple bedroom with
the curtains closed and calm my Babycham hangover with nuggets from the twin titans of
literary bitchery, Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker. The great luxe soap operas — Dallas,
1978–91 and Dynasty, 1981–89 — were just around the corner and in their spotlight were
a brace of brilliant bitches; Sue Ellen Ewing, played by Linda Gray, and Alexis
Carrington Colby — not so much played as taken out like a Borzoi on a long lead by the
ultimate bitch-goddess, Joan Collins. She summed up the difference with which men and
women are treated: ‘I wouldn’t be “nice” to studio heads and it gave me a reputation of
being a bitch because being witty and hard was accepted in men like Noël Coward and
Oscar Wilde but not in a young woman.’
Indeed, Miss Collins was both the personification of the word in showbusiness (her
comeback was in the 1979 film of her sister Jackie’s novel The Bitch) and also an arch
admirer of the woman who took the b-word into politics, Margaret Thatcher, who won
her first general election in the same year. There was a 1979 song by the Village People
called ‘Ready for the Eighties’ (ironically, it would be their last hit) and as ambitious
women squared up to the new decade, we really knew that if we couldn’t cut it in the
world of work then all our glittering quips counted for nothing. The 1980s was the
decade when the bitch came out of the bedroom and into the boardroom, her eye on a
prize somewhat more prestigious than some other woman’s rich husband. It was as if
seeing Mrs Thatcher enter No. 10 suddenly gave substance to our discontent. Ambition
was now not a curse but a benediction. When the young Madonna was asked about
feminism and answered ‘I believe in everything they do, but I was too impatient — I had
to do it for myself’, she crystallised the bitch doctrine; not anti-feminist but fast-track
feminist, open to anyone tough enough to walk the tightrope without a safety net,
trusting that they might fly.
The 1980s were also useful in clarifying the fact that the left is no friend to women.
The ditch the bitch placards carried on anti-Thatcher marches showed their hand then.
But it wasn’t until the modern left embraced wokeness that the bitch really had her
talons clipped. Wokeism is not a revolutionary but a reactionary movement, and
nowhere is this more obvious than in the modern left’s attitude to women’s issues. Every
other oppressed group is told to riot. Women: #BeKind. The social commentator Laura
Bishop told me: ‘While shopping for my kids I noticed that there are so many items of
clothing which say Be Kind. They are all in the girls’ and women’s section. Every. Single.
One. It’s like indoctrination.’ And it’s not like men aren’t more in need of reminders to
Be Kind, as rapes and domestic murders continue to be this country’s most thriving areas
of endeavour. Women are being castrated by being encouraged to view kindness as the
best quality they can have. Though I’ve loved the book since I shoplifted it at the age of
12, I never really understood what a ‘Female Eunuch’ was for most of my life. Since the
world turned woke, I certainly do.
It would be easy to be dismayed as I take stock in the dog days of my life as a bitch.
But it’s best to look on the bright side — and already I hear hissings of discontent on the
near horizon. ‘I just took a DNA test / Turns out I’m 100 per cent that bitch,’ smirks the
splendid young pop star Lizzo, while Sherry Argov’s 2003 book Why Men Love Bitches:
From Doormat To Dream Girl is back on the bestseller charts after going viral on
TikTok with ‘Gen Z’. For a new generation of young women, accustomed to porn-sick
men trying to take liberties with them, the lure of being a Hard-Hearted Hannah is
tempting. So beware of the bitch; she’s back and this time — with so little to lose, as it’s
all being given away on our behalf, from toilets to sports tracks — her bite will be much
worse than her bark.

‘‘I must admit, I thought I could have had more support from the palace.’’
 Press gang
The dangers of televising lobby briefings
FRANCIS ELLIOTT

iStock

L
ike a tongue searching for an absent tooth, I keep wondering if I’m missing
anything from my two decades as a lobby hack. Friends, of course, and perhaps
the vast, grey field of sloping slate as seen from the Times’s parliamentary office.
That empty and silent space, the roof of Westminster Hall, seemed austere and
indifferent, a mental refuge from the babble beneath and within. The opposite aspect,
towards the crumbling guts of the Palace of Westminster, elicits more complicated
memories.
I arrived in the press gallery aged 30 to take a job as Westminster correspondent for a
clutch of provincial papers. On my first day my new colleagues took me to tea at 4 p.m.
in the dining room. There was also a bar with its own barflies and a barman named Clive.
 It was 1998 and the lobby was gearing up for a fight with an aggressive Downing
Street. Soon there were rumours that No. 10 wanted to televise the daily briefings. Which
is to say there is nothing new in SW1 — but everything grows older.
The lobby, a collective name for journalists accredited to report from parliament,
attracts criticism, a lot of it nutty. It is said, sometimes simultaneously, to be too cosy and
too confrontational. Given the complexity of its ecosystem, from the client-journalists
wafting gently about their hosts to bull sharks on relentless patrol, it’s hard to make
general criticism stick.
Hard but not impossible — and if the latest attempts to televise the daily press
briefings actually come to fruition there is danger all around. The current off-camera
sessions are on most days a joyless dance that fails to build even to an anti-climax. Bring
in cameras, and the patient probing that winkles out news won’t be clipped for social
media: the ‘car crash’ moments — on both sides — most definitely shall. The
broadcasters will have to ask the ‘question of the day’ for their packages (although must
each ask the same question?) and those with a print deadline will have to think of how to
move the story on and search every rabbit hole, no matter how tedious. Through it all,
Downing Street will say what it has to say. And say it again.
It will be grimly fascinating to see which jars more with viewers: the stonewalling by
No. 10, or the ridiculous peacocking of some hacks. Some lobby journalists are looking
forward to the exposure, unbothered about how they might be perceived by a general
public. Little thought has been given to the fact that political journalists, as a group,
don’t look much like the rest of the country. In fact they have grown less representative,
in terms of social background, over the past 50 years, as is clear from The Westminster
Lobby Correspondents, Jeremy Tunstall’s ‘sociological study of national political
journalism’.
Much of this wonderful book remains as true today as when it was published in 1970.
His portrait of ‘lobby man’ as a ‘self–contained and unbohemian’ suburbanite whose
friends are mostly other journalists who complain they can’t make evening plans but
‘exhibit somewhat obsessional interest’ in their work is wincingly accurate. And yet it is
striking to learn that then just a quarter of the lobby had been university-educated.
The 2008/09 parliamentary expenses scandal showed a political class that had
forgotten to care how its internal workings looked to the outside world. But that fierce
shaming has made it harder to arrest a slide in status, as manifested by a building falling
apart. There is a strange fatalism that comes from working in a physical metaphor for
decline. Tunstall, good on the conditioning effects of the ‘squalid’ building on the
institution, would recognise the state of the gents’ lavatories. In a bank of basins and taps
as old as Pugin himself, one plughole is almost permanently blocked. It is hard to say
which of the urinals leaks, possibly all of them. The point is that they were leaking when
I arrived 23 years ago and very probably long before that, and have leaked more or less
ever since.
‘The simplest way to produce a change in the lobby system might be to drop some
bombs on the Houses of Parliament,’ Tunstall notes. While I have often thought that a
victimless accident that flattened the place might not be the worst way to rescue the
Westminster system, there may yet still be a less drastic solution. The lobby has shown its
mettle recently. It won the ‘battle of the carpet’ when journalists, lined up on either side
of No. 10’s hall according to whether they had been invited to a selective briefing, walked
out en masse in protest. It was a great act of solidarity that put paid to an attempt to
undermine its power as a collective. It needs to summon that spirit again and welcome
what the new scrutiny will bring.
 NOTES ON...

Egrets
By Mark Solomons

Great and small: egretta garzetta and ardea alba. Credit: iStock

T
here’s an unwritten rule in newspaper journalism that any story about egrets
must have one of two headlines. Either ‘no egrets’ if numbers are dropping or
‘egrets, we’ve had a few’ if they are booming. At the moment, fortunately, it’s
the latter.
The little egret (egretta garzetta) can be seen as something of a trailblazer. The first
only nested successfully in England as recently as 1997, on Brownsea Island in Dorset,
and there are now up to 1,000 pairs in the country, according to the RSPB. They compete
for food with herons and cormorants on the Thames and even have been known to
venture into cities and towns.
What looks like its big brother, the enormous great white egret (ardea alba) was, last
year, seen in so many places in Britain that the website Bird Guides — the twitchers’
bible — no longer classifies them as a rare species and only reports sightings in regions
where they remain scarce. There is also a third type of egret, the visiting western cattle
egret (bubulcus ibis), which first bred here in 2008 and is still comparatively rare.
The great white is tall, elegant and stunning. The size is what sets it apart — it is as
large as a grey heron — but also it has a bright yellow beak while the little egret’s is
black. Both have black legs although the little egret has shiny yellow feet, nicknamed
‘golden slippers’ among birdwatchers.
Egrets were once common in Britain but were wiped out by the end of the Middle
Ages, probably in part because of the ‘Little Ice Age’, which began in roughly 1300 and
lasted for 500 years. It would be easy to cite climate change as the reason they have been
flying over from Europe’s mainland in recent years, but that only goes some way to
explaining the phenomenon. Yes, warmer winters have boosted populations in countries
such as Holland which leads to overcrowding, forcing birds to fly further afield. But
much more important are the efforts of conservation organisations and farmers who
have worked with nature groups to provide the ideal environments for these birds.
Reedbeds and lakes have been carefully managed to create the right shelter for ground
nesting birds. It worked for the bittern, once almost wiped out in Britain but now named
as the RSPB’s Bird of the Decade for its revival in the past ten years.
Egrets, like so many other birds which feed on fish and toads in shallow waters, are
incredibly sensitive to long-term changes in water levels which is why the populations in
areas such as Suffolk’s east coast are worried about the effects of the proposed Sizewell
C construction project, for instance.
I have my own theory for the increase in numbers. People are simply noticing more.
Lockdown has encouraged a resurgence in bird-watching and not just counting the blue
tits, wrens and robins on the feeders. Instead, people are noticing and reporting the
sightings of rarer birds on their permitted exercise outings. Great white and cattle egrets
are being spotted more and more and their sightings reported which has helped track
their positive progress.
 Cheltenham Preview
Brought to you by Fitzdares
FITZDARES

Five things to look out for

1. Every Cheltenham Festival has an Irish ‘banker’ bet, but only the most charismatic
horses make the further leap to legendary status: in the 1960s, the three-time Gold Cup
winner Arkle was perhaps the greatest example, and in subsequent decades champions
Dawn Run, Danoli and Istabraq followed. More recently, however, nothing has entirely
fitted the bill, but the brilliant mare Honeysuckle, a leading contender for the Champion
Hurdle on day one, could change all that. The possibility revolves around an undefeated
record — 11/11 — her jockey being Rachael Blackmore, one of Ireland’s leading female
sporting figures, plus an all-important catchy name.
2. And it’s not just Blackmore: in Britain, the fascination with the success of women
in what is perceived to be a male-dominated sport — though it is arguable whether that
is entirely the case these days — shows no sign of abating, certainly not as regards jockey
Bryony Frost. Frost’s already prolific profile multiplied when winning the Ryanair Chase
on Frodon at the 2019 Festival, and this time they are scheduled to chase top honours in
the event’s centrepiece, the Wellchild Cheltenham Gold Cup, on day four. Previously,
Frodon has won six races staged over the course’s famously tricky contours, clearly an
advantage.
3. The ghostly silence that will envelop much of the racecourse because of the
pandemic is all the tougher because the festival has grown over the past 40 years from a
parochial, purists’ event to one of the biggest, noisiest and most profitable weeks of the
sporting calendar. The 2020 staging proved controversial as the first lockdown was
looming, leading to claims it should have been cancelled; officials believe arrangements
were within national guidelines, and they look forward to returning to a normal, crowded
service.
4. Talking of changes, the success rate of horses from Ireland has accelerated beyond
all recognition. Twice in my early working days, there was just one Irish-trained winner
and in 1989 none at all. But these days the talent under the care of Ireland’s leading
trainers Willie Mullins and Henry de Bromhead means the boot is firmly on the other
foot. Covid-19 restrictions combined with Brexit-related red tape mean that the number
of horses travelling this year may be down, but most of the major fancies — from de
Bromhead’s Honeysuckle and unbeaten chaser Envoi Allen, to Gold Cup hat-trick-
seeker Al Boum Photo, from the Mullins stable — are booked on the ferry.
5. Oh yes, Al Boum Photo: a third Gold Cup victory for the nine-year-old would see
him jump into festival history alongside racing ‘greats’ Golden Miller — who also won
two more — Cottage Rake, Arkle and Best Mate. But opponents are queuing up against
him: they include the de Bromhead-trained A Plus Tard, and, for the ‘home’ team,
Champ and Royale Pagaille.
Cornelius Lysaght. Fitzdares Ambassador. Former racing correspondent of the BBC.
My first Cheltenham winner
Thirteen has never been considered unlucky in the Webber family. I was born on 13
August, my father’s 33rd birthday — not that he was conscious of my arrival until the
following day, as he was busy celebrating ‘harvest home’, considered far more important
than the arrival of a third child. Saddling our horses with a ‘13’ number-cloth has never
brought on superstitious worries, so the fact they were competing on Friday 13th was not
a concern.
On the day last year, having spilled white wine all over my best tweed, my wife Ku
and I quickly left the party marquee and bumped into Carol and Martin Pipe. We said
just how much we would love our runner Indefatigable, nicknamed ‘Mary’, to win his
race, the Martin Pipe Conditional Jockeys’ Handicap Hurdle. We decided this meeting
must have been a great omen.
Her odds of 33-1 were an insult to both of us. Just two days earlier, Dame de
Compagnie, who had beaten her at Cheltenham in December, had won the Coral Cup.
Form does not get more solid than that.
She was in the hands of pilot Rex Dingle, in his very first sortie for us. Our plan was
for Rex to jump off middle to outer and get a position with a bit of daylight in the
forward half of the pack. As taught by Jack Ramsden: ‘Don’t worry if you don’t quite get
there, but don’t get beat because you hit the front too soon.’
Plan A looked to be going really well — until the false start. Then trouble began
when Mary began snarling and trying to bite her opponents. She was flat-footed, jumping
the first hurdle in plum last. However, our ace pilot was ice-cool, letting things unfold in
front of him. Still last, with less than a mile to go, they started to thread their way
through the field, bravely jumping the second last like a gazelle between two horses. Ten
lengths off the leaders as they turned into the straight, they were flying. They were very
quick over the last, dodging a faller and setting their sights on Pileon, crossing the line
together. Nobody at that moment knew who had won.
Amazingly, Indefatigable got up by a short head, and, as hoped, we got to meet
Martin Pipe again in the winners’ enclosure — the closest finish in the last race of a
festival that might not have taken place.
Racing ceased four days later. I am more grateful than most that Cheltenham did
indeed go ahead. My father trained two festival winners, the last of which was Elfast in
1994, the year before he died. I feel he may have played a part in aligning the various
stars in this story in the correct order, which enabled this fairy tale to become reality.
To be a dual Royal Ascot winner and — finally — a Cheltenham Festival-winning
trainer feels good, and I send huge gratitude to everybody who made it happen.
Paul Webber. Dual Royal Ascot and now Cheltenham Festival-winning trainer.
A Cheltenham certainty
In a year where almost everything has gone wrong, those famous ‘three certainties in
life’ have become increasingly prominent. We won’t dwell too much on death and taxes,
suffice to say the former has become ever more pronounced, while the latter will shortly
be rearing its ugly head. This leaves us with the third, and perhaps most important
certainty. The ‘good news’ certainty, shall we say. The Cheltenham Festival.
An eternal flame of the racing calendar, the festival is one candle that is hard to blow
out. And boy, has Mother Earth tried. While foot and mouth disease had its success in
2001, the ‘Beast from the East’ merely huffed and puffed (a nickname wasted
prematurely on bad weather). Then equine flu. Let’s face it, if that couldn’t stop the
horses, what chance did the pandemic have? Not last year. Not this year.
Cheltenham really does showcase the spirit of the British public. It is a hearty
gathering of risk-takers, fun-makers and dreamers. Everyone is in it for the love of the
game, for the love of fun and — dare we say — for the love of a punt.
 Alas, this festival will bear no crowds and thus no Cheltenham roar. The sitting room
will have to make do, although that shouldn’t lessen the excitement. Almost the entire
Cheltenham experience can be reimagined within your four walls.
Wearing tweed is the unnecessary but crucial first step, even just a flat cap to cover
your bald patch. Speaking of patches, we designed tweed masks for Cheltenham-goers to
wear last year. Sadly, and curiously, we were banned from handing them out. It was
deemed a PR stunt. We will let the readers decide on that one.
As for grub, our Fitzdares Club chefs are already grafting away at members’ hampers.
Not a well-done beef wellington in sight. Alternatively, empty a can of warm Guinness
into that stolen pint glass and raid the back of the fridge.
The final and most important step is getting your bets on. We have a fast-touch app
for you to download. For a more personal experience, give us a call or text your bets,
depending on whether it’s the wifi or reception that lets you down more often.
If you’d like to cheer when the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle starts, that’s up to you.
Trying to organise a 1 p.m. national roar for Cheltenham might raise some emotions.
The racing, as always, will do most of the talking. The main story is whether Al Boum
Photo can leap his way to a Gold Cup hat-trick and emulate Best Mate and Arkle. His
trainer Willie Mullins is the all-time festival leader with 72 winners and the Irish genius
has enough favourites to all but guarantee the return of the Prestbury Cup to Ireland.
Our ambassador Cornelius Lysaght will be offering his daily insights every morning
via our voice note service, WhatSport. It is with his words, we suspect, that you will find
the most value.
Rory Fairfax. Editor of the Fitzdares Times.
Fitzdares is the SBC Racing Sportsbook of the Year. If you are interested in
becoming a member of the world’s finest bookmaker and would like to find out more
about the exclusive Fitzdares Club in Mayfair, please visit www.fitzdares.com
The Fitzdares Club
Fitzdares is the oldest bookmaker on the planet. A takeover of Sunderlands in 2018
saw them inherit almost 140 years of experience, dating back to T. Guntrip in 1882. Back
then, results were delivered from the racecourse by carrier pigeon to their Mayfair
headquarters. Now, races are shown live on giant screens in their Mayfair headquarters.
Some things change. Some stay the same.
That is the essence of Fitzdares, an old-school bookmaker with modern innovations.
They were the first to launch text betting; the last to launch an app. Yet when they did, it
came with free streaming and an extreme racing focus. You are only ever a few taps
away from any race in the world. This recently saw them named Racing Sportsbook of
the Year. They’ve long lived by an in-house motto: properly, or not at all.
 Customer service is at the heart of everything they do, although they see it more as
customer experience. When you bet with Fitzdares, it is more than just a transaction. It is
a lifestyle choice. You have the option of speaking with an expert broker about the sport
of the day or keeping things discreet with a simple tap of the app or a text bet. Whatever
suits the occasion.
Then the immersive element. The Fitzdares Club was launched last September to
bring luxury and comfort to the sporting experience. Fitzdares chose Davies Street for its
new home, bringing it right back to the industry’s spiritual roots.
Set on two floors above the Running Horse on Davies Street, the club is an
immaculate hideaway for discerning sports fans, exquisitely decorated by 5 Hertford
Street’s Rosanna Bossom. There is no hard and fast dress code, but you certainly
wouldn’t want to be the eye sore in such a beautifully curated environment.
Nine giant screens mark every corner of the club, which consists of a restaurant, bar,
two private rooms and a dedicated racing room. There is a remote control in that room,
but it only turns to channels with the geegees.
The menu is exquisite and the service impeccable. Headed up by former bar director
of Sketch, Dom Jacobs, the team are at your every beck and call. The beef wellington is
the highlight on a confident menu, while the extensive wine list overlaps pages. If you
find that intimidating, you are never better off than just asking Dom for his choice.
Yet for all the food and wine in the world, this club is really about one thing: the pure
love of sport. In fact, on the application form that is the only requirement. That you love
sport. At this time of year, the screens would be showing every race, Champions League
match and Test Cricket ball bowled.
Until the great unlocking, that will have to wait. In the meantime, you’re best served
by filling in that membership application and hoping the limited spaces don’t fill up
before then.
 Lead book review
Crying in the wilderness
Even Edward Said would not have claimed to be ‘the 20th century’s most
celebrated intellectual’. But neither was he ‘Professor of Terror’, says Justin
Marozzi

Places of the Mind: A Life of Edward Said

by Timothy Brennan
Bloomsbury, pp.464, 25

A vain man, with much to be vain about: Edward Said, photographed in Paris in 1996. Credit: Getty
Images

It had been billed as a clash of the Titans. Boston, 22 November 1986: two giants of their
field slugging it out in the circus, a shootout at the scholars’ corral. The atmosphere was
electric. Here was the long-awaited confrontation between Edward Said, professor of
English and comparative literature at Columbia University, and Bernard Lewis, emeritus
professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. It didn’t disappoint.
Ten minutes into the debate on ‘The Scholars, the Media and the Middle East’, Said
took the microphone and let rip, unleashing his blistering attack on American scholars,
journalists and ‘the Zionist lobby’. Together, he said, they had collaborated in a
‘shameful’ misrepresentation of the Middle East in order ‘to maintain American hostility
towards the vast majority’ of its peoples.
Said put the entire American media and their academic accomplices on trial and
pronounced them guilty. From the New York Times, Washington Post, the New Yorker
and the New York Review of Books to CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS, all were complicit in a
tendentious distortion of the Middle East:

Ask yourselves whether any of you can think of a media outlet whose guiding principles vis-à-vis Middle
East coverage include the notions that Islam is never to be criticised; that the PLO, while prone to a few
excesses, is basically democratic and lovable; that one or another Middle East state beside Israel is
worthy of unrestricted US aid; and that Christianity and Judaism are basically violent, hypocritical and
depraved religions.

The media climate boiled down to this: ‘We need an expert on Islam. Tell us, why are
Muslims terrorists?’
The 90-minute film of the debate, available on YouTube, shows Said in full flow, the
black-maned, expensively tailored, trilingual Palestinian-American polymath and
polemicist taking on the Establishment — to which he, as the consummate outsider–
insider, partly belonged (equally spellbinding, incidentally, are his 1993 Reith Lectures).
Timothy Brennan, a former student of Said, a professor of humanities at the
University of Minnesota and the author of this authorised biography, is in no doubt
about the winner of the showdown. He quotes Said, apparently approvingly, boasting
before the debate: ‘I am going to fuck his mother.’ So much for Said the humanist.
By 1986, Said was at the height of his fame and influence as a cultural critic and
champion of the Palestinian cause. Published in 1978, Orientalism had won him an
international audience with his controversial analysis of how the West came to dominate
the Middle East through its exoticising narrative of the Orient, an ideological tool for
writers and colonialists from Homer to Flaubert and Disraeli to Kipling. A scandalous
affront to some readers, it was an exhilarating triumph for many more, not least those
who felt they had been written out of history by the more powerful. The British
Orientalist Robert Irwin considered it ‘malignant charlatanry’. No matter.
Orientalismbecame the founding text of post-colonial studies and father of a thousand
doctoral theses.
 Of Said’s many other books, Culture and Imperialism (1993) is the stand-out classic.
A fierce and wide-ranging polemic bristling with erudition, it traces the roots of
imperialism in European culture among unlikely sources ranging from Conrad and
Camus to Jane Austen and Verdi. Said’s discussions of conquest and the brute
acquisition of land, within a context of contested narratives and ideologies, took in
Algeria, Vietnam, Ireland, Guinea, South Africa and, glancingly, Palestine.
It was a minor tragedy that both books, and much of Said’s career, were drawn into
black-and-white confrontation — East vs West, America vs Arabs, Palestinians vs Israel
— which completely ignored the more sophisticated shade and nuances at the heart of
his writing. Cultures and civilisations, he insisted, were less sharp-edged and distinct than
hybrid, heterogeneous and interdependent. While his arguments remained anathema to
many Israelis and other critics, his 1979 essay on ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its
Victims’ acknowledged both the legitimacy of the Zionist claims to a Jewish homeland
and the corresponding right of national self-determination for the Palestinians, the
‘victims of victims’. These were ‘two communities of suffering’.
By far the most appealing sections in Brennan’s curate’s egg of a biography are those
which deal with Said’s gilded childhood, split between Cairo and Lebanon, his education
in America following his arrival there in 1951, aged 16, and his later championing of the
Palestinian cause. Born into a wealthy Christian family in Jerusalem in 1935, he was an
American citizen courtesy of his father, a Palestinian who had served in the US army; yet
the feeling of being an outsider rarely left him. He later wrote that as an Arab in
America he felt somehow ‘criminalised or delinquent… outside the pale’. The stifling
straitjacket of McCarthyism can only have intensified the feeling.
After graduating from Princeton, and then completing a doctorate in English
literature at Harvard in 1964, Said fell under the dazzling spell of literary theory in the
late 1960s, ignoring the warnings of his graduate mentor, Harry Levin, who did not share
the younger man’s then gushing admiration of French structuralism. He cautioned:

In a brusque word, this approach does not truly aim at the understanding of literature, but at deriving
metaphysical paradigms from authors by superimposing certain abstractions supported by quotations
taken out of context.

It may come as little surprise then that the long sections in Places of the Mind on
literary theory, frequently dense and impenetrable, are the least readable and rewarding.
Brennan writes of how, while lecturing on Foucault in Beirut, Said wrestled with the
Frenchman’s use of the word ‘discourse’, ultimately defining it as ‘the possibility of, as
well as the rule of formation for, subsequent texts’. General readers may scratch their
heads in bafflement. It is a relief to discover that Said considered Derrida a decadent,
mannerish ‘dandy fooling around’.
 Brennan’s treatment of Said’s emerging role as the most eloquent international voice
of Palestinian statehood is far more compelling. In 1977 he became an independent
member of the Palestinian National Council, adding intellectual grist to the political mill
with his book The Question of Palestine, published in 1979. In 1988, he was filmed at
Yasser Arafat’s right hand in Algiers during the fateful Intifada meeting of the PNC, in
which delegates declared an independent Palestinian state and officially recognised
Israel. It was Said who championed the declaration on ABC’s Nightline programme to
millions of Americans.
That proved to be the high water mark of his political engagement with Arafat. With
the groundbreaking Oslo Accord of 1993, Said shockingly parted company with his PLO
comrades. It was a courageous move that thrust him into uncomfortable, even
dangerous, isolation. Death threats were not uncommon. Where many, if not most,
observers saw compromise and a road to elusive peace, Said instead discerned abject
sell-out and surrender, a ‘Palestinian Versailles’. Israel had not recognised Palestinian
statehood and self-determination, merely the right of the PLO to represent the
Palestinians and return to Gaza and Jericho in the West Bank.
Said refused to pull his punches. Arafat, he argued, had become Israel’s Buthelezi,
the administrator of a Bantustan, his Palestinian Authority another Vichy government.
The international spokesman for the PLO, who one Iranian scholar had hailed as ‘the
mighty warrior, the Salah al-Din of our reasoning with mad adversaries, source of our
sanity in despair’, suddenly found his books banned by Arafat. It says much for Said’s
courage and persistence that he spent the next decade publishing three collections of
essays positing alternatives to Oslo. When, in 1989, the US magazine Commentary
labelled him ‘Professor of Terror’, it merely underscored Said’s J’Accuse against the
American media and academia.
Diagnosed with leukaemia in 1991, he lived long enough to pour scorn on the US-led
War on Terror which began in 2001. He was appalled by the ‘levels of lobotomised
cheerleading’ for the Iraq War among intellectuals in America, Bernard Lewis once
again foremost among them.
Away from the turbulence, bitterness and disappointment of Palestinian politics, and
the torrents of vitriol it brought, Said found comfort in music. A brilliant pianist who had
almost turned professional in his youth, he joined forces with his friend the Israeli
conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim in a collaboration which evolved into the
world-famous West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. He considered it his finest achievement.
‘Humanism,’ he wrote, ‘is the only — I would go so far as saying the final — resistance
that we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.’
Brennan’s enthusiasm for his former teacher can get the better of him in a powerful
book which is at times as difficult and demanding as its subject. He calls Said ‘the most
influential, controversial and celebrated intellectual of the 20th century’. We can agree
that here was a superstar who blazed a rich cultural and literary legacy, but even Said, a
vain man with much to be vain about, would have dismissed this as high-grade
hagiography.
Books

Wind, sea and sky

Mark Cocker

A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds

by Scott Weidensaul
Picador, pp.400, 20

An Arctic tern in the Shetlands, ranging from Pole to Pole in a life of almost perpetual daylight. Credit:
Getty Images

Bird migration was once one of those unassailable mysteries that had baffled humankind
since Aristotle. A strange hypothesis, genuinely advanced in the early modern period,
was that birds flew to the Moon for winter, and barely more credible was a notion, which
haunted the patron saint of British naturalists Gilbert White, that swallows buried
themselves in mud.
A modern understanding really began in the 20th century, when ornithologists
started to place numbered metal rings on birds’ legs. Scott Weidensaul is one of many
researchers worldwide who have helped to map this avian story. He then captured the
findings in his Pulitzer-nominated Living on the Wind (2003).
Yet he was also aware that these research methods had limitations. As an example,
he recalls how he and others placed bands on 4,312 beautiful woodland birds called gray-
cheeked thrushes. Of these, just three have ever been relocated. The yield in information
is minuscule compared with the massive efforts entailed in the trapping.
In the past two decades scientists have begun to use digital geolocators that are light
enough to place on the backs of small birds such as thrushes. The devices have now
upgraded our understanding of migration as much as the bird-ringing programme laid to
rest the old myths about hibernation in mud. Weidensaul has sifted the fresh findings to
bring us this meticulously researched, engrossing update.
Take, for instance, his story of bar-tailed godwits — medium-sized waders that grace
Britain’s shores in winter. Satellite trackers placed on several Alaskan individuals
revealed that they do not skirt the continental coasts on their annual travels to the
austral summer. They head out over the Pacific, then fly non-stop for eight or nine days
until they reach New Zealand. The two-way journey is 30,000 km and godwits may
repeat it up 30 times in their surprisingly long lives.
It is now the longest continuous flight known by any bird, and as remarkable as the
act of Ulyssean navigation are the internal physiological changes that licence the feat.
The godwits binge to double their weight until they wobble when they walk. Yet rather
than risking heart disease and diabetes, the birds inexplicably remain in the peak of
health. Over the course of their millions of wingbeats they slowly use up the surplus fat,
then start to consume their own internal muscles and organs as additional energy. Once
they arrive in New Zealand they binge again to restore the weight loss.
The book is packed with these awesome tales. Here are hummingbirds, the
equivalent weight of an airmail letter, crossing the Gulf of Mexico in one 800 km transit.
Here are Arctic terns, which range from Pole to Pole in a life of almost permanent
daylight, clocking up 100,000 km in a year. A dumpy Asiatic shorebird, the great knot,
flies nonstop from Australia to Korea in a feat of endurance that makes top human
athletes look like couch potatoes. Weidensaul, who delights in these comparisons, points
out how a Tour de France cyclist operating at the limits of human capacity is functioning
at five times his base metabolism. The great knot, meanwhile, without food, water or
rest, sustains eight times its base metabolism for days at a time.
As much as the book is upbeat and celebratory, Weidensaul is fearless in describing
the acute challenges that face the birds he loves. The hemispheric background is grim
enough: a loss of 3.2 billion birds from North America since 1970, and 400million birds
from Europe. The transient behaviour of migrants places them at even greater
disadvantage, because they require stable habitats and resources wherever they alight.
We learn that the populations of America’s migrant shorebirds, including the bar-tailed
godwit, have halved in 50 years.
Weidensaul notes that one of the most unlikely, if acute, pressure points is the
world’s foremost industrialised heartland — on the great sweep of intertidal flats as the
Yangtze debouches into the Yellow Sea. Where once the mighty river carried soil
sediments from inner Asia to the Chinese shore, today 90 per cent of those ancient silts
are blocked by 50,000 dams. Environmentalists are deeply worried about the millions of
waterbirds that pause there to feed, and have identified it as one of the worst ecological
crises on the planet. Under intense international pressure, the Chinese government has
recently set aside an enormous reserve, almost twice the area of Greater London.
A World on the Wing is a superb globe-trotting survey of avian restlessness that
reaches one core conclusion. Migrants may seem like here-today-gone-tomorrow
nomads but they are really inhabitants of a single place and one living system, on which
they and humans depend equally: the entire Earth.
Books

Deepest, darkest Peru

Hugh Thomson

Wars of the Interior

by Joseph Zárate, Translated By Annie McDermott
Granta, pp.208, 12

Getty Images

As the planet gets more and more ravaged, the mind can begin to glaze over at the
cumulative general statistics — so much rainforest lost, so many glaciers melted, so much
less oil left. Joseph Zárate’s masterly new book reminds us that when it comes to fighting
on the front line of the environmental wars, it’s all in the detail, and that nothing is quite
as simple as might at first appear.
Some years ago I went to a remote area on the border between Peru and Bolivia
where a meteorite had landed on a small village and caused mass poisoning. The
hospitals had filled up both with the locals and with the police who had been sent to
investigate. Given that meteorites are not known to contain toxic materials, this seemed
curious to say the least.
What had really happened was that the red-hot meteorite had landed close to a small
stream that meandered down from the hills and had sent a cloud of water vapour up into
the air and over the community. Unbeknown to the locals, that stream had long been
contaminated by illegal gold miners using arsenic in those nearby hills. What had
poisoned them was not the meteorite but a vastly increased dose of what had slowly been
affecting them for years in their water supply without anyone noticing. Their early
mortality and liver problems had been put down to the hardship of the villagers’ lives.
Zárate goes in search of other such stories in his native Peru, a country that combines
immense natural beauty with resources which multinational corporations are only too
eager to exploit: timber, oil and gold. Illegal logging in the Peruvian Amazon does far
more long-term damage to the planet than the cocaine industry which runs alongside it.
Yet while the eradication of coca plants has been pursued with extreme vigour, often
with American support, and Peruvian jails are full of drug-smugglers, not a single illegal
logger has ever been convicted — even though 80 per cent of the wood exported by Peru
has unlawful origins. Just a cubic metre of mahogany can sell for $5,000 in the United
States. One Peruvian judge dismissed a case, asking: ‘How can I send someone to prison
for taking 70 logs if there are still millions of trees in the rainforest?’
Members of the large Asháninka tribe have done their best to resist the loggers.
Rather like the English, they try not to get angry, because when they do they get very,
very angry. One community leader, Edwin Chota, attempted to confront the loggers and
was killed by them, along with three of his companions. Zárate spent time with the dead
man’s family to understand the tribe’s world view, which is one both of community
ownership — the concept of owning land individually or by a corporation is foreign to
them — but also one in which they recognise the existence of evil. They saw the illegal
loggers as demons, kamári, malevolent spirits who had come to destroy them.
But it is gold which has always exerted such dangerous power in Peru, ever since
Atahualpa tried to ransom himself from the conquistadors by filling a room with the
stuff. To end up with an ounce of gold, enough for a wedding ring, you need to extract 50
tons of earth and then leach it with cyanide. Whole mountains can disappear in weeks.
Yet somehow an illiterate 50-year-old farmer, Máxima Acuña, who found that her lake
was sitting on top of a gold deposit, managed to resist the mining companies with
remarkable success, if at great hardship to her own family.
Zárate’s strategy is to describe, as he puts it, ‘not just such social conflicts, but rather
the human questions at their heart’. By doing so, he casts light on the true complexity
and emotional cost of what is happening in Peru. Unless we can make such connections,
we will only have the statistics.
Books

Truckload of trouble
Lee Langley

We Are Not in the World

by Conor O’Callaghan
Doubleday, pp.264, 14.99

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A father and his estranged 20-year-old daughter set off across France, sharing the
driver’s cabin of a long-haul truck. This is a road trip like no other: Paddy, deracinated,
footloose, divorced, taking on a temporary job for reasons that become clear later; and
daughter Kitty, spiky, provocative, shaved head, grubby jeans and sweater, wrapped in
an old mink coat she’s pinched from her grandmother. Occasionally she rewards her
father with an ambiguous affectionate response as their edgy banter veers in and out of
dangerous territory: the minefield of parenthood.
 The narrative is fractured; nothing told chronologically, the surface deliberately
throw-away — skewed punctuation, sentences left hanging. Conor O’Callaghan is a
prize-winning poet, whose second novel, We Are Not in the World, could be read like a
poem, making sense cumulatively, the full picture only gradually emerging.
We follow the here and now of tachograph checks, fast food and
crampedovernighters in sleeping bags; darker moments — desperate refugees at the
docks; the queasy horror when Paddy stumbles on a haulier roadside gang-bang.
Interwoven with all this we get fleeting moments from a fugitive past, as though revealed
in the headlamps of vehicles flashing by: a dysfunctional family; a mother-son
relationship verging on the oedipal; brothers whose childhood closeness has been soured
by misunderstandings… Here, a wrong turning taken, there, an opportunity missed; a
long-running, passionate love affair holding two lives in suspension for a decade.
‘Happiness,’ Paddy observes, ‘comes and goes. It tends not to hang around. Unhappiness
has a habit of outstaying its welcome.’
The novel wrenchingly conveys the pain of loss and the power of memory both to
heal and to destroy, circling back repeatedly to one particular night: Kitty rushed to
hospital, Paddy’s frantic journey to reach her, his guilt about what they now refer to as
her ‘Thing’.
All this makes it sound like a miserabilist litany, but the journey is lit up with
moments of unexpected beauty and humour. When his lover’s three-year-old boy
glimpses Paddy clad only in underpants and great coat, the child thinks he’s encountered
a giant from a fairy tale — neither of them aware that they are in fact father and son.
Paddy is haunted by regrets, moral failures and the question of what’s true and what’s
imagined. Then, at about the halfway mark, the author delivers a body blow, a shift of
gear so wrenching it alters the perspective of all that has gone before and what follows.
Gradually the tangled threads form a pattern, the final loose strand woven in only at
the very end — heartbreaking, sweetly logical and tentatively hopeful.
Books

The real rogue traders

James Ball

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s
Resources
by Javier Blas And Jack Farchy
Random House, pp.416, 20

Getty Images

When we think of those lurching moments last spring when it became clear that much of
the world, not just one or two regions, would grind to a halt, for most of us it is anything
but a fond memory. But the traders of Glencore probably remember the time differently:
they saw it as an unprecedented opportunity to cash in.
Anticipating a global slowdown, they bought up all the space they could to store oil,
including tankers capable of holding 3.2 bn barrels. When the markets caught up with the
scale of the pandemic, the price of oil dropped to zero and below, and in they swooped.
They took the oil for free, stored it at sea, and sold it a few months later. While we
worried about our livelihoods, Glencore’s traders made $1.3 bn trading energy.
This is just one of dozens of tales which fill Javier Blas and Jack Farchy’s
swashbuckling history of a profession most of us would write off as unbearably boring:
the life of a commodities trader. Grain, gold, iron and oil might be what make the world
work, but few of us think of them as riveting subjects. That, it turns out, suits the traders
just fine. When asked about the book during an interview with the authors, Ian Taylor,
then CEO of one of the trading houses, said simply: ‘We would prefer you not to write
it.’
The industry’s real story, at least as told here, reads more like a globe-spanning
corporate thriller, full of intrigue and double-dealing. The traders jet in where no one
else will go, signing deals to ship oil to Libyan rebels, produce aluminium within the
Soviet Union, and befriend dictators in order to boost the cobalt trade. Inevitably, when
the matter of ‘commissions’ (sometimes in the form of briefcases stuffed with cash)
arises, the traders do not flinch — especially since, the book reveals, those foreign bribes
were until recently a tax-deductible expense in the businesses’ Swiss headquarters.
The result is a book that changes how we see the world, often in horrifying ways. For
instance, it describes the realisation by a group of teachers in Pennsylvania that their
pensions helped further civil strife in Iraq, being used to fund Kurdish efforts to monetise
oil fields which the US-backed government in Iraq claimed as their own.
That was, if anything, the least of it: name a geopolitical crisis in the second half of
the 20th century and you’ll find a commodities trader close to its heart — consistently
amoral, looking to extract the most profit possible without falling foul of the law. It is
suggested that traders helped spark the Arab Spring, accelerated the collapse of the
Soviet Union and enabled more than one anti-Western military coup.
In the hands of lesser writers, this could easily slip into the realms of the
conspiratorial — the sort of Facebook post about ‘globalists’ or ‘lluminati’ for which
more than one British politician has found themselves apologising in recent years. But
the book weaves together years of reporting experience in the field with access to many
of the key figures in an industry dominated by huge characters. The men (it’s almost all
men) are, on their own terms, wildly successful, rich, charming and well-travelled — so
perhaps it’s unsurprising to detect the odd tone of admiration in the authors.
Many of the stories have been told before in this history of some five decades of
activity, charting the rise and fall of different companies and leaders, some of whom —
such as Marc Rich — were notorious in their day, thanks to their very visible falls from
grace. But new insights and reporting mean that even seasoned observers will be amazed.
If nothing else, the sheer sums of money at stake are mind-boggling.When we complain
about executive pay, we are usually talking about millions, or tens of millions — since
shareholders take the biggest slice of the pie. Not so with commodities: when Glencore
became a publicly listed company, its top 13 partners were collectively worth $29 bn.
Where Blas and Farchy are not so convincing is in thinking that the time of these
traders is passing; better information and tighter regulation and scrutiny are changing
things, they claim. But it seems far from likely that such people will disappear either
quickly or quietly.

”
Books

On the game
Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Hot Stew
by Fiona Mozley
John Murray, pp.320, 16.99

Getty Images

For a novel set partly in a Soho brothel, Hot Stew is an oddly bloodless affair. Tawdry
characters drift in and out of each other’s lives but rarely seem to capture the author’s
full imagination. Fiona Mozley’s first novel, Elmet,concerned a self-sufficient family
living in Yorkshire and occupying ‘a strange, sylvan otherworld’, and was shortlisted for
the Booker Prize in 2017. This second book is a decided change of tack.
The prose sometimes has an appealing vagueness:
After the war, the concrete came, and parallel lines, and precise angles that connected earth
to sky. Houses were rebuilt, shops were rebuilt, and new paving stones were laid. The dead
were buried. The past was buried. There were new kinds of men and new kinds of women.
There was art and music and miniskirts and sharp haircuts to match the skyline.

This can work well when describing swathes of history and architecture, but is less
effective when it comes to character. The most engaging figures are the prostitutes and
their ‘maids’, former prostitutes themselves who help with the women’s day-to-day lives.
The humour and solidarity between these people, particularly in the face of ruthless
developers who wish to move them along, helps vivify the book. Young Scarlet, Candy
and Precious discuss a rent increase and are overheard by a client whom Young Scarlet is
keeping waiting:

‘For fuck’s sake. If I wanted to lose 80 per cent of my income each month I’d still have a
fucking pimp.’ The man’s voice comes from within. ‘I’m in here losing 80 per cent of my
erection.’

There are some poignant scenes, not least featuring a couple who are nicknamed Paul
Daniels and Debbie McGee because the man performs magic tricks. In the Aphra Behn,
the pub they frequent, it is well known that ‘Paul Daniels is not allowed to lose’ bets on
his magic tricks, and we witness his desperation when confronted with a stranger who
does not know this. There is also a rather clever and original sex scene between
teenagers, with the boy observing of the girl:

He could not tell if she was moved by sexual desire or by a desire to get the job done. It
seemed to him it was the latter. He knew her well and this was her homework face.

Overall, however, it is hard to see what all this amounts to — and it could also have
been a bit more fun.
Books

Dinners through the dynasties

Fuchsia Dunlop

The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals

by Jonathan Clements
Hodder & Stoughton, pp.320, 20

Getty Images

A truth that ought to be universally acknowledged is that Chinese food, while much
loved, is underappreciated. China certainly has one of the world’s most sophisticated
cuisines, yet while there’s a Chinese restaurant in almost every town, there’s little
dependable information about it in English aimed at the general reader. Jonathan
Clements addresses this in The Emperor’s Feast, a galloping journey through thousands
of years of Chinese culinary history, from origin myths through numerous dynasties, the
Opium Wars and the Cultural Revolution, right up to the present day. At the start he
says his work has been ‘a quest to find out what Chinese food actually is’, by shedding
light on its development over time and some of its dizzying geographical diversity.
As Clements rightly points out, the term ‘Chinese food’ can obscure a multitude of
local cuisines and cooking processes, as well as a history of constant evolution through
cultural exchange:

The stews of the Shang priest-kings were a world away from the banquets of the Tang
emperors; and the recipes cooked for the Mongol khans by their Central Asian staff were
nothing like the dishes that the people of the Ming era made with new ingredients from across
the Pacific.

He highlights the challenges and controversies of trying to classify regional culinary

traditions, noting that the idea that China had four great regional styles dates only to the
last dynasty, while the rival notion of ‘eight great cuisines’, so often cited, emerged in a
newspaper article in 1980.
A fascinating cast of characters, real and mythological, pepper the pages, including
the legendary Divine Farmer Shen Nong, the inventor of the plough; Yi Yin, the chef
who became a minister in the Shang dynasty and tutored his king on the finer points of
gastronomy; the pork-loving Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo; and Chairman Mao.
Clements delves into the origins of many of the traditions that make Chinese food so
distinctive, such as qu, the cultured catalysts for fermentation used in making soy sauce
and alcoholic drinks, as well as tofu, dim sum, distilled liquors and chillies.
He also gives readers a sense of some of the hot debates that have raged throughout
Chinese history on proper ways to eat and drink. Perhaps most importantly, he draws
attention to the extreme discernment of elite culinary culture in China from very early
times. The ancient Book of Rites, for example, specifies the appropriate fat for cooking
each type of meat, and describes meals prepared for the venerated elderly that include
pheasant soup, served with snail juice and a vegetable condiment.
Food proves a useful lens through which to view the grand sweep of history. The
book traces the emergence of China from a collection of ancient warring states, through
dynastic upheavals and foreign conquests. A potentially murderous banquet helps to
determine the foundation of the Han dynasty in 206 BC. We visit the Tang dynasty
capital of Chang’an (today’s Xi’an), where the emperor’s consort famously demanded
lychees couriered from the south; the humming night markets of Song-dynasty Kaifeng;
and a Mongol feast at which a controversy over halal meat led to a long campaign against
China’s Muslims and their dietary laws.
In more recent times, we hear about the surreal political campaigns and devastating
famine of the Maoist era, and the ‘banquet diplomacy’ of the early 1970s, when Zhou
Enlai stuffed Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger with Peking duck during their
negotiations. Clements marshals his sources in a deft and approachable manner,
leavening the complexities of history with folklore, and spicing up his narrative with
piquant anecdotes.
The book is billed as ‘a history of China in 12 meals’, but the food itself is less centre
stage than one might expect. Tantalisingly, Clements mentions that his research involved
adventures such as roasting wild pigeons in the desert, drinking liquor straight from the
still in Shaoxing and visiting a traditional soy sauce factory in Xiamen — but we don’t
hear any of the details. Instead, the chapters are structured around different historical
periods. We are given mouthwatering glimpses of foods prized in ancient China, such as
the lists of seasonal delicacies in the Book of Riteswhich include a recipe for ‘the Bake’, a
three-day extravaganza involving a young pig stuffed with fruit. Otherwise, the emphasis
is on the evolution of Chinese eating and drinking customs and cultural exchange rather
than actual cooking.
Recent decades have seen a growing international appreciation of the regional
diversity of Chinese food. But while China’s rising wealth and power seem likely to
elevate its status abroad from the realm of cheap takeaway fare to a more appropriate
level, Chinese restaurants have been hard hit by a wave of prejudice triggered by the
Covid pandemic. The Emperor’s Feast, by shining a light on some of the intricacies of
Chinese history over more than two millennia, serves as a timely reminder that the
country’s modern cuisine is the delicious fruit of a rich, ancient and perhaps surprisingly
multicultural tradition.
Books

An oddly matched pair

Anne Margaret Daniel

Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats
and F. Scott Fitzgerald
by Jonathan Bate
William Collins, pp.416, 25

Alamy

On a shard of paper, some time in the bleak mid-1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald incorporated
a favourite line from one of his favourite poets, John Keats, in a short verse of his own:

Don’t you worry I surrender

Days are long and life’s a bender
Still I know that
Tender is the Night
 Keats was a Romantic, perhaps the Romantic, with his lyric gift and tragically brief
life. Fitzgerald loved the Romantic poets, and romance in the lower case, but was at the
heart’s core a modernist, far more egoist than romantic, and quite hard-boiled. The little
quatrain above is rather like T.S. Eliot’s ‘jug jug’ in The Waste Land — homage of a sort,
but also showing ironic distance, and no intention of writing like Keats. Indeed, it’s all
about his own novel in the last line, with ‘Night’ capitalised; the moustache on the Mona
Lisa.
Jonathan Bate, in Bright Star, Green Light, speculates on the convergence of the
twain. Taking Plutarch’s paralleled Lives as his model, Bate yokes Keats and Fitzgerald
together to compare the leading achievements of this oddly matched team — Keats’s
mature poems and Fitzgerald’s novels. Some of the parallels work, and some strain.
Basic parallels of their lives are well known. Keats died in 1821 at the age of 25;
Fitzgerald had his first and most lucrative success a century later, with This Side of
Paradise in 1920, when he was 23. Keats loved and lost Fanny Brawne because he died
before they could marry; Fitzgerald loved and lost Ginevra King because she married a
rich boy instead, and then loved Zelda Sayre, only to lose her to her increasing mental
illness.
As Bate chronicles their lives and writings together, his book bounces from Keats to
Fitzgerald in alternating chapters. At times this feels like a tennis match, with one’s head
as the ball, from reading two disparate narratives that are not always adequately linked.
Bright Star, Green Light is chronological, following both writers from boyhood through
youth, school, first loves, marriage (in Fitzgerald’s case) and selected works. Bate knows
Keats’s life and poetry inside out, and his readings of ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’ and
‘The Eve of St Agnes’, among other poems, are elegant and incisive. Using Sidney
Colvin’s biography of Keats, a copy of which was in Fitzgerald’s library, Bate selects
anecdotes, letters, major events and friendships to flesh out a comprehensive account of
the man and his art.
Less so with Fitzgerald. Bate doesn’t talk about Fitzgerald’s own poetry, which is a
mix of fairly saccharine, though sometimes beautiful, Romantic derivatives and snappy,
popular-song-infused modern verse. He focuses instead on selected short stories and
Fitzgerald’s handful of novels. He writes:

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination was fired to life by Keats, but he failed when he tried to
write pseudo-Keatzian [the spelling is Fitzgerald’s, and Bate retains it] lyric poetry. He
succeeded, triumphantly, when he took the spirit of Keats and infused it into a different form,
that of the lyrical novel — The Great Gatsby, above all.

Bate is more concerned with the short stories as testing ground for these ‘lyrical’
novels, which is fitting, since Fitzgerald indeed made clinical use of his short stories as
quarries for his novels— often writing across the tearsheets of a thoroughly mined story
the noir-sounding headline ‘stripped and permanently buried’.
But if it feels natural and appropriate to find mentions of Keats throughout Bate’s
chapters on Fitzgerald, the reverse is not the case in this book. To say Fitzgerald was, in
terms of his ‘literary taste’, ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past’ and only to Keats, for
instance, is highly reductive. Fitzgerald revelled in contemporary authors and loved
James Joyce as much as he did John Keats. He tirelessly read, promoted, edited and
advised other writers. Most notably, he provided Hemingway with pivotal criticism and
suggestions for The Sun Also Rises, and even arranged Hemingway’s publication
contract for the novel with Scribner.
Bate’s mentions of Fitzgerald in the Keats chapters generally feel forced, along the
lines of the ‘who would you invite if you had a literary-favourites-to-supper-party’ game.
Concluding a fine section on Keats comes a sentence: ‘The wild surmise of Cortez and
his men merged with Keats standing alone on the shore of the wide world into Gatsby’s
gaze towards the green light of Daisy’s dock.’ I kept imagining a young Fitzgerald, his
sea-green eyes wide with amazement, sitting at table with Keats, Leigh Hunt and William
Hazlitt, trying to understand their accents, and ultimately taking refuge in wordplay and
claret.
Bate gives Keats’s famed imagination just rein and range, but not Fitzgerald’s. The
latter’s imagination is repeatedly deemed to be derived from Keats, or must be based in
something actual from Fitzgerald’s life. This leads to assertions that are untenable, and
suppositions that are unsupported by fact. Some of these claims aren’t that
consequential. Zelda’s hair was not long or golden when she and Scott met, but neck-
length and coppery red; a lock of it survives — of russet witch, if you will — in the copy
of The Beautiful and Damned Scott inscribed to her. Bate states that when Scott and
Zelda took their delayed honeymoon trip to Europe in the summer of 1921, ‘the only
place that Fitzgerald liked was Oxford’. He liked Cambridge more. He and Zelda went
there on a Rupert Brooke pilgrimage, and she inscribed the photo she took of a pensive
Scott in Grantchester: ‘The men observe the rules of thought.’ In a well-wrought
discussion of The Chorus Girl’s Romance, the silent film made in 1920 from Fitzgerald’s
first story sold to Hollywood, Bate says that the movie ‘is lost, save for a few stills’.
Martina Mastandrea found the film print, missing only two scenes, in the Museum of
Modern Art archives in 2016.
Other claims made in the book are consequential, however, and sometimes seriously
misguided. Bate’s suggestion that Fitzgerald introduced an incestuous rape into the plot
of Tender is the Night at the end of 1931 because Zelda might have been raped by her
father, Judge Anthony Sayre, is an egregious example, even if he frames it with a
question mark. There is no evidence of any kind to support such a damaging inference.
Most likely Fitzgerald introduced the plot twist because William Faulkner’s Sanctuary
had been a runaway bestseller that year. Scott and Zelda gave Sanctuary, with the
repeated rapes of the Southern belle socialite Temple Drake as central to its plot, to
friends as a Christmas present in 1931.
More valuably, Bate gives both writers’ efforts ‘to make money in the more lucrative
arena of the performing arts’ the attention it deserves: Keats’s writing for London’s West
End and Fitzgerald’s for Broadway and then Hollywood. Bate’s sketch of Keats writing
for Edmund Kean is captivating — the awfulness of Otho the Great, and the idea of an
elephant on stage. Similarly, Fitzgerald’s repeated failures as a screenwriter in
Hollywood are nicely backgrounded against the ‘College of One’ he ran for his lover, the
English-born gossip columnist Sheilah Graham (who was no one’s muse but her own).
Near the end of his life, Fitzgerald recorded himself reciting selections from
Shakespeare, John Masefield and Keats. Bate concludes his book by referring to the
portion of that recording where Fitzgerald recites part of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and he
asserts that ‘under the shadow cast by global damnation, the loveliness of Keats’s poems
and Fitzgerald’s novels increases’. Only excerpts of the reading are available online,
which actually ends with the brusque and decidedly unromantic directive in Fitzgerald’s
non-performance, speaking voice: ‘Hello, that’s the end, never mind, cut it off then.’
Not just the beauty of their way with words, but the visceral practicality of both
writers, binds them: Keats’s recognition as a doctor that the bright blood he coughed up
meant he would die, and the at once living and haunting hand he held out in his verse;
Fitzgerald’s horror of what people did for love, and how wrecked the filthy modern tide
made the world, resonant in all he wrote. Bright Star, Green Light is a problematic
diptych portrait of the two men — both less beautiful, or damned, than struggling to
make it as professional authors in an ever rough world.
Books

Bright and beautiful

Alex Preston

Double Blind
by Edward St Aubyn
Harvill Secker, pp.352, 18.99

Edward St Aubyn. Credit: Getty Images

Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels were loosely autobiographical renderings of

the author’s harrowing, rarefied, drug-sozzled existence. Despite their subject matter,
they managed to be uplifting through the beauty in which they expressed their
melancholy sentiments. After At Last, the final novel of the pentalogy, St Aubyn
published Lost for Words, a prickly satire on the literary prize culture that seemed
narrowly parochial for such a classy novelist.
Now we have Double Blind, his tenth novel, which has what is typically referred to as
a rich cast of characters. We open with Francis, a kind of St Aubyn avatar, working at
Howarth, a rewilded Sussex estate clearly based on Isabella Tree’s project at Knepp.
Francis lives an idyllic life, surveying turtle doves and nightingales, enjoying the magic
mushrooms he harvests (not forgetting to pay his tithe to his aristocratic employers). He
has recently met Olivia, a professor of genetics at a London university, and they are
falling hard for one another. She is the adopted daughter of Martin Carr, a respected
Belsize Park psychiatrist. Then there’s Lucy, Olivia’s best friend, a scientist who works
for Hunter, a hedge fund billionaire who has set up Digitas, a ‘digital, technological and
scientific venture capital firm’.
The narrative energy of the novel is provided by the revelation that Lucy has a brain
tumour; the first time she is introduced to Francis by the love-struck Olivia she is on the
way back from a scan. Lucy’s illness (and her increasingly close relationship with
Hunter) brings an urgency to the work she’s doing for Digitas (a name uncomfortably
close to Dignitas), exploring AI and virtual reality. Then it is disclosed that Olivia has a
twin brother, who was not adopted. And Sebastian, her father’s schizophrenic patient,
seems on the verge of a great therapeutic breakthrough.
If this sounds like a lot of plates to keep spinning, it is; and there’s something almost
insolent in the way St Aubyn glides effortlessly from one plotline to the next. More
remarkable still is that the clever ideas —about epignetics, rewilding, psychoanalysis and
the placebo effect — never seem forced or showy (which is not always the case with this
writer).
That’s not to say that you don’t occasionally bridle at the brilliance of the
conversations. Perhaps St Aubyn does live in a world where people say

If science offered a unified vision of the world it would be a pyramid, with consciousness at
the apex, arising explicably from biology, and life arising smoothly from chemistry, and the
Periodic Table, in all its variety, emerging inevitably from the fundamental forces and
structures described by physics; but in reality, even physics isn’t unified, let alone unified
with the rest of science. It’s not a pyramid; it’s an archipelago…

but it makes for surreal reading. Only in a St Aubyn novel do characters use such
elegant adverbs or so many semicolons when they talk. But that’s really what you come
here for: the sense of being at a party full of people wittier and more charmingly
damaged than the rich and beautiful are in the real world.
This is a novel with heart, though, and as the cast moves from Sussex to London to
Hunter’s pads in Antibes and Big Sur, we learn what ‘the corrupting exposure to the
habits of the very rich’ does to people, and what it takes to resist that corruption. Double
Blind is both clever and compassionate, confirming St Aubyn as among the brightest
lights of contemporary British literature.
‘‘I can remember exactly what I was doing this time last year.’’
 Arts feature
‘His paintings are perfectly meant for our times’
Musa Mayer talks to Hermione Eyre about her father Philip Guston’s cancellation
and her fear that he will for ever be known as the artist who painted the Ku Klux
Klan

‘Monument’, 1976, by Philip Guston. Credit: ©The Estate of Philip Guston

Philip Guston’s later work is — and I say this with love — nails-down-a-blackboard
weird. The vapid pinks and flat reds lend a nightmare cheerfulness. The menacing
American figure wearing Mickey Mouse gloves is rendered in cartoonish style. The clock
shows it is time to panic, challenging you to call out the hood for the Ku Klux Klan
symbol it appears to be.
By the time he started making these paintings, in 1968, Guston was pretty much post-
everything: post-realism, post-abstract expressionism, post-criticism (he and his wife
Musa sailed to Italy the day after the show’s opening night, and when a review found him
in Venice, poste restante, he dropped it in a canal). He was also post-breakdown and,
with the cigarettes and alcohol in his work more than painter’s props — he smoked three
packs a day — hastening himself to post-mortem. When he died in 1980 he was lucky to
have a gifted advocate in his daughter, Musa Mayer, who spoke to me over the phone
about her new book and her father’s recent cancellation.
A big travelling retrospective, due to have arrived at Tate Modern last month, was
notoriously binned last September. ‘We are postponing the Philip Guston Now
exhibition,’ announced a joint statement from the four host museums, ‘until a time at
which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the centre
of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.’ They were referring to the
images of hooded KKK figures in both early and late Guston. On a podcast, the director
of the Washington National Gallery said that Guston had ‘appropriated images of black
trauma’.
‘I was really wounded by the actions taken and particularly that statement,’ Musa
Mayer, 78, told me last week. ‘I thought that was really uncalled for, and a
misunderstanding.’ Mark Godfrey, a curator at Tate Modern, called the argument for the
cancellation ‘extremely patronising’, and was suspended for it. ‘He dared to speak out
and was reprimanded,’ says Mayer. Godfrey explained some historical context to me
over the phone, saying: ‘Guston first witnessed the KKK in the streets, when he was a
boy growing up in Los Angeles. His parents were Jewish immigrants, who had fled
pogroms in Odessa. The KKK, which had five million members at the time of the
Depression, was anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant as well as anti-Black.’
Born Goldstein, Guston changed his name but later regretted the deracinating effect
of the change, particularly, says his daughter, after the facts about the Holocaust
emerged. Guston also had the personal tragedy, aged ten, of finding his father’s body
after he hanged himself in an outhouse at their home. Working at a rubbish tip to
support his family had compounded his father’s psychic collapse. ‘The pain and the
persecution and the unfairness of all he experienced as the child of refugees never left
him,’ says Mayer. ‘In his love of Renaissance art he was particularly drawn to images like
Uccello’s ‘Battle of San Romano’, to images of horror, really. He never found the angels
in heaven very interesting.’
At high school, he and his friend Jackson Pollock were expelled for making a satirical
pamphlet about the school’s military training and athletics. Guston won prizes for his
cartoons, but taught himself to draw from books of Old Masters and De Chirico, and quit
art school early to become a politically engaged muralist, influenced by Mexican social
realism. In 1930, a Marxist John Reed club with his protest art on its walls depicting the
anti-African American racist brutality of the Ku Klux Klan was raided by the LA police
and the images shot out.
In 1934 he and a friend Reuben Kadish went down to the San Pedro docks. ‘Reuben
and I wanted to go to Italy to see the old frescoes first-hand.’ But when they discovered
how much the fare was, they settled for Mexico. There, helped by the communist
revolutionary painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, they secured a canvas 1,000ft-square —
the wall of the former Summer Palace in Morelia, which they covered with distorted
visions of the bondage of war and fascism (extant, though in bad shape). Its hooded
figures are grandiose and terrifying; later, in his fifties, he made them cartoonish,
belittled, a goon squad.
‘They’re not given any grandeur later,’ says Mayer. ‘He started off pointing the finger
at unknown figures doing evil, then he paints himself in that costume. So what he’s
saying, it seems to me, is that the potential for evil resides within us all. My feeling is
these are perfectly meant for our times, and would actually engender the kind of
dialogue we need to have about white culpability and the banality of evil.’
In the UK, Guston’s work was discussed with the Tate’s BAME network in
preparation for the show. The network’s chair, Rudi Minto de Wijs, who works in the
Tate’s marketing department, wrote in an email that Philip Guston Now would ‘appeal
to those Tate goers keen to align and educate themselves on active ally-ship’.
Washington National Gallery director Kaywin Feldman, also looking to broaden the
range of voices in her institution’s discussions, came to a different conclusion. While 98
per cent of her curatorial staff is white, 83 per cent of the museum guards are BIPOC
(Black, Indigenous and people of colour). ‘Going forward, we will be spending more
time hearing from our guards on this particular exhibition about how we might display
and interpret it.’ Conversations with ‘a handful’ of guards took place before the
cancellation, but no Guston works were shared. ‘I was asked not to show them the
images because they are so disturbing at this moment in time.’
Guston painted ‘Bombardment’, a dynamic tondo, in 1937 in response to the Spanish
Civil War. In 1940, employed by the Work Progress Administration to paint murals, his
work on a housing project in Queens was temporarily halted when a government
inspector, alert for communist emblems, thought he spotted a hammer and sickle in the
curve of a dog’s tail against a child’s leg. ‘My father was ordered off the scaffold until his
background could be investigated.’
Although he grew weary of officialdom, the New Deal’s WPA kept him ‘alive and
working’ and he won prizes and posts, a Guggenheim fellowship and a Carnegie prize,
for which he would later be called a ‘mandarin’. Winning the Prix de Rome took him,
finally, on the longed-for trip to see Renaissance art first-hand in 1948. He was gone for a
year, despite his new daughter. ‘Being a good father was certainly the least of his
concerns. At the same time, being a good daughter was well on the way to being the
greatest of mine,’ writes Musa Mayer wryly in her excellent 1988 memoir Night Studio.
She describes the torrents of advice and conversation Guston gave his students, but
his absolute absence of interest in her attempts at painting. Might this have been
different had she been a boy? I ask her. She’s on the phone, but I can hear her shaking
her head, smiling. ‘I think that [relationship] would have been impossible,’ she says. ‘I
mean, you’ve seen [in Night Studio] how incredibly self-involved and absorbed he was…
I think he ultimately made space for me because I was female and I used that
relationship he had with my mother as a model. I revolved around him as she revolved
around him and his needs.’
He came back from Europe with Beckett and Kafka on his mind and a germ of
abstraction in his sketches. Exit the massive manacled figures and laboured allegories;
enter the numinous blob.
‘I would stand in front of the surface and simply keep on painting for three or four
hours,’ he recalled. He was at the centre of New York abstract expressionism with
friends Mark Rothko, Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and of course
Jackson Pollock, who once tried to throw Guston out of a window during a drunken
argument over who was the better painter. In protest against the shallow commercialism
of pop art in 1962, he and his peers left their gallery en masse. Guston’s life is a history of
the 20th century. Close pals were composers John Cage and Morton Feldman, and writer
Philip Roth.
He abandoned abstraction in part because it felt impotent in the face of Vietnam and
civil rights, the assassination of Martin Luther King, police violence in Chicago in 1968.
‘What kind of man am I,’ he asked, ‘sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a
frustrated fury about everything… and then going into my studio just to adjust a red to a
blue?’
And so came about his later phase, his Klan figures, his Robert Crumb-like piles of
feet and legs referencing the Holocaust, his own head a guilty cyclops, all of it now
pushed back to 2023. Mark Godfrey told me he remained passionately interested in
Guston, but was leaving his role as curator at Tate Modern for another project. Kaywin
Feldman said, in an interview with art.net, that it was ‘just extraordinary that art critics
hadn’t noticed’ the extreme pressure that museums were under, from within and without,
to change to become more inclusive and equitable. She mentioned an anonymous
petition received by the museum last summer.
Musa Mayer broadened the debate: ‘All I have to say is, from a feminist perspective,
do we really want to see all the nudes come off the walls of the major museums of the
world? Because isn’t that where this goes, if you follow the argument? Art reflects its
times, you know. Not all artists are liberated, thoughtful commentators, they are just
ordinary human beings in their time. We are all entitled to critique their art as much as
we like. But to take it off the wall? That’s a level of cancel culture I don’t think we dare
go down.’
Guston’s work shows the hopelessness, the struggle of making art. It is raw, painful,
alive. The cancellation provoked clamour from influential fans, from Art Spiegelman to
Chris Ofili. It ended up showing how much he is loved, I said to Mayer. ‘Yes, but the
show at Tate Modern is important to me,’ she replied. ‘I have been waiting for it since
Tate Modern opened. And I am distressed by what I call “Jack the Dripper” syndrome.
Once an artist becomes a household name, what tends to happen is the flattening of
knowledge about them. Just as Jackson Pollock is now for ever known as the artist who
made paintings by dripping, I’m afraid my father will be known as the artist who painted
the Ku Klux Klan.’
To date, no specific objections have been made against Guston’s work. As a US arts
journalist noted, this was ‘a precancellation: a case of institutions running scared from
phantasms’.

Philip Guston by Musa Mayer is published by Laurence King Publishing, £14.99.

Film
Thriller instinct
Deborah Ross

Judas and the Black Messiah

BFI Player And Major Digital Platforms

Electrifying: Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah. Credit: © Warner
Bros/Glen Wilson

Judas and the Black Messiah is a biopic about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, but
it’s not your regular biopic because it’s told as crime thriller, through the eyes of a snitch,
who may be found out at any minute. This film says what it has to say — about race,
injustice, police brutality — but excitingly, thrillingly and non-formulaically. It’s the best
film of the year so far, which may not be saying much, given how few films have been
released, but you get the sentiment. (The Bond film No Time to Die has been postponed
so many times I fear none of us will see it in our lifetimes.)
 Directed by Shaka King, and written by King, Will Berson, Kenny Lucas and Keith
Lucas, the film is based quite accurately, as far as I can fathom, on true events. And it’s
best you resist looking up Hampton until afterwards — when you will want to look him
up — otherwise you’ll know the ending, which is such a shocker that I’m still reeling.
This isn’t a cradle-to-grave journey, thankfully, but instead captures a moment in time in
the late 1960s when Hampton, chairman of the Illinois section of the Black Panther
party, was just 21 but had already set up breakfast clubs for black kids and was seeking to
build a revolutionary ‘Rainbow Coalition’ to draw together all the under-represented
groups in Chicago. He was also an electrifying orator, as played electrifyingly by Daniel
Kaluuya, who has already won a Golden Globe for his performance. (He was so fiercely
committed he took opera lessons for the oration scenes.)
However, J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen in heavy prosthetics) is not impressed by
Hampton. Not at all. He fears the rise of this ‘black messiah’ and needs a Judas to bring
him down. Enter Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), a small-time felon who is coerced by
the FBI to infiltrate the Black Panthers and feed back information. What we see is,
mostly, what he sees. (The only comparison that comes to mind is Amadeus in which
Mozart is seen through the eyes of a plotting Salieri.)
O’Neal succeeds. He even becomes the Panther’s chief of security and Hampton’s
friend. Supposedly. But he is always in danger of being found out and the stakes are high.
He’ll be tortured and killed by the Panthers if he’s weeded out as a rat. There are many
tense moments, including a scene that involves the hot-wiring of a car that is so nerve-
racking you will bite your nails until you have no nails left and will have to chew down to
the knuckle. I don’t know why Stanfield wasn’t nominated for his role. O’Neal is the
trickier part and Stanfield can convey increasing paranoia and internal torture without
having to say a single word.
There are some genre elements. There are shoot-outs. There is a romance for
Hampton in the form of Deborah Johnson (the excellent Dominique Fishback). But this
is exquisitely handled and allows Kaluuya to rein in an otherwise barnstorming
performance to play tender, loving, shy.
Every character is fully realised, including O’Neal’s FBI handler, Roy Mitchell (Jesse
Plemons), who is sinister on most occasions yet strangely sympathetic at other times,
particularly when he has doubts over where Hoover is going with all this. Hoover is
always happy to reassure him. If Hampton is not stopped, he tells him, one day your
daughter will come home with a ‘negro’ and say she wants to marry him. That scene will
chill you to the very bone.
Of course, this has resonance today, particularly in relation to racist police brutality,
but at no point do you ever feel you’re being lectured. Instead, the film simply carries
you along with its clever, propulsive, fully immersive storytelling. It is the best film of the
year so far. Whatever that may be worth.
Film
Thriller instinct
Deborah Ross

Judas and the Black Messiah

BFI Player And Major Digital Platforms

Electrifying: Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah. Credit: © Warner
Bros/Glen Wilson

Judas and the Black Messiah is a biopic about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, but
it’s not your regular biopic because it’s told as crime thriller, through the eyes of a snitch,
who may be found out at any minute. This film says what it has to say — about race,
injustice, police brutality — but excitingly, thrillingly and non-formulaically. It’s the best
film of the year so far, which may not be saying much, given how few films have been
released, but you get the sentiment. (The Bond film No Time to Die has been postponed
so many times I fear none of us will see it in our lifetimes.)
 Directed by Shaka King, and written by King, Will Berson, Kenny Lucas and Keith
Lucas, the film is based quite accurately, as far as I can fathom, on true events. And it’s
best you resist looking up Hampton until afterwards — when you will want to look him
up — otherwise you’ll know the ending, which is such a shocker that I’m still reeling.
This isn’t a cradle-to-grave journey, thankfully, but instead captures a moment in time in
the late 1960s when Hampton, chairman of the Illinois section of the Black Panther
party, was just 21 but had already set up breakfast clubs for black kids and was seeking to
build a revolutionary ‘Rainbow Coalition’ to draw together all the under-represented
groups in Chicago. He was also an electrifying orator, as played electrifyingly by Daniel
Kaluuya, who has already won a Golden Globe for his performance. (He was so fiercely
committed he took opera lessons for the oration scenes.)
However, J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen in heavy prosthetics) is not impressed by
Hampton. Not at all. He fears the rise of this ‘black messiah’ and needs a Judas to bring
him down. Enter Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), a small-time felon who is coerced by
the FBI to infiltrate the Black Panthers and feed back information. What we see is,
mostly, what he sees. (The only comparison that comes to mind is Amadeus in which
Mozart is seen through the eyes of a plotting Salieri.)
O’Neal succeeds. He even becomes the Panther’s chief of security and Hampton’s
friend. Supposedly. But he is always in danger of being found out and the stakes are high.
He’ll be tortured and killed by the Panthers if he’s weeded out as a rat. There are many
tense moments, including a scene that involves the hot-wiring of a car that is so nerve-
racking you will bite your nails until you have no nails left and will have to chew down to
the knuckle. I don’t know why Stanfield wasn’t nominated for his role. O’Neal is the
trickier part and Stanfield can convey increasing paranoia and internal torture without
having to say a single word.
There are some genre elements. There are shoot-outs. There is a romance for
Hampton in the form of Deborah Johnson (the excellent Dominique Fishback). But this
is exquisitely handled and allows Kaluuya to rein in an otherwise barnstorming
performance to play tender, loving, shy.
Every character is fully realised, including O’Neal’s FBI handler, Roy Mitchell (Jesse
Plemons), who is sinister on most occasions yet strangely sympathetic at other times,
particularly when he has doubts over where Hoover is going with all this. Hoover is
always happy to reassure him. If Hampton is not stopped, he tells him, one day your
daughter will come home with a ‘negro’ and say she wants to marry him. That scene will
chill you to the very bone.
Of course, this has resonance today, particularly in relation to racist police brutality,
but at no point do you ever feel you’re being lectured. Instead, the film simply carries
you along with its clever, propulsive, fully immersive storytelling. It is the best film of the
year so far. Whatever that may be worth.
Classical

Alive and kicking

Richard Bratby

Rachmaninov: Symphony No.1, Symphonic Dances

Philadelphia Orchestra, Nézet-Séguin/Deutsche Grammophon

Bruckner: Symphonies 2 & 8

Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Nelsons/Deutsche Grammophon

Elgar: Violin Concerto/ Violin Sonata

Is the pairing of the LSO under Rattle with the Kreisler-like virtuosity Renaud Capuçon (above) one for
the ages? Credit: SYSPEO/SIPA/Shutterstock
Rachmaninov’s First Symphony begins with a snarl, and gets angrier. A menacing skirl
from the woodwinds, a triple-fortissimo blast from the brass, and then the full weight of
the strings, hammering out one of those doomy Russian motto-melodies like lead boots
dragging you to the bottom of the Neva. ‘Vengeance is mine; I shall repay’ glowers the
epigraph that Rachmaninov inscribed at the top of the score, and you’d better believe it.
The symphony’s première in 1897 was a disaster that stunned the 23-year-old composer
into near-silence. And no question, when the gong roars out at the climax of the finale —
on the way to one of the most savage endings in the 19th-century repertoire — it’s easy
to imagine the bronze portals of the Inferno swinging open beneath the whole of Russian
music.
There’s a new recording out by the Philadelphia Orchestra under its hipsterish music
director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and if any orchestra has what you might call a
Rachmaninov tradition, it’s the Philadelphia. This is the ensemble that the composer
himself conducted during his long exile, and for which he wrote his last major work, the
Symphonic Dances, in 1940. ‘Years ago I composed for the great Chaliapin,’ he told
them. ‘Now he is dead and so I compose for a new kind of artist, the Philadelphia
Orchestra’ — a line which, had Deutsche Grammophon’s PR department been a bit
more on the ball, would surely have been plastered all over this new release.
But anyway, the remarkable thing is that it’s happening at all. This sort of recording, I
mean: blockbuster symphonies by Dead White European Males, conducted by superstar
maestros on major labels. The classical recording industry is basically kaput, or so we’ve
been hearing since at least the mid-1990s. The repertoire is overexposed, and the big-
beast conductors — the kind who could sell an album on little more than a Continental-
sounding name and a moody cover photo — are extinct. Well, not if my inbox is anything
to go by. The economics of the big classical labels are equal parts magical thinking and
brute pragmatism, and it’s unlikely that anyone is getting rich from projects like these.
But to misquote Adam Smith, there’s a lot of ruin in a record company. Someone,
somewhere, is doing a cost-benefit analysis on this stuff and concluding that the figures
still somehow add up.
So here in the spring of 2021 we have Nézet-Séguin conducting Rachmaninov in
Philadelphia and Andris Nelsons recording a double-disc set of Bruckner’s Second and
Eighth Symphonies with the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, with Wagner’s
Meistersinger prelude as the merest amuse-bouche. That’s a lot of C minor and C major
to be getting on with, and if a complete Bruckner cycle on Deutsche Grammophon isn’t
sufficient proof of the industry’s refusal to shut up and die, Nelsons is also halfway
through recording all 15 Shostakovich symphonies across the Atlantic in Boston.
Meanwhile in the UK, the big recording of the year (and judging from the level of PR
activity behind it, someone definitely thinks it has legs) pairs Sir Simon Rattle and the
LSO with the French violinist Renaud Capuçon in Elgar’s Violin Concerto.
 Ah, but they’re not Karajan or Bernstein or Solti, are they? Can these kids (this is
classical music: many still regard the 66-year-old Rattle as a punk upstart) possibly
compete on such well-trodden ground? That depends. At the very least, the deep sunset
glow of the Gewandhaus’s horn section under Nelsons puts the lid on the persistent,
cloth-eared notion that modern orchestras all sound alike. Is the pairing of a restless-
sounding LSO under Rattle with Capuçon’s Kreisler-like virtuosity one for the ages?
That’s for the ages to decide. For now it’s a sweeping, charismatic performance, while the
coupling — Capuçon and Stephen Hough, playing Elgar’s 1918 Violin Sonata with a
lightness and sense of fantasy that evokes Debussy’s near-contemporary late sonatas —
opens an intriguing new perspective. Elgar as Francophile? Why not? Ravel loved steak
and kidney pudding, didn’t he?
In Philadelphia, Nézet-Séguin launches Rachmaninov’s symphony as though he’s
brandishing a fist. It’s brisk, it’s moody, but it’s undeniably sincere, with the fabled satin
sheen of the Philadelphia string section (yes, that endures) glinting on the blunt edges of
an interpretation that ends up closer to The Rite of Spring than Brief Encounter. Coming
straight after the symphony, the Symphonic Dances sound more surreal than ever, their
last note (a fading, jangling gong stroke) making an unambiguous connection between
that doomed youthful symphony and the ageing emigré in 1940s America: a stranger in a
strange land, salvaging the melodies of a lost Russia for an orchestra that even today can
do big-band pizzazz as effortlessly as that luxury string sound. Worth a spin? I’d say so.
It’s still their music, after all.
More from Arts

Twitter, but with actual screaming

Zoe Strimpel

Clubhouse satisfies our new, pandemic-fuelled appetite to yammer. Credit: Nina Leen/The LIFE
Picture Collection/Getty Images

For my 13th birthday in 1995 I requested — and got — my own ‘line’. This meant that I
could jabber all night without taking the phone out of service for everyone else. Getting
your own line was a rite of passage for teenage girls in America back then, and
everybody just sighed and let us get on with it. Talking on the phone all the time was
simply something girls did. Women, meanwhile, at least according to film and TV, spent
their time sitting by the phone eagerly awaiting calls from men that usually didn’t come.
But then the feminised world of the endless, open-ended voice call dwindled with the
arrival of mobile phones and a preference for texting, messaging, tweet-messaging, and
the easy WhatsApp voice note. And as phones began to come with us everywhere, we
began answering them less. Millennials’ terror about picking up is well documented.
 All of which makes the stratospheric success of Clubhouse rather odd. Clubhouse is a
social media sensation that essentially lets people have, and listen in on, public phone
calls, known as ‘rooms’ — and it’s just as popular with boys. It was launched in March
last year by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, hit the big time
last month after Elon Musk hosted a phone-in, and is now valued at $1 billion with an
exponentially growing userbase of about ten million. It is only accessible to iPhone users
(so far), thereby excluding vast swathes of the world, and requires an ‘invite’ to join. It’s
not hard to get an invite, but this faux–exclusivity seems to be working. Once in,
Clubhouse users chase followers, and, as usual, there’s a pot of gold — power and
renown — at the end of the rainbow. It’s not easy to get a following on Clubhouse. I
dipped into a discussion about the Budget last week with Tom Tugendhat, MP and chair
of the UK Foreign Affairs Committee, and Andrew Griffith MP, and the audience was
just 53, far fewer than they’d get on a podcast, at a talk, or on TV. At the time of writing,
I have 15 followers.
The rage for post-radio audio isn’t new. Podcasts — the reigning audio form today in
the Anglosphere — emerged from an age obsessed with curation and shaped by an on-
demand sensibility. But the sudden appetite for talk is new. And not cutely produced
talk; just talk, dressed up as an event that lands on fellow Clubhousers’ calendars. Talk
that is promoted, with queasy circularity, on Twitter or LinkedIn. In essence, Clubhouse
encourages chancers to yodel into the ravine and see what comes back. Speakers form
panels or can just go it alone and start jawing on the spot, hoping a crowd will gather.
Clicking on a room allows you into it (your profile pic will be visible), and then you can
intervene by pressing a ‘raise your hand’ button. Whether you are ‘invited up to the
stage’ to say your piece depends on the moderator. Nonetheless, there has been much
excitement about the democratic possibilities of Clubhouse: ‘I can ask a question to Elon
Musk directly!’ a friend raved.
A telling comment. At last count I found 11 Elon Musk profiles on Clubhouse. My
garbled homescreen, a daunting update on the computer bulletin boards of the 1980s,
suggests a long list of ‘people to follow’, the vast majority of whom describe themselves
as ‘co-founders’ and experts in ‘building’ things — brands, ‘billion dollar startups’ and
‘products’. Dollar signs and laptops are frequent emojis in Clubhouse profiles. Among
the topics I am invited to ‘find conversations about’ are ‘Hustle’ (entrepreneurship,
TikTok, Clubhouse, Small Business), ‘Hanging Out’ (Chill Vibes, Welcome Newbies,
Late Night) and ‘Tech’ (Crypto, DTC, VR/AR, Engineering). One can find the great and
the good from politics, academia and the art world on here too, but they don’t really
belong — yet. Their habitat is still Twitter and YouTube, podcasts and print, but that
seems set to change, and fast.
My own invite came from a 26-year-old, someone too young to remember the golden
age of the telephone or the talk show. To him Clubhouse is dazzling and new, the
apotheosis of a social media dream of total connectedness and endless expression. He
told me he had been staying up until 5 a.m. every morning to listen in on this unending
phone line — the previous evening had been taken up eavesdropping on ‘mostly high
people talking about [disgraced rapper] R Kelly’ and whether ‘they’re allowed to play his
music again’. But it’s hard to see where these conversations can go, or are supposed to
go, apart from towards the creation of yet another brutal, exhausting hierarchy, with a
small cream of stars at the top, and more catfights. Twitter, but with actual screaming.
This has already begun to happen: a room created to discuss ‘wokeism’ recently ended
up as a bloody inquisition against the intellectual dark web star and evolutionary
biologist Bret Weinstein, who, after being spotted in the audience, was hauled on to the
virtual stage and interrogated: ‘Are you anti-racist? Are you transphobic? Are you anti-
black? Give us the answers now.’
In the end, though, the real horror of Clubhouse is its crystalline embodiment of the
infinite content principal. The logic of the digital world seems to be that there should be
ever more room for video, photos, ‘stories’, caustic comments, and now talk — from
anyone with an iPhone. Surfing around Clubhouse, even dipping into conversations on
interesting topics by esteemed people, I was left with only one question: why am I here?
Unstructured opining, or yelling, is one thing at the dinner table, but this ferocious new
appetite for it from perfect strangers is hard to understand. Maybe, after a decade of
social media, we simply find it easier to seek the company of strangers and semi-
strangers on our phone screens. Why we’d want to listen to them yammering all day and
all night is a different question. A year into a lonely pandemic, perhaps Clubhouse’s
appeal is more to do with the chance to yammer oneself, in the hope of being heard by
someone, somewhere.
Theatre
Initial impressions
Lloyd Evans

Late Night Staring At High Res Pixels

Finborough Theatre, Via YouTube
Until 31 March

Max Black, or, 62 Ways of Supporting the Head with a Hand

Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, Via Digitaltheatre.Com

Lay folk will be baffled: Max Black, or, 62 Ways of Supporting the Head with a Hand. Credit: Andrey
Bezukladnikov

The Finborough’s new show is a love story with the male partner absent. Two women,
one Irish and one American, explain their feelings for a London businessman, aged 45,
who seems to be connected with the fashion trade. The women, known as ‘I’ and ‘A’,
have different functions. ‘I’ is a young Irish model and ‘A’ is the absent man’s co-worker.
Both are besotted with him for obscure reasons. We know nothing about him except that
he visits east London every Sunday to devour his parents’ roast dinner. ‘A’ attends these
meals but ‘I’ is excluded so she texts him snaps of her boobs instead. The women aren’t
remotely troubled by his cold, exploitative attitude. He uses ‘A’ for friendship and ‘I’ for
sex. As soon as their affair begins he tries to demolish her ego. He tells ‘I’ that she lacks
the confidence to ‘rock the red carpet in high heels’. It’s her fault that she doesn’t enjoy
sex, he explains, because she’s not old enough to have proper orgasms. Obviously, this is
a ploy to disguise his feeble performance but she trusts every word he says about her.
It becomes increasingly hard to believe that ‘I’, a beautiful 29-year-old brunette,
would want to date a middle-aged swine who detests her neediness. ‘Why do I always
end up with the clingers?’ he rants. When she bursts into tears she blames herself for
bothering him. ‘I make a note never to bring up issues.’ Some of the fault lies with her
because she regards their affair as a giddy little adventure. ‘I want us to look like it does
in films,’ she simpers. ‘An Instagram relationship to make people jealous.’ It gets worse.
She suggests that the creepy tyrant has a violent streak. At first she makes excuses for
him. ‘He wouldn’t harm a fly.’ Later she finds his brutality exciting and describes her
fantasy ‘to stand before the beast and transform him into a man’. At the same time she
describes herself as ‘an empowered woman’.
After 18 months of mistreatment, she drops hints that he ought to declare his love for
her. He declines. She takes the initiative and confesses that she adores him. He asks her
to leave. She’s distraught. He sulks. She blames herself again. ‘What could I do to make
myself his equal?’ And so this grotesque drama plods on.
There are 28 filmed episodes lasting about six minutes each, and the full show runs to
nearly three hours. And yet we never learn the women’s names or any details about their
friends or families. They don’t even tell us why they came to London. Their sole interest
in life is to share gossip about a heartless monster who seems to have hypnotised them.
Some playwrights deliberately withhold information to add mystery and intrigue to the
story. It doesn’t work here. The lack of background details makes the women seem like
brainwashed noodle-heads rather than human beings. And the soundtrack is hard to
follow because the actors, filmed in arty poses, often speak with shadows across their
mouths. The director has overlooked a useful theatrical adage: ‘An actor that can’t be
seen can’t be heard.’
Max Black, or, 62 Ways of Supporting the Head with a Hand is a one-man show
produced by Stanislavsky Electrotheatre in Moscow. Black was a linguistic philosopher,
born in 1909 in Baku, whose family migrated to Britain when he was small. After the war
he taught in America. Academics know his name. The play is a chaotic extravaganza
presented by an actor in full Professor Brainstorm mode: white lab coat, tie askew, mad
staring eyes. He sits at a bench full of instruments and bottles of acid. Above him dangle
metal tanks that might contain fish or birds. Nearby stands an upside-down bicycle
whose spinning wheels emit silvery ribbons of static electricity.
The show looks like one of those practical science lectures that young kids, especially
boys, adore. Unfortunately nothing is explained. No lesson is delivered. The professor
mutters streams of digits and solves equations in his head while experimenting with
frequencies using a stringed contraption. Random thoughts occur to him. ‘I love
lightning flashes. So vast, so brief. Enormity in an instant.’
He hooks up some spinning toys to an electrical fan while musing on the source of
creativity. Inventiveness arises, he says, from a lack of symmetry, therefore newborns
should receive a sharp knock on the skull to unbalance their brains. There’s a joke in
there somewhere. The same goes for his speech about the placement of one’s hands in
relation to one’s head while posing for a portrait. It’s nearly funny but not quite.
This show is aimed at experts in linguistic philosophy who will enjoy an arbitrary
rummage through Max Black’s numerous preoccupations. Lay folk will be baffled.
Radio
Barack and the Boss
Daisy Dunn

Renegades: Born in the USA; Tes: My Best Teacher

Apple, Spotify And Various Platforms

My Teenage Diary
BBC Radio 4

A fine bromance: Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama use music as a way in to discussing race in
America. Credit: Photo by Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Barack Obama wants the world to know how much he loves singing. In his new podcast,
which takes the form of a series of conversations with Bruce Springsteen, he’s rarely
without a tune on his lips. ‘Further on up the road…/ you been laughing, pretty baby…’
A shower-singer, a bedroom warbler, an Air Force One air guitarist with an okay voice,
the former president is proof that you really can be embarrassing without feeling an
ounce of embarrassment.
Oh, to have seen his daughters’ faces when he broke into ‘Let’s Stay Together’ in
front of Al Green. The sound team at the fundraiser in Harlem urged him to do it, he
tells Springsteen, but no one’s buying it. We’re not five minutes into the third episode
before he’s crooning ‘Let’s Get It On’ and ‘Me and Mrs Jones’ — songs he’s been
practising, to the bemusement of his grandmother, since he was ten years old.
Obama may be a ‘shut up, Dad’ kind of a singer. As a talker, though? He’s as warm
and lucid as ever. In the last month of his presidency or, as he calls it, ‘our presidency’, he
and Michelle invited Springsteen to play a private gig to their staff at the White House.
‘Some of the best music… happened off camera during some of our parties,’ he winks.
Springsteen’s set was so good that Barack suggested he take it to Broadway. After that
success, the singer seems only too happy to be back at his side, using music as a way in to
discussing race in America.
‘How did we get here?’ and ‘How can we find our way back to a more unifying
American story?’ are the prevailing questions of the series. Between harrowing passages
on shootings and slavery, Obama reflects on the differences between his own and his
white schoolfriends’ early music tastes, and Springsteen on the racism directed towards
his E Street Band saxophonist and close friend, Clarence Clemons.
In the second episode, Springsteen raised the question of whether reparations should
be paid to the descendants of those who suffered the effects of discrimination. While
Obama agreed that reparations were justified, he had reached the conclusion, he said,
that drawing up a programme was a political non-starter. Not that this should be a reason
to shut the conversation down, he added.
Prompted by Obama’s descriptions of his schooldays, I turned to the Tes (formerly
Times Educational Supplement) podcast My Best Teacher. Every episode, a celebrity
talks to the publication’s senior editor, Dan Worth, about the teacher who inspired them
most. Usually this is fairly straightforward. Recent weeks have seen comedian Meera
Syal describe her ‘complete maverick’ of a Spanish teacher, Mr Cartwright, and singer
Cerys Matthews her nature-loving biology teacher, Mrs Ellis. Unfortunately for last
week’s guest, Ricky Wilson of Kaiser Chiefs, however, school was rather a hazy memory.
If you’re appearing on a podcast to discuss your most inspiring teachers, it helps if
you can remember their names. After confessing that he couldn’t name a single person
who taught him at primary school, Wilson decided to describe what he could remember,
the smell of school meatballs — and that only because he recently discovered their secret
ingredient, caraway seeds.
Things got more interesting when he began to contrast his schoolmates’ descriptions
of him with the boy he thought he was. It struck him that his stage persona had coloured
their perceptions of him as a loud show-off when, to his mind, he was the average,
unremarkable kid no one noticed. Which made me wonder. Does anyone really know
who they were at school? Go to a reunion, if you can bear to, and the bully will describe
himself as the victim, the in-crowd as the outcasts, and the airhead as a nerd. Perhaps, in
Wilson’s case, losing the ghost of boyhood is the price of fame.
Listening to some of the very lovely but rather safe episodes of My Best Teacher
made me miss My Teenage Diary. Radio 4 has lately been repeating episodes from three
years ago on Saturday evenings. The diarist may be as susceptible as anyone else to
contorting or editing history, but when the results are as funny as these, who really cares?
Helen Lederer had me in stitches as she read from her diaries from 1969–70, a time
when ‘rotten yobs’ would throw almonds at girls in the park, teenage wisdom taught that
she was ‘growing up faster than before’, and the only way to fall out of love with
someone was to turn to God: ‘I decide to attack the process of getting over him by
praying. By 10.15 p.m. I’m almost there.’ As Obama may discover to his credit, everyone
enjoys a good cringe.
Pop

Bands on the run

Michael Hann

Black Country, New Road

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Bicep
Saatchi Gallery

When the world reopens, try to catch them in a small room: Black Country, New Road, performing at
the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Credit: Southbank Centre: Mark Allan

Twitter was awash with mockery last week, after Adam Levine, the singer of the
American group Maroon 5, was interviewed on Apple Music and told Zane Lowe: ‘It’s
funny, when the first Maroon 5 album came out there were still other bands. I feel like
there aren’t any bands any more, you know?’ Out came the outraged, citing their
favourite bands with fanbases numbering in the dozens. What about the fertile deep
sludge scene based around Pimple Nose Records of Butt Wipe, Montana, eh? Then there
were the K-Pop stans, demanding BTS — a seven-piece vocal group who, had they been
formed in England in the 1990s, would clearly have been a boyband — be recognised as
functionally equivalent to the Rolling Stones (there’s no moral judgment there, BTS
stans. Just the fact that, to be a band, you have to play some instruments).
Taken in context, though, Levine’s comments were perfectly reasonable. Bands now
exist on the periphery. In Levine’s world —the absolute middle of the road; the very
heart of the mainstream — new bands have disappeared. When recording industry
revenues began declining with the advent of digital music, the major labels began signing
solo acts instead — they’re so much cheaper to launch — and never bothered to return
to bands when the Spotify money started streaming back in.
All of which leaves us in a place where Black Country, New Road, the most
acclaimed new band of 2021, are so far from the mainstream that they could catch a flight
to it, and still need to rent a car for a six-hour drive at the other end. This London septet
— with sax and violin prominent in the mix — combine various strands of English
experimental rock (there are echoes of the Canterbury scene, Van Der Graaf Generator,
the Fall) into something that, if not new, is without a direct competitor at the moment.
Isaac Wood’s voice is likely to be the stumbling block for many listeners. He doesn’t
sing; he intones, with a desperately arch quaver in his voice. On their livestream, that
gave his lyrics a sense of confused gravitas I’m not quite sure they yet merit. He’s an
interesting writer with a gift for arresting imagery — ‘I met her accidentally/ It was at the
Cambridge Science Fair/ And she was so impressed I could make so many things catch
on fire,’ began ‘Science Fair’ — but I’m not convinced there’s depth beneath the imagery
just yet.
There was something truly thrilling in there when the ramshackle and the disciplined
combined, falling into place like jigsaw-puzzle pieces whose shapes fit perfectly but have
mismatching pictures on them. The conclusion of ‘Basketball Shoes’, as the band ramped
up and up and up, joined by a choir scattered around the seating of the QEH, was a
glorious moment. Truthfully, though, the livestream is not their milieu. Listen to their
debut album on headphones or, when the world reopens, try to catch them in a small
room if you can. You need to be enveloped by this kind of thing. It depends on
suspension of disbelief, and a cat mewling for your attention breaks the spell.
Another of this year’s best received albums has been Isles, by the Northern Irish duo
Bicep, whose selling point is that they make dance music that people who used to rave in
1995 can listen to at home with a nice Merlot, instead of coming home saucer-eyed and
drenched with sweat at five in the morning. The retro vibe extended — perhaps
unintentionally — to the visuals. When we weren’t watching Andy Ferguson and Matt
McBriar fiddle with electronics in a blank white room, we were watching the kind of
colour and picture manipulation that would once have been preceded by Michael Rodd
saying: ‘Tonight on Tomorrow’s World, how computers will change the way we look at
the world.’
Bicep were bloggers before they became artists, famed for their exquisite taste, and
this was an exquisitely tasteful show —sounds layered beautifully and manipulated
precisely. The way they combined the different elements was delicious. Where rock
limits itself to a small sonic palette, electronic music can employ any noise imaginable.
Finding a blend of sounds that complement each other is harder than it sounds. It must
be like having every ingredient in the world at your disposal, and having to use ten of
them to create something delicious without ever ending up with chilli, strawberries and
ribeye on the same plate. Obviously, huge swathes must have been preprogrammed, but
how they fiddled with the sound live altered the music enough to make it a compellingly
different experience from putting on the albums and watching your screensaver. It was
dance music for those of us whose knees will no longer stand anything more rigorous on
a weekend night than walking upstairs to bed, and wonderful for it.
Television
Double act
James Walton

McDonald & Dodds; DNA Journey

ITV

The odd couple: Tala Gouveia as DCI Lauren McDonald and Jason Watkins as DS Dodds, who is
equipped with a full range of middle-aged male signifiers

Well, this a bit awkward. A fortnight ago, in my last TV column, I confidently asserted
that, despite the involvement of Jed Mercurio, Bloodlands (BBC1) was nothing like the
programme it was being compared to in all the advance publicity. Two episodes, several
twists and at least one bent copper later, my ringing conclusion ‘Just don’t expect Line of
Duty’ feels somewhere between premature and spectacularly wrong.
Luckily, this is not a mistake anybody could make about Bloodlands’ Sunday night
crime rival, McDonald & Dodds, which has been building up a solid following on ITV.
The central idea it depends on is, like that of many a cop show before it, two mismatched
detectives. Lauren McDonald (Tala Gouveia) is an ambitious officer of colour recently
moved from south London to Bath — a city whose gentility is constantly emphasised
amid all the murders. There, she’s paired with underling DS Dodds (Jason Watkins),
who may or may not have a first name, but is certainly equipped with a full range of
middle-aged male signifiers: among them specs on a chain, a deep interest in the history
of railways and the inability to understand any word coined after about 1980. (On
Sunday, he duly thought a barista was a lawyer.) As a rule, Dodds spends most of each
episode blinking around in benevolent perplexity, until to general surprise — every week
— he proves to have a mind like a steel trap, turning McDonald’s exasperation with that
regrettable middle-aged maleness to admiration for his crime-solving skills. (Think New
Tricks with only one old bloke.)
In the latest instalment, all of this was applied to the killing of Dominque Aubert, the
hunky French star of the Bath Eagles rugby team, whose body was found on the railway
tracks outside Brunel’s Box tunnel. Shortly before that, he’d been at a nearby party with
a group of Glaswegian women having a girls’ weekend away — as a result of which none
of them could remember what happened.
None of them, that is, except their least glamorous member Doreen (Sharon
Rooney), who’d taken lots of photos on her phone that appeared to incriminate her
prettier, blonder and more flirtatious best friend Angela (Joy McAvoy). Not that the
friendship seemed entirely mutual. As the women impressively stuck to their original
weekend plan of drinking at all times — and even made the murder part of their inter-
group joshing — Angela continued to boss Doreen around with lordly aplomb. It also
became clear that there was more to Angela and Dominique’s relationship than a chance
meeting the night before. But of course she wasn’t the only character with a secret to
hide…
More unexpectedly, a key component of the plot was, as Dodds pointed out in one of
his steel-trap moments, that Dominique’s body had been found on the morning of
Brunel’s birthday: the only dawn of the year when the sun shines directly through the
Box tunnel. In fact, a quick and slightly disappointing Google suggests that this is more
legend than truth, but it was one we were clearly meant to accept at face value. A more
damaging mistake, though, was the episode’s title.
Usually in crime shows it’s the criminal who makes one fatal error. Yet, by opting to
call this one ‘We Need to Talk about Doreen’, the makers not only made what by my
reckoning is officially the gazillionth not-really-punning reference of the past 20-odd
years to We Need to Talk about Kevin, the novel about a murderer of that name by our
own Lionel Shriver. They also rather gave the game away.
Fortunately, this mystifying blunder apart, McDonald & Dodds once again succeeded
in its by no means ignoble aim of making two hours of television pass in an
undemandingly enjoyable way. Just don’t expect Line of Duty.
 Still with ITV, the new series of DNA Journey — following a two-part Ant and Dec
special in 2019 — is essentially the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? with added
banter and less history. In it two celebrity friends are driven about the country to meet
local historians who reveal what some of the celebs’ ancestors got up to.
For the first episode, the friends were Andrew Flintoff and Jamie Redknapp whose
bantz often reached the genuinely witty, with Flintoff in particular confirming what a
funny, likeable and accomplished broadcaster he’s become. Adding to the jollity were
the historians, all of whom clearly relished their chance to be on telly. They passed on
their findings — a convicted criminal here, a war hero there — with a game-show
flourish and, in one case, even whispered the word ‘Psst!’ from a doorway as the two
leads passed by. There was also a nice cameo from Redknapp’s dad Harry who didn’t
seem especially startled to hear that he was descended from a fraudster.
Television
Double act
James Walton

McDonald & Dodds; DNA Journey

ITV

The odd couple: Tala Gouveia as DCI Lauren McDonald and Jason Watkins as DS Dodds, who is
equipped with a full range of middle-aged male signifiers

Well, this a bit awkward. A fortnight ago, in my last TV column, I confidently asserted
that, despite the involvement of Jed Mercurio, Bloodlands (BBC1) was nothing like the
programme it was being compared to in all the advance publicity. Two episodes, several
twists and at least one bent copper later, my ringing conclusion ‘Just don’t expect Line of
Duty’ feels somewhere between premature and spectacularly wrong.
Luckily, this is not a mistake anybody could make about Bloodlands’ Sunday night
crime rival, McDonald & Dodds, which has been building up a solid following on ITV.
The central idea it depends on is, like that of many a cop show before it, two mismatched
detectives. Lauren McDonald (Tala Gouveia) is an ambitious officer of colour recently
moved from south London to Bath — a city whose gentility is constantly emphasised
amid all the murders. There, she’s paired with underling DS Dodds (Jason Watkins),
who may or may not have a first name, but is certainly equipped with a full range of
middle-aged male signifiers: among them specs on a chain, a deep interest in the history
of railways and the inability to understand any word coined after about 1980. (On
Sunday, he duly thought a barista was a lawyer.) As a rule, Dodds spends most of each
episode blinking around in benevolent perplexity, until to general surprise — every week
— he proves to have a mind like a steel trap, turning McDonald’s exasperation with that
regrettable middle-aged maleness to admiration for his crime-solving skills. (Think New
Tricks with only one old bloke.)
In the latest instalment, all of this was applied to the killing of Dominque Aubert, the
hunky French star of the Bath Eagles rugby team, whose body was found on the railway
tracks outside Brunel’s Box tunnel. Shortly before that, he’d been at a nearby party with
a group of Glaswegian women having a girls’ weekend away — as a result of which none
of them could remember what happened.
None of them, that is, except their least glamorous member Doreen (Sharon
Rooney), who’d taken lots of photos on her phone that appeared to incriminate her
prettier, blonder and more flirtatious best friend Angela (Joy McAvoy). Not that the
friendship seemed entirely mutual. As the women impressively stuck to their original
weekend plan of drinking at all times — and even made the murder part of their inter-
group joshing — Angela continued to boss Doreen around with lordly aplomb. It also
became clear that there was more to Angela and Dominique’s relationship than a chance
meeting the night before. But of course she wasn’t the only character with a secret to
hide…
More unexpectedly, a key component of the plot was, as Dodds pointed out in one of
his steel-trap moments, that Dominique’s body had been found on the morning of
Brunel’s birthday: the only dawn of the year when the sun shines directly through the
Box tunnel. In fact, a quick and slightly disappointing Google suggests that this is more
legend than truth, but it was one we were clearly meant to accept at face value. A more
damaging mistake, though, was the episode’s title.
Usually in crime shows it’s the criminal who makes one fatal error. Yet, by opting to
call this one ‘We Need to Talk about Doreen’, the makers not only made what by my
reckoning is officially the gazillionth not-really-punning reference of the past 20-odd
years to We Need to Talk about Kevin, the novel about a murderer of that name by our
own Lionel Shriver. They also rather gave the game away.
Fortunately, this mystifying blunder apart, McDonald & Dodds once again succeeded
in its by no means ignoble aim of making two hours of television pass in an
undemandingly enjoyable way. Just don’t expect Line of Duty.
 Still with ITV, the new series of DNA Journey — following a two-part Ant and Dec
special in 2019 — is essentially the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? with added
banter and less history. In it two celebrity friends are driven about the country to meet
local historians who reveal what some of the celebs’ ancestors got up to.
For the first episode, the friends were Andrew Flintoff and Jamie Redknapp whose
bantz often reached the genuinely witty, with Flintoff in particular confirming what a
funny, likeable and accomplished broadcaster he’s become. Adding to the jollity were
the historians, all of whom clearly relished their chance to be on telly. They passed on
their findings — a convicted criminal here, a war hero there — with a game-show
flourish and, in one case, even whispered the word ‘Psst!’ from a doorway as the two
leads passed by. There was also a nice cameo from Redknapp’s dad Harry who didn’t
seem especially startled to hear that he was descended from a fraudster.
High life
Taki

Gstaad
I was very sad to read of Rupert Hambro’s death. I didn’t know him well, but first
met him long ago, along with his younger brother Rick, also gone. They were both
quintessential English gentlemen: handsome, kind and with a great sense of humour.
Rupert invited me to lunch quite a few times, but because of circumstance I was never
able to reciprocate. The last one was at Wiltons, which he owned, I believe, but he never
gave any indication that all was not well. In an age of crybabies and professional victims,
Rupert stood out like a saint in hell. He leaves his lovely wife Robin, a Philadelphia-born
beauty, and two children.
Thinking of Rupert and Wiltons, I remembered a dinner I gave there long ago for my
friend Nick Scott to meet some of The Spectator people. Nick was a very funny man and
writer who had not managed to publish his gems, so I decided to turn him into
Shakespeare by introducing him to those in charge at this magazine: namely, our
chairman Andrew Neil, the then editor Matthew d’Ancona, and the recently departed
editor, Boris. Also invited were my then High Life editor Liz, and the love of my life —
unbeknown to her or anyone else at The Speccie — Mary Wakefield. I sat between Liz
and Mary, placed Boris at the head at one end and Andrew at the other, and some 25 of
us began to make whoopee.
Oh yes, I almost forgot. I invited most of my Pugs friends to the dinner — such as the
Bismarcks and the Hoares — plus some other sweet young things. Our chairman
Andrew was still a bachelor back then, and arrived late from recording his TV show
accompanied by two ladies (or perhaps it was three — or four or five). Mary, Boris and I
went out for a ciggie at one point, and Boris mentioned that he had to decide by the
following morning whether or not to run for mayor. If memory serves, Mary said that he
should. When I asked — begged — Mary to come with me to a nightclub, she said that
she was off very early the next morning to Rome. This was a eureka moment as I, too,
was going to the Eternal City. I know, it sounds a bit pathetic, but one has to put one’s
best foot forward. I was a married man in his sixties and not exactly a magnet for ladies
who didn’t believe that diamonds are a girl’s best friend, so the pitch was: ‘I have a plane
taking me and some friends to Rome early tomorrow. Would you accept a ride?’
Eventually — and for the first and last time in her life — she said yes to me.
In the meantime, inside the grand private dining room Wiltons and Rupert had made
available to me, Nick Scott had taken to the grape with a vengeance and told some very
funny jokes. He’d failed to mention that he’d like to contribute to the magazine — in
fact, he’d gone as far as to tell Matthew, Andrew and yours truly what a lousy job we
were doing at Britain’s oldest and greatest weekly. Nick Scott and Tim Hoare have since
died, as of course has Rupert, but I have such pleasant memories of these dear friends
that I need to share them.
Things got worse the next morning when, on our flight to Rome, Charlie Glass, lefty
by political persuasion, decided that the lavatory did not have enough headroom and
complained rather bitterly about it. This prompted Bolle Bismarck to ask him if his
commie friends flew on bigger private jets, which Charlie thought a cheap shot. Mary
made matters worse when she told me that the purpose of her trip was to attend Gian
Carlo Menotti’s Spoleto music festival. The reason for our trip was less refined perhaps,
the Valentino ball for the 1,000 richest but worst-read people in Europe. Charlie Glass
was attending an extreme left-wing party’s annual conference, whose theme that year
was how to deal with the curse of private jets. When someone asked me at the Valentino
bash what was going on in Spoleto, I told them it was a rap concert for ex-felons.
Mind you, all this was about 15 years ago. Some of the protagonists are dead, Boris is
on top, and I’m wondering why supposedly conservative newspapers are making a fuss
over his girlfriend and decorating costs. Why are Lord and Lady Bamford in the news?
All they do is help people, their generosity knowing no bounds. Why is Damian Aspinall,
whom I haven’t seen in 30 years, being investigated? All he does is save wild animals that
need saving. And, while I’m at it, why isn’t Philip Green being investigated for being
much too vulgar to be allowed to call his miserable self ‘Sir’?
Finally, guess what happened to my buddy Charlie Glass? This is unconfirmed, but
apparently, as he was addressing the lefties and the commies in Rome, some Roman
Judas revealed that he had flown in on a private jet and the mob went after him. What is
confirmed is the following: when I rang Charlie up just as I was finishing this column, he
answered in a very weak voice from the Florence hospital that saved his life. He had
been struck down by a very bad case of Covid. I offered to come over and bring anything
he needed, but he said he thought that the worse was over, although it had been so bad
at times that he’d wished that the mob had caught him all those years ago.
Low life
Jeremy Clarke

Around the time that poor M. Macron was casting televised aspersions on the
AstraZeneca jab, I was offered one by Mme Michaud, our hardworking French village
GP. Concerned about her bosoms, Catriona had visited for a routine appointment and
while there had asked what the chances were of getting a Covid jab. By a stroke of good
luck, Mme Michaud said she had a batch of the AstraZeneca vaccine arriving in a
fortnight and would her friend like one as well? Consequently my name was pencilled on
her list, but with a question mark against it.
My busy oncologist at Marseille replied to my email within two minutes. He said that
in spite of what the President of the Republic was saying about the AstraZeneca jab, he
believed it to be as effective as the other brands for people of my age and condition and
that I should go ahead. Catriona phoned Mme Michaud and the question mark against
my name was removed. We were all set.
The appointment was at three o’clock on a Friday afternoon in Mme Michaud’s new
surgery. We half expected a phone call at some stage cancelling it, but the day and the
hour crept inexorably around without a hitch and at ten to the hour we found the right
door and mounted the stairs. A receptionist indicated a double row of circular bamboo
seats, about half of them occupied by villagers who were noticeably much older and iller
than we were, and we chose seats opposite a gasping, mulberry-faced man with two sticks
who didn’t look like he’d make it to half past.
Compared with this decrepit lot, I felt fraudulent and juvenile. And amazed, too, that
as a foreigner in France without a health card, with so few French people inoculated
against Covid to date, I should be getting a jab so soon. In my mind I was reconciled to
not qualifying for a vaccination until August at the earliest, if at all. After 13 months of
masks, immobility, mild anxiety and curfews, another three or four weren’t going to
make a lot of difference. In fact, my receiving a jab had seemed such a distant possibility
that I hadn’t even begun to look forward or calculate the benefits. Until I looked online
half an hour before leaving the house, for example, I did not know that 22 days after
getting a single AstraZeneca jab, the chance of my being hospitalised by Covid or dying
from it is zero. As I sat in Mme Michaud’s brand-new waiting room, I felt like the bloke
in that blistering hymn whose chains fell off, whose heart was free, who rose, went forth
and followed Thee.
Mme Michaud appeared in the doorway of her consulting room and hooted our
names. Close to retirement, she was wearing a short satin miniskirt with a reptile-skin
pattern, knee-length leather boots, black patterned tights and a silk blouse with
diaphanous trimmings. We rose and followed her in. She tottered ahead of us, like Dick
Emery in drag, flung herself in her chair, belched mildly, and began without delay to
complete the necessary paperwork with a sort of savage contempt. We sat before her,
docile and solemn, and watched her moving Biro tip slashing and skewering.
The old ornate, high-ceilinged rooms in which she used single-handedly to conduct
her daily surgeries suited our doctor’s larger than life personality and operatic style very
well. This spanking-new, faultless, modern, odourless, monochrome, contemporary,
claustrophobic office, on the other hand, seemed to diminish her. I made some fatuous
comment about the relative sizes of the former and the new. She muttered something
deeply despairing about functionality, gave the form a final couple of vicious stabs, then
stood, sighed and trotted behind the arras to concoct the jabs.
Catriona rolled up her sleeve to receive the prick in her upper arm. I had put on a
clean shirt and tartan tie for the occasion and it was necessary to strip to the waist. Our
injections took less than two seconds each and were painless. I lowered my mask and
mimed a passionate kiss in Mme Michaud’s direction. Shaking her head, she printed off
two easily forgeable vaccine certificates, handed them over, told us not to lose them, and
said she’d give us a ring in two or three months for the second jab. Catriona has a health
card, so pays nothing; I handed over the usual €25. Then we bowed our thanks and
returned to the waiting room to sit out the mandatory 15 minutes in case of a reaction.
Some of those poor souls we’d seen earlier were still grimly waiting there. Others
were missing. Catriona and I sat and laughed so helplessly that we had to get up and
leave well before the 15 minutes were up.
Real life
Melissa Kite

‘Have you had your jab, Margery?’ said one Surrey lady to another in the queue for take-
away coffee at the chintzy, shabby chic coffee shop.
‘Oh yes, I’ve had it for my country,’ said her friend. ‘I just can’t understand these
people who won’t have the jab. I mean, how selfish…’
I looked at them and they looked at me, pointedly, because they had decided what
sort of person I was thanks to the altercation we had all just had.
‘Margery, are you feeling all right after your jab?’ said one to the other, more quietly.
‘Well, now you ask, no, I’ve been rather ill for two weeks now. I’m sure it’s nothing.’
‘Yes, I feel dreadful too. I’m sure it’s nothing.’ Suffice to say that this pair had just
been so rude to me I thought: ‘Well, you’re serving your country, so shut up and enjoy it.’
If they don’t end this lockdown soon, I am going to be arrested for affray. I’ve
already been cautioned for not having an MOT, because of the darn Covid MOT
extension which made me then forget it completely. Because that’s criminal, I presume I
can’t now run away to America. Lockdown is making a hardened offender of me.
Next I fear some kind of punch-up resulting in me being led away in handcuffs from
the bakery, or the shabby chic café.
In the bakery, they don’t seem to like any more than two customers at a time, so we
all queue round the block, Soviet Russia-style, which is why I didn’t question the queue
outside the shabby chic café opposite the bakery. I had just got to the front when the two
obnoxious Surrey battleaxes swept past me.
‘Excuse me?’ I said, blocking the doorway. ‘I am queuing to go in.’
‘Well, go in then!’ said the rudest of the two. ‘Well I would,’ I said, ‘but there’s still
people at the counter.’ ‘So?’ said the other.
So three women stood glaring at each other outside this chintzy café full of dainty
homewares and I’m sure all of us had murder on our minds.
 ‘Look here,’ I hissed, wanting to grab them by the scruffs of their designer hiking
jackets, ‘the people in there now were out here queuing a moment ago. So now I’m next.
But I’m not going to go in because why the hell were they waiting if I’m not meant to
wait now?’
‘Just go in!’ barked the rudest woman. Very much fearing I was about to take a swing
at her if I didn’t, I stepped over the threshold without putting on my mask.
‘You’ll need a mask!’ she called. And the slightly less rude woman snorted with
pleasure, as they both gave each other a look that said: ‘Another Covidiot!’
Swearing under my breath, I muzzled myself. When I got to the counter I decided to
point out to the lady behind it that there was a degree of ambiguity outside. ‘What?’ she
snapped. She didn’t have a mask on, so I could see her scowl. ‘Do you want us to queue
or come straight in?’ ‘We want you inside ideally!’
‘Never mind,’ I said, for the two rude women were bearing down on me. They had
pushed their way round the aisles of bric-à-brac they couldn’t buy — a cushion with a fox
on it, a mug with a fox on it, a book about walking, a doormat with a fox on it — and
were now burning a hole in my back with their accusing, pillar of the local residents’
association eyes.
I ordered lattes for me and the friend who had not yet arrived to stand outside in the
street for ten minutes on her birthday. Whether or not that is illegal I couldn’t work out
if I wanted to.
I was told my lattes would be deposited on the collection table by the exit.
As I was standing there, waiting for tiny, underfilled paper cups of overpriced coffee,
the rude women waltzed over and planted themselves inches from where I was standing,
then looked at me as though I were invading their personal space, so I had to move as
they chatted: ‘Have you had your jab, Margery?’ ‘Yes, I’ve had it for my country…’ And
so on.
The rudest one pointed at the wall. ‘Look, Margery, this is the photo of Paul Weller I
was telling you about. Oh yes. Paul Weller comes here all the time, you know.’
As I took my coffees to leave, I saw that outside Paul Weller stood quietly by the
door of the café sipping his coffee. I could see that. But the battleaxes were oblivious.
Any minute now they would flounce out the door, telling each other their best Paul
Weller stories as they pushed Paul Weller aside.
Wild life
Wild life
Aidan Hartley

Laikipia
In one of Kenya farmer Karen Blixen’s short stories, a character says: ‘I know of a
cure for everything: salt water… Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea’. After two months on the
Indian Ocean shore since Mum left us, I set off on the two-day drive back to the farm. At
dawn in Tsavo I had breakfast watching a young leopard, and passed a herd of 400
buffalo, many elephant, kudu, giraffe and buck. In four hours on the back roads I saw
just one car. I reached the Nairobi highway, overtook scores of juggernauts and then
diverted along the track following the Selengei river, where Ernest Hemingway used to
hunt, passing very few cars until I arrived in town towards evening. Unlike elsewhere,
Kenya’s cities throng with life: crowded markets, gridlocked traffic, busy bars and shops.
Early next day I zigzagged through the wacky races of Nairobi rush hour, fleeing north
towards Mount Kenya, left the tarmac again and for three hours passed more great
wildlife herds until, at last, covered in sweat and dust, I reached our farmstead with
cattle, dogs and a cold Tusker.
The entire roof of our home had been ripped off. It’s the hot, dry season and a few
days before my return a team of thatchers — led by a short, noisy man called Bashora
Dadi — had begun knotting thousands of makuti coconut fronds to the roof, replacing
the thatch Bashora had done for us in 2006. All his people are Waata, whose ancestors
were famous hunters, using long bows to shoot arrows tipped with deadly desert rose
poison into elephants. Bashora calls his job ‘fighting’, or ‘a war’, as in ‘today we are going
to fight your roof’. He follows me around the farm, demanding cash at all hours,
complaining how ‘wars cost money… I will die one day, Aidan… my men miss their
women — they need meat!’ The Waata have a story that the first elephant was a
shrewish wife who grew tusks and big ears when she became angry with her husband for
being lazy. The thatchers’ hunger is insatiable! A lion half ate a calf a few nights ago and
we all consumed what we retrieved from the kill within hours. Cockerels and cabbages
disappear in great quantities, in between rude jokes and shanties shouted from the
rooftop.
A lorry driver arrives with more makuti thatch from the coast, and as we unload he
demands a cocktail. I give him a beer and say he looks like a military man. ‘Police,’ he
says. ‘The Somalis ambushed us and killed everybody except me. I played dead and
decided it was time to leave the service.’ Other lorries are rolling in with timber for cattle
crushes and floorboards, farm purchases, feed and stock salt. The tractor team is working
overtime in a race against the onset of the long rains, digging a dam to irrigate a new
avocado field we are preparing with furious speed while it remains dry. Each day brings
more broken things: the farm motorbikes, the internet, a cattle weighing scale and the
Lister water pump, which belches bits of twisted gear metal.
My wife Claire joins me on the farm, tired from her work in Nairobi, and we wash out
of buckets and sit making our calls in a roofless office, with the fish eagles circling in the
blue skies above us by day and the constellations spread out above our office desks by
night. We get little sleep, because as soon as I arrived we weaned 27 Boran calves and
they are in the yard behind the house, keening for their mothers until dawn. There are
livestock to dip against ticks, chickens’ eggs to collect, wethers to castrate, calves to feed,
trees to water and plant and farm books to update. A vet is on his way to vaccinate the
livestock against foot and mouth disease —and the fertiliser will soon need spreading on
the Rhodes grass pastures for when the first downpours arrive.
Out of the old thatch come snakes, dead bats and barn owl nests. The new thatch
takes shape on the roof and glows a handsome copper. Bashora assures me the makuti is
such good quality it will last for 20 years, by which time we will both be around 75 years
old. I realise that the next time I ask Bashora to redo the roof, that will probably be the
last time we have to tackle it — and then the time after that will be the children’s turn.
Between today and that day, I hope to sweat a lot.
‘‘I think your father’s hoping he’ll never have to hug anyone again.’’
Bridge
Janet de Botton

One benefit of lockdown is that there is much more time for reading. My personal
favourite bridge book is Play These Hands With Me by Terence Reese. Reese was the
first author to introduce the ‘over the shoulder’ approach when explaining a hand —
meaning the reader can follow the thought processes behind the bidding and play of
many of his great hands. First published in 1960, it is now back in print after being
unavailable for many years and if you haven’t already got it I can’t recommend it highly
enough.
Reese said: ‘You don’t have to be able to see the endplays that may crop up — all
you have to do is follow normal good technique and watch what’s going on.’
I was reminded of this when I watched this hand, played by the inimitable Norwegian
International Thomas (Charlie) Charlsen in a recent online tournament (see diagram).
The cue bid in Diamonds was music to North’s ears and he launched the partnership
into slam. It wasn’t great, but it had play.
 West led a Heart and Charlie won in dummy and tried a Spade to the Jack followed
by the Ace of Spades, but the King did not appear. Next he tried Diamonds; A, K and a
ruff, but they were not breaking 3-3. Time for plan C: Declarer took two more Hearts
and ruffed another Diamond. Finally he threw East on lead with the trump King, and
East had to play away from the King of Clubs to give South his twelfth trick.
If at first you don’t succeed…
Chess
Armenian champions
Luke McShane

In the 21st century, which country has won more international chess Olympiads than any
other? Russia? USA? China? None of the above — it’s Armenia, which won gold three
times (2006, 2008 and 2012). Despite a population of just 3 million, the country has a
healthy number of top flight grandmasters, and Levon Aronian (the current world no. 5,
and former world no. 2) has been its pre-eminent player for many years. So Aronian’s
announcement that he will switch federations, representing the USA in future events, is
significant. He will relocate to St Louis, which has become a major chess centre in recent
years, with the backing of the American philanthropist Rex Sinquefield. Aronian’s move
bolsters an already exceptional US team, with Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So, Leinier
Dominguez Perez and Hikaru Nakamura all in the world’s top 20.

It may seem odd that a player’s affiliation is not simply bound by citizenship, but it does
make sense to permit such transfers. Notwithstanding patriotic considerations,
disagreements between players and their federations are common, so the possibility of a
switch ensures that individuals are not beholden to their federations. (A prominent
example is that of Alireza Firouzja, from Iran, who looks likely to represent France in
future). To prevent abuse, the adopting federation is obliged to pay a significant fee to
the old federation — €50,000 for a player of Aronian’s stature.

In a statement published on Facebook, Aronian harshly criticised the diminished support

and attention that chess has received from the new Armenian government. (Until 2018,
chess in Armenia enjoyed significant support and recognition from the country’s
president, Serzh Sargsyan, who resigned amid the ‘velvet revolution’ of that year.) One
can only speculate whether tragic events in 2020 may also have influenced Aronian’s
decision. In March, his wife Arianne Caoili died of her injuries from a car crash in the
capital Yerevan, while later in the year Armenia was engaged in a bloody war with
Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Aronian is already out of the current world championship cycle and at 38, is significantly
older than many of his rivals. But I’m in no doubt that, with the right support, he could
still mount a serious challenge to Carlsen. I hope that a new start provides the boost he
needs.

Meanwhile, a stunning combination from the recent Armenian championship:

Robert Hovhannisyan–Arman Pashikian

Armenian Championship, February 2021

1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 Nf6 4 O-O Nxe4 5 Re1 Nd6 6 Nxe5 Be7 7 Bf1 Nxe5 8 Rxe5 O-O 9 Nc3 Ne8 10 Nd5
Bd6 11 Re1 c6 12 Ne3 Be7 13 c4 Nc7 14 Nf5 Bf6 15 Nd6 Bd4 16 Qg4 Qf6 17 Qg3 Bxf2+ 18 Qxf2 Qxd6 19
c5 Qg6 20 a4With this imaginative rook deployment, White gets dangerous compensation
for the sacrificed pawn. d6 21 Ra3 dxc5 22 d4 Re8 23 Bf4 Rxe1 24 Qxe1 Ne6 25 Rg3 Qh5 (see
diagram) 26 d5!! A brilliant idea. cxd5 26…Nxf4 allows 27 Qe8 mate. Or 26…Qxd5 sees
White forcibly open the e-file: 27 Rd3 Qh5 28 Rd8+ Nf8 29 Rxf8+ Kxf8 30 Bd6+ Kg8 31
Qe8 mate. 27 Rg5! Qh6 28 Rxd5 Qxf4 29 Rd8+ Nf8 29…Nxd8 30 Qe8# 30 Qe7 h5 30…Qd4+ 31
Rxd4 cxd4 32 Qe8! ties Black in knots. 31 Rxf8+ Kh7 32 Bd3+ Bf5 Black won’t last long after
32…f5 33 Qe8! Qd4+ 34 Kh1. 33 Bxf5+ Qxf5 34 Rxa8 Qb1+ 35 Kf2 Qxb2+ 36 Qe2 Once the
checks run out, White’s extra rook mops up comfortably. Qd4+ 37 Kf1 Qa1+ 38 Qe1 Qxa4 39
Re8 f5 40 Re5 Qf4+ 41 Kg1 c4 42 Qe3 Qg4 43 h3 Qd1+ 44 Kh2 Qd6 45 Qf4 c3 46 Qxf5+ g6 47 Qe6 Qxe6 48
Rxe6 b5 49 Re7+ Kh6 50 Rxa7 b4 51 Rc7 Black resigns
Chess puzzle
Puzzle no. 644
Luke McShane

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Philip Hamilton Williams,
Birmingham Post, 1890. Answers should be emailed to [email protected] by Monday
15 March. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a
postal address.

Last week’s solution: 1 Qd5! Nc5+ 2 Ka2 and the threat Qd5-g8 is decisive. 1 Bxe6? Qa3+!
soon led to a draw, because it’s stalemate if the queen is captured: 2 Kc4 Qb4+ 3 Kd5
Qd6+ etc. Or 1 Qe3? Nd4+ 2 Qxd4 Qa3+ is similar.
Last week’s winner Yue Wu, Bishops Stortford, Herts
Competition

Heaven scent
Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3189 you were invited to submit a poem about a favourite smell.
This challenge certainly seemed to strike a chord — not surprising, perhaps, given the
looming threat of Covid-induced anosmia. As Brian Murdoch puts it:

Be ever grateful for your sense of smell!

Treat no aroma with the least disdain,
In case some virus makes you so unwell
That you can never smell a thing again…

Other star turns, in an entry that was a delight to judge, were Adrian Fry (‘Most of all, I
crave the pong/ of a layabed, copperhead girl gone wrong…’), Chris Ramsey’s
Wordsworthian tribute to the smell of frying bacon and Paul Brown’s clever twist on
Herrick. Commendations also go to David Silverman, Nick MacKinnon and Sarah
Drury.
The winners take £25 each.

The smooth, sharp tang of lime or lemon zest;

The autumn gush of cider apples pressed;
The lilac that intoxicates the bees;
The brisk broth of a briny seaside breeze;
Mown hay’s clean, sweet surrender to clear skies;
Gorse flowers’ playful coconut surprise;
A raindrop’s splashy duet with dry earth;
A grapevine’s juicy air of purple mirth;
Fried masterpieces sizzling with a wealth
Of greasy, joyous disregard for health;
A yeasty fresh-brewed beer or fresh-baked bread;
A newborn’s drowsy, delicate, lush head;
The sun’s perfume you wear when you come in
From gardening, the season on your skin —
For all these, coffee richly wakes my senses
To how immense each scent with its portents is.
Chris O’Carroll

A fine bouquet! That rich and potent smell:

a ‘high’, to which no class-A drug compares,
transports me in a mood-inducing spell
to sample an aroma that ensnares.
 
The substances that drove the volatile
Van Gogh to frenzied creativity:
the scent that made the Mona Lisa smile
and then spiced up Chagall’s Nativity.
 
That fragrant blend of turpentine and oil
at once ignites the fire in my belly;
the odour makes creative juices boil,
while tempting me to challenge Botticelli.
 
In truth, my Birth of Venus sadly fails,
and yet, in part, lives on — I make a trip
to throw it out, yet still the essence trails
in perfumed strands above the council tip.
Sylvia Fairley

The Casanova of all smells, the coffee bean’s perfume

is my seducer, darkly rich and strong;
it’s Cumberbatch’s vocal cords, a purring baritone,
an earthy, smoky, fragrant siren song.
Persuasive and pervasive, an olfactory nirvana,
unholy incense, every tempter’s dream,
it’s leather, furs and velvet in a luxury boudoir,
a sensual match for chocolate and cream.
A caffeine-laden bad boy, it beguiles you through the nostrils,
an intoxicating brew, a lure, a hum,
Eve’s apple couldn’t match it, it’s a jolt of pure espresso,
inhale it at your peril; you’ll succumb.
It’s cellos, oboes, saxophones, it’s ‘o’s of satisfaction,
it’s more than any cup of vapid tea,
and throatily it murmurs, ‘Drop your Dior at the doorway.
‘For real aromas, take a sniff of me.’
Janine Beacham

Up a small drawbridge, so awkward,

But in through a well-fretted arch:
What aroma! I didn’t dare squawk, couldn’t
Breathe — and my throat was so parched —
The straw was as sweet as a sheet
When a warm breeze has rendered it dry —
It smelt of molasses, of wheat.
I looked at the occupants, shy.
Wood-shavings, and lemon-peel, curling:
The headiest brew you might guess —
It still sends my memory swirling —
The scent of safe childhood, no less.
I can still hear my grandmother call
As I eye up the well-feathered troupe,
And their beady old gaze as I sprawl
In the scent of the henhouse, the coop.
Bill Greenwell

Inconceivable that I alone

Should revel in the smell of acetone
Which unequivocally, to tell the truth,
Still calls to mind those salad days of youth
When life made sense, was simple, clear and good—
Diligent homework, hobby balsa wood…
Alluring scent: intriguing, all-pervasive,
Versatile, volatile solvent and adhesive;
Degreasant. Furthermore, we learned at school,
A not especially complex molecule,
Merely a footnote to our education,
No sinister malign indoctrination.
How could we know the pear-drop waft of ‘sweeties’
 On breath betokened Type 1 diabetes?
Mike Morrison

The house honks and a fusty hum appals

my nostrils. While I laboured in the loo,
Cat, in her litter, did the ritual waltz
then squatted down and defecated too.
Our mutual relief is evident
and nothing I can do will stop it stinking.
Cat nonchalantly cleans her fundament.
I sip a cup of tea, sniffing and thinking.
Like typists in a pool, whose monthly flows
will shift until they menstruate together
we two have shat in unison, which shows
how close we have become to one another
and though the smell is bad, the thought is good;
a token of a sort of sisterhood.
Ann Drysdale

No. 3192: beastly

You are invited to submit a short story that features an animal (or animals) taking
revenge on humankind. Please email entries of up to 150 words to [email protected]
by midday on 24 March.
Crossword
2497: Scramble
Smurf

Six unclued lights (three of two words) are of a kind, associated with the 16’s 11s, and
overseen by 28. Elsewhere, ignore a grave accent.

Across
10 Some money held back for bananas (4)
12 16’s members who may face hostility, even crimes, perhaps? (10)
14 Use leverage to get private information (3)
17 Newly demilitarised losing demerits is epic (5)
18 Index of sad ladies, distraught with two sons shot down (7)
22 Quick to admit each trouncing of 16’s enemy? (6)
24 Fleet assembly point in Gaul is described by Racine (5)
26 Boldness has attendant making important appearance (9, two words)
27 Manoeuvring, get nearer outsider from Rouen (9)
29 Old twisted threads not at all robust, reportedly (5)
31 Reorganised Corinthians crash out being complicit (6, three words)
34 16’s aim — find the rear of Messerschmitt with great difficulty (6)
36 Resigned oneself to non-professional support (7, two words)
38 State aid distributed with hand outs, initially (5)
40 Current fine restricts hooligan (3)
41 Being given holy orders, could be nominated rector (10)
42 Little woman, born pre-Fifties (4)
43 Silver is not this well-behaved (12, four words)

Down
2 Toil, but see criminal in dungeons (10)
3 Dark brown or light brown will restrict painter (7)
4 In pool, time for some rhythm (5)
5 Growth of intellect in Essex? (9)
6 Double-tongued character has to cultivate allotment (6)
7 Unwanted items such as mourning clothes (5)
8 Reversion does not affect this legal document (4)
9 Airway point into centre is under reconstruction (12)
16 At heart Bleriot dreaded briefings being 12 (3, initials)
19 Playwright’s son making fourth change in play (6)
20 In middle of winter a bronze for swimming (6)
23 Loose woman with marijuana and diamonds advanced in the property market (9)
25 Leaf-gatherer on the greensward sounds depraved (8, two words)
30 Upset working with one top Hollywood star (6)
32 Reportedly tries to open lock to Mint receptacle (3)
33 Bishops wanting day of rest (not Thursday!) to come back (5)
35 I left Elaine in distress for another girl (5)
37 Beauty marries Beast — their hearts glow (4)

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 29 March. There are two
runners-up prizes of £20. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including
the crossword number in the subject field) to [email protected] – the
dictionary prize is not available. We will accept postal entries again at some point.
Crossword solution
to 2494: Back to front
Unclued lights are from the ‘Looking Glass’ poem Jabberwocky.

Alison Peck, Mathry, Pembrokeshire

First prize
Runners-up Patricia Gibbs, Barrow upon Soar, Leics; Stephen Charman, Shoreham-by-Sea,
West Sussex
No sacred cows

How I learned to love audio books

Toby Young

According to a charity called Fight For Sight, 38 per cent of people who’ve been using
screens more during lockdown believe their eyesight has deteriorated. I am definitely in
that category. This time last year, I didn’t need reading glasses; now I do. When I’m
working at my desk this doesn’t much matter, but it has made reading in bed more
difficult because I was in the habit of doing this on an iPad under the covers so as not to
wake Caroline. Keeping my glasses in place while lying on my side, with one hand
clutching my iPad and the other pulling the duvet tight over my head to eliminate any
light pollution, is surprisingly difficult. The upshot is I’ve switched over to talking books.
In the past, I found listening to a novel less satisfactory than reading it. The effort
required to read anchored me in the text, making my attention less likely to wander, and
it didn’t take long before I was transported into the world of the novel. With audio
books, my imagination wasn’t as engaged, possibly because some aspects of the
experience — such as the sound of the characters’ voices — is filled in by the voice actor.
It was more like watching television — no bad thing, obviously, but closer to fast food
than a three-course meal. OK if you’re doing something else at the same time, but no
substitute for reading in the dark.
But that has changed during lockdown — and I have Bernard Cornwell to thank for
it. I had just finished the Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope and asked James
Delingpole to recommend something. He suggested Cornwell’s Azincourt. I started
listening to it during the 15 minutes or so between getting into bed and falling asleep, and
was instantly hooked. The main character, an English archer, lacks depth and it’s hard to
work up much interest in his romance with a French nun, but the historical set pieces are
very well done, from the sacking of Soissons to the battle itself. I don’t recall ever
reading an author who describes violent conflict with such skill. He doesn’t gloss over the
pity of war, but he also captures the thrill.
When I’d finished it I moved on to 1356, hoping for more of the same. Like in
Azincourt, the protagonist is an English archer and it also climaxes with a famous
English victory — in this case the Battle of Poitiers. Being new to Cornwell’s books, I
didn’t realise it was the final one in a quartet called the Grail Quest until I was about
halfway through, but on the plus side that meant there were three more in the same
series. I went on to devour them too and am now getting stuck into the Warlord
Chronicles, a trilogy set in Arthurian Britain. I fully expect to work my way through
Cornwell’s entire oeuvre, including the 13-part Last Kingdom series.
One of the great things about these novels is that they provide a crash course in
English history. In the acknowledgments to the Grail Quest, Cornwell credits Jonathan
Sumption’s history of the Hundred Years’ War for having furnished him with much of
the detail, and cantering through these books is a bit like reading a pulp fiction version of
Our Island Story. There’s a strong streak of patriotism running through them, too, a
pride in the stoicism, courage and ingenuity of ordinary Britons. The English win almost
every battle in the Grail Quest thanks to the archers, and Cornwell never tires of telling
you in loving detail how many years of practice it takes to become an archer, how much
upper body strength is needed, the different craftsmen involved in fashioning the long
bow and the steel-tipped arrows, and so on. The Genevese crossbowmen employed by
the French never stand a chance.
Listening to these books has given me a renewed appreciation for voice actors. I
thought nothing could match up to Timothy West’s reading of Trollope, but Jonathan
Keeble, the actor who narrates the Warlord Chronicles, is just as good. The fact that the
characters aren’t properly filled out, usually a shortcoming of Cornwell’s novels, is a
benefit here since it leaves room for Keeble to put flesh on their bones. I can sense the
characters in the room with me, just as I can when reading a novel by Charles Dickens.
I didn’t think it was possible to become so absorbed in a talking book, but I was
wrong. I now look forward to going to bed like nothing else, knowing I can lie there in
the dark, with Caroline sleeping beside me, while history comes to life in vivid
Technicolor.
THE BATTLE FOR BRITAIN
MICHAEL HEATH
The Wiki Man

Cross purposes

Rory Sutherland

I was once asked by a previous editor of the Timeshow to increase sales of the paper. I
was slightly more circumspect, but the thrust of my argument was: ‘Don’t bother with all
that news and opinion malarkey — just teach more people how to solve cryptic
crosswords.’
My argument was simple. There are now 40,000 different places where I can obtain
global news and metropolitan opinion, but there is only one Times cryptic crossword.
‘Play your cards right.’ I suggested, ‘and you can be the Bernie Ecclestone of
cruciverbalism.’ Revive crossword-solving as a craze; create apps whereby two people
can co-operate remotely on a single grid; run live competitions. Buy your best crossword
setters Bentleys and make them celebrities… stage fights between them outside
fashionable nightclubs, that kind of thing.
I think everyone who has discovered cryptic crosswords views their newspaper in this
way already — a daily crossword surrounded by superfluous text to glance at when
you’re stuck on 23 across. Moreover, a crossword guarantees a reader 30 minutes of
pleasure from purchasing a newspaper. In terms of the fashionable metric CpEH, or ‘cost
per entertainment hour’, the crosswords and puzzles section delivers inordinately more
value to the reader than the surrounding pabulum. The only problem is not enough
people know this.
My grandmother taught me how to do crosswords. Back in the 1970s it was very
difficult to teach yourself — not least because you had to wait a day for the solution to be
published, and this came with no explanation. Now it is better. You can Google the clue,
if you are desperate. And there are blogs, which not only provide instant answers but
explain the workings out.
The same technology which helps to solve cryptics does add slightly to the difficulty.
Being rich in acronyms, a solver now needs to know RAM, ROM, ALT, DEL, ESC,
APP and a host of other TLAs (I’ve even encountered CPU hidden backwards within
the word ‘cupcake’). This imposes an extra burden on the solver, who is assumed to be a
colonial-era, high-church Anglican cricketing bishop who enjoyed a raffish youth in the
1920s (‘Rhino’ for money, SA for sex appeal) before developing a late-onset interest in
computing at the age of 125. I’m lucky in having a vicar as a wife. Often I have to shout
‘Churchy thing, X letters’ across the house for my wife to reply CHASUBLE, NONES
or ALB. She also helped me out when the NONCES in the word ANNOUNCES was
clued by ‘Catholic’s, perhaps…’ [Article Catholic’s perhaps written about United States
(9)]. ‘Even in the light of the Boston scandal, that seems a bit harsh,’ I suggested. ‘No,
you idiot, it’s NON-CEs or “not Church of England”.’
But as well as selling papers, I do believe cryptic-crossword solving is good for the
mind. The comedian Dave Gorman, himself a setter, likens it to comedy. I agree. It is an
exercise in seeing beyond the obvious. The beauty of a great crossword clue is that it is
obvious only in retrospect. But then all the best ideas are like that. The genius of ‘First
dose first’, say. Or the superb campaign TOTS (Turn On The Subtitles) which observed
that you can hugely improve child literacy by displaying subtitles by default on children’s
TV.
It’s good to encourage this mode of thinking. When I met the late Colin Dexter at a
party, I explained how my grandmother, who spent much of her life in Tredegar, taught
me the knack. ‘It’s one of my favourite towns,’ he replied without a pause. ‘It’s the
birthplace of Aneurin Bevan, but also an anagram of A Great Red. Perfect for an &lit
clue.’
DEAR MARY

Your problems solved

Q. I hesitate to bring you this problem, but I suspect it is not that

uncommon. Early in our very successful marriage we privately took photographs of
each other which neither of us would like our children, or indeed anyone else, to see.
They were intended for our old age and now that has arrived we take the greatest
pleasure in them; indeed they did much to enliven our most recent Christmas spent
on our own. Those of my wife I find quite enchanting: she was extremely attractive in
her youth and remains very good-looking to this day. It would be such a shame to
destroy them prematurely but at some stage we will surely have to deprive ourselves.
Or is there a solution you can suggest, Mary?
— R., Watlington

A. No child wants to dwell on the idea that their parents might have had sex lives.
Great-grandchildren, however, are fascinated to see vintage physiques, particularly if
their ancestors were good physical specimens. So, as long as they are not
pornographic, keep them in an archive to be opened in 2050.

Q. There are just the two of us in the house and my husband has developed a
maddening habit of talking at the same time as me. Sometimes he will be sitting in
total silence but, as soon as I begin to speak, he begins almost simultaneously. I do
occasionally need to convey information to him so this is frustrating. He was never
like this before lockdown and I suppose it’s because I am the only person he sees.
Mary, how can I stop him doing this?
— M.F., Stoke by Nayland

A. Record said information as a voice note on your own iPhone. Bring the iPhone to
your husband, press play and leave the room while he listens to it. Return in order to
listen to his response. He will find this maddening but it will teach him to wait his turn
while you are speaking.

Q. A friend has set up an online shop selling objects she has hand-painted. I want to
encourage her so I bought something which was just on the cusp of what I could
afford. However when I reached the checkout I saw that with VAT (which had not
been mentioned before) and a hefty delivery charge added, I would be spending
roughly half as much again. Since it is a one-person operation, I knew she would have
seen my name and address being registered for an account so I had to go ahead. I felt
a bit swindled and know others in our friendship group have had the same reaction.
But our friend is very touchy and I don’t know how to tell her. What should I do?
— Name and address withheld

A. Ask another friend, unknown to the online shopkeeper, to set up an account and
then fill her trolley. When she comes to the checkout she should cancel the order and
write to ‘customer services’ to explain her decision.
Drink

We’ll always have Paris

Bruce Anderson

Some friends claim to be making marks on the wall to count the days until liberation.
Ah, the forgotten delights of restaurants and foreign travel. In one long nostalgic phone
call, we kept present discontents at bay by discussing Paris. Although I have partaken of
three-rosette meals in the capital of gastronomy and was never disappointed, a different
experience came to mind. This restaurant has never received Michelin’s highest accolade,
not that it would care. It believes itself entitled to at least four rosettes.
Its name is Chez l’Ami Louis, in the Troisième, not far from the Marais. I was
introduced to it by Rémy and Mathilde, a couple who knew their Paris. The husband
could explain every nuance in Proust and the wife was not far behind. At a glance, they
would vet a new acquaintance’s claim to social standing, delicately and ruthlessly. Only
in a republic could snobbery become such an art form.
The Ami Louis clientele looked grand enough to me. This was in the early 1980s and
old Antoine Magnin was still in charge; he had won the Légion d’Honneur for his
chicken. Several of his male customers were sporting their boutonnières. As for the
ladies, haute couture danced a gavotte with haute cuisine. But the high style was
sometimes deceptive. ‘See that girl,’ Rémy said, discreetly pointing to the most elegant
female in the room. ‘Shot her first husband. The lawyer who got her off promptly
doubled his fees — and what do you make of her?’ He had picked out a splendidly self-
assured creature, who looked like a walking definition of refinement. ‘Madame Claude’s
favourite girl until that Marquis took her home.’ Her fellow diner looked much less
distinguished. (The Madame in question presided over the haut monde’s favourite
bordello.)
 ‘I daren’t let Rémy come here on his own,’ proclaimed Mathilde. ‘He’d end up having
a duel.’ Alas, the couple are no more, but only because of natural causes, if you can
describe nearly seven decades of serious eating as natural. But they lived until their late
eighties, which is encouraging.
As for the food, my friends counselled simplicity, and we decided to share our main
dishes. Before that, escargots were followed by foie gras: both as good as possible. Then,
roast chicken, in honour of Antoine’s decoration, along with a navarin of lamb and, I
think, a blanquette de veau. This was not only classic French bourgeois cooking: it was
the Platonic ideal of French cookery. The chicken was fully worthy of any honours list. I
do not know whether it was the kitchen or the quality of the bird, but I can still taste it.
To follow, a splendid cheeseboard and then a tarte Tatin.
To drink, we started with house champagne and then sundry more-than-adequate
whites, before moving to a couple of bottles of Beychevelle. The aim was to compare
1959, a great year, with 1964, a good but under–rated vintage. I cannot remember our
verdict. Rémy then insisted that with the tarte, we had a serious sauternes and chose a
’67 Rieussec: superb year, wine just about ready. Time for a proper drink, Rémy
declared. That turned out to be an 1893 Armagnac, which was still in prime condition.
The scent filled the dining-room.
By the end, I was in a state of glorious repletion. In the French language, ‘gourmet’
slips easily into ‘gourmand’. So did we. At the outset, Rémy had declared that he was the
host; he had just won a big contract from the government. I was never quite clear what
he did, apart from winning contracts. But scepticism would have been ungracious. Given
the likely size of the bill, I just hoped that it was a huge contract. I have been back to
Ami Louis since, but not for far too long. Let us hope that 17 May turns out to be
gastronomy’s version of 6 June.
”
MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Formica

If I ever again accompany my husband to a medical conference in

Spain, and want to tell my hosts that I am embarrassed (as he often makes me), I
should not say embarazada, for that word means ‘pregnant’, which at my age would
be unusual. Such false friends can add to the gaiety of foreign travel.
Among false friends, I must confess to assuming, all my adult life, that Formica, the
kitchen laminate, had something to do with the ant, formica in Latin. It came as a
shock last week to discover that the inventors in 1913 simply meant Formica as a
substitute ‘for mica’.
Mica was an electrical insulator — the original purpose of Formica. In my defence, it
is true that Formica, fabric coated with resin, did use bakelite as a resin. Bakelite
(named after the Belgian-born American L.H. Baekeland) had formaldehyde as a
constituent part, and the first part of formaldehyde does indeed relate to ants, which
produce formic acid.
Another mystery to me was the connection with formica of the Spanish word for
‘concrete’, hormigón. There is a law that Spanish words such as hacer, hijo or hoja
derive from Latin words beginning with f (facere, filius, folium). The Spanish for ‘ant’
is hormiga, from Latin formica. But what had that to do with hormigón?
The favoured theory of etymologists (not entomologists) is that hormigón, ‘concrete’,
derives from a pudding or sweet called hormigos, made with breadcrumbs and
walnuts or almonds with honey. I can see that it might resemble concrete, but the
connection with hormigas, ‘ants’, is less clear. Did the bits of nut seem like ants?
A parenthesis here is that a more well-known dish in Spain is called migas,
‘breadcrumbs’, made indeed with breadcrumbs, oil, garlic of course and bits of
chorizo and bacon. (Mexican migas are different.) The origin of the word miga is
apparently Latin mica, presumably from those specks of mica you can see in granite.
For hormigón, ‘concrete’, a rival etymology posits a late Latin word formicare, ‘to
mould’ or ‘form’, as one would to concrete. But there is no record of any such word.
So the ants have it, I feel, for the concrete, leaving the breadcrumbs to the Formica
surface.
Dot Wordsworth