The Spectator - 24 08 2019 PDF

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Brace for no deal Andrew Marr The godfathers of reggae Colin Grant My jailhouse diet Taki
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The new monarchy

Can the royal family survive its makeover?
Jan Moir u William Shawcross u Charles Moore
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See the film at polroger.co.uk

established 1828
Boris goes to Berlin

T
here were many Brexiteers who were project more than an economic one. It has Tory rebels in parliament. It will wait to see
urging Boris Johnson to travel to responded with unity and discipline to the if Dominic Grieve and his band of rebels can
Washington before he went anywhere Brexit talks. Its main objective is not so defeat Boris, in the same way that the Greek
else, to underline that Britain’s most impor- much to strike a good deal with the UK as parliament defeated Varoufakis.
tant relationship is with the United States. to show the world that the EU is undaunted The plan might work. Jeremy Corbyn may
And if the EU felt nervous seeing the UK and united. throw in his lot with the anti-Brexit Tories,
cosy up to America, so much the better. But Angela Merkel is a natural friend of joined by the SNP and the Liberal Demo-
the Prime Minister’s first visit was to Berlin, Britain, and made sure (for example) that crats. But these groups have been at each
and then to Paris, to see if a Brexit deal can the latest extension to Britain’s EU member- other’s throats all summer, and have so far
be negotiated and the needless disruption of ship did not come with any strings attached. been unable to agree on anything. Even John
a no-deal exit avoided. It seems, at present, a She is also realistic about the nature of the Bercow hasn’t been able to explain exactly
rather long shot. EU and its pride. The best way for Boris how parliament could block a no-deal Brexit.
Theresa May famously said little in one- Johnson to get a Brexit deal is to show (or With ten weeks to go, no one has been able to
to-one meetings with European leaders. fake) some humility. He would have to ditch prove that any parliamentary tool exists that
Boris Johnson can be a lot more forthright, could derail Brexit by 31 October.
and should speak with candour about his The best way for Boris Johnson Boris Johnson has been trying to make
own lack of room for manoeuvre. Even if to get a Brexit deal is to show this point to his French and German counter-
he had been persuaded about the merits of (or fake) some humility parts this week. Even if he is brought down
the EU’s last offer (which, after all, he voted by a vote of confidence, he could delay a
for in the end), it was rejected three times by a demand or two, and visibly make conces- general election until after Brexit. That may
parliament, and by historic margins. This is sions. The EU is then more likely to encour- be an outrageous affront to many, but if he
why a new deal is needed. age Dublin to do the same. holds an election before we leave then the
On one level, it seems strange — almost German diplomats have been quietly urg- Brexit party will still be at large; the Tory
baffling — to think that a no-deal Brexit ing the British to behave in this way. Look at vote would be decimated and the party pos-
could be pushed through simply because pol- Greece in 2015, they argued: Yanis Varoufa- sibly destroyed. No one likes to admit it, but
iticians cannot swallow their pride. Leo Var- kis, the finance minister, played hardball and Nigel Farage has once again changed every-
adkar, in particular, has talked himself into a lost. He even held a referendum, to show that thing. Fear of the Brexit party means the
corner on the Irish backstop: to compromise the Greek public rejected the EU’s bailout Tories cannot risk an election before deliv-
now would be very difficult for him. But if terms. But this had the reverse effect to the ering on their manifesto promise on Brexit.
there were a no-deal Brexit, Ireland would one he desired. The EU held firm, thinking The G7 summit, held in Biarritz this
suffer. The mutual interdependence of our that if it compromised, there would be a lot weekend, is always a bit of an illusion. It is
islands is such that 41 per cent of Ireland’s more of these referendums and it would end not a place where big decisions are made,
exports to the EU go through Britain: we up getting pushed about by voters. So Varou- because democratic leaders cannot, between
have a common interest in minimising that fakis quit and the Greek parliament pushed them, collude on any serious form of action.
disruption and in finding a compromise that through the EU bailout. Varoufakis’s ref- Everyone is hemmed in by what their politi-
puts people first and political games second. erendum was a powerful gesture, a cri de cians and electorates will allow. This is true
The Brexiteers were naive to think such coeur. But as a negotiating strategy, it failed. with regards to Britain leaving the EU: Boris
practical concerns would govern these nego- The Boris gambit is similar: to demand a Johnson cannot delay or dilute Brexit and
tiations. Look at German carmakers, ran the ‘total backstop-ectomy’ and say that parlia- expect his party to survive the next election.
argument, look at that Dutch report saying a ment will settle for nothing less. In Brussels, If the EU is serious about refusing to com-
no-deal Brexit would mean a £30 billion hit this will be seen as a Greek-style attempt promise on the backstop, then the only dis-
to the economy of the Netherlands. Surely to pressure the EU. It will probably again cussion to be had is how best to deal with a
they’ll sign a deal! But the EU is a political resist such pressure and hope to ally with no-deal Brexit.
the spectator | 24 august 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk 3
Into the mouths

of babes, p18
Who is he? p53
Voguish causes, p10
THE WEEK BOOKS & ARTS

3 Leading article 10 By royal disappointment BOOKS
6 Portrait of the Week The younger generation’s behaviour 26 Nicholas Shakespeare
is undermining the Crown Cold Warriors, by Duncan White
7 Diary Gearing up for a very Jan Moir
political autumn 28 David Eimer
Andrew Marr 11 The light above politics First, They Erased our Name,
We need the monarchy more than ever by Habiburahman
8 Politics It’s time to talk about no deal William Shawcross
Katy Balls 29 Prue Leith
12 War on the home front A Half-Baked Idea,
9 The Spectator’s Notes Would your living room pass the by Olivia Potts
The royals should embody virtue, cultural-appropriation test?
not signal it Richard Francis
Laura Freeman Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune,
Charles Moore
14 The Icelandic solution by Rory Muir
13 Rod Liddle Anything can be The UK should become a temporary
blamed on a ‘condition’ 30 Carolyne Larrington
member of the EEA Hollow Places,
14 Ancient and modern David Gunnlaugsson by Christopher Hadley
Boris’s Sparta moment 16 Black and blue 31 Derek Turner
17 James Delingpole When did Police deserve greater protection Mudlarking, by Lara Maiklem
English A-level become a science? Rory Geoghegan
Simon Rae
18 Barometer Richards, carbon 18 Daddy, what’s Fanta? ‘One’: a poem
footprints and making the grade My kids are more middle-class than me
Colin Freeman 32 Hugh Thomson
19 Douglas Murray Who’ll be the To the Island of Tides,
next jihadi-jackpot winner? 22 Letter from Kabul by Alistair Moffat
23 Letters Uncomfortable trains, 100 years of Afghan independence
Justin Marozzi 33 Mia Levitin
grouse moors and lessons from history The Man Who Saw Everything,
24 Any other business by Deborah Levy
You can’t let Brexit affect your life
Martin Vander Weyer
James Forsyth is away
Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, Adam Singleton, Bernie, Grizelda, Percival, Nick Newman, Colin Wheeler
www.spectator.co.uk Editorial and advertising The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: letters@spectator.
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Distributor Marketforce, 161 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9AP. Tel. 0203 787 9001. www.marketforce.co.uk Vol 340; no 9965 © The Spectator (1828) Ltd. ISSN 0038-6952
The Spectator is published weekly by The Spectator (1828) Ltd at 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP
Editor: Fraser Nelson
4 the spectator | 24 august 2019 | www.spectator.co.uk

The ideal pet, p39

Culturally inappropriate, p12
Spiritually uplifting, p34
LIFE
ARTS LIFE I was never healthier than
34 Colin Grant 47 High life Taki when I was doing three months
The rebirth of reggae Low life Jeremy Clarke
in Pentonville without booze
36 Exhibitions 48 Real life Melissa Kite or drugs of any kind
Freud and Egypt 49 Wild life Aidan Hartley Taki, p47
Martin Gayford Bridge Susanna Gross
37 Theatre Between 1952 and 1957, a CIA
More from the Fringe AND FINALLY . . . operation launched millions of
Lloyd Evans 42 Notes on… Greenland ten-foot balloons carrying copies
Radio Robert Chote of George Orwell’s Animal Farm,
In Search of Lost Time 50 Chess and dropped them over Poland,
Kate Chisholm Raymond Keene Hungary and Czechoslovakia
38 Music Competition Nicholas Shakespeare, p26
James MacMillan’s Fifth Symphony; Lucy Vickery
Komische Oper Berlin 51 Crossword Doc
Richard Bratby
So much better to embody
52 No sacred cows virtue than to signal it
39 Television Toby Young
The Octopus in my House;
Charles Moore, p9
Battle for Britain
Stath Lets Flats Michael Heath
James Walton
53 Sport Roger Alton
40 Cinema Your problems solved
Pain and Glory Mary Killen
Deborah Ross
54 Food Tanya Gold
Mind your language
Dot Wordsworth
CONTRIBUTORS
David Gunnlaugsson David Eimer writes about Prue Leith is a restaurateur, Carolyne Larrington, Robert Chote is chairman
was Iceland’s youngest prime China and south-east Asia. His writer and television presenter. who reviews a book about of the Office for Budget
minister and now leads the latest book, Savage Dreamland, On p29, she reviews a book historical legends on p30, is a Responsibility and a former
country’s Centre party (which explores history and politics in about food and grief by medieval scholar specialising adviser to the International
opposes future accession to the Burma. On p28, he reviews a Spectator Life’s Vintage Chef, in Old Norse. Her most recent Monetary Fund. He visits
EU). He gives his advice on Rohingya memoir. Olivia Potts. book examines the historical Greenland on p42.
Brexit on p14. influences on Game of Thrones.

Home ‘disproportionately affected by rises in the

price of food and fuel’. Asked by the Times
anchored for 18 days. The Bundesbank
said the likelihood of Germany entering
B oris Johnson, the Prime Minister, wrote

to Donald Tusk, the President of the
European Council, saying: ‘The backstop
if he favoured transferring stamp duty to
sellers, Sajid Javid, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, said: ‘I’m looking at various
a recession was increasing. Jean-Claude
Juncker, the outgoing President of the
European Commission, had emergency
cannot form part of an agreed withdrawal options. I’m a low-tax guy. I want to see surgery to remove his gallbladder and
agreement. That is a fact that we must both simpler taxes.’ Two days later, after most missed the G7 summit in Biarritz.
acknowledge.’ Mr Tusk said that those people had said what a terrible idea it was,
who opposed the Irish backstop ‘in fact
support re-establishing a border. Even if
he said: ‘I wouldn’t support that.’
G ibraltar released an Iranian tanker,
the Grace 1, full of £115 million of
they do not admit it’. Mr Johnson, after an
hour of failing to agree with Leo Varadkar,
the Taoiseach, on the telephone, prepared
A ndrew Harper, a police constable
aged 28, who had been married for
four weeks, died after going to investigate
oil after Iran gave a written commitment
that it would not sail to Syria; Gibraltar
rejected a warrant from a federal court in
for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel a burglary when he was dragged along the Washington for the seizure of the tanker.
of Germany and President Emmanuel road by a vehicle. Police arrested ten men Peter Fonda, best known for directing and
Macron of France. An atmosphere of and boys at a municipal travellers’ site and starring in Easy Rider (1969), died aged 79.
plotting hung over prospects of an election charged a 20-year-old man with murder. The Fusarium fungus, which causes Panama
on a date close to 31 October, when the A company lawyer was stabbed to death disease in the popular Cavendish strain of
United Kingdom is due to leave the with a screwdriver in Newcastle; a 17-year- banana plants, was detected in Colombia,
European Union. Jeremy Corbyn, the old boy was charged with his murder. the first outbreak in Latin America.
Labour leader, said that his party would Moments after the three 375ft cooling
do ‘everything we can’ to prevent Brexit
without a withdrawal agreement. He
envisaged the Conservative government
towers of Didcot A power station were
demolished, an incandescent ball was seen
above a nearby electricity pole and power
C rowds estimated at 1.7 million took
part in an unauthorised march through
Hong Kong in continuing protests against
being defeated in a vote of no confidence was cut off for 49,000 customers. A report Chinese interference. A suicide bomb
and himself heading an administration. by the National Grid into a power cut at a wedding in Kabul killed 63 people.
Kenneth Clarke, the Father of the House, that affected nearly a million people on 9 Jihadists killed 24 soldiers at an army base
who was suggested as a willing potential August blamed the wrong kind of lightning. in Burkina Faso. Jihadist forces withdrew
leader of an emergency government from Khan Sheikhoun, a town in the
(Labour MP Harriet Harman, the Mother
of the House, was also suggested) said that
Abroad last rebel-held Syrian province of Idlib.
Turkey told unregistered migrants to leave
Mr Corbyn was ‘quite unsuitable to lead a
government of national unity’. G iuseppe Conte said he was resigning
as Prime Minister of Italy after
denouncing his coalition partner Matteo
Istanbul. British citizenship was taken away
from Jack Letts, who had gone to Syria
aged 18 in 2014 and joined Isis; Canada, of
N o. 10 sources blamed a hostile former

minister for leaking a document
outlining preparations under Operation
Salvini for creating a new political crisis
out of ‘personal and party interests’. Italy
ordered the seizure of a Spanish rescue
which Mr Letts remains a citizen, said it was
‘disappointed’ at Britain’s action. President
Donald Trump of the United States said
Yellowhammer for dealing with a no-deal ship and the evacuation of more than he was interested in buying Greenland; he
Brexit on 31 October: some veg would be 100 migrants on board to the island of cancelled a state visit to Denmark when it
in short supply, and ‘the poor’ would be Lampedusa off which the vessel had been dismissed the idea. CSH
Andrew Marr
I am up on the far north-west coast

of Scotland, where the weather is
changing every five minutes under
Scotland) are broken by no deal.
Unionists are despairing. After a no deal,
who would lead the ‘stay’ campaign?
vast skies and huge seascapes. Go to the There is even talk of a new party. For
beach and look left, and it’s a sparkling Scotland, being outside both the EU
Mediterranean scene, bright white sand and the British union seems a very tough
and opalescent turquoise water, what you economic proposition. But there’s an
might call Rossini weather. Swivel your even bigger issue. Suppose the Scottish
gaze right, and vast dark clouds tower up, government calls a new referendum this
obliterating mountain ranges — Bruckner force Johnson to ask Brussels for a further autumn, and Johnson’s administration
weather. Me? Like Isabel Hardman, of delay, to give time for a referendum. That sticks by its refusal to give the vote legal
this parish, I just walk straight into the sea would be unbearably humiliating for him… cover? What then? Many unionists
and swim. The choppy water is certainly without the alternative route of an election. would not campaign, on the basis that
cold but the whole experience is elating, That, I suspect, is his nightmare. this was an illegal referendum. But if,
and good for clearing the head. driven by Brexit, there was a really big
W hich is, of course, what we need

this summer. August politics is
B ut here in Scotland, people are talking
about that other referendum, the
second independence one Nicola Sturgeon
independence vote, wouldn’t Britain be
close to a Spanish-Catalan stand-off? If
independence then happened, it would
changing faster than the August skies, keeps promising. Many here argue that the be after an angry, cantankerous period
and this autumn looks set to be the underlying terms of the previous Scottish — marches, civil disobedience (during
most politically dramatic in my lifetime. settlement (that Tory England does not which the future of Ireland would also
(I’ve just turned 60.) Before Wester impose itself too heavily on devolved be being debated). Borders really might
Ross, we were at the Edinburgh festival. go up. I get the strong sense of living
I’ve never known so many people through history.
talking so vehemently about politics
— conversations everywhere about
governments of national unity, Dominic
Cummings, Article 50, you name it. For
I n the circumstances, there is a
special journalists’ duty to keep a
sense of proportion and balance. I’ve
what it’s worth, for more than a year I been reading a book about how other
have been expecting a no-deal Brexit. I countries can learn from Germany’s
still do. That’s because the government struggle to confront its Nazi past. The
has formidable powers, and I can’t see author, Susan Neiman, quotes an essay
any deal to be done in the remaining by the philosopher William James on
time that Boris Johnson can strike which COFFEE HOUSE the Boston statue commemorating the
doesn’t finish him. Of course, there might black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts
be a no-confidence vote in the Commons SHOTS Regiment, who fought in the Civil War.
within a few weeks. Curiously, he may He argues that the deadliest enemies of
well find himself in a stronger position Writers worth listening to nations always dwell within their borders.
if such a vote goes against him. How so? But, he says: ‘The nation blest above all
Because if he loses, then under the law Daily political analysis from James nations is she in whom the civic genius
he can call a general election for after of the people does the saving day by day,
Forsyth, Katy Balls, Fraser Nelson
Brexit day. With Britain out, the threat of by acts without external picturesqueness;
the Brexit party is much less. Yes, there and more. Your must-have by speaking, writing, voting reasonably;
may be post-no-deal chaos, not the ideal Westminster briefing by smiting corruption swiftly; by good
backdrop for an election campaign; but temper between parties.’
the no-dealers are united while, almost
inevitably, the Remainers will be badly
split. Electorally, it’s his best bet. But
if he sees off a vote of no confidence,
Exceptional insights from T hat strikes me as an excellent motto
for autumn 2019. I’m delighted that
my show will be back at the beginning of
intelligent and well-informed
according to the current law it’s then September at its old time of 9 a.m. I had
commentators. If only politicians
harder for him to call an election on been worried that by mid-morning, too
a date that suits him. With an election were this level-headed… many people would be off walking the
off the agenda, the Commons alliance PJKM76, Apple Podcasts dog, visiting children or grandchildren,
against no deal will pivot towards a or at church. I can’t promise who will
further referendum. I don’t expect a VISIT: turn up. I can promise due seriousness
government of national unity to happen. spectator.co.uk/shots for serious times, and courtesy in angry
But I do think MPs may find a way to times. Join me, please.

POLITICS|KATY BALLS
It’s time to talk about no deal
T
he main reason Conservative MPs tie Johnson’s hands? While no-deal prepa- To try to assuage such fears, the government
prefer Boris Johnson’s government rations have been ramped up under John- will soon embark on a multi-million-pound
to Theresa May’s is because of its son, we don’t hear very much about what it PR blitz to raise public awareness over
clarity of message. The government now has would mean in reality. measures they ought to take in preparation
direction and purpose. Briefings from Tory Are the stories — some of which lie in for no deal. Time has been spent attempt-
HQ, delivered even to those MPs who have government analysis — a case of Project ing to prepare the government website for
managed to get away on holiday, have gone Fear 2.0? Or are they things that ought to be extra traffic, so it doesn’t crash (which would
from intermittent and inconsistent to daily taken seriously — and, if necessary, a price not be an encouraging sign). Michael Gove
and succinct. The message is simple: Brex- to be paid in pursuit of a project that mil- is expected to give weekly no-deal updates
it will be delivered by 31 October, crime is lions have steeled themselves for? Depend- to the Commons when it returns, on the
being tackled and the NHS properly fund- ing on who in government you speak to, you grounds that if planning is kept hidden, peo-
ed. We can expect to hear these messages, get a different answer. In light of the leak, ple will expect the worst.
or variants thereof, for the next few months. Johnson himself would only go as far as to The arrival of Sajid Javid in No. 11 has
But there is one area where the gov- say ‘there may well be bumps in the road’. changed how the Treasury treats no deal.
ernment seems less sure of itself: what will ‘There is still no central message,’ says Under Philip Hammond, government
happen in the event of no deal? The Prime a government source. ‘Some say it will be a departmental bids for funds were subject-
Minister has long been reluctant to enter- walk in the park. Others that no deal is bad, ed to slow scrutiny, which ministers saw
tain the possibility as a likely outcome, after as obstructionism. Now, cash bids are wel-
having said the odds on it happening are Even the most optimistic souls in comed, with Treasury aides offering to do
‘a million to one’. He is a firm believer in government are beginning to regard what they can to speed things up. Cum-
the preparation paradox: by preparing for mings told aides last month that he expect-
no deal, you avoid it. He has pitched himself no deal as the most likely outcome ed a Budget in early October, but a decision
as an optimistic leader, decrying the naysay- has yet to be made on whether to publish
ers as doomsters and gloomsters. But with but can be mitigated.’ A member of govern- a no-deal Budget in advance. Budgets need
Brussels this week rejecting Johnson’s call ment adds: ‘Do or die is easy to sell to voters. to be approved by MPs: a risky move for a
to ditch the backstop and renegotiate, even It’s the bit after that worries me.’ government with a working majority of one.
the most optimistic souls in government The Prime Minister’s most senior aide, The political divisions that dogged May’s
are beginning to regard a no-deal Brexit as Dominic Cummings, is regarded by min- premiership have not completely vanished
the most likely outcome. So it’s time to talk isters as being one of the most gung-ho now Johnson is in No. 10. The coalition
about it. But how to do so without scaring about no deal. His line is to do Brexit by that put him there consisted of reformed
voters, or saying anything that might come ‘any means necessary’. And while Johnson Remainers hopeful of a deal to bring the
back to haunt them? chose his government ministers in part for Brexit drama to an end, and arch-Brexiteers
A taste of the challenge ahead arrived their willingness to go through with no deal, — some of whom now regard no deal as an
last weekend with a leak of Operation Yel- some worry that playing down warnings optimal outcome. Both Steve Baker and
lowhammer. The official government docu- could come back to haunt them. ‘Let’s face Mark Francois have already made clear that
ment set out various scenarios for a no-deal it: in a no-deal scenario, we will be blamed even if the backstop is ditched entirely, they
Brexit: food, medicine and fuel shortages for everything that goes wrong — even if it’s wouldn’t support the original Brexit deal.
and the return of a hard border in Ireland. unrelated,’ says one Tory MP. Some of the MPs in the Brexiteer European
In response, Downing Street attempted to Some are concerned that the effect of Research Group have privately encouraged
play down the leak, claiming it was an old Johnson’s optimism could be to raise expec- the Brexit party to pitch candidates against
document from the previous regime which tations to the point that even light disruption the Tories in any imminent election to keep
was based on ‘worst case scenarios’. The fin- in the event of no deal results in a backlash. the pressure up.
ger of blame was pointed at an ex-minister The message from Boris Johnson is to
working against no deal. stay calm, keep smiling, and keep plan-
But while Operation Yellowhammer ning: the more you prepare for a no-deal
began under May, Johnson and his team Brexit the more likely the EU is to offer a
cannot dismiss the various disaster scenarios deal. But No. 10 itself has some hard deci-
it details as impossible. No one can know for sions to make. Would no deal be a real prob-
certain what will happen in a no-deal Brexit. lem? Would it be a painful but necessary
There are too many variables: it is impossi- experience, a step towards a brighter Brexit
ble to predict. destiny for the country? Or is this all a giant
The recent messages from No. 10 about bluff, to force the hand of Brussels? There
no deal have been about who gets the isn’t much time left to decide.
blame: Brussels, for refusing to renegotiate?
MPs who are opposed to no deal, who have SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RADIO
been undermining the government’s posi- Katy Balls, Poppy Trowbridge and Stewart
tion in the Brexit negotiations by plotting to Jackson on No. 10’s no-deal narrative.
Charles Moore
O ne should not be censorious if the

Duke and Duchess of Sussex fly
in private jets to their holidays, though
particularly the less educated ones. MPs
who had denigrated the concept of the
sovereignty of parliament since at least
one cannot help laughing when they 1972 suddenly invoked it against their
combine this with exhortations to save own people in a way they were never
the planet. There is, sadly, no royal yacht prepared to do against the European
nowadays (a new one would be a good Union. Just now, I am reading Julian
make-work scheme post-Brexit), and Jackson’s fascinating biography of de
we are not a civilised enough country Gaulle (A Certain Idea of France). When
to leave them and their baby alone if trying to rally recruits to his Free French,
they were to travel on public transport. de Gaulle was advised that he should try
But they are making two mistakes. to uphold the parliament of the Third
The first is to go somewhere hot, sunny Although he came from a declaredly Republic. He did not want to because,
and celebrity-filled for their break. socialist view, he understood what it is — to as he put it, ‘Parliament abdicated’. In
One of the secrets of the Queen’s use the modern Goodhart distinction — to his view, it had given in to an exterior
popularity is that she has almost be a person from somewhere rather than power, at the expense of the people it
never been seen sunbathing with the a person from anywhere. In his famous was supposed to represent. Our situation
rich and famous. The worm of public wartime book The Lion and The Unicorn today is not nearly as bad as that, but if
envy never stirs when she spends her (its very title is pleasing for Brexiteers the majority of MPs do in the end block
summers in Scotland. Her Balmorality is since Remainers are unremittingly Brexit, they will indeed have abdicated
impregnable. The Sussexes’ second error unpleasant about unicorns), Orwell tries their role as representatives, upon which
is to take moral stands on issues which to enter into the patriotism both as felt their legitimacy rests.
make ordinary people feel inferior. It is by the upper and military classes and by
increasingly well understood by voters
that endless lecturing about racism,
sexism, diet and the environment is the
the working classes. On the whole, he
compares such patriotism favourably with
the attitudes of the left-wing intellectuals
T here is, of course, another reason
why, to understand what is going on,
we need to recall the wartime example:
main modern means by which elites among whom he moves. ‘The insularity of the Churchill story is in Boris’s head
disdain the commonalty. The British the English, their refusal to take foreigners all the time. And one can be confident
royal family is popular in part because, seriously,’ he writes, ‘is a folly that has to be that, just like Churchill, he is already
although — obviously — grand, its paid for very heavily from time to time. But thinking about to turn his story into a
members do not share the attitudes of it plays its part in the English mystique, and bestselling memoir when he leaves office.
super-educated, globalised people. Most the intellectuals who have tried to break it
of them are not graduates; no monarch
since the 17th century has shown an
inclination to read serious books. Until
down have generally done more harm than
good. At bottom it is the same quality in
the English character that repels the tourist
I t is reported that the average British
worker now spends 26 working days
in meetings each year, up from 23 last
recently, Prince Harry’s magical gift was and keeps out the invader.’ year. I don’t understand the sudden
just to be obviously warm-hearted and jump — surely not no-deal planning
open to all. He imperils this if he starts
expressing views. So much better to
embody virtue than to signal it.
T hat was 1941. Orwell began the book
with the words ‘As I write, highly
civilised human beings are flying overhead,
— but the phenomenon is real enough.
When Alexander Chancellor edited
this paper, he insisted on having no
trying to kill me.’ It is dangerous to regular meetings at all: he felt a meeting
I n the London Review of Books this

month, James Meek wrote a long
article about Jacob Rees-Mogg and his
apply the feelings of the war to now, and
I understand why some Remainers see
this as offensive to their modern fellow
should be held only for a specific
reason, such as lunch. His rule had its
disadvantages, such as not knowing what
‘curious duality’ in being both a high Europeans. But the comparison became colleagues were doing, but it did mean
Catholic, fogey Brexiteer and a founder pertinent once referendum voters had we learnt to decide things ourselves.
of Somerset Capital Management, made up their mind in 2016. Until then, When I left the editorship of the
which the author sees as globalist and it was fair — indeed it was intended by Daily Telegraph in 2003 and switched
ruthless. The piece is elegantly done, but the process — that each side should argue to writing (from home), at first I greatly
entirely sneery. It makes not the slightest its case as hard as possible. Once the missed meetings. I gradually realised
attempt to enter into the Mogg’s (or any result was in, however, arguing against that what I was missing was their
Brexiteer’s) mind with any sympathy. it became a different sort of thing — an congenial pointlessness. Once it was
I was thinking about this because the attempt to deny what the voters had, by just me and the computer, I experienced
LRB’s publicity emphasised that Meek the rules, decided. That is when too many the loneliness of the long-distance
is an Orwell Prize winner. How we Remainers embarked on a character writer and worked much harder than
need an Orwell on the subject of Brexit. assassination of their fellow countrymen, when I had been editor.

By royal disappointment
The younger generation’s behaviour is undermining the Crown
JAN MOIR
A
ugust on Royal Deeside. Soft haps his unhealthy interest in young
rain falls without cease on girls. The Duke has strenuously denied
the Caledonian pine forests, it having sex with a 17-year-old called
soaks into the ancient peatlands and Virginia Roberts Giuffre — the issue
it darkens the pelts of the red deer at the heart of the scandal — and this
chewing heather out on the moor. week pronounced himself ‘appalled’ at
Behold the beauty and the glory of the the sex abuse claims against his former
Scottish land and skies, from deep inside friend. There is nothing to suggest he is
a luxurious estate where the troubles of not speaking the truth. But two weeks
the world melt into this velvety panora- before Christmas in 2010, the Duke was
ma. Certainly, one has always found this photographed at the door of Epstein’s
to be the case. One has taken peace- mansion in New York. By this time, the
ful refuge here every summer since financier had pleaded guilty to solicit-
one was one. However, one’s tranquillity is selves like the entitled spawn of a dodgy ing prostitution from girls as young as 14
being tested this year, most sorely. Eurotrash autocrat, perhaps she must be and had served just over a year in jail. As
Recent newspaper headlines and strident asking herself: is any of this my fault? the images emerged in the media over the
television bulletins will have made uncom- Taken individually, these inglori- weekend, I imagine the Queen pouring a
fortable reading and viewing for the Queen ous instances on the York-Sussex-Tindall steadying sherry and asking herself: what in
during her annual holiday at Balmoral. axis would be bad enough. Together they the name of snickerdoodles was that idiot
Fresh revelations about the Duke of York’s form a storm front of folly and greed; a Andrew doing there?
friendship with the late Jeffrey Epstein are mutual lack of judgment that adds up to a Should I pause to note that Epstein also
causing further embarrassment in a snow- bad business for the Queen to unpack at a paid off some personal debts of Andrew’s
balling scandal that threatens to engulf her time in her life when she should be putting former wife, the Duchess of York, which
beleaguered second son. Eco-warriors the her feet up and reflecting upon a blameless she later admitted was ‘a gigantic error
Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been life of unstinting duty. of judgment’? I think I shall. At least the
criticised for taking four private jet flights in Look at her! A woman and a monarch Duchess’s ever-readiness — now mirrored
11 days, two of them paid for by Elton John. who has always chosen decent but unfash- by Zara Tindall’s newfound enthusiasm —
Yet they see no hypocrisy in their elitist, ionable causes and charities to champion; to be the financial beneficiary of random
planet-destroying travel plans. businessmen has a positive side. It shows a
Meanwhile it has been revealed that a The Queen has never ridden a willingness by these inspiring women not
Hong Kong businessman has being paying bandwagon nor embraced a to take money from the public purse. So
fistfuls of dollars to willing royals for years. voguish cause for chic credibility perhaps they are to be commended, not
Dr Jonny Hon gives a £100,000 stipend to condemned after all?
Zara Tindall to advise him on horse racing a stalwart figurehead who has never ridden Well, almost. It would be more admira-
matters (‘it’s over there, the one with four a bandwagon nor embraced a voguish cause ble still if they chose a quieter and more fru-
legs’) and has given almost £300,000 to the just to harvest some chic credibility with gal existence on the wooden bench of royal
Duchess of York for ‘marketing and promo- the fast set. life, like many of the more minor Windsors,
tion’ and being a non-executive director of In 67 years on the throne the Queen has instead of insisting upon the cushioning
his film company (‘pass me the paperclips’). managed to avoid the greasy clutches of con- balm of the overstuffed sofa at all times.
In return he gets lots of lovely handshaking men and the siren call of celebrity, always This brings us to the Duke and Duch-
access to the Windsors — and he certainly following her own wise counsel instead. Yet ess of Sussex, whose every move seems
seems pleased with his deal. some of the younger members just will not fraught with controversy and hullabaloo.
Inside Balmoral Castle, in the canyons heed her gold standards of propriety, wheth- Despite their environmental campaigning
of my mind, a 93-year-old woman switches er through wilful arrogance or the inability and their laughable pledge not to have more
on both bars of the electric fire in her sit- to resist the largesse of empty men with deep than two children for the sake of the plan-
ting room and shivers as she buttons up the pockets who yearn for prestige by proxy. et, the couple have made it painfully clear
cardigan of her twinset. For HM the Queen The Duke of York allowed himself to be that their comfort, their privacy and their
is feeling a distinct chill in the air that has caught in a sad-sack trap, becoming a bauble ease of passage are not going to be compro-
nothing to do with the weather; a change in in the crown of an evil billionaire who had mised for any cause, no matter how green
the climate that has little to do with green- everything but respect. For Epstein, having a or noble. Meanwhile any criticism of their
house gases. As several of her children and pet British royal on the scene gave a veneer behaviour is increasingly seen, especially
grandchildren continue to disport them- of decorum to his lifestyle — and even per- by their celebrity pals, as bullying. Sir Elton
John bankrolled the Sussexes’ controversial

flights plus their holiday at his villa in the
south of France, and his subsequent fren-
zied tweets wailed about the ‘relentless and
The light above politics
untrue assassinations on their character’ and We need the monarchy more than ever
even invoked the fate of Princess Diana. Up
in Balmoral, I imagine the Queen pressing
a moss-scented pomander to her reddening WILLIAM SHAWCROSS
cheek. This isn’t helping, she whispers into
the silent gloaming.
T he problem is that Harry and Meghan

can’t have it both ways, and everyone
can see that except them. Their refusal to
choose between a taxpayer-funded life and
a private life is at the root of all the current
tensions and the endless disparaging head-
O ne part of our unwritten
constitution has been functioning
perfectly during the Brexit upheaval:
monotony) should reflect on the fact
that it has long been the envy of the
democratic world. With good reason.
lines. The former life choice has behaviour- the monarchy. Unhappy behaviour The French philosopher Simone Weil
al constraints embodied by the Queen, while by some younger royals reminds us wrote during the war that Britain was
the latter offers the freedom they so crave; how jealously the institution must be exceptional among European powers
where they could jet anywhere on Air Cavi- protected. It will also be essential to in maintaining ‘a centuries-long
ar, refuse to name Archie’s godparents, spend guard the monarchy’s impartial ‘light tradition of liberty’. This was, she
the whole summer on a yacht with Beyon- above politics’ (Roger Scruton’s happy understood, guaranteed by the
cé and Jay Z and guest edit glossy publica- phrase) with more care than ever in the seemingly least powerful part of the
tions such as Vogue, while no one would bat inevitable Brexit arguments of the next constitution, the monarch.
an eye. Instead they insist upon this queasy few months. Snobs and intellectuals may cavil,
middle ground, where they happily accept Since Elizabeth II came to the but Andrew Marr, who followed
a £2.4 million taxpayer-funded revamp of throne in 1952, aged only 25, she has the Queen during her Diamond
provided a comforting, non-political Jubilee celebrations, marvelled at
These inglorious instances on presence throughout immense and her extraordinary workload and her
the York-Sussex-Tindall axis form often unsettling change in this country.
There is no way in which a succession Elizabeth II has provided a
a storm front of folly and greed
of republican presidents (probably comforting, non-political presence
Frogmore Cottage while living like A-list politicians kicked upstairs) could have throughout immense change
stars resentful of our good-natured interest done the same. Imagine Presidents
in their wellbeing and their baby. Wilson, Major or Blair on the balcony of ‘mighty force field’: ‘I have watched
‘We had a garden party to celebrate Buckingham Palace. Nor can I. her talk to scaffolders, cooks, railways
Harry and Meghan’s wedding,’ a Daily Mail Or imagine a president today who workers, people running charity shops,
reader wrote to me recently. ‘Now I wouldn’t was known to have strong views one army wives — many of the people
go to the end of the street to see them.’ And way or another on Brexit. It would be virtually ignored by the media and the
it is clear that many feel the same way. Never intolerable. The Queen’s reign is by no metropolitan elite.’ He rightly praised
in the course of royal history has so much means over, but she became our longest- her as ‘a profoundly reassuring part of
public goodwill been squandered so quick- reigning monarch in 2015 when she national life’. She learned that from her
ly and so thoughtlessly, amid the suspicion overtook her great-great-grandmother father, George VI, a vital reassuring
that H&M are just not that interested in the Victoria. Her Platinum Jubilee is now in focus of the nation during the war.
dopes back home who paid for their £5,000 hailing distance in early 2022. Misbehaviour by younger members
copper bath, their fixtures and their fittings. Her reign has been always informed of the royal family is always damaging
With important announcements such as by her lack of pomp and boundless and it must be corrected. But it should
Archie’s birth, always released at an hour sense of duty. ‘I know that the only way not lead us to doubt the precious,
that is most beneficial to the US morning to live my life is to try to do what is enduring value of our apolitical head
media, their priorities towards attracting a right, to take the long view,’ she once of state. One of the Queen’s Private
more global and less critical audience are said. ‘To give of my best in all that that Secretaries used to raise his glass, saying:
clear. Even American chat show host Ellen day brings — and to put my trust in ‘May the Queen live for ever.’ An
DeGeneres recently met with the Sussexes God.’ Her belief in Christ’s message understandable sentiment, but perhaps
in England to ‘talk about their work on wild- of ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ not what she would wish for.
life conservation’. The question is, does all informed the graceful advice she gave Fortunately the Prince of Wales has
this negativity mean that the royals could to all Brexit warriors in her last shown similar reassuring dedication
become an endangered species themselves? Christmas broadcast (the only words and love of country — think only
The Queen will breathe a sigh of relief she is allowed every year to write of the thousands upon thousands of
to note that the monarchy is not in crisis. herself): ‘Even with the most deeply young people he has helped through
Not yet, anyway: polls show it’s as popular held differences, treating the other his Prince’s Trust. He and the Duchess
as ever. Yet there is a feeling that, while the person with respect and as a fellow of Cornwall, and Prince William and
Queen deserves our respect, certain other human being is always a good first step the Duchess of Cambridge after
members of her family should try harder. towards greater understanding.’ them, clearly understand their roles in
Much harder. Those who speak of abolishing our continuing the genius of constitutional
constitutional monarchy (as Corbyn monarchy — which, as Simone Weil
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RADIO et al do with cruel and banal Marxist appreciated, is crucial to our liberty.
Jan Moir on the monarchy in trouble.
War on the home front

Would your living room pass the cultural-appropriation test?
LAURA FREEMAN
Q
uick! Roll up the Persian carpet. Hide Why not go the whole hog — sorry, the world’. I am reminded of the (less than dip-
the willow-pattern service. Sweep the whole tofu sausage — and ban images of lomatic) Foreign Office joke that you can
wok and chopsticks under the Ber- any fruit or foliage not native to the Brit- tell a woman’s first posting by her crockery
ber rug. Mr and Mx Virtue-Signaller from ish Isles? So, no tropical prints — bananas, and a man’s first posting by his wife.
number 12 are on their way over for tea. palm leaves, bamboo — and no novelty What then would the inspirational, yet
How woke is your house? If your impec- ice buckets in the shape of watermelons or indigenous, great British interior look like?
cably enlightened neighbour ran a finger coconuts. I once interviewed a designer who Walls by William Morris, fabrics by Cath
along the mantelpiece, would you pass the printed her wallpaper patterns using the cut Kidston. Staffordshire spaniels on the win-
cultural-appropriation test? side of a potato. Well, that’s definitely dodgy. dowsill, Emma Bridgewater mugs on the
First it was yoga classes. Then fancy dress. Potatoes are plunder from the New World. dresser, framed Tottering-by-Gently car-
Don’t go near a costume shop until you’ve Repatriate the potato! toons in the downstairs loo. A pinboard pas-
consulted one of many online guides advis- The article doesn’t mention, but perhaps tiche of Merrie England? Not so fast. The
ing party-goers ‘how not to dress like an it goes without saying, that animalia is out. person who splutters over a pineapple will
offensive idiot’. Tread carefully with tur- No zebra-skin rugs, no leopard-print sofas, wince at Jubilee biscuit tins (monarchist)
bans, kimonos, cheongsams, saris, bindis and and Union Jack tea cosies (nationalist, impe-
Native American headdresses. Dare to wear My mock-Moroccan bathroom tiles rialist). All a bit, you know, Brexit-y. To be
a sombrero? On your own head be it. We’ve on the safe side, paint it all greige and hang
had cultural storms in imported teapots over
are downright reprehensible because your hair-shirt as an objet d’art.
sushi, bánh mì, jerk chicken and Marks & they came from a depot in Leicester We talk of having a tin ear. What about
Spencer’s sweet potato biryani wrap. a tin eye? Once you start chucking out
Now it’s our living rooms. The website no taxidermy, no hunting trophies. No ant- the culturally inappropriate chintz, where
Apartment Therapy has published an arti- lers, tusks, peacock feathers or elephant-foot do you stop? Burn the Brighton Pavilion!
cle asking us to face up to ‘a harsh truth: in umbrella stands. Definitely no still-life paint- Board up the Chinese pagoda at Kew!
design, cultural appropriation is happening ings of gamey carnage. No novelty needle- Raze the Guildhall to the ground! The his-
on a widespread scale. And pretty much all point cushions of foxes in hunting jackets. tory of British art and architecture is one of
of us are culpable.’ No fishing flies in glass-fronted cases. No unrepentant plunder: Chinoiserie, Japon-
I’m guilty as hell. Sake cups, hammam leather-topped desks. No woollen throws or isme, Nile Style, Greek Revival, Regency
towels, mock-Moroccan bathroom tiles… sheepskin mats. Rajasthani, Ruskinian Romanesque.
the sake cups are OK, apparently, because The wool thing is strange. A recent article I am reaching the limits of my liberal guilt.
we bought them from a handicrafts shop in in a Sunday supplement about ‘the vegan The other day, when the Today programme
Tokyo. The tiles are doubtful, if not down- home’ squirmed over the ethics of wool and discussed the decision of Goldsmiths, Uni-
right reprehensible, because they came from cashmere. I’ve seen sheep sheared. Off they versity of London, to ban beef from campus,
a depot in Leicester. pop, a little chilly and abashed, as if they’ve I was frying pancetta to start a bolognese.
It’s all rather tricky. Following the princi- just had their trousers pulled down in the For the rest of the day I was wretched. Every
ples of feng shui is acceptable, but according playground, but otherwise unharmed. month I feel more and more like a monster
to one associate professor of contemporary Beware, too, the bear-traps of fabric and for the way I eat, shop, dress and travel.
hand-wringing: ‘Filling your space with ran- pattern: ikats, batiks, kilims, paisleys and, if My new strategy is this: better belliger-
dom Buddha statues, silk fans and a qipao you’re doing up a home south of Hadrian’s ence than letting the buggers get you down.
is a complete disconnection from feng shui. Wall, tartans. Avoid exotica and think twice When Harry and Meghan announced they
Unless you are rooted in Chinese cultural before you tiki the kitchen. Do not ‘shop the were having no more than two children for
heritage or are a practising Buddhist, the the sake of the planet, I told my husband:
aesthetics of the space will not match or con- ‘Right, that’s it, we’re having four.’ The first
textually make sense.’ thing I did after reading the ‘When a rug
The article is noticeably silent on more isn’t just a rug: the hidden context behind
troublesome items — African masks, cere- popular home decor’ article was to Google
monial spears, artefacts used in prayer and pineapple door-knockers. (My husband is
religious ritual — which might actually cause keener on the knocker plan.)
offence, while condemning such soft targets Call for unity, call for diversity, call for
as pineapples: ‘Anyone trying to incorporate inclusivity, courtesy, kindness, consideration
another culture should ask themselves some and better conversations. But leave us alone
big questions when, say, adding that Hawai- in our homes and keep your judgmental
ian pineapple into a design.’ ‘We have 50 different words for No…’ hands off my Japanese tea bowls.
ROD LIDDLE
Anything can be blamed on a ‘condition’
I
suppose it is overstating the case to sug- marks. We have had to stop her in a manner ed outrage, Islamophobia, holding us all to
gest that dyslexia is simply a term coined probably best described as authoritarian. I account should we ever venture to say any-
to assuage the disappointment of mid- would keep your kids away from the subject thing which might be construed as critical. It
dle-class parents faced with offspring who too, if they are of independent spirit. One goes without saying that if Abigail had cho-
are considerably thicker than they fondly hint of what might lay in store came when sen Roman Catholicism as her exam ques-
imagined them to be. There was an inter- she was asked to write an essay explaining tion, and questioned the social effects of its
esting report a few years ago by Professor why Islam was a ‘religion of peace’. This she opposition to birth control, she would not
Joe Elliott of Durham University. He wrote: did, but added a couple of surahs from the have been called ‘racist’, still less ‘obscenely
‘On the basis of current research, there Quran which seemed to challenge that per- racist’. My suspicion is that she would have
are no meaningful grounds to differentiate spective. She was told to do the whole thing been commended and probably awarded a
between so-called dyslexic and non-dyslex- again, omitting the caveats and the verses few extra marks, although this is only a guess.
ic poor readers. Genetics, neuroscience and from which they were drawn. Islam is a reli- But because of the growing shrillness of
cognitive science can help us better under- gion of peace and that’s it. And of course its the pro-Islam lobby and its increased politi-
stand the underlying nature of reading dis- pacific bounty is something the world expe- cal weight, all this gets a free pass from any
ability, but they do not offer means to make riences more or less every day of the week, and every criticism — and those who draw
a dyslexic/poor reader distinction.’ somewhere or other. attention to its possible defects are accused
Well, quite. The dyslexia industry — Her experience was nothing, mind, of committing hate crimes and being rac-
by now substantial — is angry that a new compared to that of Abigail Ward, aged 16, ist. Quite often this mindset leads its adher-
emphasis on spelling, punctuation and syn- ents — such as the examiner — into absurd
tax in exam marking is discriminating against I performed badly in exams as the paradoxes, for example over homosexual-
this vulnerable, and I daresay vibrant, sec- consequence of a condition known as ity, women’s rights, freedom of conscience
tion of the school population. Perhaps it ‘utter and complete bone idleness’ and apostasy. It is the mindset which leads
is. But simply to define a condition is not woke homosexuals to demand a boycott of
remotely to alter it. Indeed everything, in the in her GCSE RE paper this summer. Abi- the winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, where
end, might be documented as a ‘condition’. gail is a vegetarian and objects to the Mus- homosexuality is legal, while saying nothing
I performed very badly in several exams lim practice of halal slaughter, and described about the ICC World Twenty20 cricket com-
back in the 1970s, as the consequence of a the reasons for her disaffection in her exam petition being held around the same time in
debilitating condition known as ‘utter and paper. The examiner disqualified her entire Bangladesh, where it carries a mandatory
complete bone idleness’, a venerable Lid- paper, deeming it full of ‘obscene racial com- life sentence. They will work themselves into
dle trait stretching back through the gener- ments’ when it was nothing of the kind. She a frenzy when a couple of Christian bakers
ations. Others failed because of a condition had simply described the method of slaugh- refuse to make a cake decorated with the
known as ‘stupidity’ or ‘pig ignorance’, ter as being ‘disgusting’. The examining words ‘Support gay marriage’, but pass no
which will undoubtedly have both genetic board has since apologised to Abigail and comment when gay people are pushed off
and socio-economic components. awarded her a grade, but has not confirmed high buildings, beaten, imprisoned or oth-
We are what we are and should be wary that the uberwoke moron who marked her erwise discriminated against in virtually all
of this cringing obsequy, which seeks to paper has been sacked. parts of the Muslim world.
affirm that everyone is exactly the same, As Brendan O’Neill wrote this week, this Hideous atrocities carried out by right-
except for these unfortunate ‘conditions’ affair is symptomatic of the idiocy and dou- wing extremists are quickly identified as
which append to them. It is a tautology, no? blethink which accompanies that confect- such and the ideology behind the atrocities
Back in 2016 my daughter, Emmeline, was rightly eviscerated. But when atrocities are
irritated to discover that nearly half of the carried out by Islamic terrorists the ideology
pupils taking the 11-plus examination along- is never mentioned and instead it is usually
side her had been documented as dyslexic, assumed that the perpetrators are suffering
allowing them extra time to complete the from a kind of ‘condition’ which made them
exam. That’s not fair, she complained. No, do the stuff they did. The problem of course
it isn’t — and thus a good introduction to is that woke liberals see the world not how
the world, I reckon. It didn’t do any of them it is, but how they wish it to be — and when
much good, in the end. They still failed. reality comes along and demonstrates how
Emmy is now in her third year at gram- incalculably wrong they are, their worldview
mar school and had rather hoped to take begins to disintegrate.
religious education (or studies, or whatever
they call it now) as a GCSE option because SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RODLIDDLE
she adores the subject and gets very high The argument continues online.
ANCIENT AND MODERN

Boris’s Sparta moment
The Icelandic solution
The UK should become a temporary member of the EEA
DAVID GUNNLAUGSSON
The PM’s hero is

the Athenian statesman Pericles, and a
Periclean crossroads is now approaching.
According to the biographer Plutarch,
Pericles’ influence begins during
Athens’s golden age, when its power
was expanding at the expense of Sparta,
its rival city-state. Though an aristocrat,
I
have no doubt that Britain will thrive The elections of 2013, however, brought
Pericles turned himself into a populist, after leaving the EU, whether or not it a halt to accession talks, and in 2015, my gov-
but took care not become too familiar a
leaves with a deal. I say this as a former ernment formally withdrew Iceland’s appli-
figure. He was seen in public only when
prime minister of a country, Iceland, which cation for EU membership. I had come to
on political business and generally kept
a low profile (as Boris was accused of left the EU before it had even joined — and the conclusion that withdrawing the applica-
doing in last week’s Spectator editorial). which went on to prosper in a way which tion was essential in order for us to be able
Pericles then began to ‘borrow’ would have been impossible had its applica- to make the arrangements necessary for suc-
money on various pretexts, pouring tion for membership been carried through cessfully rebuilding the economy.
it into public festivals, fees for public to conclusion. I think Britain can learn And bounce back we did. Soon Iceland
services and fabulous major building from Iceland’s experience and find a way to had the highest GDP growth rate of any
works (one of which was the Parthenon). avoid any major disruption when 31 Octo- developed country. We saw the sharpest fall
This made him enormously popular ber comes round. in government debt achieved by any nation
but aroused the envy of enemies. Some In late 2008 Iceland suffered especially in modern history. Unemployment shrank
claimed that he was squandering the harshly from the international financial
city’s resources. Others, including comic
playwrights, spread rumours about
crisis. The country’s banking system expe- In 2015, my government
rienced a near-total collapse. The value
his relationships with women (Boris
of the currency tumbled, inflation surged,
formally withdrew Iceland’s
might sympathise). But Pericles could application for EU membership
argue his corner. A rival said of him: government debt as a percentage of GDP
‘When I defeat him at wrestling, he more than tripled in an instant. In 2009, a
disagrees, wins the argument — and even new government formed by the two parties and, at the same time, we invested heavily in
persuades the onlookers.’ on the left submitted an application for EU healthcare and other essential services.
So far, so Boris. But things turned membership. The rationalisation offered to Yet the methods we used to bring this
more serious for Pericles when he led the public was that joining the EU was the remarkable transformation about would not
Athens into war against Sparta in only way to survive. have been possible had we joined the EU
431 bc. (Parallels with Brexit?) Dreadful Iceland was already a member of the and adopted the euro and become bound
hardship ensued. At first, Pericles refused European Economic Area (EEA), which by EU regulations. Had we done so, our fate
to fight Sparta by land and evacuated facilitates free trade with the EU. But after would very likely instead have resembled
everyone inside the walls of Athens. But the application was submitted, the EU that of Greece.
when people saw their farms pillaged
became increasingly stringent regarding the My government’s decision to withdraw
by Spartan troops, their mood changed.
implementation of EU regulations in Ice- the application for EU membership was, of
Then, a devastating plague struck. The
people turned against the man who sold land. Many of Iceland’s bureaucrats were course, met with hostility from globalists,
them this adventure (as people might enthusiastic about obliging. both foreign and domestic. At every step we
turn against Boris in a no-deal Brexit). were treated to predictions of impending
But Pericles stood firm. His weapon catastrophe very similar to those now being
was oratory, and he gave the speech of ascribed to Brexit. How odd that adherents
his life. Confident he ‘knew what needed of a new global order continue to advocate
to be done and could put it into words’, an international system based on fear and
as Thucydides put it, he persuaded the submission rather than reciprocity.
people to remain patient and keep him If Iceland, while outside the EU, can
as leader. ‘He led the people rather than achieve the highest level of growth of any
letting them lead him. He did not tell western nation so soon after the collapse of
them what they wanted to hear… indeed,
its banking system and public finances, then
he was prepared to anger them by
I’m sure that a post-Brexit Britain — the
contradicting them.’ He told them they
had approved the war, that there must world’s fifth-largest economy — can pros-
be no negotiation with Sparta. After per, too. Nevertheless, there will certainly
punishing him with a fine, they agreed be some negative short-term consequences
that he was indeed the man to lead them. from leaving the EU. What can you do to
The PM is facing his Sparta moment. avoid them?
— Peter Jones One possible solution is for the UK to
become a temporary member of the EEA
agreement along with Iceland, Norway, and burden of implementing some EU regula-
Liechtenstein and, of course, the EU. Here tions while the EEA membership lasts. That
the word ‘temporary’ is paramount. It could would, however, only be a fraction of what
be for a few years or longer — depending on the UK has put up with for decades. During
the time needed to make other arrangements. the first 20 years of the EEA agreement, Ice-
land implemented on average around 13 per
B y doing so, the UK would be out of the

EU at the end of October while still
retaining free trade with the EU. You would
cent of EU regulations each year.
The question is: will this solution be
acceptable to the EU? There is no rea-
immediately be able to make new free trade son why it shouldn’t be. After all, it would
agreements all over the world. Iceland has be using an instrument of the EU’s own
more free trade agreements than most other making, because the EEA agreement was
countries, including the first such agreement originally envisioned as a means of easing
made with China by a European country. In are no problems on that front. And being out reluctant countries into the EU. Some might
talks on free trade, the UK would be negoti- of Schengen will allow the UK to protect its find it unsettling if the EEA were turned on
ating from a position of strength. other borders, as it does now. its head and used to ease a country’s passage
In becoming a member of the EEA, the Under the EEA, Britain would immedi- out of the EU.
UK would be joining a system that is already ately be in full control of its fisheries — as However, the EU is now having to face a
tried and tested. There could be a smooth Iceland is — and in a position to make its democratic decision by one of its members
transition, with no need for a frantic attempt to leave. If the Union’s primary objective in
to create a complicated new mechanism in In joining the EEA, the UK those circumstances turns out to be punish-
a matter of weeks. Citizens’ rights would be ing the citizens of the outgoing country for
guaranteed while a new framework is devel- would become a member of a their decision — even if that means causing
oped. And the same goes for trade in goods, system that is tried and tested great damage to the remaining countries —
services and capital. then it is hardly a great advert for EU mem-
What’s more, there would be no hard bor- own arrangements for agriculture. Given bership. If this does turn out to be the case,
der in Ireland, just as there is no hard border the size of the UK population compared to the sooner Britain leaves, the better. Let the
between Sweden (EU) and Norway (EEA) its farming sector, any drop in agricultural EU do their worst. Britain will do its best
or Germany (EU) and Switzerland (which exports would be more than offset by farm- and I am sure that will be good enough.
has its own bilateral deal with the EU). ers winning an increased share of domestic
Luckily, neither the UK nor the Republic of consumption. David Gunnlaugsson is a former prime
Ireland is a member of Schengen, so there Admittedly, Britain would still face the minister of Iceland.
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Black and blue

Police officers deserve greater protection
RORY GEOGHEGAN
T
he past decade has not been through thousands of indecent images
kind to those we entrust, in the of children, to repeatedly dealing
words of Sir Robert Peel, ‘to with the dying or dead. Then come
give full-time attention to duties which the complaints and misconduct pro-
are incumbent on every citizen’. Since cedures which, whether for serious or
2010, police numbers have fallen by minor allegations, can hang over offic-
more than 20,000, with too many choos- ers for years. Sincere, conscientious
ing to leave the force owing to physical types tend to be the worst affected.
and emotional assaults in a stressed and The complaints system offers little or
underfunded job. no appreciation for honest mistakes,
I can sympathise, because I had to nor does it place enough value on
step away from the front line and the swift resolutions.
job I loved three years ago. At the time, Meanwhile, we have yet to address
friends and family repeatedly asked seriously whether our existing
me why I felt I had to leave. Set against unarmed model of policing is fit for
the latest news of escalating assaults on purpose. Tasers are still not routinely
police, I’m not so sure they’d ask now. provided to all those on the front line.
There were approximately 31,000 The lethal gun and grenade ambush
assaults on officers last year, an increase of broken jaw that means they get Christmas of PC Nicola Hughes and PC Fiona Bone
almost 5,000 on the year before. Barely any off for a change, but can’t laugh or enjoy in Manchester in 2012, when they were
make the news — despite the stab and slash dinner with their family for example. Then responding to a report of a burglary, could
wounds, broken bones and close calls. there was the colleague who, having come have been a watershed moment. It was an
The past fortnight has been especially face-to-face with the barrel of a gun at point- opportunity to reappraise how we can better
cruel — and has exposed the risks that police blank range, sometimes bursts into tears equip our officers for the threats they face.
officers face. Charges have been brought for when he gets home and sees his children. But the response from many in the wake
the attempted murder of PC Stuart Outten My own service — like that of many of the attack was the old refrain that ‘now
in a machete attack in London; the attempt- is not the time’ to confront these issues. It
ed murder of PC Gareth Phillips in Birming- My own service – like that never seems to be the right time.
ham; and the murder of PC Andrew Harper If our politicians are serious about reas-
in Berkshire.
of many – featured close calls, serting the rule of law, it will take more than
Growing up, I considered myself to have broken bones and plenty of bruises the 20,000 police officers and 10,000 prison
had a fairly decent dose of life experience: spaces which have been promised. If I were
I’m state-educated, have friends from across — featured close calls, broken bones and writing a to-do list for the new Home Sec-
the social spectrum, was in the first gener- plenty of bruises. On one occasion, my col- retary, it would include the restoration and
ation of my family to go to university, and leagues and I were confronted by a man renewal of proactive community policing, a
have an interest in social policy. How igno- armed with an axe. significant stepping up of the effort to tackle
rant I was. It was only through policing that But for all the hostility and violence the serious and organised crime, the roll-out
I discovered the full spectrum of what mod- police face, it is more than matched by the of Tasers across the country and a review
ern Britain looks like and how, at worst, it compassion and care that the vast majority of our model for armed policing, a radical
behaves. of officers show to the public — even if that overhaul of complaints procedures, and a
I saw everything, from utter and abject rarely makes headlines. policing covenant that provides support for
poverty, in which children stand little chance One colleague of mine bought and the police and their families.
of a decent life, to the abuse and exploitation cooked dinner for an elderly victim, out of While the promises of more police, more
of the young and the elderly, and the reality his own pocket. Others volunteered their prison capacity and a review of sentencing
that police are often the ones left ‘holding spare time to help support the Police Cadets, are all welcome and necessary, they must
the baby’ — literally and metaphorically — the burgeoning Mini Police, and other groups only be the beginning. Now is the time to
outside of office hours. that create positive relationships and make move beyond crowd-pleasing headlines
On the front line you also learn to expect our communities safer. and deliver a serious renewal. The men and
verbal abuse and hostile words from some: There are also the more insidious factors women who make up our thin blue line
‘Rory, Rory, Rory, you racist white faggot pig’ that can eat away at the lives of those in the deserve nothing less.
was what one violent prisoner shouted at me police force. Traumatic experiences can turn
for what felt like an eternity. Violence against a happy, enthusiastic person into a shadow Rory Geoghegan is the head of criminal
colleagues is always painful to witness: the of their former self. Jobs range from sifting justice at the Centre for Social Justice.
JAMES DELINGPOLE
When did English A-level become a science?
N
ow that my youngest has got her of its life. By the time I got to Girl’s English and Pink Mist, a 2014 play by Owen Sheers.
A-level grades, I’m finally free to A-level I was ready to give up. So was she. I think it’s unrealistic to expect from teen-
say just how much I have loathed English is taught at advanced level, agers a coherent response to literature so
the past 20 or so years I have spent helping now, as if it were a science. It’s about pushing recent it hasn’t had time to bed down.
my children with their English homework. buttons. You are marked according to how I’m not blaming Girl’s hard-working, car-
This is a sad admission. After all, I stud- well you have achieved various ‘assessment ing teachers for this. They did their best for
ied English at university and still love read- objectives’, as decreed by Ofqual. AO1 is her, often giving up their spare time for extra
ing classic literature and learning poetry ‘Articulate informed, personal and creative tutorials. Still, though, their main, grinding
by heart. But when I read that the number responses to literary texts, using associated task — methodically to prepare their classes
of 18-year-olds taking English A-level has concepts and terminology, and coherent to get through their exams — left Girl feel-
plummeted to its lowest level since 2001 I accurate expression’ (hence, I suspect, that ing somewhat uninspired. I feared she was
wasn’t at all surprised. If I were that age, I’m excess of critical jargon the kids all cram almost bound to get a mediocre grade, till
not sure I’d choose to do English either. into their essays now); AO2 is ‘analyse ways one day she hit on the bright idea of getting
The first taste I had of just how grisly in which meanings are shaped in literary extra tuition in the holidays.
English has become was when I helped the texts’; and so on. ‘I’ve found someone on Gumtree!’ she
Rat with his GCSEs. I don’t think at any Also — in an attempt to make Eng- announced one day. ‘Oh dear,’ I thought.
stage he was required to complete an actual lish seem ‘relevant’ — the course seems to (Isn’t Gumtree where you go to arrange sor-
book. Instead, he studied what were known did extra-marital liaisons?) ‘He used to be
as ‘texts’ — gobbets of often third-rate prose Wading through Boy’s essays was a head of English at Eton,’ Girl said. ‘And he
and poetry, selected either for its diversity won’t tutor you unless he’s interviewed you
(Maya Angelou) or its accessibility (includ-
chore: too much jargon and an excess first to see if you’re suitable.’
ing, I seem to remember, random verbiage of laboured, navel-gazing analysis This sounded promising. And sure
written by children). Maybe whoever set the enough, Nick Welsh proved Girl’s salva-
course had been to the same Terry Eagle- embrace a lot more modern stuff. Yes, I do tion. He was firm (nearly refusing to carry
ton lecture that I had — ‘Why study Shake- recall having to study Faulkner’s As I Lay on teaching her after she had failed to pre-
speare when you can study the telephone Dying in the 1980s. But mostly our course pare for one of his sessions), erudite (lots of
directory?’ — but didn’t realise it was an back then comprised rock-solid classics, fascinating digressions about Shakespeare
intellectual joke. studied in depth: Emma and Pride and Preju- which, obviously, her hard-pressed teachers
Things got even less fun when I tried to dice; Othello and King Lear; The Waste Land; at school would never have found time for)
help Boy prepare for Oxbridge. I gave him etc. Girl, on the other hand, studied only one and utterly inspirational.
two hefty ring-binders containing the essays Shakespeare play — Twelfth Night; she also Girl, who had once declared she found
I’d written at school and university. They did Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (but Shakespeare boring and pointless, now
stood up quite well, I thought: fluent, playful, only in translation). And there was far too grasped Twelfth Night so thoroughly that she
with the occasional insight worthy of a lit- much American literature — including the was getting near top marks in all her essays.
tle red tick in the margin. And a sight more dreaded Of Mice and Men; and too much Nick had taught her at least two invaluable
enjoyable than the turgid, convoluted, ach- contemporary stuff, such as The Yellow things: first, that you’re never going to get
ingly worthy toss that Boy was required to Birds, a 2012 novel about the Iraq war — Shakespeare unless you’ve put in all the
produce for his teachers at school. groundwork and know the text inside out;
Boy isn’t stupid. He won one of his second, the joy and excitement of coming up
school’s top competitive English prizes, with your own, original critical insights.
beating all the King’s Scholars. But wading ‘I’ve been studying Twelfth Night for
through his essays was a chore. There was more than 50 years but I’ve never consid-
far too much jargon and an excess, it seemed ered that angle before,’ Nick told Girl, after
to me, of the kind of laboured, navel-gazing, one point she’d made. She came home elat-
close critical analysis they take especial ed: ‘So I’m not stupid, after all!’
delight in at Cambridge; and far too little What I can’t work out, I’m afraid, is
of the panache and ludic wit and flights of a solution to this more general problem.
imagination which are — or rather, I fear, Nick is an inspirational teacher in the same
were — the speciality of Oxford. To me, it way my brilliant Oxford tutor Peter Con-
felt tragically like the Tabs (or the Puritans, if rad was. If you’re lucky enough to find one
you prefer) had won the argument as to how then you’ve won the English lottery; if you
English should be studied: to within an inch ‘Talk these revelations down as Project Fear.’ haven’t, you’re probably stuffed.
Daddy, what’s Fanta? BAROMETER
My children are now more middle-class than me

Name calling
COLIN FREEMAN
Richard Braine was appointed leader of
Ukip, leading to jokes about the party
being led by a ‘Dick Braine’. How did the
name Richard come to be shortened?
— There was a common practice in
I
n a café in Norfolk last week, my seven- burger, rather than lettuce and a stodgy
medieval England for rhyming slang, with
year-old son uttered words that morti- white roll? Ooh, go on then. The problem is the first letters of many common names
fied me. No, he didn’t comment loudly that we pass on those acquired food tastes to being interchanged, hence Robert became
on someone’s weight, or ask why the lady our children, and what I see as trendy indul- ‘Bob’ and Edward ‘Ted’. It is believed
next to us had a moustache. It was worse gences, they see as normal. And they are not the practice may have come about as a
than that. Asked by a kindly man at the next inhibited about letting the world know. result of Anglo-Saxons finding it hard to
table if he was enjoying his bacon sandwich, Hence those toe-curling moments — pronounce Norman names and vice versa.
he declared to the café at large: ‘Yes, but I usually in a greasy spoon, non-gastro pub — Dick was established by Shakespeare’s
prefer them with rocket!’ or other blue-collar setting — when they time — the bard referred to ‘every Tom,
Judging by the gentleman’s slightly blank demand their right to organic tomatoes Dick or Francis’ in Henry IV, Part 1.
smile, I’m not sure if he even knew what and almond-milk babyccinos. Through the — For the first few centuries there was
rocket was, let alone that in the London tofu-munching mouths of babes, we are nothing rude about ‘Dick’. It’s recorded
suburb where I live, it’s now as much a part as slang for the male organ from the 1890s.
denounced as the bourgeois creatures we
— Besides Dick Braine there have been a
of breakfast as smashed avocado on toast. really are. If Chairman Mao were alive, he’d
couple of famous Richard or Dick Heads:
Inwardly, though, I cringed — just as Peter be using this system for his Cultural Revo- a 17th-century English novelist and early
Mandelson presumably did when, accord- lution, despatching offenders like me for re- 20th-century Australian rules footballer.
ing to legend, he mistook mushy peas for education at some McDonald’s in Teesside. — Meanwhile the Pick operating
guacamole in a Hartlepool chippy. I’d been It isn’t just our children’s food prefer- system (an early computing system) was
exposed, by my own young son, as a fash- ences that give us away. Another parent developed by Dick Pick in 1965.
ionable metropolitan type. I might as well remembers the period when his teenage
have asked for gluten-free granola, or worn daughter would tell people that she found Plane, sailing
a T-shirt saying ‘Bollocks to Brexit’. it ‘quite hard to get to sleep at night without
With the summer holidays in full swing, listening to a bit of Beethoven’. Her sibling Climate activist Greta Thunberg set out
I predict many more scenes like this around threw a party where, rather than legal highs to the US on a sailing vessel in order
the country, if conversations with other and alcopops, she and her friends played to cut her carbon footprint. There are
parents are anything to go by. One mother a very limited number of journeys that
their own version of Radio 4’s Just a Min-
passengers can do on a scheduled sailing
recalls one of her offspring, aged around six, ute. I once saw a fellow dad pretending not
vessel. Do you have the time and money
announcing she wanted ham only if it was to hear when his daughter asked: ‘Why can’t to emulate her?
prosciutto. Another child, asked by a neigh- we just go the Tate Modern café as usual?’ Fredrikstad (Norway) to Amsterdam
bour if he’d like a snack, requested dried Then there’s the eco-consciousness stuff. (Dutchtallships.com) 9 days; £820
mangos. My nine-year-old daughter, if treat- Or, as it might be called, eco-precociousness. Oslo to Amsterdam (via Norwegian Air)
ed to a fizzy drink in a café, now insists on After endless lessons on climate change at 1 hr, 35 mins; £98
Sanpellegrino — aka Fanta for the middle- primary school, my son is showing signs of Rotterdam to Tenerife (Dutchtallships.com)
classes. When I was shopping with her in the turning into Greta Thunberg’s pious little 20 days; £1,640
Co-op recently, she demanded to know why brother. At a filling station on the way back Amsterdam to Tenerife (TUI)
I was buying sliced bread rather than sour- from Norfolk, he asked why we’d hired a 4 hrs, 35 mins; £61
dough. I wandered off to another aisle for a diesel car rather than a petrol one, remind- Seville to Punta Arenas (Chile)
bit, pretending I wasn’t with her. ing me that diesel was ‘killing the planet’. (Dutchtallships.com) 87 days; £7,775
Tough luck, you might say. Surely, if your Seville to Punta Arenas (Iberia)
Just the comment to lighten the mood when
23 hrs; £860
children choose to identify as junior Tar- you’re in a long and impatient queue of van
quins and Jocastas, that’s because you’re and lorry drivers. Making the grade
like that too, right? But I’m not. Or so I pre- I could go on, but I suspect that many
fer to think, anyway. Like many other Lon- of you have your own versions of this story, A-levels were criticised after it was
don parents, I grew up in the provinces. Two even if you’re too embarrassed to mention revealed that candidates taking one
decades on from moving to the capital, I them. Besides, I have to get some planning maths paper could achieve an A grade
still like to virtue-signal about how down- done for my daughter’s birthday, which is at with only 55 per cent of the marks.
to-earth I am. I eat kebab and chips. I drink the end of the summer hols. I’m thinking of Yet overall, grades fell. How has the
beer, especially non-craft beer. I don’t know Green & Black’s mini chocolate bars for the proportion of candidates achieving A
how to pronounce ‘quinoa’. And when I’m party bags, but I’m still struggling to find an (and A* since 2010) grades changed over
sent to the newsagent to buy my other half’s appropriate children’s entertainer. Seems the years?
Saturday Guardian — our homestead strad- that round my way, all the good poetry 1982 8.9%
1994 18%
dles the political divide — I hide it under the workshop organisers get booked up months
1999 24%
Times or Telegraph. in advance…
2004 28%
But inevitably, yes, some of the capital’s 2009 31%
culinary habits have rubbed off on me. That SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RADIO 2014 (A & A* grades) 28%
caramelised red onion houmous is quite Colin Freeman and Leah McLaren on 2019 (A & A* grades) 26%
nice, isn’t it? Rocket and ciabatta with a what kids are really eating.
DOUGLAS MURRAY
Who’ll be the next jihadi-jackpot winner?
R
eading the news this week of Jihadi suffered since being in an ‘unfortunate place’ the stated situation. Yet if Shamima Begum
Jack (née Letts, of Oxfordshire) hav- in ‘unfortunate circumstances’. The audience can have her passport taken away, does that
ing his UK passport withdrawn, my and fellow guests were filled with admira- not suggest there is a twin-track reality?
mind went to a Canadian television pro- tion. ‘How can you be so mentally strong?’ One in which some people — notably peo-
gramme earlier this year. While most people asked one. ‘Because, like, you seem so zen ple of Muslim origin — can lose their pass-
can’t recall what was on TV last night, for us after everything that happened to you.’ ports, while nobody else would lose theirs in
connoisseurs of western masochism the 2019 Khadr explained that while some peo- comparable circumstances.
Easter edition of Tout le monde en parle ple think he’s special, he doesn’t think he is, It was striking, this argument. Not just
(Television de Radio-Canada) was a collec- because we all have strength, and should all because it had a point, but because it seemed
tor’s item. The subject was Omar Khadr. believe in ourselves. Other portions of Hall- to cause genuine unease among some Brit-
In case you haven’t had the pleasure, the mark Cards wisdom proved equal catnip to ish Muslims who are among the best advo-
Khadrs are a Canadian family of Palestinian- the Canadians. ‘From what I see right now, cates against the extremists.
Egyptian origin. Since 2001 they have had a I see a strong, willing man,’ the fellow guest So forceful was the logic that it meant
sketchy patch. Specifically, family members continued. ‘And I still can’t, I don’t know — Jihadi Jack was for it. To demonstrate that we
have shown a terrible propensity for being at you’re amazing.’ Khadr smiled benevolently. do indeed have one law for all, the Oxford-
‘weddings’ at the wrong place and time. Spe- I only mention this scene because it has shire schoolboy had to be de-passported
cifically around the Pakistan-Afghan border. been playing in my mind since the issue of too. And this week he was. It transpired that
And generally involving less an exchange of returning Isis fighters re-erupted in the UK. the Letts family are helpfully unsympathet-
vows so much as an exchange of bullets with ic. Jack’s father recently expressed regret
infidel soldiers. Papa Khadr died in one such Societies like ours still have no that his ‘armchair revolutionary shite’ (his
exchange (of ammunition, not vows) while idea what to do with Shamimas words, not mine) may have influenced his
one son was wounded in action. Another and Jacks if they return son. Meanwhile Jack mocked the idea of the
son, Omar, was captured and taken to Guan- British taking his passport away, saying he
tanamo Bay where he was charged with the You will recall the furore earlier in the year didn’t want to live in a country where Boris
killing of US Sergeant Christopher Speer. when the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, Johnson is prime minister anyway.
Back home, Khadr mère never made any announced he was revoking the citizen- Whatever the pros or cons of Johnson’s
effort to hide the family’s loyalties or expec- ship of Shamima Begum, one of the British Britain, I feel this at least can be chalked up
tations, memorably saying of the Canadian schoolgirls who went to join Isis. From the as an early win. Because while we certainly
taxpayers’ requirement to pay to support moment that happened, it was certain Jihadi know what to do in a foreign theatre, socie-
her wounded son: ‘I’m Canadian, and I’m Jack would lose his passport too. ties like ours still have no idea what to do
not begging for my rights. I’m demanding my During the Begum affair I was as with the Shamimas and Jacks if they return.
rights.’ As Mark Steyn said, the Khadr fam- unmoved as anyone by her family and law- As in Canada, I can predict it. There
ily demonstrated that whether you chose to yer’s pleas. Nor was I much more impressed would have been a softball interview on the
fight for the ‘home’ team or the ‘away’ team by those individuals who tried to insist that Today programme, followed by a Vaseline-
in these 21st-century wars doesn’t much somehow we were ‘all to blame’ for her join- lensed television special. After some sym-
matter, because if the ‘away’ team fails, you ing Isis. But one objection did ring true. A pathetic profile pieces, a legal case for
get the same bonuses as if you’d played for number of prominent Muslims, including mistreatment somewhere would have got
the ‘home’ side. Rather more in fact. friends of mine who I listen to, noted that under way, pro-bono-ed by sympathetic
A couple of years ago the Canadian gov- our country presents itself as blind once lawyers. Finally the great machine of state
ernment awarded Omar Khadr more than someone has become a subject: equal before would doubtless have coughed some money
$10 million dollars for the inconvenience the law and just like everyone else. Some of Jack’s way too. Soon studio audiences would
of his post-9/11 years. Which was consider- us may quibble with the realities, but that is be applauding his bravery. Because he’d had
ably more than any American, Canadian or to put up with something, and had in any
British widow got for a deeper hurt. But it is case ‘been on a journey’.
the sort of gesture of which Britain has also It writes itself, this era. We just can’t help
become fond. They crop up still, our own ourselves from giving every benefit of every
British jihadi-jackpot winners. Always with doubt to the perpetrators, while rarely if
a case. Always with lawyers and an army of ever bothering to learn the names of their
supporters. But few have been supported so victims. Keep them away, I say. For we only
copiously as Khadr was at Easter. embarrass ourselves when they return.
The multi-millionaire entered the Mon-
treal studio to a standing ovation. He talked Douglas Murray is associate editor of
sadly about the flashbacks and PTSD he had ‘This is your fault…’ The Spectator.
The Spectator.
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LETTER FROM KABUL

Justin Marozzi
‘I ncoming! Incoming! Incoming!’ As

morning alarms go, this one leaves
a lot to be desired. Normally I wake up
this without you’ referred to me, or my
wife Julia. It’s a scurrilous suggestion,
of course, but I have to admit it was
to the long, trippy build-up of ‘Shine On tempting. I mean, come on, who’s done
You Crazy Diamond’, which I used to all the work for the past five years?
love in the searing heat of Mogadishu.
But this is Kabul and the occasional
grating siren is part and parcel of life
in the Green Zone. It turns out to be a
S omeone should write a book about
the utterly dispiriting architecture of
the Global War on Terror. While much
false alarm, but not before I have thrown of Kabul is in fine shape these days, long
myself to the floor in my duvet and is spray-painted on Kabul’s blast walls recovered from the Soviet occupation
buggered my back. Talking of bed linen, (another popular one is the optimistic and the ruinous intra-mujahidin fighting
Al-Shabaab suicide bombers once ‘Kabul the Peace City’). But my favourite that followed in the 1990s, swaths of
attacked the Somali capital’s presidential ruler of this mountain kingdom is Babur, the Green Zone are an urban dystopia:
compound where I lived. They missed a hashish-smoking, wine-drinking, sword- concrete blast walls, razor wire, speed
the president but killed my best friend toting, poetry-penning warrior who bumps, security cameras, armed guards
Mohamud, the prime minister’s chief loved gardening, founded the Mughal and more checkpoints than you can
of staff. Seven corpses of brainwashed Empire and wrote the Baburnama, throw a bag of opium at. The sky
young men were piled up outside my one of literature’s greatest memoirs. narrows as the blast walls grow taller.
bedroom. My John Lewis mattress The advice he gave his son in a letter At least the weather is heavenly. Babur
topper was completely ruined. of 27 November 1528 could have come was enchanted by Kabul’s climate: ‘If the
straight from a Spectator style guide: world has another so pleasant, it is not
I t’s a sign of the strange times we

inhabit that, 18 years after the US-led
invasion of Afghanistan, the American
‘In future write without elaboration. Use
plain, clear words. It will be less trouble
for you and the reader.’
known. Even in the heats, one cannot
sleep at night without a fur coat.’
president and the Taleban find they both

want the same thing: Americans out.
The mood music is all set: peace talks C ongratulations to my new Afghan
heroine, the twentysomething Zahra
S houldn’t life be full of adventures?
Many of my fellow Land Rover
owners in Norfolk have windscreen
ongoing in Doha, the Taleban worn out Elham, who defied death threats to become stickers which proclaim: ‘One Life.
by endless fighting and an isolationist the first woman to win Afghanistan’s Live It.’ There are worse maxims to
president in Washington. Oh, and version of Pop Idol. One in the eye for follow. I’m planning a horse-riding
last week Afghanistan celebrated its Taleban conservatives and religious expedition in Afghanistan’s north-
100th anniversary of independence. scholars such as Abdul Basit Khalili who easternmost province of Badakhshan
Don’t be surprised if peace breaks reckons Afghan Star ‘seduces the youth and with my New Best Friend, Aurangzeb,
out any time soon, though opinion is pushes the country into a deeper crisis’. named after the sixth Mughal emperor.
sharply divided on what any deal will The Wakhan Corridor is an improbably
really mean. ‘The Taleban are very
hierarchical. They’ll follow whatever
the leadership decides,’ says my friend
K abul is one of the 15 cities whose
spellbinding histories I tell in my new
book, Islamic Empires. The others are
shaped sliver of land that separates
Tajikistan from Pakistan, runs 220 miles
long and tapers to just eight miles wide
Arif. His colleague Jamshid shakes his Mecca, Damascus, Baghdad, Cordoba, at its narrowest. For some reason my
head. ‘The diehards will never accept it. Jerusalem, Cairo, Fez, Samarkand, wife is unconvinced by the obvious
They’ll keep fighting.’ Afghans do love a Constantinople, Isfahan, Tripoli, Beirut, glories of a remote, Taleban-free
fight. ‘These are a powerful and violent Dubai and Doha. One of the starkest itinerary among hospitable Afghans,
people and the greater part of them lessons is this. The Islamic world was wide, wind-scoured valleys, snow-
highway robbers,’ wrote Ibn Battuta, at its strongest when it boasted rich, sprinkled mountains and foaming rivers.
the great Moroccan traveller, on arriving cosmopolitan cities of Jews, Christians and Usually she comes round, but this one
in Kabul — in 1332. Muslims co-existing more or less happily. is a tough sell.
Kill or kick out the Jews and Christians
A fghans will soon be celebrating the

centenary of Amanullah Khan,
the Afghan king whose elegant portrait
and it all starts to go wrong very rapidly
indeed. A cheeky friend asked me if the
dedication ‘To J — I could not have done
Justin Marozzi’s Islamic Empires:
Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilization
is published by Allen Lane this month.

LETTERS
to be contradicted by the experience The plant life on an unkept moor will alone
Travelling in discomfort of Denmark. Here the lowest rate of destroy biodiversity. Balance of nature
Sir: I don’t agree with much of what tax on earned income is 42.6 per cent. is too complex a problem for many to
Matthew Parris says these days, but he was The highest rate is 55.8 per cent and it is contemplate, and the antis of course are
spot on with his piece about train seats paid by 20 per cent of full-time workers. not naturalists. Their prejudice is against
(‘Who’s to blame for my terrible journey?’, The economy is doing OK and, most a perceived stereotype who shoots.
17 August). I think his hunch about where interestingly, on some measures Denmark Anne Booth
the blame lies for such uncomfortable has the happiest citizens. Shaftesbury, Dorset
seats is correct. In these parts, our train Peter Wheadon
service provider is GWR, which has Hinnerup, Denmark
introduced new trains with bum-numbingly
Great uncle
unforgiving seats that are wholly unsuited Sir: In his attack on India’s present
to typical journeys of four to five hours.
Grouse Kashmir policy (‘India’s land grab’, 17
When questioned, the always helpful staff Sir: Regarding Charles Moore’s comments August) Peter Oborne dismisses my great
respond that: ‘This is what happens when on the rewilding of grouse moors (Notes, uncle Sir Douglas Gracey as a ‘British
you get civil servants to design the trains.’ 17 August), I know of a small grouse moor officer who stayed on after Independence
To add insult to injury, the new GWR which was given up because of endless to run the Pakistan army’. Immediately
trains also have no buffet carriages. Instead hassle from Scottish Nature, the RSPB, and post 1947 independence, both the Indian
there is an elusive, poorly stocked trolley. a whole lot of ‘nature lover’ incomers. It is and Pakistan armies were officered by
Again according to the harassed GWR now silent, save for the occasional croak their existing British officers. He remained
staff, the ‘focus group’ that was relied of a hooded crow. Gone are the cries of commander-in-chief until 1951.
upon to influence the design of the trains waders and the many songbirds which love Sir Douglas had won two MCs on the
responded positively to the idea of at-seat a properly kept moor. Crows and the other Western Front in the Great War, and was a
service, without realising that this meant predators in this ‘re-wilded’ place have career soldier in the Indian Army. Between
the end of the buffet. What with the typical emptied the hill of its glory. the wars he rose to become a colonel of the
obstructions found on our overcrowded As Charles Moore points out, the Gurkhas. During the war he trained and
trains today, you can count yourself lucky grouse is a unique bird which cannot be commanded the crack 20th Indian Division
to see a refreshment trolley on the long reared. It is wild, and in a poor breeding which turned the tide in the all-important
journey to the south-west. year the moors will be closed for shooting. battle of Imphal. Slim stated that Gracey
Add to this the fact that journey times was his best divisional commander, and
with GWR are slower than 30 years ago the loyalty of his troops led to his Pakistan
and the ticket prices multiples of what they command.
were, and I am sure many passengers from In 1945-46, Gracey controversially
the West Country will support Mr Parris led his division into Vietnam to help the
in his quest to identify the functionaries beleaguered French re-establish colonial
responsible. control, which put him briefly up against
M. Tetley Ho Chi Minh. For this he was awarded
Truro, Cornwall a Legion d’Honneur and a small but
important part in the whole Vietnam story.
In retirement he became director of what
Bad trains is now the Royal Hospital for Neuro-
Sir: I travelled by train from Totnes to disability, in Putney.
Stamford and returned via Peterborough Hugh Gracey Thompson
and London Paddington last weekend. London SW15
Points out of ten for comfort:
Cross country to Birmingham, standard class: 6.
East Midlands to Stamford, standard class: 8.
Europe on the lips
LNER Peterborough to London King’s Cross, Sir: Professor Robert Tombs (‘Time warp’,
1st class: 6. 17 August) is certainly right that history is
GWR Paddington to Totnes, tourist class: 2.
not required as a justification for Brexit,
Verdict: Three hours on GWR is painful. but it still provides a useful guide. Bismarck,
Take a large pullover to pad the arms of who knew a thing or two about European
the seat and a cushion for the back. political integration, summed up the whole
Elisabeth Lunn thing nicely in the late 19th century: ‘I have
Totnes, Devon always found the word Europe on the lips
of those politicians who wanted something
from other Powers which they dared not
What Danes pay demand in their own names.’ That is a
Sir: Charles Moore suggests (Notes, warning from history we should heed.
10 August) that one’s psychological Dr Sean McGlynn, FRHistS
maximum for income tax is 40 per cent. Monkton Farleigh, Bradford on Avon
‘Once you know that almost half of what
you earn will be taken from you, your WRITE TO US
animal spirits droop and so eventually The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London
does the entire economy.’ This view seems SW1H 9HP; letters@spectator.co.uk
ANY OTHER BUSINESS|MARTIN VANDER WEYER
Why you can’t let Brexit

affect your life
A A different Hong Kong

couple with a first baby sought my truth is it made me even more depressed
advice: they had accepted a low about economic prospects. Here’s why.
offer for their cramped London flat I’m watching Hong Kong with trepidation, I’m grateful to Derek Thompson, writ-
and bid the asking price for a nice house in having lived there 30 years ago when popu- ing in the Atlantic, for the news that in 2015,
commuterland. But they need a bigger mort- lar fears of what China might one day do to Americans for the first time spent more in
gage and if Brexit leads to a property crash, the then British colony were aroused after restaurants than in grocery stores and that
they could face negative equity and financial the Tiananmen massacre in Beijing. If today’s by next year, more than half of their restau-
stress. Should they call the whole thing off? pro-democracy protestors provoke the clos- rant spend will be ‘off-premises’ on take-
Emphatically I said they should not: buy- et Stalinist Xi Jinping to a hardline reaction, aways and deliveries. Online orders via the
ing a family home is a long-term choice, rarely the economic fallout will be as severe as the likes of Uber Eats are already rising towards
regretted, in which fluctuating value matters human consequences will be tragic. Even if 10 per cent of the US restaurant trade.
far less than whether you love the house and it doesn’t come to that, we have just seen in And all these trends are crossing the
whether (as in their case, I gathered) income the ousting of Cathay Pacific Airways boss Atlantic, conjuring visions of a generation
is sufficient to support the mortgage. Con- Rupert Hogg what may be the beginning of people who can no longer be bothered to
ventional wisdom, perhaps, but I’m pleased of the end of Hong Kong as a freewheeling buy and cook raw ingredients; who prefer
to see the nation thinking the same way: the international business centre. to order in, oblivious of the food miles and
property website Rightmove reports a 6.1 Cathay is 30 per cent owned by Air China labour practices involved, and stay slumped
per cent year-on-year surge in agreed sales and dependent on Hong Kong as an operat- in front of the energy-consuming screen
in the month to mid-August, with rises of up ing hub, but it’s ultimately controlled by the through which the order was placed. Maybe
to 10 per cent in the east and north-east, with billionaire British Swire family, who have the £9 billion of value ascribed to Just Eat
many buyers pressing for completion before assiduously built relationships in Beijing and Takeaway will be £12 billion by next
31 October. (more successfully so than their rivals, the year, or maybe some slicker competitor
It’s the way to go, kids: just get on with Keswicks of Jardine Matheson) but are still will have wiped them both out. But a pile of
your lives. We’ll never know how Brexit labelled, as in one report this week, ‘a symbol capital that might have fertilised something
changes the future because we’ll never know of Hong Kong’s colonial past’. After some worthwhile will have been directed towards
the counterfactual — but you’ll make your Cathay aircrew were allegedly involved in a sector whose growth symbolises nothing
own luck by your own decisions and you’ll the protests, a ‘safety alert’ from China’s more than a society that can’t be arsed.
always regret a hesitation. aviation authority prompted Hogg’s exit
and a sharp fall in the airline’s share price — Sunshine and solace
Europe’s sinking banks swiftly followed by a statement from its par-
ent Swire Pacific (also Hong Kong-based) Here in France, news reports offer yet
To add to last week’s list of negative signals in condemning street violence and expressing another signal of growing unease, or so I
the global economy, European bank shares support for government efforts to restore interpret it: a dramatic rise, after ten years
have collapsed back to levels last seen dur- order. Kowtowing, in other words: expect of decline, in the number of pilgrims head-
ing the 2012 eurozone debt crisis, reflecting much more of that from other businesses ing for Lourdes and hoping for miracles.
recession indicators in Germany and else- rooted in the territory — while those that are Personally, I prefer the worldlier solace of
where. Their problems, we’re told, are not not reconsider their commitment to a police- sunlit restaurant terraces where bargain-
about solvency — most banks have been state Hong Kong. priced lunches with talkative friends repre-
adequately recapitalised and passed their sent economic stimulus in several senses. I
‘stress tests’ — but limp profitability at a The takeaway society shall return from my month in France burst-
time when the European Central Bank is ing with creative energy; I have contributed
highly likely to cut interest rates again as a When I said last week that a paucity of a portion of trickle-down to local businesses
stimulus measure, while hard-pressed corpo- deals indicates falling economic confidence, and their suppliers; and I have found aston-
rate customers are not borrowing to expand. I had not overlooked the £9 billion merger ishing value despite the fallen pound: this
US banks look stronger and markets value (barring rival bids) of FTSE 100-listed Just week at Marminiac (Dordogne), a €13.90
them higher: so should they cross the Atlan- Eat with Dutch-base delivery service Take- feast of gazpacho, quiche Lorraine, slow-
tic hunting for cheap acquisitions? History away.com, which between them handled cooked lamb, and coconut dessert, in a vil-
will surely remind them that that has never 360 million food orders in the UK, Europe lage eaterie whose name no English visitor
been a good idea. and Canada in 2018. I had spotted it, but the will easily forget: Aux airs de Fanny.
DAVID REDFERN/GETTY IMAGES
Ken Boothe, one of the Hugh Thomson wonders David Eimer takes Aung Richard Bratby hails James
pioneers of reggae, in why today’s travel writers San Suu Kyi to task for MacMillan’s new symphony
the 1970s
Colin Grant — p34 seem to regard all journeys failing to speak up for the Lloyd Evans finds that
as paths to recovery Rohingya Tony Slattery’s comedic
Prue Leith admits that James Walton watches an instinct and love
a great pastry chef needs to octopus unscrew a jar-lid of mischief haven’t
be a bit obsessive and attentively watch TV deserted him
BOOKS & ARTS
BOOKS
The Cold War of words

Humour, satire, drama and poetry proved explosive weapons
in the fight against Stalinism, says Nicholas Shakespeare
Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged cious notes and drafts of The Gulag Archi- cow to smoke with him a ceremonial pipe of
the Literary Cold War pelago ‘were as dangerous as atom bombs’. peace that Havel had been given by a North
by Duncan White Books were lobbed into enemy territory American tribe, Gorbachev stammered:
Little, Brown, £25, pp. 736 like grenades. Between 1952 and 1957, from ‘But I… I don’t smoke.’
three sites in West Germany, a CIA opera- For all its balloon-filling hot air, the
One autumn night in 1991, I stood on the tion codenamed ‘Aedinosaur’ launched mil- Cold War was a deadly serious affair, even
rooftop terrace of a tacky villa in Saranda lions of ten-foot balloons carrying copies of if it seemed hard to take seriously early on.
once owned by Albania’s Stalinist dictator George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and dropped Orwell’s factual account of his experiences
Enver Hoxha, beside three elderly former them over Poland, Hungary and Czechoslo- in Spain, Homage to Catalonia, sold just 638
SOE officers who were returning to Albania vakia — whose airforces were ordered to copies. Only when he was sent for review
for the first time since 1945. In an image that shoot the balloons down. Koestler’s fictionalised account of the same
summed up the waste and the horror of the It was Orwell, ‘the iconic writer of a gen- conflict, Darkness at Noon (half a million
Cold War, David Smiley stared out over the eration’, who gave the Cold War its name. copies were sold in France alone), did he
dark water at the lights of Corfu, from where, He had had his acidic baptism in the Spanish recognise that fiction, rather than journalism
on a similar night in October 1949, he had sent Civil War, alongside Arthur Koestler and Ste- or memoir, was, in White’s words, ‘the most
a group of dissidents, code-named the ‘Pix- phen Spender. ‘We started off by being heroic effective way to communicate the essence
ies’, to launch an insurgency — and wiped defenders of democracy, and ended by slip- of totalitarianism’.
his eye in silence. The American novelist Mary McCarthy
Smiley’s men had been ambushed as they Millions of balloons carrying copies later explained it like this:
landed, and then killed, on the tip-off from
Kim Philby, the highest Russian agent to of Animal Farm were dropped over Readers put perhaps not more trust but a dif-
ferent kind of trust in the perception of writers
infiltrate British Intelligence, and in charge Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia they know as novelists… What we can do, per-
of anti-communist espionage. It was left haps better than the next man, is smell a rat.
to Smiley’s fellow SOE companion, Julian ping over the border with the police panting
Amery, to murmur reflectively: ‘We might on our heels.’ Even though he had been shot Written to undermine Stalinism and the
have saved Albania. We didn’t, and Alba- in the throat by a nationalist bullet, Orwell rabid purges that Orwell witnessed in Spain
nia became the Orwell caricature of com- was denounced as a ‘confirmed Trotskyist’ by — ‘the special world created by secret police
munism.’ a fanatical English communist, David Crook, forces, censorship of opinion, torture and
Philby looms large in Duncan White’s who had been recruited to Stalin’s NKVD frame-up trials’ — Animal Farm was com-
ambitious and constantly rewarding survey by the agent who later assassinated Trotsky, pleted in three weeks. Nineteen Eighty-Four
of writers who battled to get read in the Cold Ramón Mercader — and whose unrepent- took three years longer. Published in 1949,
War.Although not strictly speaking an author, ant Canadian widow I met years later in Bei- and set, not in Russia, but in a future Britain
Philby was a mark of how far each side was jing, where she and Crook were imprisoned which, White nicely reminds us, had become
committed to penetrating, understanding during the Cultural Revolution. It had not a mere colony of the US, renamed ‘Airstrip
and subverting the other; a perversion, if you altered the course of her reverence. ‘When One’, it was immediately recognised as
like, of the empathy that is the writer’s nec- I was locked up, I read Volumes I-IV of Mao’s ‘the most powerful weapon yet deployed in
essary condition, and which defines White’s complete works three and a half times.’ And? the cultural Cold War’.
chiefly Anglo/Soviet cast of novelists, poets ‘I loved his rare shafts of humour.’ Behind the Iron Curtain, Stalin’s chief
and playwrights. Isabel Crook had obliterated from her cultural propagandist, Andrei Zhdanov,
In the wake of the second world war, Rus- memory how humour was a dangerous insisted that Soviet literature was ‘the most
sia and the West feared the domino effect commodity in the Cold War. Along with advanced literature in the world’ because
of enfeebled countries like Albania falling 2.4 million others, the poet Osip Mandelstam ‘it does not and cannot have other interests
into the clutches of imperialist capitalism was incarcerated for an epigram he wrote besides the interests of the state’. In pursuit
or communism. Each side deployed litera- about Stalin’s grub-fat fingers — as was of ‘socialist realism’, brigades of writers were
ture as a frontline force in their struggle. For Solzhenitsyn, for cracking a joke about encouraged to write collective novels about
the CIA, which covertly funded magazines Stalin. Distinctly shy of humour was Mikhail the factory to which they had been assigned.
such as Encounter and Mundo Nuevo, books Gorbachev, the Russian leader who did more The penalty for not doing so was in general
were ‘the most important weapon of strate- than anyone to end the Cold War. When as dire as the result. The poet Anna Akhma-
gic (long-term) propaganda’; for Alexander Václav Havel, the Czech playwright-turned- tova, who, like Solzhenitsyn, had to tear up
Solzhenitsyn, in a different context, his pre- dissident-leader, suggested coming to Mos- and swallow or bury her work, reckoned that
GETTY IMAGES
The chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers, Alexander
Fadeyev, was responsible for the deaths of many of his fellow
authors before he shot himself in 1956. Anna Akhmatova
(right), who had to tear up, swallow or bury her work,
reckoned that ‘not a single piece of literature’ was printed
under Stalin’s rule
‘not a single piece of literature’ was printed hypocrisies and complicities. America’s Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabri-
under Stalin’s poisonous rule. declared pre-war wish to champion self- el García Márquez or Guillermo Cabrera
One of myriad mediocre talents hitched determination lost out to the stronger Infante. Nor does China get a look-in; or East
to communism’s disintegrating band- impulse to contain the spread of commu- Germany, where writers such as Christa
wagon was the Russian novelist Alexander nism and find new resources, as in oil-rich Wolf became irrelevant overnight once
Fadeyev. Co-founder and chairman of the Iran, where a joint CIA–SIS coup toppled the Berlin Wall was broached. A further
Union of Soviet Writers, he had signed let- the elected leader. Elsewhere, America absence is a considered voice from the
ters which led to his fellow authors being propped up repressive right-wing dictator- other side — for example, a poet like Yevg-
arrested, and sometimes worse: an esti- ships in South Vietnam (as fictionalised in eny Yevtushenko, who appeared to straddle
mated 1,500 writers lost their lives in Sta- Graham Greene’s The Quiet American), the divide; or a representative of the victo-
lin’s purges, among them Mandelstam, Isaac Cuba (Our Man in Havana) and South and rious Spanish Nationalists like the novelist
Babel and Boris Pilnyak. But the price of Central America, the supreme act of hypoc- Camilo José Cela, a censor for Franco who
selling his soul to ‘the satrap Stalin’ became risy being the Iran-Contra Affair. in the epochal year of 1989 won the Nobel
too high, and on 13 May 1956 Fadeyev shot It’s a big subject. White wants us never Prize. Perhaps the subject is too big.
himself. His suicide note mourned how lit- to forget that ‘the Cold War was a conflict That said, Cold Warriors fascinates
erature had been ‘debased, persecuted and of truly global scope’, and though not pre- in the areas it does choose to cover,
destroyed’, and the best writers ‘physically tending to be comprehensive, his research and serves as a nostalgic reminder of
exterminated’. is impressive, presented in crisp, efficient a time when literature was a life-or-death
Dissident writers were treated less bar- prose with an eye for the encapsulating matter. White writes: ‘It is hard to imag-
barically in America. One famous lead- detail (e.g. Ho Chi Minh catching frostbite ine the publication of a novel precipitat-
er of the communist cause was Howard while queuing to pay homage to Lenin’s ing a geopolitical crisis in the manner of
Fast, who at a protest against anti-com- corpse). Even so, his parameters are a bit Dr Zhivago or The Gulag Archipelago.’
munists was observed ‘fighting with a loosey-goosey. While prepared to bring As for the future, Václav Havel, the
Coke bottle in each hand’. Still, his books Nicaragua into his sphere of interest, he Czech writer who lived to become president,
were burned and removed from librar- strangely neglects to travel further south, predicted two possibilities only. Either ‘the
ies in Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch- most glaringly to Chile, where the CIA’s independent life of society’, that seemed
hunt, and Fast was sent to prison at Mill overthrow of the communist president Sal- won when the Cold War ended, will grow
Point where he conceived his novel Spart- vador Allende merits just half a paragraph. and grow until society changes. Or else, we
acus, which became a self-published Many of this period’s outstanding writers are doomed to face what happened in Alba-
bestseller and Hollywood movie. were the products of Latin America’s Guer- nia — ‘some dreadful Orwellian vision of a
Nor was the US spared its enemy’s ra Fría, yet White finds no space for Jorge world of absolute manipulation’.
BOOKS & ARTS
Rohingya from the landscape is the fact

ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
A Rohingya
woman in an IDP that the Rohingya have very little written
camp in 2012 history of their own to counter the false
narratives deployed by the army and the
current government. Their grim story is
told mainly through death tolls and the
head counts in refugee camps.
Habiburahman’s book is a rare first-
hand account of what the Rohingya have
had to endure over the past few decades,
and especially valuable because the events
it describes took place long before most of
the world had heard of them. Told in short,
punchy chapters, written in an urgent pre-
sent tense, Habiburahman details the
experiences of his family to reveal how
the Burmese army has been brutalising his
people since the 1960s.
Perhaps the most remarkable part of
the book comes when the author as a teen-
ager flees Rakhine State, acquires a fake
identity card and enrols in a provincial
Forcing 700,000 Rohingya from

their homes was a textbook
example of ethnic cleansing
college to study for the degree he so des-
perately wants. Some people still call him
kalar, but he is no longer officially a Roh-
ingya, and so for the first time in his life has
freedom of movement.
1980s. He was also known as ‘10 per cent’
We looked the other way to his Buddhist classmates, because the
Brave, but also foolhardy, Habiburah-
man became involved with a cell of pro-
David Eimer Rohingya were considered to be only part- democracy activists. Betrayed to the
human. But Habiburahman thought himself authorities, he escaped to Thailand and
First, They Erased Our Name: lucky to be attending school. Even 30 years then Malaysia in 2000. There, he and
A Rohingya Speaks ago, the Rohingya were being denied access other undocumented Rohingya were at
by Habiburahman, with Sophie Ansel to education, as well as healthcare. the mercy of people-traffickers. His way
Scribe, £14.99, pp. 248 No one referred to Habiburahman as out was to embark on an unseaworthy
a Rohingya because his people had lost boat bound for Australia, where he now lives,
My local shop in Yangon was owned by the right to use that name in 1982. That was in Melbourne, after a prolonged period in
a retired army officer and his wife and guard- the year Burma’s citizenship law was changed a detention centre.
ed by their handsome coal-black dog. When by the then ruling junta to exclude the If Burma’s generals are the principal
I asked the name of the hound the man 1.4 million Rohingya from the list of Bur- villains of this deeply depressing story,
smiled and said ‘Kalar’, before enquiring ma’s 135 officially recognised ethnic groups. Habiburahman also wants Aung San Suu
if I knew the meaning of the word. The Rohingya have been effectively state- Kyi to take her share of the blame. Her
I did. Kalar is a racial slur, employed less since then, typed as illegal immigrants failure to speak out against the army’s
originally by the Burmese to describe the from Bangladesh, despite the fact that actions in Rakhine State is damning and
darker-skinned immigrants from India there has been a significant Muslim pres- disgraceful. While she was in Oslo in June
brought to Burma by the British as cheap ence in Rakhine State since at least the 2012, making her much delayed accept-
labour in the colonial era. 15th century. ance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize she
More recently, the word has come to But twisting history to suit their own was awarded in 1991, Rohingya villages
be used as a derogatory reference to Bur- repressive purposes was a speciality of the were being attacked by soldiers and
ma’s Muslims, and especially the reviled golf-playing generals who snatched power civilian mobs.
Rohingya minority in the far western state in a 1962 coup, thereby consigning Burma to The West also played an inglorious
of Rakhine. The use of the insult has become almost 50 years of military misrule. And their part as the Rohingya tragedy unfolded
so pervasive since the persecution of the revisionism has had the desired effect. When in 2012, averting its gaze from the vio-
Rohingya began making global headlines in 700,000-odd Rohingya were forced out of lence while placing a blind faith in Aung
2012 that Facebook, by far the most favoured their homes and across Rakhine State’s bor- San Suu Kyi that she has done little to
means of communication in Burma, now der with Bangladesh by the Burmese army justify since becoming Burma’s leader.
automatically censors any post that includes in 2017 — an operation the United Nations As Habiburahman puts it: ‘My people dis-
the word. described as ‘a textbook example of ethnic appeared in the euphoria of a new age of
Being called a kalar was a daily de- cleansing’ — their plight drew little sympa- democracy.’ Peace and prosperity, though,
humanising experience for the Rohingya thy in Burma. remain sadly elusive in Burma. And if
activist and writer Habiburahman when One of the reasons why the Burmese they’re ever achieved, it will be too late for
he was growing up in Rakhine State in the state has been so successful in erasing the the Rohingya.
chambers, is doing a nine-month patisse- by making 1,700 paper cranes to decorate

Sweetness and light rie course at the Cordon Bleu. We follow the roof of a wedding yurt is entirely foreign
Prue Leith her from cutting up fruit for a fruit salad to to me. But you have to be a bit obsessive
making elaborate professional cakes and to be a great pastry chef. It takes enormous
A Half-Baked Idea: How Grief, pastries, sometimes involving half a dozen patience — hours and hours of repetitive,
Love and Cake Took Me from the techniques. She writes with the precision exacting, minute work. And then it all gets
Courtroom to Le Cordon Bleu required of a pastry chef. It’s not preten- eaten in a flash.
by Olivia Potts tious foodie-gushing but finely observed What chimed with me most was the
Fig Tree, £14.99, pp. 368 and accurate descriptions of texture, taste author’s love of good food and her desire
and smell — with heart. for everyone else to love it too. Talking of
This is a gentle, lovely book. It will, I’m I’m not sure this book is for everyone. puddings, she says:
sure, appeal to many an aspiring cook and There is a lot of patisserie in it. But non-cooks
baker, and should be read by anyone griev- should take a chance, and be amazed at what We don’t have to eat puddings to live. We
don’t have to eat them at all. Puddings aren’t
ing for the loss of someone they loved. It is drama there can be in a patisserie exam. sustenance. Puddings are joy. The squidge of
a memoir — each chapter ending with I held my breath reading Olivia’s account hot syrup sponge, coated in thick, cold cus-
a recipe — covering a few years, from the sud- of making multi-layered entremets (one tard; the knife’s first slice into a cake. Ice
den death of a beloved mother, through the cream scooped at the perfect temperature.
author’s bleak, enveloping sorrow to a change Your first taste of caramel, and the revelation
A great pastry chef has to be a bit that something bitter can also be sweet and
of career, retraining as a pastry chef, and
a love affair. obsessive: hours of exacting work – the best thing you’ve ever eaten. The snap of
precisely tempered chocolate. Beautiful mac-
At first, I found it unengaging. The then it all gets eaten in a flash arons splurging with scarlet raspberry jam.
stages of grief — denial, anger, resentment A gravity-defying soufflé; is there anything
of other people’s happiness, manic displace- large and two single portions) for her more magical?
ment activity, exhaustion, sudden outbursts final test. And she’s merciful to those who
of either wracking sobs or unsuitable laugh- haven’t a clue about such things, translating
ter — are well-written and honest, but too Joconde, chiboust, feuilletine, Claire- Finding work for
familiar, too predictable. (Though what did fontaine and dacquoise.
I want? Originality in grief?) The point is, this is not a cookbook, idle hands
But gradually I was drawn in to Olivia despite the chapter-end recipes. It’s a love Richard Francis
Potts’ almost obsessive love for her mother, story, with sadness, humour and tension. It’s
and her ways of coping — or not coping — uplifting, too. That someone so emotional, Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune:
with her death. Adopting the ‘I’m fine, I’m struggling with loss, can come out of misery How Younger Sons Made Their
fine’ mantra, she works ridiculous hours as Way in Jane Austen’s England
a junior barrister in chambers, begins to by Rory Muir
think that criminal law might not be for her Yale, £25, pp. 362
and feels guilty about falling in love.
The legal bits are fascinating. Not so Readers of Jane Austen gain a clear idea
much the cases — most criminals are pathet- of the task facing the daughters of gentle-
ic and their crimes either too mundane or INTRODUCTORY OFFER: men. They need to secure a husband who
horrible to dwell on — but Olivia’s own life: can enable them to keep or even improve
her pride in her absurd wig and gown, which
give her both status and anonymity (she isn’t
Subscribe for their social and economic status. But what
about their opposite numbers? How did
recognised in civvies at a bus stop by some-
one she’s just accused in court of shagging only £1 an issue the younger sons of gentlemen face up
to the challenges and responsibilities
the postman); her arbitrary winning and of adulthood?
losing of cases, often having nothing to do 9 Weekly delivery of the magazine Primogeniture meant that even those
with her own skills, let alone the truth; or her from a wealthy background often had to
description of the magistrates court cells on 9 App access to the new earn their living. While for girls marriage
a Saturday morning: issue from Thursday and career tended to be synonymous, for
The stench of sweat is overpowering. Under- 9 Full website access many of their brothers a profession came
neath, you can detect the sickly-sweet smell of first, and then with luck a marriage would
alcohol leaching from pores. There is a faint follow, since ‘a single man in possession of
undertone of toilets. On top of this, instant a good fortune must be in want of a wife’.
coffee and the plasticky, porky, beany tang of How young single men went about achiev-
the all-day-breakfast ration packs they feed ing such good fortune is the question that
the defendants.
Rory Muir sets out to answer. At one point
he even reverses the gender of the Ben-
In danger of falling apart, and still obsess- net sisters in order to speculate about the
ing privately about her mother while refus- career path each might have followed —
ing to talk through or really face her loss, poor Mary would have become an attor-
she finds some solace in cooking, and the ney, and ‘ripened fully into pomposity and
recipes get more interesting. They’d been dullness with years and success’.
www.spectator.co.uk/A346A
a bit on the boring side before: shepherd’s This is a book about the professions on
pie, banana cake (admittedly with the addi- 0330 333 0050 quoting A346A offer at the end of the 18th century and the
tion of a packet of Rolos), soda bread, pizza beginning of the 19th, not just to young-
and minestrone. Auto-renewing payments only. $1 a week in Australia er sons but also to the eldest offspring of
Now the book becomes almost all about call 089 362 4134 or go to www.spectator.com.au/T051A gentlemen down on their luck, as well as
cakes and puddings. Olivia, having left her to the sons of successful members of the
BOOKS & ARTS
treatment is possible. Muir

There be no dragons
ILLUSTRATION BY ALFRED WALLACE MILLS/ BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
plots the curious career tra-

jectory of Jane’s own broth- Carolyne Larrington
er Francis Austen, who saw
distinguished action at sea, Hollow Places: An Unusual History
then cooled his heels on half- of Land and Legend
pay for 30 years, before being by Christopher Hadley
abruptly promoted to admi- Collins, £20, pp. 438
ral. Meanwhile, John Scott’s
18-year-old beloved climbed How interesting is local history? The his-
down a ladder from her bed- tory of my Cotswold village — recently cel-
room window and the roman- ebrating the centenary of the Armistice with
tic pair eloped to Scotland. In a well-researched exhibition and booklet
due course John became a baron events in the Sibfords in the first world
rister, but, as with so many of war — fascinates me, but I am not sure
the young men in all the pro- that people from other parts of Oxford-
fessions, struggled to make shire, let alone further afield, would agree.
a living. One year he prom- This is the perennial problem of the local:
ised to treat himself to all his unless it offers, in microcosm, insight into
income for 11 months, leaving larger themes and topics, an element of
only the final month’s money ‘so-whatness’ colours the reader’s response.
for his wife (‘What a stingy Christopher Hadley’s Hollow Places
dog I must have been!’). As takes its inspiration from a mysterious stone
it happened, his only earnings let into the wall in his Hertfordshire village.
arrived in December. Still, The carvings on it are somewhat indistinct,
through talent and hard work but they show a dragon, a floriated cross,
(not to mention, as in so many symbols of the Evangelists and an angel
cases, useful connections), bearing a tiny soul heavenwards in a napkin.
he ended up Earl of Eldon, The tomb-cover, for that is what it is, is made
Lord High Chancellor of of grey-black Purbeck marble and com-
Great Britain. memorates one Piers Shonks. Local legend
But only a tiny minority — and a now-vanished inscription record-
Henry Tilney, a younger son and beneficed clergyman, defies achieved such success. Career ed in Latin and English — has it that Piers
his father in a scene from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey structures tended to be arbi- slew a dragon. And, in the early 19th century
trary and ramshackle. In many when a mighty yew was felled in the parish,
professions, entrance require- a cave, or at least a great hollow, was
ments were a lottery. Exami- revealed at its roots. The lair of the dragon
middle classes wanting to improve their nations and interviews might be probing had been uncovered.
social standing. There was a ‘tidal zone or superficial, according to the whim or Hadley describes the book as ‘a historical
where lower reaches of the gentry... temperament of the employer. In most detective story and a meditation on memo-
overlapped and merged with the upper cases, what really mattered was money up ry, belief, the stories we used to tell — and
reaches of the bourgeoisie’. front, whether to buy a position or to sup- why they still matter’. He begins with the
The principal options can be told off yew tree, brilliantly bringing to life the sharp
on one’s fingers: the church, medicine, Military expenses were so high winter morning on which the tree was felled,
the law, banking and commerce, civil office, with much information about the many
the army, the navy, service in India. Nowa- that most army officers spent ancient yews of Britain, the reasons why
days, we face ‘a greater array... from air- more than they ever earned they may have been planted, and the secret
traffic controller to zoologist’, and women ways in which they continue to live on, even
are eligible too (apart from those cross-dress- port oneself for many years until — if ever when apparent decrepitude sets in. The his-
ing Bennet sisters, there is only one mention — one’s labours began to turn a profit. torical context for the felling of such a sig-
of women participating in the recognised Many clerics worked as underpaid curates nificant tree, growing most probably on an
professions, those acting as ‘supernumerary for the whole of their working lives, while ancient charter boundary, is set out in detail:
clerks’ in certain government offices). military expenses were so high that infuriatingly, the enterprise may simply have
No book with the words ‘Jane Aus- most army officers spent more than they been a make-work for the unemployed agri-
ten’ in the subtitle can afford to be dull, ever earned. cultural labourers on parish relief.
and though Muir gives us plenty of detail Boredom and frustration were as com- Next, Hadley turns his attention to the
— numbers recruited at different periods, mon then as now, and the transition from rare and expensive marble of which the
premiums paid and salaries earned — he a cosy home to professional life was stone is made, and he travels down to Pur-
illuminates the hard facts with vignettes a wrench for many. Several testimonies beck to talk to local quarrymen and sculp-
of actual lives lived. Sometimes these convey a sense of the unreality of the tors. The mixed chalk and limestone geology
are the merest glimpses, figures flicker- world of work. For one young midship- of the dramatic Dorset coastline, the tower-
ing into life for a moment before vanish- man, ‘all seemed strange; different lan- ing stone ruins of Corfe Castle set against
ing into the darkness of the past. A bored guage and expressions of tongue, that I a spring sky and the poetic names given
infantry officer by the name of William thought myself always asleep or in a dream, to the different marble-beds — ‘feather,
Swabey watches fish from a bridge or and never properly awake’. As Muir says thornback and sky-bed’ — vividly sketch
throws stones at pigs: ‘I am ashamed of it, at the conclusion of this fascinating study: a different landscape from the patchwork
but have nothing else to do.’ ‘Whether work should be so important in of fields and ancient churches around Brent
Elsewhere, however, more sustained our lives... is another matter.’ Pelham, Shonks’s home village. Hadley
confidently deploys technical terms for the apparently insignificant items can convey
tools of the marble quarrier and sculptor’s
Salvaged from the silt powerful emotions.
trade, skilfully used in chiselling and sand- Derek Turner Over 23 squelchy years, Lara Maiklem
ing, and for the kinds of axe through which has amassed a battered and stained collec-
the mighty yew was brought down. The past Mudlarking: Lost and Found tion of everyday things turned talismanic by
is animated both with imagination on the River Thames time and immersion. The Thames is the long-
and knowledge. by Lara Maiklem est archaeological site in the world, running
Tracing the route by which the mar- Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 319 from the obelisk at Teddington, marking the
ble might have found its way to Hertford- limit of the tidal Thames, to its battered cous-
shire, via river and sea, the narrative returns The 1950 B-film The Mudlark tells of an ins on the Yantlet Line between Southend
home to look more closely at the stone itself, urchin who ekes out an unpleasant existence and Hoo. Maiklem has prospected as much
explaining the meaning of its symbols and scavenging the slimy Thames foreshore. of this frequently feculent, sometimes toxic
its likely date, and correcting the many erro- He finds a coin bearing the head of Queen Troy as she can, often on hands and knees,
neous accounts and ‘terrible sketches’ that Victoria, and creeps into Windsor Castle blasted by easterlies, disoriented in fogs or
later antiquarian enthusiasts provided of its to see the sequestered sovereign for him- almost cut off by tides. She has crossed from
decoration. Shonks’s story, whether battling self. Through sheer goodhearted pluck, he Middlesex to Surrey dry-shod, pried among
the dragon — here there is an excursus on succeeds where sophisticated politicians the ribs of broken ships, seen Traitor’s Gate
the different types of dragon in European have failed, appealing to the Queen’s feel- from water level and considered the course
folklore — or a variant, in which he fights ings and reawakening her sense of pub- of riparian history from Greenwich, ‘where
a local giant named Cadmus, is examined, lic duty. Modern mudlarking is a hobby time begins at the Prime Meridian’.
and the meaning both of the tales and of rather than a necessity, but chance finds of She disdains metal-detecting as
their survival over the centuries is consid- disrespectfully predatory. Her trove nev-
ered. In the final part of the book, Shonks ertheless encompasses amber, garnets,
himself is disinterred with much excitement One pieces of Londinium hypocaust, beads, tiles,
from the historical record, as witness to boar tusks, gold lace-ends, handmade bricks,
a deed of land transfer somewhere between nit-combs, thimbles, buckled shoes, shards of
1231 and 1242. One cup one plate bellarmines and clay pipes, hand-blown bot-
This reference is unearthed in the splen- one knife one fork tles, toy soldiers and letters of the drowned
didly named Hairy Book or Liber Pilosus, Dove typeface, tipped into the Thames by
so called for its binding which retains the its high-minded creator in 1913 to avoid its
hair of the goatskin from which its parch- four walls one ceiling use on lesser texts (she has, perhaps pre-
ment is made; this is a cartulary, or collec- and one floor sumptuously, used it for chapter headers).
tion of documents, pertaining to churches Other finds are too redolent to be retriev-
associated with St Paul’s Cathedral, Lon- able — recent wedding rings, or the heavy
don. Sadly, this collection of legal materi- one coat one hook box labelled ‘Remains of the Late…’.
als, though it preserves further references Another time, she watched the ‘peace-
to Shonks, or his similarly named grandson, one table and one ful, angelic’ body of a girl sailing gracefully
makes no mention of dragons or giants; the seawards.
transactions in which Shonks is involved table lamp Henry Mayhew appears, inevitably, doc-
are ordinary enough for the 13th centu- umenting a sad cadre of coal-picking and
ry. Hadley explains medieval legal custom one pool of light rope-thieving teenagers, and even sadder
and practice clearly and thoroughly, situat- ‘old women of the lowest grade’. As in other
ing the Shonks family within their immedi- one open book books about the Thames, there are stock
ate social context and unsettling some of characters — homesick Romans, Viking
the more fanciful explanations for dragon- marauders, Tudor theatre-goers, Georgian
slaying legends. watermen, Pip from Great Expectations
Shonks and his story, the tomb and the No ornaments — plus Henry VIII, Samuel Pepys, John
now vanished yew are a starting point for no mantelpiece Evelyn and Captain Kidd. But this author
a digressive and affectionate exploration augments the Thamesian tally, summoning
of a local tradition that has survived for old Londoners out of silty suspension from
800 years. Over more than 400 pages, the no hat or hat stand a discarded Victoria Cross or a pot-lid.
search for Shonks takes the author on many vase or flowers There are other mudlarking books, but
wandering ways. He speaks to historians, this one offers engaging insight into an
folklorists, artists and archivists along the amphibian ambience of strongly marked
journey, and his explanations are authorita- no record characters, semi-secret exploits and out-
tive and well-researched. The writing, fine of the days or hours landish theories. Maiklem is not alone in
though it is in places, cannot always sus- resorting to the river for salvation as much
tain the reader over long accounts of 18th- as salvage — ‘It healed my broken heart’.
century antiquaries and their misapprehen- no means Centuries earlier, Edmund Spenser similar-
sions. But the book nevertheless meets the of keeping tab or track ly ‘walkt forth to ease my payne / Along the
challenge of amplifying the local beyond shoare of silver streaming Themmes’.
the merely parochial. It chronicles, thought- The author is attuned — glimpsing faces
fully and pleasurably, the different kinds of no passport in walls, sensing ‘ghostly essences’, espe-
work that the story and the memorialising cially of her boat-builder ancestors, seeing
objects associated with it do, and the vagar- and no going back the river almost as a deity to be propitiat-
ies of preservation that allowed it to leave its ed. The key to spotting objects, she reflects,
traces to be read across the palimpsest of an is ‘to relax and look through the surface’
English village. —Simon Rae (a prosthetic eye once stared startling-
BOOKS & ARTS
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Alistair Moffat imagines St Cuthbert’s death, in the bleak midwinter, on a lonely, inhospitable island
ly back). But she also tells how to dry Alistair Moffat has joined this party of
out old iron, and contributes knowledge-
Travelling hopefully in burdened pilgrims. Nearly 70, he wants to
ably to antiquarian archives. Today’s Cuthbert’s footsteps face up to some ‘actuarial facts’, those he
Society of Mudlarks is a learned and has wronged and mistakes he has made, so
unexpectedly exclusionary body infinitely far Hugh Thomson he ‘can change what is in my heart and soul’.
from Mayhew-era connotations. To shrive himself, he decides to travel to
The foreshore is falling away, as seas rise, To the Island of Tides: Lindisfarne in the footsteps of Cuthbert, the
and the city subsides. The ‘sacred river’ clas- A Journey to Lindisfarne great 7th-century saint of the north. This is
sicised by Turner and commemorated by by Alistair Moffat admirable in its ambition, if at times dull in
Peter Ackroyd, repository of Englishness, Canongate, £20, pp 317 the execution, but suffers from one essential
medieval pilgrims’ tokens, modern Hindu flaw. We know very little about St Cuthbert’s
statuettes and peace-seeking suicides, is also There was a time when travel writers would journey to Lindisfarne.
a sewer. The river is cleaner than it used to set off with a spring in their step: Coleridge So Moffat has to do a great deal of suppo-
be, but after rain, all outfalls ooze cotton knocking the bristles from a broom in his sition: what Cuthbert might have thought if
buds, nappies, condoms, tampons, medical impatience to make it into a stick; Laurie he had once stood in the same place;whether
Lee walking out one midsummer morning; he knew where his decision to become a
Lara Maiklem’s trove includes amber, Patrick Leigh Fermor singing as he headed monk might take him. He even admits at one
down the lane. To travel was an expression point that Cuthbert probably would not have
garnets, thimbles, clay pipes, toy of freedom and exploration; to step out of travelled this particular way, though it did at
soldiers and discarded wedding rings the front door the beginning of a grand least give very fine views.
adventure. It would take a writer of Sebaldian genius
waste, and gobbets of fat. The sediments Not any more. Travel writers now come to flesh out such slender pickings, which Mof-
that hold sentiment leach arsenic, mercury troubled and weary before they’ve even fat is not. The prose can be all too pedestrian.
and cadmium. Today’s coins are pinchbeck, begun. A journey can no longer be a jeu This is the sort of walking book that notices
fizzling after a few years, oxidising Elizabeth d’esprit. It has to be undertaken to expiate when you pass a car park or a dog barks. And
II into anonymity — while interloping mus- some trauma. It is almost as if, in today’s new while he tantalises the reader with the prom-
sels and crabs devastate native species. puritanism, it has to be painful. One thinks ise of past misdeeds, the only one he will con-
The further downriver, the more evident of the old nursery rhyme: ‘Wednesday’s child fess to is that he gave up rugby when he was
England’s erosion; recent trash at Tilbury is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go.’ 22, despite having shown promise.
‘tells a story of overconsumption and wanton Recent bestselling examples of the He’s at his best as a historian and he has
waste’. Vast mounds of soiled, single-use junk genre have all followed the same princi- already written widely on ancient Scotland
befit a recent past whose voices cry ‘loud ple: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to and the Borders. It’s fascinating to learn that
and angry’ on the estuarial wind. It is hard to Found treated walking as necessary psy- Celtic monks followed the Druids in hav-
imagine such stuff ever feeling evocative, but chotherapy; Guy Stagg’s The Crossway ing their foreheads tonsured to give them
while we hope for transmutation we can fol- was billed as ‘a journey to recovery’; while a high hairline, with a pigtail behind —
low Lara Maiklem’s footprints down to the The Salt Path by Raynor Winn told of and that this may have been a fashion that
tideline and back. a couple escaping from eviction and illness. aggravated divisions at the crucial Synod of
commendably honest in his self-apprais- rator. He has a love affair with his translator,
al, and there will be readers who welcome Walter, and also beds Walter’s sister, Luna.
these confessions of a justified travel writer. (‘I think I had less sex in social democra-
However, I would be concerned if the trend cies than I did in authoritarian regimes,’ he
becomes a requirement. reminisces later.) Levy adeptly captures the
Some music festivals have lockers in ambience of life in the GDR, from the ever-
which you can deposit ‘emotional baggage’ present surveillance down to Luna’s pining
at the start of your long weekend, so that you for fruit and a pair of Wrangler jeans.
can dance away without inhibitions. It’s not The second part of the book is set in
that I’m suggesting all travel writers should London in 2016, in the days following the
do the same; but one would hope that it Brexit vote, with Saul, who still thinks he’s
should still remain possible sometimes to do 28, again hit by a Jaguar crossing Abbey
a journey, well, just for the fun of it. Road. This time, the injuries sustained
are graver: he comes to in hospital with
a ruptured spleen and a ruptured sense of
A difficult crossing reality. He entertains visits from a 51-year-
old Jennifer; his current partner, Jack; his
Mia Levitin brother and nephews; and his father, who
— to Saul’s surprise — is very much alive.
The Man Who Saw Everything ‘How do you write a coherent character,’
by Deborah Levy Levy wondered in a 2013 interview in
Hamish Hamilton, £14.99, pp. 208 The White Review, ‘or why should you?’
Betrayals, real and imagined, are a recur-
‘Serious readers and serious writers have ring theme. ‘We are East and West looting
a contract with each other,’ Deborah Levy each other,’ Levy wrote in her 1989 novel
once wrote. ‘We live through the same his- Beautiful Mutants. Saul is aware that Walter
torical events, and the same Pepsi ads. Writ- is reporting on his comings and goings to the
ers and readers, nervously sharing this all too Stasi: ‘I knew his heart was not in it, but he
fluid world, circle each other to find out what had to save himself.’ Walter further betrays
the hell is going on.’ Saul by withholding information about his
Figuring out what the hell is going on family situation; Saul betrays Walter with
Whitby between the Celtic and Roman del- within the fluid worlds of Levy’s fiction is Luna; Luna betrays her son; Rainier, a col-
egates. And that at the only Anglo-Saxon not always straightforward. While other league of Walter’s, likely betrays them all. We
temple to have been excavated in Britain, at authors are increasingly drawn to autofic- learn of Saul’s careless betrayal of Jennifer
Yeavering near the Tweed, a living woman tion, for Levy, uncertain times, it seems, call during a tragic turn of events.
had been thrown on top of the corpse for uncertain realities. The characters in The Levy draws clear parallels between Saul
of a nobleman buried there and covered Man Who Saw Everything shape-shift, and and Narcissus: ‘I had gazed at my reflec-
by stones. time bends back and then twists upon itself tion in the wing mirror of his car and my
On arriving at Lindisfarne, Moffat makes again. Objects and animals — wolves and reflection had fallen into me.’ No self-effac-
the point that the famous Gospels which jaguars; sunflowers and cherry trees; a string ing Echo, Jennifer moved to the States to
the monks produced there so painstaking- of pearls and a toy train — echo through- pursue her artistic ambitions. ‘I was scared
ly would be better seen in situ rather than out like leitmotifs. It may be best not to try of your envy,’ she explains, ‘which was big-
to pry apart the seams and just enjoy loop- ger than your love.’ Jennifer’s debut solo
The Vikings ripped off the Gospels’ ing the loop along Levy’s carefully crafted exhibition features a triptych of Saul titled
jewelled cover – but left the Möbius strip. ‘A Man in Pieces’: ‘His armpits, nipples, fin-
Longlisted for the Booker Prize, The Man gers, penis, feet, lips, ears. Floating in space
manuscript, as being of no interest Who Saw Everything joins Levy’s two most and time.’ Attending the show, Saul realises,
recent novels, which made the Booker short with some sadness, that he is only part of
buried away in the British Library. He draws list: Swimming Home (2011) and Hot Milk a bigger picture.
attention to the skill with which the inks were (2016). It opens in 1988, with 28-year-old The oldest known hero’s journey,
made, so that the colours have remained historian Saul Adler struck by a Jaguar as The Epic of Gilgamesh, begins:
largely unfaded 13 centuries later. Because he tries to cross Abbey Road. The car’s wing He had seen everything, had experienced all
the monks used vellum calf skin, it was easi- mirror splinters, launching us into Saul’s emotions, from exaltation to despair… He
est to cut larger double pages and then bind kaleidoscopic vision of events. The driver is had journeyed to the edge of the world and
them, thereby creating the template for the dubious about Saul’s age, and a ‘small, flat, made his way back, exhausted but whole.
printed book. The jewelled cover of the Gos- rectangular object’, with a voice emanating
pels was ripped off by the Vikings in their from within, lies in the road — making us Despite displaying a modern, eyeliner-
terrible raid on the island in 793, although wonder whether we are indeed where (and wearing version of masculinity, Saul is stunt-
they left the manuscript itself, it being pre- when) Saul says we are. Walking away from ed by a lack of emotional maturity. ‘I had no
sumably of no interest. the accident bruised but intact, he visits his idea how to be the man you wanted me to
By then St Cuthbert himself was long girlfriend, Jennifer, who sleeps with him and be,’ he tells Jennifer. ‘I have only just start-
dead, and Moffat comes to some sobering promptly dumps him. ed to feel things and I don’t even know what
conclusions about both his own impending Saul then travels to East Berlin for year I am in.’ In order to cross the road that
mortality — his journey has been ‘the first research, bringing along the ashes of his he’s been trying to traverse for 30 years,
few faltering steps in learning how to die’ recently deceased communist father. Saul Saul will not only have to look both ways,
— and the likelihood that Cuthbert’s end has a prescient awareness of the impending but outside of himself. Otherwise, he is des-
was a bleak one, in the middle of winter fall of the wall, down to the exact date, cast- tined to remain a man in pieces, lonely in all
on a lonely, inhospitable island. Moffat is ing further doubt on his reliability as a nar- space-time continua.
BOOKS & ARTS
ARTS
Soul music
Colin Grant talks to the godfathers of reggae, who are trying to
return the music to its spiritually uplifting roots
A
camera sweeps across the ver- After Marley’s death in 1981 that spir-
dant, shimmering beauty of itually uplifting old-school reggae was
Jamaica before descending on eclipsed by harsher-sounding dancehall
to a raffishly charming wooden house stars whose music was characterised by
built into the hills. We’re at a music stu- highly sexualised ‘punany’ lyrics. The cul-
dio where four of the pioneers who gave tural coup was confirmed by 1990 when
birth to reggae are congregated to record Bunny Wailer (one of the three original
a new album. Wailers) was bottled off stage by a young
‘It’s tranquil, a real feeling of nature, crowd at the Sting Festival.
just birds, trees and the wind,’ says Like many of his contemporaries, Wail-
71-year-old Ken Boothe, whose seductive er seemed thereafter to withdraw from
voice is smooth as rum, just as it was in performing. Premature decline also affect-
1974 when ‘Everything I Own’ stormed ed Kiddus I, Winston McAnuff and Cedric
the British charts. Myton, who along with Ken Boothe (the
Boothe is one of the stars of a beguil- godfather of reggae) star in Inna De Yard.
ing new documentary, Inna De Yard, All four, in past decades, suffered terrible
about the rise and fall of roots reggae, misfortunes and yet, late in their careers,
which reached its peak in the late 1970s they find themselves lauded, in a remarkable
with Bob Marley’s ‘conscious’ lyric-writ-
ing and is now witnessing a revival. ‘If this generation doesn’t know
What made the music so distinctive what they’re doing with the
were two key elements: earnest harmonies, music we’ll lose it’
especially of the Rastafarian reggae singers,
underpinned by the characteristic ‘one drop’ turnaround. The documentary charts them remembers Myton (original lead singer of
of the rhythm guitar and bass drum. It her- coming together on the remote outskirts the Congos). ‘When we go to the studio is
alded a simple ‘dirt music’, grounded in the of Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, to record an a one shot. With the live band playing. It’s
sun-baked earth of Jamaica’s ghettos, such album in a makeshift studio known locally totally changed now; you can lay the rhythm
as Trench Town, from where it emerged. as music mountain. and overdub the voice. But back then you
Fundamentally, roots reggae was a music Here, Nyabinghi drummers join the Ras- have to be sharp, like a Gillette!’
of black liberation, a narrative of freedom tafarian singers in drawing out what Kiddus Speaking on the phone to each of the
from subjugation: either in escaping to I calls ‘the natural mystic of the location. It’s quartet individually, it’s immediately appar-
mythical Mother Africa or in death, over all contributing to the primal acoustic sound, ent that all have that strange mix often
which the slave master and his colonial suc- a vibration from the past, from Africa, from found in Jamaican musicians: mischief and
cessor held no dominion. When, in ‘Talkin’ the days of slavery.’ mercurial majesty.
Blues’, Marley sang ‘cold ground was my Inna De Yard conjures a golden period of Inna De Yard evolves as a sequence of
bed at night/ and rock was my pillow too’, Jamaican music. As a child Boothe remem- chapters capturing them in profile as they
his compatriots recognised it as real-life bers standing outside of theatres in awe of rehearse inna de yard both for the album
biography; his suffering was theirs. Rooted singers passing through, as other young- and the start of a European tour.
in hope and redemption, these searing, ethe- sters competed to carry the stars’ flypacks Myton, the most eccentric-seeming (he
real songs evoked an eternal life beyond this (containing their stage outfits) guaranteeing strikes a series of Usain Bolt-like poses on
one, its lyrics peppered with reflections on them free entry to the venue. stage), is heartened but not surprised by
the remembrance of slavery, most soulfully ‘I so wanted to be a star,’ says Boothe, the new young European audience that has
rendered in Peter Tosh’s ‘Stop That Train’. ‘their glamour was awesome.’ Starting out in ‘discovered’ old-school reggae. ‘The music
But embedded in these serious themes were the 1960s as a Blues singer in the mould of speaks to the yearning for spirituality. Some-
wit and optimism. As the Heptones sang Louis Prima, Boothe emerged at the fore- thing is wrong and people are searching for
in ‘Sufferer’s Time’, the popularity of reg- front of a new, faster-paced fusion of blues some form of redemption.’
gae meant ‘a time fe sufferer’s drive big car/ and mento (a local folk music): ska. I wonder what the Rasta-loving Euro-
a time fe sufferer’s live it up’. The music was also recorded ‘fast, fast,’ peans make of Boothe when he appears on
Renaissance men:
Kiddus I, Winston
McAnuff and Cedric
Myton, the stars of
the documentary
Inna De Yard
of his high-velocity stage presence. ‘I had an

album for 20 years playing everywhere, wast-
ing time for an opening that was never going
to happen. Twenty years later that same
album, Diary of the Silent Years, is now a hit
in France. It’s not really a resurrection; it’s
just a case of when the fruit is ripe.’
That sweet reward was short-lived,
a point emphasised in the documenta-
ry when it drops down a gear to focus
on the randomness of violence that has
scarred Jamaica. One musician recounts
how, caught in the crossfire of rival gangs,
his sister was shot dead in her yard; the
group’s heartrending song ‘Be Careful’
is a tribute to her and also to McAnuff’s
son who was murdered in 2012. In a
filmed concert in Paris, Electric Dread
stands like a sentinel at the edge of the
stage staring out over the crowd. ‘For
a long time I couldn’t sing that song; it was
too heavy. Losing a youth, I don’t wish that
stage dressed, typically, to a point beyond way, nullified, any defiant voice… I was said ’pon anybody. I felt suicidal.’
distinction, in an evening jacket. ‘But I am to be too abrasive in the 1970s. I was always Repairing the connection between gen-
a Rasta man,’ he objects, affronted by my self-produced. I would work and get my lik- erations is central to the documentary. It
ignorance. ‘Look here, what is Rasta? You kle money.’ When he did work with other asks implicitly whether those who rejected
don’t have to be dreadlocks to be a Rasta. producers, such as Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, it singers like Bunny Wailer can ever be drawn
It’s not a fashion; it’s a way of life.’ always seemed to result in some inexplica- back to what Inna De Yard has to offer.
All are committed to the notion of ble calamity. The master tapes of 20 songs he ‘Every generation has key musicians,’
music as a tool for healing. Kiddus I, aka recorded with Perry have never been found. says Boothe, ‘and it’s up to them to take
‘Dr Feelgood’ after his reputation for ‘I am the most recorded unreleased artist in care of the music’s legacy. If this generation
sourcing the best marijuana on the island, Jamaica,’ he says drily. doesn’t know what they’re doing with the
famously joined Bob Marley on stage for A stalled career also befell Myton, but music we’ll lose it.’
the 1978 ‘One Love Peace Concert’. Back nonetheless his exuberance crackles down McAnuff laments the grip dancehall’s
then musicians united to try to bring about the phone line. Unprompted, he starts sing- ‘below the waist’ music currently exerts over
an end to hostilities between rival gunmen ing ‘row fisherman row’, the lyrics from his the culture. He asserts that it’s antithetical
of Jamaica’s political parties trapped in most admired song. He’d happily sing for to the soul of Jamaica: ‘The singers have to
a near civil war. It was a time, recalls the free, he tells me. In recent years he’s had lit- come back!’ With Inna De Yard there are
regal Judy Mowatt in the film, when music tle choice. signs of their return. ‘We’re trying to uplift
bore witness to the urgency and jeopardy ‘The relationship [with the record com- the music and, with it, uplift the people.’
of life: ‘Reggae music was people’s news. pany] was damaging from the beginning. Kiddus I echoes the sentiment: ‘At this
If a man get shot the singers would make I haven’t received a penny in royalties from moment in my seventies, I’m on a platform
a song of it.’ “Row Fisherman” in more than 20 years. My on a runway, lifting up. Where creation
Kiddus I was touted as a successor to last payment was in 1998.’ allows me to go that’s where we’ll go.’
Marley but he’s glad it didn’t turn out that The trauma of a hiatus resonates with
way. ‘Because anyone who is a threat to the the most youthful member, 62-year-old Win- Inna De Yard is released nationwide on
establishment is always taken out in some ston McAnuff, aka ‘Electric Dread’ because 30 August.
BOOKS & ARTS
Exhibitions
© FREUD MUSEUM
Talk like an Egyptian
Martin Gayford
Between Oedipus and the Sphinx:
Freud and Egypt
Freud Museum, until 13 October
Twenty years ago, I visited the ancient Egyp-

tian city of Amarna with a party of Ameri-
can journalists. Even in those days this place,
near Asyut on the Middle Nile, was regarded
as a dodgy destination for western tourists.
As a tribute to the value of an entire CBS
television crew as a terrorist target, we were
accompanied by a squad of heavily armed,
black-clad Egyptian special forces. But the
sense of daring adventure was dented when,
shortly after arriving at the ruins, we were
joined by a couple of intrepid Germans who
had come in a taxi.
The Germanic world has long been fas-
cinated by Amarna and its ruler, the phar-
aoh Akhenaten — which is why many of the
best finds from the place are in Berlin — and
none more so than the founder of psychoa-
nalysis. That much is clear from an intrigu-
To Freud ancient Egypt must

have offered a thesaurus
of the unconscious mind
ing little exhibition, Freud and Egypt, at the
Freud Museum, Hampstead.
Akhenaten features prominently in one
of Sigmund Freud’s last books, Moses and
Monotheism, published in 1939 while he
was living in exile in London. In this Freud
argued — startlingly — that the prophet, ‘Oedipus and the Sphinx’, c.1826, by Ingres, a copy of which hung over Freud’s desk
rather than being Jewish, was actually an
ancient Egyptian noble. And, furthermore,
that Jewish monotheism was derived from
Akhenaten’s cult of the sun god, Ra, who it’s not hard to see why Freud was obsessed head and the body of a lion. Over his desk
was the only deity venerated at Amarna. by Akhenaten, and by things Egyptian more there was a reproduction of Ingres’s paint-
It is fair to say that few have been con- generally. ing ‘Oedipus and the Sphinx’, in which the
vinced by this thesis. Rowan Williams, the He was an enthusiastic — you could creature, though retaining sharp claws, has
ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, rather tartly even say compulsive — collector of antiq- become voluptuously female, the seduc-
described the idea as ‘painfully absurd’. But uities. The shelves and display cupboards of tive, dangerous incarnation of an Oedipus
being wrong is not the same as being unin- his study and consulting room are filled by complex. It’s no surprise that the surrealists
teresting, and Freud’s Egyptomania is an a dense clutter of archaeological bric-à-brac: revered Freud. Salvador Dali came to pay
absorbing theme. Greek, Chinese, Roman and — most of all his respects soon after he arrived in London
Akhenaten, who ruled in the mid-14th — Egyptian. There is more in the show. in 1938 (a portrait sketch of Freud by Dali
century BC, is full, you might say, of Freudian An essay in the exhibition catalogue pre- hangs in the hall).
possibilities. Why, for instance, was he rep- sents various, rather psychoanalytical expla- The sphinx, of course, posed a riddle.
resented as a weirdly androgynous figure, nations of this, suggesting that these objects So, too, for Freud did the human mind, and
with wide hips and almost feminine breasts? averted fears of his mother’s death or calmed especially its dreams. When he psychoana-
A pair of statuettes in the exhibition of the him down in some way. Of these the most lysed himself he recalled an ‘anxiety dream’
Pharaoh and his queen Nefertiti show them plausible is: ‘Because the objects inspired him he had had as a child of eight or so. To his
with almost interchangeable bodies. This is and filled him with ideas for his work.’ horror, the young Sigmund seemed to see his
not the standard notion of a regal physique. The macabre rituals, the mummy wrap- sleeping mother being carried by ‘strangely
Did Akhenaten actually look like this, pings, the hieroglyphs and above all the draped and unnaturally tall figures’. These
perhaps, as some scholars suggest, for medi- Egyptian pantheon of partly animal deities phantoms had the heads of birds. It sounds
cal reasons? Or was it because he believed must have seemed like a thesaurus of the just like a picture by Dali or Max Ernst.
that the great god Ra and everybody else unconscious mind, abounding with Freud- The exhibition is best taken as a supple-
was simultaneously male and female (an ian symbols. In his library there is an etch- ment to a visit to Freud’s study itself, which
unexpectedly 21st-century idea). At any rate ing of the Sphinx at Giza, with a human includes the celebrated couch on which his
patients reclined on a sort of nest of luxu- being rearranged. ‘I’m here as a last-minute The Red by Marcus Brigstocke is a medi-
riantly patterned Middle Eastern textiles. replacement for the Evening Standard’s the- tation on alcoholism. Ben is 43 and has been
This room is not only a time capsule, but atre critic Nicholas de Jongh who — it has sober since he went into rehab aged 18.
one moved bodily from early 20th-centu- just been announced — is a complete cunt.’ When his bibulous father dies he leaves a let-
ry Mitteleuropa. The furniture and fittings Slattery pauses. ‘That was the last time the ter instructing Ben to enjoy a single glass of
— transported from Vienna in 1938, when Baftas were televised live.’ These glimpses Château Lafite, 1979. ‘One drink can’t hurt.’
the 82-year-old Freud and his wife Martha of a crumpled but indomitably funny come- Dad shows up as a ghost in the family wine
escaped the Nazis — would provide rich dian should be recorded and uploaded to vault where he and Ben discuss their differ-
material for a book entitled Psychoanalysis YouTube. He’s still a miraculously gifted ing attitudes to booze. Dad’s admiration and
and the Interpretation of Interior Decoration. performer and his repertoire of gags and love for Ben are so powerful that he seems
Why he was so fascinated by the land of the anecdotes, salvaged from a reluctant mem- the last person to try to knock him off the
Nile would be a good place for it to start. ory, have the feel of a cult classic. wagon. Is the ghost really a personification
IvankaPlay is a monologue about Ivan- of Ben’s alcohol problem? This is a beautiful-
ka Trump’s wacky relationship with her dad. ly acted and heartfelt show and it just about
Theatre She’s amazed when he wins the presidency warrants its hour-long running time. But one
in 2016 because she assumed that the cam- minute more would have been too much.
Yesterday’s man paign was just a stunt to win cheap advertis-
Lloyd Evans ing for the family brand. A friend tells her
she must use her position ‘to do good in the Radio
world’. Ivanka investigates climate change
Tony Slattery: Slattery Will Get and urges ‘Daddy’ to act against ‘fire-air’ Proust for our times
You Nowhere and ‘reef-death’. But he changes the sub- Kate Chisholm
The Stand Comedy Club 3, until 25 August ject and suggests that she take over Trump
National Golf Club in Los Angeles. She
IvankaPlay drops climate change instantly and starts The madeleine upon which Proust’s seven-
Udderbelly, until 25 August thinking about redesigning the club’s res- volume epic In Search of Lost Time pivots
taurant menu. makes its significant appearance after just
Lauren Booth: Accidentally Muslim For satirical purposes the writer Charles 18 minutes in the new Radio 4 adaptation —
Gilded Balloon Teviot, until 26 August Gershman has reduced Ivanka’s IQ by with which, if you’re not obsessed with the
a large margin and turned her into a ditzy Ashes or holed up with the family in some
The Passion of the Playboy Riots dank seaside cottage, you can while away this
PQA Venues, until 26 August Slattery is a miraculously gifted bank holiday weekend. It’s always a surprise
performer whose gags and anecdotes to realise that the most significant cake ever
The Red have the feel of a cult classic baked (after Alfred’s burnt tarts) makes its
Pleasance Dome, until 26 August fictional appearance so soon, almost before
hedonist rather than a cool, savvy presiden- Proust’s characters, Swann, Gilberte and the
Some of the marketing efforts by amateur tial adviser. This version of Ivanka is a rav- Guermantes, have taken shape in your mind.
impresarios up in Edinburgh are extraordi- ishing voluptuary debauched by the sight The narrator, now grown up, is offered a cup
nary. I was handed a leaflet for a poetry show of her reflection in the mirror. ‘My hotness of tea and a fresh madeleine by his mother
called Don’t Bother. I didn’t. Tony Slattery magnifies Daddy’s aura,’ she pants. and taken back in time to those holidays as
appears in Slattery Will Get You Nowhere Accidentally Muslim is a riveting hour of a child at his great-aunt Léonie’s house in the
(a good pun that advertises the content), stand-up by Lauren Booth who was doing a French countryside. The madeleine by itself
in which the ageing comic takes the audi- journalism course when Tony Blair became is not the trigger. It’s the combination of
ence back to the 1990s. In those days he was prime minister in 1997. ‘In the time it takes scent and taste — the lime herbal tea, those
a handsome, clever, charismatic wag who to say Blair’s sister-in-law there were lots of few crumbs of sweet plain scalloped sponge
suffered from an excess of self-regard. Now jobs.’ She was sent to cover a story in Pales- — ‘like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping,
he’s a grizzled, ramshackle presence, jowly tine and she initially felt repelled by ‘the fast- among the ruins of everything else, and car-
and ill-shaven, like a forgetful pensioner on ing penguins’, as she called Muslim women. rying without flinching… the whole edifice
his way to the day centre. But she stayed and converted to Islam which of memory’.
He starts his show with a lot of banter she describes as ‘a light in my heart’. The first episode lasted two hours. At first
about wine but he doesn’t drink on stage. The Passion of the Playboy Riots is a back- I doubted whether I could continue listen-
Alongside him sits a friendly interviewer stage comedy about W.B. Yeats and Lady ing much beyond the madeleine. Two hours
who guides him through the rougher bri- Gregory who co-founded the Abbey Thea- is a long time and too much nostalgia can be
dleways of his anecdotes. His memory is tre in Dublin. They sit in the wings discuss- overwhelming, Proust forcing us to face up to
a little shaky but his comic instincts and ing Irish nationalism while keeping an eye memories we ourselves might prefer to shel-
his unquenchable love of mischief haven’t on their latest controversial production. This ter from rather than expose again at the sur-
deserted him. He hints at an episode of subtle historical play touches on lesser-known face of our minds. The Radio 4 title, Marcel
sexual abuse at school but refuses to go aspects of the Irish cause. The predominant- Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, irritates, as
into details ‘because it’s not funny, and ly Catholic nationalists felt ashamed that if the powers-that-be at Broadcasting House
I shouldn’t say this either because it real- their movement had been embraced by so were in fear of sounding off-puttingly high-
ly isn’t funny, except that it is: child abuse many Protestant activists such as Wolfe Tone, brow and that no one would now appreci-
can come back to bite you on the arse.’ He Charles Stewart Parnell and Yeats himself. ate the significance of In Search of Lost Time
once hosted an event sponsored by a leading And even members of Yeats’s own circle without Proust’s name attached.
champagne marque. ‘Remarkable bubbly, were jealous of his fame among the Eng- Then there’s the extraordinary PR that
isn’t it?’ he told the crowd. ‘How they got lish. ‘If we want your opinion, Mr Yeats, we’ll has heralded its bank-holiday position in
the cats to squat on the bottles I can’t imag- ask a London cab driver.’ This is a small gem the schedule (broadcast in ten slots over
ine.’ He recalls being sent on stage at the of a play which deserves to be expanded the weekend), even mentioned as an item
Baftas to improvise while a lighting cue was and taken on by a producing theatre. on the news a fortnight before broadcast.
BOOKS & ARTS
Long-form drama has been part of Radio fraught with so many tales of love lost, hope the Spirit as air (or breath), as water, and
4 for several years now, from Zola to Joyce abandoned and faith misplaced, all happen- as fire.
via Vasily Grossman and Tolstoy, and later ing simultaneously. From that starting point, MacMillan rum-
made available as ‘a boxed set’ as if on TV. Deeply irritating Kate has been recast mages energetically through the whole toy-
It’s hardly news. as light relief now that Joe Grundy can no box of musical colour and memory. Like
It’s also surprisingly English in tone and longer be relied on (the actor playing him Tippett’s Fourth, the symphony opens with
feel, Combray as much a Sussex village as died four months ago). The scriptwriters the sound of human breath; and the first
anything in France, right down to Swann have given her the unenviable task of seduc- climax resembles a speeded-up opening of
declaring with relish: ‘How agreeable it ing the dullest character ever to inhabit that Wagner’s Rheingold, rendered primal and
would be to have always a little person in Borsetshire village, Jakob, the vet. Who saw weird by the off-key fanfaring of valveless
whose house one might find that rare thing that coming? horns. Piano and harp scatter glistening
— a good cup of tea.’ Proust for our times. droplets of moisture about the central move-
But the lusciousness of the production ment, and the third movement’s fire flashes
(by Celia de Wolff) is superbly indulgent. Music brazenly over a Holst-like cortège (MacMil-
The skill by which Timberlake Wertenbak- lan sets the same Carolingian hymn, ‘Veni
er’s adaptation maintains narrative pace Perfect Fifth Creator Spiritus’, with which Mahler opened
in spite of the compression (boiling down Richard Bratby his Eighth Symphony). Amid all this divine
those seven huge books into just ten epi- play, MacMillan reserves the right to with-
sodes) is impressive. The sheer pleasure with draw into pure, radiant choral sonority. The
which Derek Jacobi, Paterson Joseph, Franc- James MacMillan’s Fifth Symphony unaccompanied chorus that crowns the sec-
es Barber, Fenella Woolgar, Susan Brown Usher Hall, Edinburgh ond movement is a moment of reflection
and company inhabit their characters cre- and culmination so poised and perfect that
ates that invisible but tangible connection Forget Me Not it’s surely destined for a second life as a stan-
with the listener. Two hours went by in The Lyceum, Edinburgh dalone motet, though it’ll never have quite
a flash; time lost but not mourned. the effect that it does here.
Out there in podcast world, programmes Eugene Onegin Which is? Well, putting it crudely, the
are getting longer and longer, as if time is Festival Theatre, Edinburgh whole symphony pulls quietly towards con-
being stretched. Audible’s new fictional sonance and a vast, cumulative sense of
‘boxed set’, Hag (released on Tuesday), prom- All symphonies were sacred symphonies, affirmation. In the moment, and for a while
ises ten hours of new storytelling, commis- once. Haydn began each day’s composition afterwards, that choked me up, and I don’t
sioned from Eimear McBride, Kirsty Logan, with a prayer, and ended every score with the think it was just me. Why does it feel so mov-
Daisy Johnson among others. The stories words ‘Laus Deo’. ‘These thoughts cheered ing when a piece of contemporary music
are retellings of traditional folklore, selkies me up,’ he told his biographer Albert Dies. actually delivers on its promise? You don’t
and lost loves, patriarchal men and aban- Haydn, like Mozart, was a lifelong Catho- even need the words, or the faith, though
doned children, given a feminist rebranding. lic, and the Swiss theologian Hans Küng has MacMillan probably couldn’t have achieved
A series of interviews with each of the writ- suggested that the daring, exuberance and what he has without them. After the last cli-
ers accompanies each tale, chaired by Caro- glorious wholeness that characterises even max the orchestra darted out from under the
lyne Larrington, who teaches Old Norse and Mozart’s secular music comes from a specifi- chorus and cartwheeled about in the sun-
medieval English at Oxford University and cally Catholic understanding of the universe: light, before floating a final beatific smile
who gives us the original story and its context. of salvation perceived not as an object of upon the silence. Radio Three recorded the
McBride tells of Kathleen, who is griev- struggle, but as an unshakable, all-embrac- premiere for future broadcast; there’s a Lon-
ing for her boyfriend, lost at sea. She reads ing certainty. don performance at the Barbican in Octo-
beautifully, adding her own voice as narra- Sir James MacMillan’s Fifth Sympho- ber, and you should try and hear one or the
tor, shedding a perspective on this ancient ny concerns itself with the Holy Spirit, but other. I could be very wrong — it goes with
myth of the fallen woman. But it’s still hard he struggled to find an English phrase that the job — but right now, it feels important.
to stay focused on a single voice for almost did the job, so its title is Le grand inconnu. At the Komische Oper Berlin, the direc-
45 minutes and it’s a relief to turn to the A useful hint of vagueness there — offer- tor Barrie Kosky has been exploring inter-
interview in which Carrington gives us ing scope to change the subject in the face war Yiddish operetta. He took to the piano
a vivid précis of the original story (first col- of those who can’t or won’t understand. But at the Lyceum, together with two sing-
lected by Oscar Wilde’s parents). it’s always healthy to tweak the whiskers ers from the company, for Forget Me Not:
Daisy Johnson was sent to update the of prim progressives, and MacMillan’s pro- a revue compiled from songs by Abraham
ancient Suffolk tale of the two green babes gramme note for this world première paid Ellstein, Sholom Secunda and their contem-
found on the edge of a wood, speaking no the most backhanded compliment imagi- poraries. Yearning melodies and pitch-black
English and with no explanation of where nable to Darmstadt and the spectralists humour spun on a pfennig into outright
they have come from. The arrival of aliens in before falling largely silent on the supremely hilarity (‘Yiddle, fiddle, schmiddle, hey!’)
a settled community. Each writer has taken assured Great Unknown of the music itself. and klezmer laments suddenly accelerated
a different stance, Johnson writing in the And sure enough, I can tell you roughly into a tango, a waltz, or a Hungarian csardas:
present with herself as a character, trying to what MacMillan’s Fifth does. What it says a reminder, as Kosky explained, that this lost
relate the story to present concerns. Sharp is something with which I’m still grappling, repertoire wasn’t a thing apart from Euro-
writing and cleverly done, if perhaps too long. three days after witnessing a sizeable Usher pean culture, but something that was ripped
Meanwhile, every night on Radio 4 we’re Hall audience rise, cheering, to its feet. It’s bodily from it after 1933.
experiencing high drama accomplished in a choral symphony, and in this performance Up at the Festival Theatre, the Komis-
just 13 and a half minutes as Ed and Emma’s with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under che Oper performed Kosky’s raw, hyper-
marriage crumbles overnight with Shake- Harry Christophers, the Sixteen served as real staging of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene
spearean pathos, Jazzer turns into a social a semi-chorus, with four singers stepping Onegin. Set in a woodland glade, drenched
worker/detective as he tries to hunt down briefly out as soloists. Using sacred texts in turn by sunlight, mist and summer rain,
Jim’s abuser, and Shula attempts to enter in English, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, the it could almost have been imagined by
the church. Never has life in Ambridge been three movements address the notion of Lars von Trier. Flaming torches turned
a ball scene into a sinister midsummer rite,
BBC/PASSION PLANET/QUINTON SMITH

while Kosky’s decision to throw the focus
entirely on to the roiling hormones of the
two young couples worked because it was
so unsparingly sincere. Vocal beauty came
second to dramatic intensity, and Asmik
Grigorian’s calf-eyed, desperately fragile
Tatyana more than compensated for clum-
sy scene changes, for Kosky’s characterisa-
tion of Lensky (Oleksiy Palchykov) as an
abusive drunk, and for orchestral playing
under Ainars Rubikis that veered from
quiet passion to honking coarseness, some-
times within the same bar.
Television
Eight legs good
James Walton
Professor David Scheel, the presenter of
a BBC2 documentary on Thursday, instantly
brought to mind that American scientist in
The Fast Show: bearded, bespectacled, soft-
ly spoken and willing to try an experiment Heidi’s changing-colours-and-textures routine never failed to delight
just for the hell of it. A marine biologist in
Alaska, Scheel has been studying octopuses
(his own preferred plural, incidentally) for
25 years. But what, he whispered excitedly, more to love than to scientific rigour. (‘It’s astonishingness of octopuses. By the end,
‘would I find out if I invited an octopus into always tempting to impute/ Unlikely virtues I can’t imagine any viewers disagreeing with
my house?’ to the cute,’ wrote Ogden Nash — and for his verdict that these are ‘such strange and
Well, one obvious answer we got from the Scheel, Heidi’s cuteness was indisputable.) wonderful creatures’. Many might also have
starkly titled The Octopus in My House is Towards the end, he noticed Heidi changing thought that the programme was pretty
that a TV film crew would be happy to show colour as she slept and instantly decided that strange and wonderful itself.
up and record what happened — which she was dreaming, before identifying pre- Happily, the welcome return of Channel
was essentially that he and his 16-year-old cisely what she was dreaming about. 4’s Stath Lets Flats helps to confirm my pet
daughter Laurel spent a lot of time peering Another unworthy half-thought is that theory that sitcoms have become a lot more
wonderingly into the animal’s tank. Heidi was a handy way of seeing more of kindly in recent years. (Think, among oth-
Then again, there was plenty to won- his daughter. As he told us at the start, his ers, The Detectorists, Derry Girls and This
der at. As Scheel pointed out more than ex-wife had got most of the living-room Country.)
once, all forms of intelligent life — birds, furniture in their recent divorce. On the The Stath of the title (Jamie Demetri-
reptiles, amphibians, mammals, us — devel- ou, who writes the show) is deeply proud
oped along the same evolutionary pathway. Octopuses can use tools, pass of working for his Greek-Cypriot family’s
All, that is, except one: the three-hearted, memory tests, plan for the future flat-letting business despite being complete-
literally blue-blooded and entirely bone- and solve the trickiest of mazes ly rubbish at letting flats. His sister Sophie
less octopus, which has come up with its (Natasia Demetriou, Jamie’s real-life sister)
own, very different genetic solutions to plus side, this did leave space for a large is deeply proud of her online songs about
successful living. And if you’ve ever doubt- octopus tank. But the divorce also meant ‘the dramas and pains we’re living every day
ed whether the ‘intelligent’ part applies that he now had to share custody of Lau- and night’, despite being completely rubbish
to octopuses (or worse still, never given rel, who was very keen for his house to at music. Stath’s colleague Carole (Katy
it much thought), Scheel was the man to contain a dog — at least until he managed Wix) may be far better at the job than he is,
put you right. With a mixture of passion to persuade her that an octopus would be but a) that’s no great feat and b) what suc-
and mild truculence — as if carrying on an much the same: just as affectionate, just as cess she does have apparently requires the
argument with some off-screen octo-scep- pleased to see her and just as fond of play- mouthing of any amount of half-understood
tics — he listed their achievements at some ing. Yet, if this was a cunning parental trick, corporate guff.
length. Not only are they among the 1 per I have to admit that it worked on me as well Nevertheless, the programme treats all
cent of animals that use tools, but they can as on the clearly smitten Laurel. Whenever three of these people not with the tradition-
pass memory tests, plan for the future and she approached the tank, Heidi really did al comic scorn, but with a level of sympathy
solve the trickiest of mazes. Displaying an appear to greet her with both recognition which ensures that, however excruciating
almost paternal pride, he also showed his and pleasure. things get, we wince along with them rath-
own octopus Heidi unscrewing a jar-lid and, Still, whatever Scheel’s motives, he er than sneer. There’s kindness between the
he insisted, attentively watching television. undoubtedly accomplished his main aim. characters too, especially Stath and Sophie.
Now, I’m prepared to admit that Dr With a bit of help from Heidi herself, And all this without the sweetness ever cur-
Scheel may know more about octopuses whose changing-colours-and-textures rou- dling into sentimentality — or the show for-
than I do. Even so, there were times when tine never failed to delight, he left us with getting its primary sitcom duty to be funny.
it seemed as if some of his claims might owe an overwhelming sense of the all-round As I say, a welcome return.
BOOKS & ARTS
Back together again: Antonio Banderas as Salvador Mallo and Asier Etxeandia as Alberto
including depression and insomnia. He is on to (Asier Etxeandia), the actor who starred
Cinema every type of pill. His suffers both physical- in the film 32 years earlier, but they fell out
Love me tender ly and existentially. He does not imagine he and haven’t spoken since. This reunion,
will ever surmount his creative crisis, make in turn, leads him to reconnect with Fed-
Deborah Ross another film, taste success again. The pain is erico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), his one-time
wholly present but the glory? Yesterday’s boyfriend of three years whom he loved
Pain and Glory news. None of this is ever spelled out but it’s very much.
Nationwide, 15 all in Banderas’s sensitive, nuanced perfor- Meanwhile, desperate for relief, he devel-
mance. It’s as if he’s somehow managed to ops a bit of a heroin habit which prompts
Pedro Almodovar can sometimes be over- dim the light in his own eyes. a series of flashbacks to his childhood:
ly flamboyant if not out-and-out nuts — Salvador is living a life of self-imposed washing clothes in the river with his mother
let us never talk about I’m So Excited! seclusion. He has money and a housekeeper (Penelope Cruz); moving to a small Spanish
ever again — but his latest film, Pain and village and teaching local illiterates to read
Glory, is wonderfully restrained and all This has the humanity, sympathy and write; first attending the cinema; expe-
the better for it. Partly autobiographical, and generosity that you never see in riencing the initial stirrings of erotic desire.
it’s about ageing, and the reckoning that a Tarantino film These scenes are filled with all the hope and
always comes with that — when you know possibility that Salvador can no longer feel,
you’ve had most of your life, how do you and the most terrific apartment. If you are and are based on many of the events from
keep living it? — as told with the kind of into iconic 1960s pieces, as I am, you will be Almodovar’s own childhood.
humanity and sympathy and generosity you entirely transfixed. At one point he stands I’ve made this all sound very sad and joy-
don’t ever see in a Tarantino film, say. (Are in front of a Vitra wall-organiser and I was less and sour but there is also humour — his
we still arguing about the Tarantino film or quite annoyed I couldn’t see it properly. (Out and Alberto’s Q&A at the cinema showing
have we moved on?) of the way, Salvador, out of the way!) The their film doesn’t quite go to plan — and it
The film stars Antonio Banderas as Sal- apartment is also eye-poppingly colourful. is all suffused with a beautiful tenderness.
vador Mallo, who is clearly meant to rep- Almodovar does love colour and here it In particular, the scenes showing Salvador
resent Almodovar, now approaching 70, at is used as contrast. The apartment is vibrant, caring for his peppery, aged mother (now
some level. Salvador is a famous filmmaker whereas Salvador is decidedly not. played by Julieta Serrano) before her death
who has not written or directed anything for However, he is forced out into the world are especially moving. I shed a tear. But, ulti-
quite a while now. He is afflicted by physical when he learns that a cinema has restored mately, does Salvador have anything left to
ailments — a bad back; migraines; a chok- one of his early films and is about to show it. say? Does Salvador find salvation? You’ll
ing syndrome — as well as mental ones, This leads him to make contact with Alber- find out. At the end.
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NOTES ON …
Greenland
By Robert Chote
W
hen the news broke of Don- The buildings and their contents
ald Trump’s interest in acquiring remain, though: the red church with its
Greenland from the Danes for still-functioning organ and hymn numbers
strategic, mining and perhaps golf course chalked on the board, and the houses littered
development purposes, it was a perfectly with everyday ephemera — milk cartons,
timed affirmation of what had otherwise guitars, New Testaments and the occasional
looked an eccentric choice of summer holi- porn mag. It’s good news that the US Presi-
day destination — namely to spend three dent will not be building an enormous gold-
days last week exploring part of the island’s en Trump Tower on the island’s coast, as
east coast. that would somewhat spoil things.
When friends asked ‘Why Greenland?’ Another former settlement — perhaps
I explained that Iceland had served as the 120 years old — has just two houses visible,
gateway drug. A fortuitous visit to Reyk- although they have largely been reclaimed
javik a few years ago to advise on a new by the earth. Legend has it that the families
budget law had prompted return trips, not feuded. In Iceland it would have been an eye
least for the food but also to explore the for an eye, our guide tells us; but here no one
country’s fabled natural landscape. But it Donald Trump’s photoshopped Twitter pic could afford the luxury of losing a man.
wasn’t enough. Surely you must have some- Back in Tasiilaq, the Trump news broke
thing else behind the counter, you know, a On the trip we took, we were struck not too late for me to assess the national reac-
little harder…? just by stunning natural beauty — ice floes tion. But, perhaps not surprisingly in a coun-
In this quest, last week my elder son the size of office blocks framed against huge try where people cling to the edges of a vast
and I flew two hours west from Reykja- mountain ridges rising from the water — but land mass, local identity seems just as import-
vik’s tiny city airport to Kulusuk, a small by man’s tenuous existence in such an envi- ant as national. A shopkeeper apologised for
island flat enough for a runway, and then ronment. Beautiful Tiniteqilaaq (pop. 110) selling books in West Greenlandic rather
ten minutes further by helicopter to Tasiilaq, looked viable enough, with kids playing on than East (which is largely oral and which
the largest town in the east, with around the village basketball court as sled dogs (rest- the local school is officially not allowed to
2,000 inhabitants. Attractive in its own right, ing for the summer) looked on. But a few teach). But she told me the young are fos-
with colourful wood and iron houses cling- miles down the fjord lay Ikkatteq. A thriving tering a new written tradition, spurred by
ing to the steep slopes that rise from its cod fishing village 30 years ago, the settle- texting. From my brief glimpse, Greenland-
misty harbour, it is a perfect base to explore ment went into decline and was finally aban- ers don’t seem the type of people to let their
the surrounding fjords and islands by boat. doned by its last two residents in 2005. homeland be sold from under them.
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You can get a bus from Victoria Station

to Poland, and that is the best thing
about it
— Tanya Gold, p54
munity — what the hell does the Q stand I do need them,’ answered Brzezinski smil-
High life for? — young men are seen as rapists and ing enigmatically. The Pole was a very intelli-
Taki Neanderthals. Admiring a woman these gent man and he also had a sense of humour.
days is tantamount to leering, and open- He realised that the wife had mistaken him
ing a door for a lady is sexist. So late into for someone else — Jerzy Kosinski, as it hap-
the night Michael Mailer, my son and some pened, author of Being There. What I clearly
other friends and I talked about past ‘cre- remember is what a perfect evening I had
ative gatherings’, mainly at my New York and how much I learned from Zbig, a very
house, a block down from the recently nice person and very down-to-earth, once
departed paedophile Epstein’s mega-man- we had established that he was one of the
sion shithole. biggest shots in Washington.
The evenings were informal and relaxed. And so it went down memory lane. Nor-
Gstaad Most of the time dinner was in the kitchen, a man Mailer is gone, Bret Easton Ellis lives
It’s written in the Declaration of Independ- converted library with dark-brown panelling in El Lay, and Michael and I recently went
ence, so it must be true: the pursuit of happi- on the walls. Norman Mailer was at the head, to visit Jay McInerney in Southampton. He’s
ness is an unalienable right. There are those, Jay McInerney, of Bright Lights, Big City married to Anne Hearst, one of the richest
of course, who try to deny us the pursuit of fame, and Bret Easton Ellis, of Less Than women in America. When he took us around
happiness — we used to call them ball-bust- Zero renown, were regulars. The literary their gigantic house, we asked Jay which of
ers — and they were more often than not talks were interrupted by Anthony Haden- his books had earned enough to build such
wives or girlfriends, ladies who had replaced Guest crashing, forcing us to plead in unison a mansion. He didn’t find it at all funny.
stern nannies, or even sterner mothers, as we in the style of Hilaire Belloc: ‘Grant oh Lord
grew older. I’ve had women trying to thwart eternal rest,/ To thy servant Haden-Guest/
my pursuit of happiness throughout my life, Never mind the where and how,/ Only grant Low life
mostly using the excuse that they’re worried it to him now.’ We never managed to shame
about my health. They don’t seem to get that him into leaving. Free booze was our down- Jeremy Clarke
happiness is more important than health, fall. Little John Taki would hear the noise
and that I was never healthier than when and come down, an eight-year-old convers-
I was doing three months in Pentonville ing with bestselling novelists about life and
without booze or drugs of any kind. Happy I sport. He now recalls those evenings with
was not. (That was 35 years ago.) almost teary-eyed nostalgia.
Never mind. The wife no longer gives me Tom Wolfe would come to dinner in
hell after a night-long bender, but now my his all-white trademark suit, and listen like
children play nanny and soon it will be the a gentleman to Henry Kwiatowski, or Baron
grandchildren. What fresh hell is this? Can’t Munchausen as we called him in view of his
a man have a little tinkle once in a while? stupendous lies, as he recounted how his On Saturday evening I showered, shaved
We did overdo it for my birthday, mind you. ancestor had led the Somosierra Polish dra- and, prompted by a strange impulse, put on
But I’ve got news for the new Gestapo: it goon charge that broke the Spanish resist- my going-out clothes. Then I cycled round to
only comes once a year, thank God. What ance in the gateway to Madrid. (Henry is the nursing home.
these Nazis didn’t realise is that my name no longer with us, but he once convinced The door of room 33 was ajar and she was
day, the saint’s day that counts even more Jimmy Goldsmith, in my house, that he was fast asleep, mouth open, brow furrowed, as if
back home, is 15 August, four days after the on the board of the top ten Fortune 500 she were trying to make sense of it all. The
dreaded birthday and yet another excuse to companies.) The Poles won a great victory electric motor-powered mattress was raised
get rip-roaring drunk and disorderly. And oh for Napoleon, but they were no more led and she was sitting up rather than lying, her
boy, the Karamazovian hangovers now last by a Kwiatowski than a Tchaikovsky. Wolfe, head lolling towards the darkening window.
three days. Remember the grand old days always the gent, said nothing. It was left up On the bed table was a box of man-size tis-
when the hangover would disappear after to me. sues, a TV remote, a little pink sponge on
20 minutes of running? After two hours of Another Pole, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a stick for sucking liquid out of, and a baby’s
exercise one was ready for another big one, Jimmy Carter’s national security advis- plastic drinking beaker in which her tea had
and then another, and another. Yep, those er, caused more merriment. My editor at gone cold. Poor Mum! Her tide has receded
were the nights — days rather — preparing Esquire, Clay Felker, rang me at the gym and as far out as it does on the Thames estuary
for the nights to come. asked if he could bring the Pole to dinner. at Southend and her skeleton is showing.
No longer. The sainted editor, writing I said of course, looking forward to learning Tonight I noticed the ruler-straight radius
in the Telegraph, referred to the television a thing or two from Zbig. Sure enough, I told bone in her forearm for the first time.
series Absolutely Fabulous, which featured the mother of my children and she said that Two months ago, when she was carried
decadent and degenerate parents — or was she had read his book and was eager to meet up to this top-floor room overlooking the
it grandparents? Yippee! Today’s youth is him. But when he arrived Alexandra remon- churchyard with a view of the bay beyond,
shell-shocked from being bombarded with strated with him about all the bodyguards. they didn’t think she’d last the week. Since
messages concerning their DNA. Unless ‘Writers don’t need them,’ she said, or some- then she’s lain up here on the air mattress
they’re members of the LGBTQ com- thing to that effect. ‘I am such a lousy writer while seagulls fly past the window day and
LIFE
night — though sadly the window is too high It was the episode in which Captain Main- works in progress. I’m sure it will be moving
for her to see out. A fortnight ago the GP waring falls in love. We’d seen it before, of soon, when the work is finished.’
thought it would be a matter of days. Last course. Too weak to pay continuous atten- I explained that the rubble has been
week a community nurse gave her anoth- tion, Mum closed her eyes. there for more than six months, the work
er week, two at the outside. Guessing how Now Captain Mainwaring and his new has been finished for about a month, and if
long she has left to live seems to me a frivo- love were tête-à-tête in the tea shop. It was you ask me, either the building firm has fly-
lous calculation, like paying 50p to guess the the most wonderful acting. The woman said: tipped it there for ever because they don’t
weight of the cake at a village fête. But they ‘But I haven’t seen Mrs Mainwaring out have a waste licence or the man has asked
cannot seem to help themselves. and about lately, have I?’ ‘Mavis hasn’t been them to leave it there to stop people parking
I like to go and see her at the end of the out of the house since Munich,’ muttered outside his house. ‘But leaving all that aside
day. Since the morphine syringe driver was Mainwaring grimly. I laughed at this. Then and assuming it is just stored there while the
installed she’s been asleep more than awake I laughed and laughed as if this present job is ongoing, let’s go over this one more
and my habit has been to draw a footstool nightmare wasn’t happening. time: what you’re telling me is that what you
close to the bed and perch on it and lay my ‘They’re very good, aren’t they?’ whis- saw in that hedgerow was legitimate storage
hand on hers and watch her sleeping, hol- pered Mum into her pillow. of private building materials, was it?’
lowed-out face while the room darkens ‘Well, yes, it’s related to the works in pro-
around us. Before the syringe driver, she had gress.’
moments of vivacity and humour (quite the Real life ‘Right, ‘ I said. ‘Then if you don’t mind,
gaiety girl) and sometimes impatience with I’m starting some work on my house tomor-
the boredom generated by my devotion. But Melissa Kite row and the skip is ever so expensive so what
I, whom she loves, her idiot boy, haven’t been I’m going to do, now that you’ve confirmed
on the receiving end of a smile or impatient it’s all right, is I’m going to get my builders to
roll of the eyes for a long while now. She is tip all the rubble into the nearest hedgerow
either too saddened by the momentousness and into the lane outside my house on the
of it all, or she is engrossed by some remote basis we are just storing it there until the end
fantasy or other. In any case, she is too weak of the job — probably be about six months.’
to smile. So I am content to sit, also sad- ‘You can’t do that,’ said the man from the
dened by the momentousness of it all, and council, quick as a flash and without a hint
watch her sleeping face. of irony. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because that would
The silence in the room is broken only When is fly-tipping not fly-tipping? I think I be fly-tipping,’ he said.
by her breathing, by the regular beeps of the can explain, now the pile of rubble has final- I allowed a silence to develop, hoping
morphine syringe driver, by the great sighing ly moved from the hedgerow after a most that the contradiction would become so
exhalations of her air mattress, and by the unusual conversation with the local council. obvious that he would have to address it.
deliriously happy, well-paid voices of BBC After weeks of trying to get to the bot- But he showed no sign of embarrassment.
presenters emanating from the television in tom of why one householder in Surrey was ‘So he can put his rubble in a hedgerow
the other occupied room on the top floor. being allowed to chuck his building refuse and it’s not fly-tipping, but if I do, it is fly-
And sometimes it is shattered by the thud into the lane outside his house, I got through tipping?’ I asked.
and rattle of a food or drugs trolley coming to a chap at the local authority who told me An awkward silence persisted, in which
out of the lift, then by the head and shoul- he had gone to have a look at the mess and I half expected him to find a way of defend-
ders of a carer shackled to reality appearing could see nothing wrong with it. ing his position. But he didn’t. I suspect this
in the doorway and saying brightly: ‘Don’t ‘You mean you didn’t see the pile of bro- was because the only way of explaining it
you want to put the light on?’ ken drains heaped up outside his house in would involve revealing the identity of the
She had opened her eyes just once this the hedgerow, by the black and white warn- householder with diplomatic fly-tipping
evening, recognised me, blown me a little ing chevron on the bend?’ immunity.
kiss, belched mildly, and said: ‘And will she He said that he had not seen anything He let out an almighty sigh, like the wea-
be going to the funeral?’ Accustomed, since that broke the law. ‘We must be talking riness of 100 years of institutionalised minor
the morphine syringe driver, to her refer- about two different places,’ he said. I went corruption was pouring out of him. ‘Ugh,’ he
ring to herself in the third person, I gave over the address with him and confirmed exhaled. ‘That means I’m going to have to go
her the honest answer that I doubted it. She that we were both looking at the same place. back there now.’
accepted this gravely and closed her eyes Yes, he had just gone there, he said, and had ‘I beg your pardon?’
once more. seen nothing that required the council to ‘I suppose I’m going to have to go back
Now we were in darkness, save what take action. there and make him move his rubbish.’ He
light came in from the corridor through ‘Well, I just drove past and he’s still stor- sounded like a broken man.
the open door. A certain quality in her still- ing rubble, building firm signs and heaps ‘Yes, you are rather. Either that or you
ness made it seem perfectly feasible that of old drains in the hedgerow, and there’s are going to have to let me tip my rub-
her breathing might falter and cease at any a smaller pile thrown into the road outside bish into the street. And would you please
moment. I held her hand and studied her his drive, forcing cars and cyclists to swerve update me when you’ve done it, so I know
breastbone as it rose and fell. Then I heard round it.’ for sure not to start chucking broken drains
Captain Mainwaring briskly telling the ‘I didn’t see anything like that,’ said the in the way of cars?’
men to fall in. The other occupant on the man from the council that is normally very A few hours later, I got a call. ‘The rub-
top floor was now watching our favourite hot on such things. So hot, in fact, that if bish has been moved,’ he said. I don’t know
programme. ‘Dad’s Army!’ I said, squeezing you leave so much as an incorrectly placed whether it was my imagination, but he
her hand to wake her. wheelie bin or one with a lid that isn’t closed sounded brighter.
I reached for the TV remote and there, properly outside your house you risk being All things considered, I didn’t think grati-
on the big telly screen, was the Walmington- slapped with a fine. tude was the right response, more like: ‘Do
on-sea Home Guard shuffling to attention. ‘So you saw nothing?’ I said. ‘Nothing at you see, when we all do the right thing, how
I whacked up the volume. ‘Is it loud enough?’ all. Thin air.’ ‘Ahh,’ he said, sighing heavily, much better it feels?’ But I decided to just
I shouted. ‘Up a bit more,’ she whispered. ‘I mean, that bit of stuff is just related to the say thank you.
I remember when George and Joy Adam-

Wild life son had a house down the beach and walked
Bridge
Aidan Hartley their lions along the sand. George’s brother Susanna Gross
Terence taught me how to divine for water
using old metal coathangers.
That world is long gone. Acres of the Terence Reese’s concentration at the bridge
coral gardens have been bleached and table was legendary. Most people know the
broken. The octopus still waft about in story of how Boris Schapiro once wagered
the pools but the lobster and seashells are £50 that Reese wouldn’t notice if a naked
mostly gone. The bright colours have dis- woman entered the room and walked
appeared from the reef below the beach around while he was playing. Somehow, he
and much of it is dead, covered with algae. found a willing woman — and won his bet.
Malindi Where kingfishers once hovered, Indi- I’d always assumed the story was apoc-
I could measure my whole life in the sum- an house crows swoop about. Out to sea, ryphal, but an incident at TGR’s recently
mers I’ve spent on the beach in front of our where Vasco da Gama once sailed towards got me wondering. A few of us were playing
family’s seaside house on Kenya’s north India from here, fishing trawlers churn up rubber bridge, and the club’s manager, Artur
coast. Walking along the white sand, eyes and down. Toothbrushes from Asia, flip- Malinowski, offered to bring us coffee. He
down among the flotsam, seaweed, cuttle- flops from Arabia and plastic bottles from returned holding four steaming mugs, but
bones and ghost crabs, for decades I have everywhere dot the high-water mark. somehow began losing his grip. ‘Help!’ he
been finding shards of blue and white porce- Yet despite all these changes, the beach shouted. Like everyone else, I didn’t notice. He
lain washed up from some lost wreck. I like remains the loveliest place in the world. shouted again. Still, we were all too absorbed.
to imagine they are from one of 15th-centu- Buses bring parties of schoolchildren, Then came a desperate third cry, and we finally
ry Chinese explorer Zheng He’s ships, which many of whom have never seen the ocean, looked up — in the nick of time.
carried a live giraffe back from the East never felt the beach sand between their Artur is not a man who is often ignored.
African coast to the emperor in his capital. toes, and their cries of joy fill the air. Three Far from it: he’s a formidable talent who
I wonder if in a lifetime I might find enough usually dominates the room. Later that day,
broken pieces to make an entire bowl. That I remember George and he was South on this deal:
seems as likely as making all my plans in life Joy Adamson walking their Dealer South Both vulnerable
come together, but year after year I keep lions along the sand
finding the shards.
I have a photo of me as a small boy fol- species of turtle nest at different times of zK7 6 3
lowing my father on this beach, stretching the year in front of the house, protected yA8 5 2
to step inside his big footprints. Dad’s ashes by the local wildlife rangers. Every year XJ
were scattered in the waves. In coral pools we see shoals of baby sharks in the clear wAJ 8 6
at low tide, my mother first taught me how shallows. Out to sea we glimpse humpback
to swim, and covering the walls of our house whales leaping and, rather than diminish- z J 9 4 z A 10 2
N
are her paintings of iridescent reef fish. In ing, their numbers seem to be growing yK9 6 W E
y J 7 3
old age she began painting the ocean, white each year. In the outer reefs the corals, XA 9 4 2 S X Q 10 8 7 6 3
horses and swells in angry storms, and as her so damaged in the late 1990s when the w75 w2
sight blurred the seascapes became almost water temperatures warmed, are coming zQ8 5
abstract. Now 94 and living in Nairobi, she back in flowering sprays that are astonish-
y Q 10 4
saw the house last year and it’s not clear ing because they seem to be doing so well.
when she will come again — but I expect Supposedly the oceans are rising because XK 5
one day she will be joining Dad on the of climate change, but our beach is grow- w K Q 10 9 4 3
incoming tide. ing bigger and whenever there is damage
The first girl I ever kissed was here on to the marine environment, when protect- West North East South
the high-water mark after a disco — and my ed it appears to bounce back very quickly. 1w
teenage hopes were dashed when the boy When we depart our place in Malindi we Pass 1y Pass 1NT
she was supposed to be going steady with all go to the beach and sadly say goodbye Pass 3NT All Pass
suddenly turned up that same evening and to the sea, until next year.
whisked her away. Much later I brought West led the X2 (fourth highest). Artur
Claire to this place and she still says swim- captured East’s XQ with his XK. It seems
ming here in the evenings is what makes her there are only eight tricks, but he saw a
happiest. Our two children Eve and Rider chance. East almost certainly held five more
spent much of their early years living at the diamonds, but, so long as he also held the
beach and it’s where we taught them to surf. zA, he could afford to discard just one dia-
They are in the waves every day. mond, or Artur could set up a spade. Artur
When I was a boy I remember the reefs ran his clubs: East discarded the z10, the
were alive with colourful fish and corals. At z2, a diamond and two hearts. With luck,
low tide we found speckled moray eels, red he was down to the z A, four diamonds
crabs and countless kinds of seashells. Sting- — and either the y K or y J. But which?
rays fluttered in the sandy pools and out to Artur’s view was that East was an excel-
sea were whales and porpoises. The place lent player, so if he held the yK he’d have
was heaving with life. The ornithologist Sir tried to disguise the fact by baring it soon-
Peter Scott came to stay and was amazed by er. So he played the yQ. West covered, and
the diversity of creatures he saw. These days when East’s yJ fell under the yA, the y10
dogs are not allowed on the beach because became a winner. That’s Artur for you: he
they might frighten marine-park visitors, but might drop a cup but he never drops a trick.
LIFE
Chess Competition
No garlands The Brexiteers
Raymond Keene Lucy Vickery
At St Louis, world champion Magnus Carlsen met Diagram 2 In Competition No. 3112 you were invited to
with unexpected setbacks in both the rapid and submit an extract from Gilbert & Sullivan’s
blitz sections. In both cases his play was unusually WDr4WDkD The Brexiteers.
lacklustre and his self-assurance seemed to
crumble. I can’t imagine Capablanca, Alekhine, 0WDWDW0W The title of this new addition to the G&S
canon was, of course, a nod to The Gondo-
Botvinnik or Kasparov ever uttered such words
about their own play as Carlsen did when he said:
W0WDWDq0 liers. But in an entry both serious and silly,
‘Everything’s going wrong. My confidence is long hWDPDWDW full of wit and whimsy, you also plundered
The Mikado (‘Four little maids in politics,
gone and now I just don’t really care anymore.
My number one wish now is for the tournament WDp$WDND we,/ Boris-resistant as can be…’), Iolanthe
to be over, it cannot come soon enough.’
Lev Aronian was the overall winner.
DWDWDWDW (Lord Chancellor’s ‘Nightmare Song’) and
H.M.S. Pinafore (‘Ring the merry bells for
PDWDQ)P) Brexit!’), among others. There were stellar
Yu Yangyi-Carlsen: St Louis Blitz 2019
DWDWDRIW performances from Max Gutmann, Sylvia
Fairley, David Shields and D.A. Prince. They
WDr1W4kD were only narrowly outstripped by the win-
DWDb0pgW a6 35 axb5 axb5 36 Ra1 Rxh5 37 Ra6
ners below, who earn £30 each.
pDW0WhpD Nf5 38 Nxf5 Rhxf5 39 Ra2 c3 40 d6 Rc5

41 Rc2 Rd8 42 f4 Kf7 43 Kf3 Ke6 44
Mine is the tousled noddle at the head of Brexit
DWDNDWDp Re2+ Kd7 45 Rd1 Kc6 White resigns

government,
Let getting Out, no deal or doubt, become our
WDpHPDPD Dominguez Perez-Carlsen: St Louis Blitz
sacred covenant.
May tried negotiation but the Eurocrats all bested
DWDWGPDP 2019 her,
P)P!WDWD WDk4WDW4
Conservatives lost confidence — hey presto, my
investiture!
DKDR$WDW DWDWhpDp It’s going to be a doddle, now we’re leaving

unilaterally,
p1WDW0WD The EU gets more bijou while Great Britain
blossoms naturally
19 Nxf6+ Bxf6 20 gxh5 c3 21 Qg2 Kh7 This DpDb0WDW Through trade deals with America and India,
WHWDWDWD
defensive measure proves too slow. The best Australia
chance was counterattack with 21 ... Bxd4 22 Bxd4 And sundry other nations who don’t think free trade
Qa5 23 hxg6 cxb2 24 Rg1 (24 gxf7+ Kf7 and the
king can escape via e8) 24 ... f6 with unclear play. DW)BDWDW a failure.
Remainers spout their twaddle listing oncoming
22 hxg6+ fxg6 23 b3 Qa5 24 f4 Rc4 25 e5
This central breakthrough is decisive. 25 ... dxe5
P)WDQ)P) catastrophes,
DWIRDWDR
Delusion and confusion are the products of their
26 fxe5 Bxe5 27 Qg5 Rc7 28 Rg1 Rf6 29 strategies.
Nf3 Bf5 30 Qh6+ Black resigns Directives and perspectives backed by Juncker and
his mountebanks
Mamedyarov-Aronian: St Louis Rapid 2019 Here Black should retreat his bishop to b7 with Are no match for my verbal wit and optimistic
(see diagram 2) a reasonable game. Carlsen’s next move is countenance.
In time Mammon and God’ll bless me for my Brexit
careless and permits the white queen to enter
bonhomie —
In this complex situation Aronian proved that his his position. 18 ... Be6 19 Qf3 a5 Carlsen
Who wouldn’t rather hear a joke than yet another
queenside majority was worth more than White’s may have intended 19 ... Nd5 but 20 Nxd5
homily? —
passed pawn and central pressure. 26 ... b5 27 Bxd5 21 Bf5+ Be6 22 Bxe6+ Qxe6 23 Qa8+ is
We’d better keep our peckers up in spite of deeper
Ne3 Nb7 28 h4 h5 29 g4 A typically strong. 20 Qa8+ Kc7 21 Na6+ Kd6 22
deficits.
optimistic Mamedyarov thrust, but Aronian is not Be4+ Nd5 23 Rxd5+ Ke7 24 Rxd8 Rxd8
Besides, who says it won’t fun to ration all our
perturbed. 29 ... Nd6 30 Qf3 Rf8 31 Qg2 25 Qb7+ Qxb7 26 Bxb7 and, with an
requisites?
Rce8 32 gxh5 Qxg2+ 33 Kxg2 Re5 34 a4 extra piece, White won easily.
Adrian Fry
I am the Leader of the House, exacting and funereal,

PUZZLE NO. 568
rDbDkDW4
And with my rod or pole or perch, all measures
most imperial,
White to play. This is from Aronian-Mamedyarov,
St Louis 2019. We are only just out of the opening 0W0Whpgp I chastise any member when he’s found
un-parliamentary,
but White has a killing blow. What is it? Answers
to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 27 August or
WDpDWDpD And ban the use of language noted in this thick
DWDp)qHW
inventory.
via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is a You will not find a Europhile upon my hallowed
prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat.
Please include a postal address and allow six weeks
WDPDWGWD premises,
And as for von der Leyen I will be her private
for prize delivery. DWDWDW)W nemesis.
We should not trade with Francophones or any
Last week’s solution 1 Ba4 P)WDQ)W) other aliens,
Last week’s winner Cecil Taitz, London NW4 $WDWIBDR But do our deals with colonists (Americans,
Australians) —
I champion free markets when I’m thinking
economical.

LIFE
I also sit on chat-shows, and they think me very

comical. Crossword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
We must return to golden days that called for Anglo-

Saxon flair,
2422: 11 12
When men wore decent breeches, and each wife of 40 furlongs 13 14

theirs had flaxen hair.
If you are poor, then have no fear, the Trussell Trust by Doc 15 16 17
will feed you all, 18

Which leaves me free for Erskine May, and matters The unclued Across lights are of
more procedural: a kind, as are the unclued Down 19 20 21 22 23
We must bring down the socialists whose dogs will ones, all verifiable in Chambers.
24 25
come to slaver us.
I am the Leader of the House, my manner most Across 26 27 28 29
cadaverous. 7 Awkward tiff before mid-
Bill Greenwell July is spasmodic (6) 30 31 32 33 34
11 Passionate entreaty from
On the fence, in a dither, a Brexit MP injured courier, around last 35 36 37 38
Sighed, ‘Will he, oh will he, oh will he?’ month (10, three words)
39 40
So I said to him, ‘Brexiteer, how sad to be 13 Older noble initially gallant
Sighing, “Will he, oh will he, oh will he?” during those times (5) 41 42
Are you mentally troubled by something you’ve 14 Stock Exchange certificate
read? St Paul found regularly (5) 43
Or has doubt made a worm that bores holes in 15 Be determined by timeless
your head?’ 44 45
article a very long time
‘It’s a worry,’ he muttered, ‘but not what you said. (7, two words)
Oh will he, oh will he, oh will he?’ 17 Bringing ashore fish and
He mopped at his brow, his complexion quite grey, it’s boxed! (7) 3 Green light changed, 34 Record kept in Brussels
Wailing, ‘Will he, oh will he, oh will he?’ 18 Indian comprehending without the petty critic (7) may finally produce praise
Then he lowered his voice but I still heard him say, most of old language (6) 4 Gloomy donkey from (6)
‘Oh, will he, oh will he, oh will he ? 19 Male Europeans consume central Greece, long ago 37 Some miser always up
Will he win what we’re wanting and set us all free? unknown Mediterranean (6) in the gods (5)
Will he prove he’s the leader we need him to be? dishes (4) 5 Recitatives starting 38 Caught on the track in
Will he call an election with a safe seat for me? 22 Missed end of planned Scarlatti compositions even the East Neuk (5)
Oh, will he, oh will he, oh will he?’ deadline – a note omitted (5)
W.J. Webster (6) 8 Dash over to meet a A first prize of £30 for the first
24 Working in the parlour, she German to swap car? (7, correct solution opened on
When you live all your days in a paranoid haze that made out flippant graduate hyphened) 9 September. There are two
induces a fear for your sanity (9) 10 Wished to have relaxed runners-up prizes of £20.
As you read in the press of the howling success of a 25 Guard, initially denied without you, we’re told (6) (UK solvers can choose to
monster of falsehood and vanity, access (5) 12 Discussion meeting, lecture receive the latest edition of the
You feel helpless and fraught at the horrible thought 26 Some tempest or monsoon or online communication Chambers dictionary instead of
of the ghastly impending disaster, (5) call (10) cash — ring ‘dictionary’.)
But what else can you do when the nightmare comes 28 Rejected and nullified, 16 Italian ode translated, Entries to: Crossword 2422,
true and your frantic pulse beats ever faster? holding back information based on the power of the The Spectator, 22 Old Queen
So you binge on the pills that relieve nervous ills or (9) mind (10) Street, London SW1H 9HP.
you comfort yourself alcoholically, 30 Three-masted boats – 20 God of marriage ignored Please allow six weeks for
one unknown in loo (6) European choral work (4) prize delivery.
Then you tear out your hair in a state of despair,
a procedure that injures you follically. 39 Pipe second carol outside 21 SW US horseman cooked Correction: in the preamble to
You are cursing out loud at the oncoming cloud of Kings (7) albacore around lake (9) No. 2421, ‘22 and 43’. Apologies for
dejection and immiseration, 40 Such dress will horrify 23 Walk briskly round this mistake.
While the mind reels in shock as you hastily stock up sappers indoors (7) construction toy (4)
with foodstuffs of long preservation. 42 Three cheers for the West 27 Socialist crowd revised Name
In the faltering hope that you’ll finally cope you Indian cricket captain (5) plan (7)
imagine a fortunate Brexit, 44 Initiate a set, having the 29 Spenser’s frightened a lad Address
Which you greet with a smile but it only lasts while support beforehand (6) going round river (7)
no ensuing catastrophe wrecks it 45 Useless pastureland in 30 Maybe, Gable or Monroe
As you queue in disguise for the food-bank supplies Black Country town (6) starts to film in thin fog (6)
out of shame for the forced importunity, 31 Boil to come into view,
Giving Europe a cause for sardonic applause as the Down with light (6)
nation dissolves in disunity, 2 Place of entertainment 32 Most expensive drink with
Or your back-garden war with the bruiser next door that’s new in district (5) no date (6, hyphened)
to decide who will get the rat dinner
And you fight for a bit till you have to admit that SOLUTION TO 2419: FIGURES IN PLACE
your muscular neighbour’s the winner,
And the Scottish secede in a sudden stampede, and
the A2 is stifled with lorries The unclued lights are English place names which include
On the Island of Fools where delirium rules and the a number in their spelling. These words appeared as figures
Lord of the Revels is Boris. in the grid — eg BRENTWOOD appears as BREN2OD in
Basil Ransome-Davies the grid. Ruyton XI Towns needed no change!
NO. 3115: FABULOUS First prize Peter Gregson, Amersham, Bucks

Runners-up J. Smith, Beeston, Norfolk;
You are invited to submit a fable for the 21st L. Coumbe, Benfleet, Essex
century complete with moral. Please email
entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.
co.uk by midday on 4 September.
LIFE
carbs’, but it doesn’t take a genius the evening, but even ignoring that I
No sacred cows to spot the flaw in this scheme. It found myself able to maintain my cur-
It seems I’m back on the became clear it wasn’t working when rent weight. At least, I did provided
I found myself using the Ocado app I ran at least two miles a day.
‘public humiliation diet’ on my phone to order 30 packets of But this was before I arrived in
Toby Young Blue Diamond smoked almonds, Turks and Caicos. I’m staying at a
20 bars of Divine Deliciously Dark Beaches resort and one of the big
smooth hazelnut chocolate and 12 selling points is that everything is
bottles of Louis Latour red burgun- included in the price. That means
I
’m on holiday with my family in dy every week. Watching the effect of 21 different restaurants where you
Turks and Caicos, and maintain- this ‘diet’ on my waistline, Caroline can order as much as you like with-
ing my current weight is proving dubbed it ‘Fatkins’. out having to pay any extra. And
difficult. Regular readers will recall The prospect of giving up the the breakfast buffets, with big metal
that I lost about half a stone at the ‘good carbs’ altogether was too grim, bowls full of scrambled eggs, sau-
beginning of 2018, after an army of but I knew that if I didn’t start exercis- sages and bacon, not to mention the
offence archeologists started sifting ing some restraint I was done for. So I platters of fresh fruit and sideboards
through everything I’d written, dat- switched to the 5:2 diet. This is a form groaning with pastries, are too tempt-
ing back more than 30 years, looking of intermittent fasting where you’re ing to resist.
for evidence that I was an unsuitable allowed to eat normally for five days Intermittent fasting has become
person to be involved in education. a week, provided you limit yourself intermittent feasting, and my kids
Since then, this type of inquisition to just 500 calories on the other two. never stop torturing me about it.
has become much more common — You can choose any two days you like ‘How many calories d’you reckon
scarcely a day passes without some- so long as they’re not consecutive. there are in that?’ my 12-year-old son
one being defenestrated from public On paper that looks easy enough, but asks, as I wolf down another choco-
life on account of having said or done staying under the 500 calorie limit is late croissant. ‘Why don’t you look it
something imprudent in the past — fiendishly difficult. I ended up using up on MyFatnessPal?’
but 18 months ago it was sufficiently an app called MyFitnessPal which In order to avoid putting on a stone
distressing to cause rapid weight tells you exactly how many calories over the course of a week, I have had
loss. I called it the ‘public humilia- there are in everything. If you start to increase the amount of exercise
tion diet’ and went on to lose another the day with a skinny flat white (54 I’m doing. That means a three-mile
20lb, bringing my weight down from calories) and a banana (105) and end run along the beach every morning at
13 to 11 stone. This feels like the one it with a can of Heinz tomato soup 7 a.m., followed by a day of swimming
redeeming feature of an otherwise (204) and a glass of Chardonnay and then a trip to the gym. Judging
unpleasant experience, and for that (121), that leaves you with 16 calories from my kids’ reactions to seeing me
reason I’m determined not to put the ‘How many to play with. That’s approximately in my trunks each day, it’s not work-
weight back on. calories are in three raw almonds. ing. Just this morning my 11-year-
To date, the key to keeping it off that?’ my son I then discovered a more man- old son asked Caroline whether he’d
has been to cycle through lots of dif- ageable form of intermittent fasting, have ‘moobies like Dad’s’ when he’s
ferent diets and in that way stave off
asks, as I wolf whereby you don’t eat for 16 hours a 55. Caroline has stopped joining in
the boredom of having to stick to down another day. You’d think that would be more this banter and now just hisses at
the same one. I initially embarked croissant. difficult, but it isn’t. You skip break- them to shush, which is a really bad
on what I dubbed ‘modified Atkins’, ‘Why don’t you fast, have your first meal at 1 p.m. and sign. Houston, we have a problem.
which meant no carbohydrates apart then don’t eat after 9 p.m. The only
from almonds, dark chocolate and look it up on impossible bit is that you’re not sup- Toby Young is associate editor of
alcohol. I thought of these as ‘good MyFatnessPal?’ posed to drink alcohol for the rest of The Spectator.
MICHAEL HEATH

Sunday and trudge out to face one of that time, though, the game had been
Spectator Sport the fastest bowlers in the world, cer- saved for his country.
Bring out the biltong tainly the most terrifying, as a concus- You wouldn’t quarrel with much
sion substitute after Steve Smith was he says, though. Marnus was brought
for this son of the veldt felled by a fearsome rising bouncer up in a Christian household, and his
Roger Alton from England’s Jofra Archer. family moved to Brisbane in 2004
Oh… he was also trying to save when he was ten. He committed to
the Test for Australia and see out the his faith aged 17, and now talks some
final day. What then happened was pretty good sense, though it wouldn’t
F
unny, the things cricketers put extraordinary. Labuschagne’s second go down well with Richard Dawkins.
on their bats. England’s Jos ball from Archer, another thunder- ‘Sport is a fickle game, and injuries
Buttler has ‘Fuck it’ written at bolt at 90 mph plus, struck him on the play a big part. In the big scheme of
the top of his blade to remind him it’s helmet grill and he went down as if things, what you’re worth, what you
only a game (or something like that). felled by a bullet. But incredibly he put your value in, isn’t out there on
Australian Marnus Labuschagne, bounced up immediately, checked his the pitch. Cricket is always going to
who for my money was one of the helmet and prepared to face the next be up and down and if you have Jesus
great heroes of the Ashes Test at ball. Which he played forward to. It Christ a constant in your life, it makes
Lord’s, has the image of an eagle was a remarkable performance. But life a lot easier.’
drawn on the bottom of his bat. It’s to who the heck is he? He’s a canny soul, though. Keen
remind young Marnus of one of his He was born in the north-west to get acquainted with English con-
favourite Bible passages, Isaiah 40:31: province of South Africa, to South ditions, he has spent the summer
‘For those who hope in the Lord, He African parents, and grew up speak- amassing runs for Glamorgan, which
shall renew their strength. They shall ing Afrikaans. Watching him on Sun- doesn’t on the face of it have much
soar on wings like eagles; they shall day, you wondered how we ever won in common with Queensland. He has
run and not grow weary, they shall the Boer War — though we only beat played more red-ball cricket this sum-
walk and not be faint.’ It has the edge them by throwing the full resources mer than any of the other 22 players
over ‘Fuck it’, but each to his own. of the British Empire at the Boers. involved at Lord’s, and is the only man
Labuschagne is a deeply religious Which, I suppose, was what we were in the country to have made more
man, and considering what he had to Considering also doing at Lord’s on Sunday. than 1,000 first-class runs, 1,114 at
do at Lord’s the presence of God on what young Eventually Marnus fell to a soft 65.53 for Glamorgan.
your side was an added bonus — or dismissal, caught — just — by the ‘International cricket is based
an absolute essential. He had pitched Marnus had England captain Joe Root after the on failure,’ says Labuschagne. ‘Most
up at the home of cricket presumably to do at Lord’s ball had deflected off another fielder. players fail more than they succeed.
in anticipation of a bit of light glove the presence of Marnus didn’t think he was out, and It’s tough. And it definitely helps
delivery to the Aussie batsmen out in nor did most people, and exchanged when you have your faith.’
the middle, maybe some fielding, and
God on your some, er, banter with Root on the way Well, he hasn’t failed yet, this
dishing out the cucumber sandwiches. side was an back. Clearly he is not one of those doughty son of the veldt. Time to
In fact, he had to put on his helmet on added bonus turn-the-other-cheek Christians. By bring out the biltong.
DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED
and it may be some months till Q. My son, who lives alone, is a taken place. And if petty theft
she gets back to either of her UK busy man, slightly chaotic and can be observed, then grand theft
bases. Every day that I don’t send absent-minded. Even taking this is likely.
an email I seem ever ruder, yet to into account, more things than
me it seems equally rude to use usual seem to have gone missing Q. How do you say ‘no’ to a spa
email for something so personal. since a new cleaner came to work therapist who tries to get you to
What is your view? for him. I have met this woman buy products after a treatment?
— Name and address withheld and I have a nagging feeling that I always feel so guilty — and
she is dishonest. My son is not irrational — saying no after he or
Q. What is your view on emailed A. Email is inadequate in in the market for having hidden she has worked hard to convince
vs handwritten thank-yous? situations where you wish to cameras installed, but he agrees me my skin needs these products.
During my recent travels around express authentic enthusiasm. with my writing to you to see It’s not the money — I just don’t
pre-Brexit Europe I stayed in It is much better to channel your if you have any ideas to try to like being pressured into buying
a dreamy house in the south of passion through the pen so the establish whether or not this things, especially when one is
France. It was a little taste of handwriting itself can convey the cleaner may be light-fingered. vulnerable, post-massage.
paradise. Our host was Anglo- sincerity of your outpourings. — Name withheld, Wilmslow — B.R., London SW10
Scots but, since she is highly Given the time delay till the
peripatetic, I asked her to which recipient gets home, however, you A. Your son should start paying A. Exclaim you’d love to buy them
address I should send my thank- should use the following method: for things by cash so he can but don’t dare since your husband/
you letter. She replied: ‘Just email write on traditional writing paper. generate lots of change to tip into wife has given you a stack of
me.’ Surely this can’t be right, Photograph each page with your some kind of large bowl, always similar products and will be
Mary? This was more than a iPhone. Make the pages into a swishing the coins around into a offended if you don’t try them first.
chatty house party. On the other PDF file and email this to your muddle, yet always leaving exactly,
hand, my host is now travelling host. Put the original into the post let’s say, £16 in £1 coins. After a Write via the editor or email
around pre-Brexit Europe herself for her to receive in the future. while he will see if petty theft has dearmary@spectator.co.uk

LIFE
the approach to the station look like The noise — the music — is so
Food Slough; immense and awful barn res- unbearable, I have to ask the manager
Market forces taurants, as I said; and now an expen- to turn it down. ‘Eleven kitchens, three
sive multicultural canteen for a bars, a coffee shop and a roof terrace!’
Tanya Gold country that has never seemed to hate the blurb screams, greedily. Everyone
minorities so much. is an addict now. The website shows
But I think that, finally and at last, the food in flashes, which is mad, as we
I have arrived at authentic Brexit are: so much choice but nothing you
madness. It has been a long road since can actually grasp.
I drew a cow on my ballot paper in This is the second Market Hall.
2016. I have never really cared about There is one in Fulham, with only
vegetables, but now that they may be seven kitchens and two bars — but it
taken away (I live at the very end of does, for some reason, have a fitness
the A30) I am grieving and fright- studio. A fitness studio in a restau-
ened. I met a kind and well-dressed rant; what to say? Another comes to
T
he Market Hall Victoria is French family on the path to Pendeen the West End this year, probably with
an international food shed Lighthouse this week, and I almost fell 68 restaurants and 19 bars and 12 cof-
opposite the station terminus. into their arms. So I have been eating, fee shops, and also a functioning music
I have long hated Victoria, thinking mostly, Project Fear. hall. And maybe a scaffold.
it the most provincial part of central ‘Eleven But back to the Market Hall, which There are two slick floors, a stair-
London. It longs for the provinces, is nothing like a market, unless you case, plants flagging like liberalism,
it impersonates them, it summons kitchens, three have never seen a market, and only and an awful dull light from a glass
them. It is odd because the station bars, a coffee slightly like a hall. Why do we make ceiling: the light of Victoria.
itself is beautiful: a grimy Edwardian shop and a so much room for computers? The And there are indeed 11 kitchens
fantasy with tall grimy chimneys and Market Hall seems designed for com- and three bars and a coffee shop,
a fantastical clock. But the rest of
roof terrace!’ puters; stylistically it makes no sense staffed by charming young people who,
it is painful: the ugly road to parlia- the blurb without a tidy line of Apple Macs. I think, have the charm of despair; what
ment; the immense new blocks with screams Perhaps they are the real customers. do they have left but charm? There is
their hideous restaurants; the sad Monty’s Deli and Fanny’s Kebabs and
and stripy Roman Catholic cathedral, the Baozi Inn; Soft Serve Society and
which searches for grandeur but just Nonna Tonda and CookDaily; Gopal’s
looks weird; the Queen’s back wall, Corner and Super Tacos; Flank and
which I marvel at, because it tells so Squirrel and Kerbisher & Malt. These
much. Victoria is a disappointment are good brands serving clever food,
to itself. It sags and gasps. It is a stage and my chilli chicken — from Baozi
with the scenery removed; a road Inn — is good; it tears the skin from
out of town. You can get a bus from the top of my mouth like pickled onion
Victoria to Poland, and that is the best Monster Munch. But, ah, this place is
thing about it. disorientating, an agonising glut —
But no part of London is immune like Twitter with food. When will we
to the drug of gentrification, which, likewise turn on each other?
as it always does, makes Victoria
uglier than ever. So there are fancy Market Hall Victoria, 191 Victoria St,
glass and steel buildings, which make ‘Look love! It’s a yellowhammer.’ London SW1E 5NE.
MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Apathy
My husband, with a dependable Evening Standard. Watkins prided directed to matters outside their
appetite for chestnuts, says he himself in getting this sort of thing control. Medieval Christians,
would be the ideal person to start right, in the days before checking while attributing an absence of
an Apathy party. There is, it is them on the internet was possible. suffering to God, had to assert it
true, a great lack of appetite for Apathy, I find, is used now of Jesus Christ as a man.
politics at the moment, yet people election campaign of 1970, which by financial journalists for the A seldom noticed figure, the
are annoyed to find they cannot Heath unexpectedly won. The late behaviour of customers of banks, 1st Baron Guilford, who found
ignore it. It is unwelcome and Frank Johnson, normally a careful insurance companies or energy himself Keeper of the Great
insistent, like toothache. journalist, placed this Willie-ism suppliers in not bothering to find Seal in the awkward days when
References have been made in ‘the 1976 Common Market better arrangements with a rival. I James II wanted that seal used to
recently to William Whitelaw referendum’. The referendum suspect this tendency would in the make royal prerogative override
complaining of Labour under was in 1975; so perhaps 1976 was past have been labelled as inertia. statute law, was said to want
Harold Wilson ‘going round a misprint. I accept the version of Apathy, or at least the Greek ‘a good general apathy’. His
the country stirring up apathy’. history given by Alan Watkins in notion apatheia, used to be a biographer explained this as:
A variety of circumstances is A Short Walk Down Fleet Street, virtue in the teaching of the Stoics, ‘1. As to himself, Equanimity.
given for this remark. Some, which dates it to the second of which my neighbour Dr Peter 2. As to all others, Indifference.’
including Ian Aitken, Whitelaw’s election of 1974, when he had the Jones has a thorough knowledge. That motto would suit my
biographer, writing after his task of writing about television They sought to do away with husband.
death in 1999, attached it to the coverage of the campaign for the passions such as fear and desire — Dot Wordsworth

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