M AGA ZI N E OF T H E Y E A R

15.01.22

55 SOLDIERS FROM ONE REGIMENT DIED IN AFGHANISTAN

22 TOOK THEIR OWN LIVES BACK HOME

THE HIDDEN COST OF WAR

By ANTHONY LOYD
 15.01.22
10

5 Caitlin Moran What I see when I look in the mirror. 7 What I’ve learnt Actor Rupert Grint on “auntie” JK Rowling. 9 Spinal column:
Melanie Reid In praise of teenage girls. 10 Move over, Selling Sunset The brash young British estate agents shaking up the luxury housing
market. 16 Cover story When war comes home Why have so many British soldiers taken their own lives after serving in Afghanistan?
Anthony Loyd investigates. 28 ‘He brainwashed me’ A new documentary tells the story of a conman who claimed to be an MI5 agent.
31 Eat! Make soup the main event. 44 Kiefer Sutherland The actor talks about his hellraising past and new singing career. 50 A family
forged in tragedy The climber who survived an avalanche that killed his best friend – and then took his place as husband and father.
56 Oh no, thongs are back Harriet Walker on the return of the whale tail. Plus: time to audit your wardrobe. 60 Giles Coren reviews
Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, London. 66 Beta male: Robert Crampton TV is not what it used to be. Just as well.

FIVE STYLISH TEAPOTS

COVER: GETTY IMAGES. THIS PAGE: JUDE EDGINTON

CHOSEN BY MONIQUE RIVALLAND

VALERIE OBJECTS, £41 ICHENDORF MILANO, £65.99 HAY, £45 SERAX, £49.90 FERM LIVING, £65
Modern ceramic teapot from Watch your tea infuse in Traditional shape with Statement teapot from Roger Transparent with smoked
Dutch designer Maarten Baas this design from a cult Italian a contemporary marbled van Damme, a famous pastry glass infuser and ball lid.
(smallable.com) glassware maker (softstore.co) surface (libertylondon.com) chef (madeindesign.co.uk) Very chic (huhstore.com)

EDITOR NICOLA JEAL DEPUTY EDITOR LOUISE FRANCE ART DIRECTOR CHRIS HITCHCOCK ASSOCIATE EDITOR JANE MULKERRINS ASSISTANT EDITOR TONY TURNBULL FEATURES EDITOR MONIQUE RIVALLAND CHIEF SUB-EDITOR AMANDA LINFOOT
DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR JO PLENT DEPUTY CHIEF SUB-EDITOR CHRIS RILEY PICTURE EDITOR ANNA BASSETT DEPUTY PICTURE EDITOR LUCY DALEY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR BRIDGET HARRISON EDITORIAL ASSISTANT GEORGINA ROBERTS

The Times Magazine 3

 CAITLIN MORAN
I’m beautiful. I’m really hot. Deal with it
When I look in the mirror, I think, ‘Wow, heads will turn’
Y
ou know how a lot of
women – a really upsetting
number – have body
dysmorphia, whereby the
sufferer believes, whatever
the physical evidence of
their glossy hair, soft skin
and joyous smile, that they
are fat or ugly or repulsive?
I think I have the opposite of that.
Whatever the physical evidence, I think
I’m really, really hot.
When I’m putting on my eyeliner and
looking at myself in the mirror, I’m thinking,
“Wow, what a classic face. When I leave
the house, heads will turn.” I ponder the
unfortunate possibility that men, women
and maybe animals – mesmerised by my nose
or eyebrows – will miss their footing and fall,
or that a distracted driver will cause a small
pile-up. I have to confront the truth: there
could be a body count.
And then I’ll put on my anorak, bobble
hat and rucksack, walk to the station and be
genuinely mystified as to why no one seems to
notice that one of the world’s most entrancing
women is walking past, sashaying in a pair
of old Doc Martens with orthotic insoles to
correct their flat feet. Don’t they want to enjoy
my face? I am.
Of course, this is the point where I should
go, “Haha, I’m only joking! Of course I know
I look like a ham with a wig on it. Don’t
worry, world, I obviously know my place in the
comeliness order and I’ll just self-deprecatingly
pop myself back down the bottom, next to Lady
Kluck from Disney’s Robin Hood and/or any
nursemaids from Shakespearean plays.”
But… it’s all true. I’m just really happy with
how I look. I have no caveats, like, “My eyes
are too small,” “My wattle is very prominent,”
or, “My upper-arm skin is so loose that,
if I stand with my arms out, I look like a
There are millions
pterodactyl.” If I don’t want to get roasted
on social media for being deluded and vain
of gorgeous women.
for saying all this, I probably ought to.
But the reason I’ve genuinely spent three
It’s just that no
years working up the nerve to write this
column is because I don’t think I’ve ever
woman is ever able to
seen another woman say, simply and happily,
“I think I’m beautiful,” and this seems
say she’s one of them
ROBERT WILSON
statistically berserk when there are almost
four billion of us. Whether you’re Penélope
Cruz (“I don’t think I’m beautiful”) or Margot
Robbie (“I am definitely not the most
beautiful”) or Salma Hayek (“I don’t actually
have a good body”), every woman, no matter
how unarguably gorgeous, has to hate herself
a tiny, delicious amount. Just 10 or 15 per cent.
That’s a vital part of being a good, likeable
woman. You show you are a good woman by
bullying bits of your face and body in public:
“I have weird elbows.” “I hate my knees.” “My
ass is flat.” A staple of interviews with famous
women is, “What are your least favourite
features?” It is absolutely presumed that
there’s a self-loathing button you can press on
a woman and stuff will pour out. Oddly, men
don’t seem to have that button. They are
never asked that question.
There’s a lot of weird psychological maths
involved in this issue. To say you are beautiful
seems to imply you think yourself superior to
your sisters. That by claiming a presumably
finite supply of beauty for yourself, you’ve
somehow spitefully stolen it from others.
Of course, perceiving beauty doesn’t
work like that. We can appreciate an infinite
number of lovely things. Just as, every day, I see
dozens of beautiful clouds and gardens, hear
wondrous songs or eat delicious things, I also
see 30 women, minimum, I want to run after
and say, “I hope you know you’re amazing! It
looks like it would be fun to have your face.”
There are millions of beautiful women.
It’s just that no woman is ever able to
say she’s one of them.
Instead, the rules are that you have to
wait and be told you are beautiful, which
seems dangerously arbitrary. What if everyone
around you is stupid? Or the current “fashion”
isn’t for girls like you? It’s a risky business,
emotionally, when the ownership of beauty is
something given to you by others, rather than
something you can just… claim for yourself.
I can’t bear living in a world where 13-year-old
girls have to stand on the threshold of
womanhood and wait, hope and pray that
other people will tell them if they are allowed
to like their faces or bodies for the rest of
their lives. What do those other f***ers know,
anyway? Darling girls, you don’t let other
people decide who you fancy. So why let them
decide if you fancy yourself?
The opposite of dysmorphia would,
I think, be “eumorphia”, which sounds like
euphoria. And that’s what it is. How could you
waste your life thinking you – alive and bright
and in your bobble hat – are not beautiful?
What would be the point of that? n
The Times Magazine 5
 What I’ve learnt Rupert Grint
Rupert Grint, 33, grew up in
Hertfordshire and was cast in the
role of Ron Weasley in Harry Potter
and the Philosopher’s Stone aged 11.
‘I liken JK Rowling
He starred in all eight Potter films
between 2001 and 2011, as well as
to an auntie.
the Return to Hogwarts reunion
last month, The ABC Murders and
I don’t agree with
M Night Shyamalan’s Servant. He
lives in London with his partner, the
everything my
actress Georgia Groome, and their
20-month-old daughter, Wednesday.
auntie says. It’s
When the baby is first born, you
a tricky one’
feel so useless as a dad. Because
you don’t have that part of your
anatomy, you don’t really have
much of a use. You’re just like
a machine that moves the baby
to different parts of the room.
There is an ice cream mafia. My
first car was an ice cream truck.
I learnt to drive on it. But it’s very
tricky to park it anywhere because
it’s so territorial: if you park on
someone’s patch, it can get quite
ugly. It’s also the most impractical
car because there’s only one seat.
All of it is freezer.
I measure my life in Harry Potter
movies. They’re so ingrained in
me. I find it very hard to detach
myself from being Ron – we
merged into the same person.
I can’t believe it started 20 years
ago. It definitely sculpted who
I am. I mentally closed the door
on it even though I’m constantly
faced with it – there’s the play,
the theme park and it’s always
on TV. I don’t see Dan and Emma
as much as you’d expect, so the
reunion was very nostalgic.
I liken JK Rowling to an auntie. INTERVIEW Georgina Roberts PORTRAIT Corey Nickols
I don’t necessarily agree with
everything my auntie says, but she’s
still my auntie. It’s a tricky one. everything’s OK. I was obsessed quite a private person and didn’t schooling, just when I’d started
I’ve always had a slight fear of with the temperature of her room. think it would fit into my life. It’s secondary school and developed
going to sleep. I’ve always seen it There was no thermometer that a slight conflict. a group of friends. At that time,
as basically dying. Having a baby I felt was accurate enough. Over Floorboards is the hardest word to we didn’t know it was going to be
completely cured my insomnia, time you do relax, but it’s still with pronounce in American. There are eight films and what a sacrifice
because I’m exhausted all the me even though she’s a year and a too many R’s in it. You think you that would be. Going back to
time. I truly need the sleep. You half now. It’s a huge adjustment, have a handle on the accent, then school for exams was the weirdest
don’t want to be sleep-deprived but I’ve loved it. some words sneak up on you. It’s thing. I’d been in this very adult
when trying to keep a baby alive. I did not expect to break an about tuning in. You have these working environment. It was a
CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES

I developed hypochondria about my
daughter. I’m from a big family,
the oldest of five, so I’m used to
babies. But when it happens to
you, it’s all-consuming. You’re
so terrified all the time that
Instagram record at all [the
quickest to one million followers,
in 4 hours, 1 minute, when he set
up his account in 2020]. It was
amazing. I had always resisted
getting Instagram because I’m
trigger words that lock you into
American. Mine’s the word “f***”.
I definitely felt a disconnect
between me and my mates when
I started Harry Potter. I suddenly
left such a crucial part of my
very different way of growing up.
But there are no regrets. n
The third series of Servant
will be released on Apple TV+
on January 21

The Times Magazine 7

 SPINAL COLUMN
MELANIE REID
Why everyone
needs a stroppy
teenager in their
lives. Trust me
on this one
I
have acquired a teenager and it’s the
best thing that’s happened in ages. As
is the way of it, you don’t realise how
much you’ve missed something until
you get another one, and then you
wonder how you existed without it
for so long.
Teenagers, the more ornery the
better, are just wonderful. Mine is only
borrowed – she’s the daughter of a friend,
whom I propositioned when I needed a dog
walker – but even for the brief snatches of time
that I possess her, it’s life-enhancing. I want to
steal her, the way some women want to steal
babies, and learn about life through her eyes.
Holly – let’s call her that, although she’ll
hate it – is the perfect age: 15 when she started
coming; now newly 16. Peak teenager. Peak
different planet, on that cusp between
child and adult. Brimful of attitude. Sassy
doesn’t begin to describe her; she’s smart,
uncompromising, utterly her own girl.
I’ve never had first-hand experience of a
modern teenage girl, because I didn’t have a
daughter and because having been a teenager
yourself in the Dark Ages just doesn’t count.
Today’s young women are ten zillion times
more together than my generation: knowing,
poised, sleek, droll and slightly terrifying.
Boys, I’m familiar with. They’re a totally
MURDO MACLEOD
different species – goofy creatures; simpler,
younger, a million times less sophisticated. My
son’s adolescent years were characterised by
a bit of binge drinking at parties, dismantling
bikes and digging holes with his mates to
create jumps. Holly by comparison is cool
and switched on, sharp as a tack, a veteran
of social media. She’s also as funny and sweet
as the characters in Clueless and Mean Girls,
classic teen comedy movies that I deliberately
went and relished again after I met her.
I’ve learnt to ambush Holly when she
returns with the dog. I watch for them coming,
him towing her, her face buried in her phone,
up the hill on his extending lead. By hanging
on to her money for a few minutes, I get her to
remove an ear bud and spare me a bit of her
chat. We discuss school, sport, fashion. Some
days she can do nothing but yawn, which
reminds me of Doug at the same age. Other
days she’s enthusiastic, full of surprises, direct,
disdainful. I respect her lack of smarminess.
She makes me laugh out loud. As Clueless
protagonist Cher Horowitz said of someone in
their early forties: “Old people can be so sweet.”
Occasionally Dave, who was never a
teenager and doesn’t have a clue, tries to tease
her. He doesn’t realise he’s a lamb going for
slaughter. She puts him down with withering
contempt. He doesn’t know what’s hit him. You
can see the speech bubble hanging in the air:
“Yeah, whatever, grandpa.”
Once or twice she’s flattered me by
obliquely sounding me out for advice. At least
I think she has. I play the detached oracle and
suggest she chooses her battles; keeps goodwill
in the bank for things that really matter. And if
I’m really honoured she shows me pictures on
her phone – her art, her favourite jeans, a selfie
she took of herself with the dog.
Twice in the summer she paid me the
ultimate compliment and brought some friends
with her for the walk. And just as I yearn
to see the world through their eyes, and
understand their take on things, I see them
eyeing me. Sometimes I feel like a baby bird,
begging to be fed fresh insight on the world.
Afterwards I pray they’re typical teenagers,
oblivious of everything, and forget me.
Adult life gets so settled and unchallenged.
Mine is about being sensible, measuring time
against commitments, weighing up pros and
cons, allocating energy, making decisions
based on physical limitations. Without young
people around, my brain shrinks. I start to bask
in stale wisdom, curious about nothing.
We need disrupters. If you have teenagers
in your home, please don’t take for granted
their innate energy and power, their
maddening ability to challenge opinions
and reject received wisdom. You’ll mourn it
when it’s gone. Holly is only fleetingly loaned
to me, as all youth is loaned to the old. I
caught up with her over Christmas, but her
year will be dominated by exams. The world
beckons. Her axis tilts inexorably towards the
end of school, university. Leaving us all behind,
dog included, nursing our loss. n
@Mel_ReidTimes
Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her
neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010
The Times Magazine 9
 MOVE OVER, SELLING SUNSET.
MEET THE BRITISH
PROPERTY PORN STARS
PORTRAIT Jude Edginton

From left: Chloe Cable, 20, Alex Moisii,

33, Tyron Ash and Sophie Leigh, 27, of
Tyron Ash Real Estate, pictured in one
of the company’s listings, a £3 million
penthouse in Chelsea Harbour, London
Tyron Ash, 33, owns a controversial estate agency – his staff cold-call
millionaires, diss the competition and promote penthouses and
mansions on social media. How has he shaken up the world of luxury
property? For starters, he tells Michael Odell, you have to look the part
 T
Clink Wharf, London, sold for £5.7 million

yron Ash remembers that first
salvo of abuse, the insults that
confirmed his business was heading
in the right direction. The first
Twitter DM (direct message) he
received said, “You’re shits.” The
second said, “Flash f***er.” Other
comments from fake accounts
added racial slurs.
“Those first messages were
from senior directors of big estate agents. But
you know what, I didn’t blame them. People
lash out when they’re scared and, trust me,
we were eating these people alive.”
In his big coat and Gucci slippers, 33-year-
old Ash might look like a financier straight out
of a Succession storyline. In fact, he’s an estate
agent working in what he calls the “luxury
super-prime” market. Early in 2020, his new
business only a few months old, his rivals
rounded on him. They were upset at how he
was disrupting the game. “They were angry
because we knocked on their clients’ doors
whenever we saw a ‘for sale’ sign and told the
owners, ‘Your current agent is lazy. We’ll sell
this property for you. Guaranteed.’ ”
Ash doesn’t run an expensive office or
print glossy brochures. Instead he simply
“cold-calls” at his rivals’ listings. If they
agree to give him a chance he makes a
cinematic sales video, posts it on social
media and then arranges highly competitive
open-house viewings where on-the-spot
deals are encouraged.  Chelsea Harbour, west London, one of the
Within 18 months he claims to have
wrenched £300 million worth of sales from
established players such as Knight Frank,
Savills and Hamptons.  outside deck with hot tub.
“It feels better when you take business
away from someone else. We are sharks and
I don’t see anything wrong with that term. It
has bad connotations, but we are lean and we
keep moving. I can handle abuse. It means
we’re winning. People don’t like us, who
gives a f***?”
Tyron Ash and his sharks are the subject
of a new Channel 4 series, Property Porn
Stars. Like the Netflix hit Selling Sunset, it
documents the lives and lifestyles of those
selling in the luxury property market. But
while Selling Sunset follows various Playboy
and Sports Illustrated models-turned-estate
agents, people almost indistinguishable from
the Los Angeles A-list they serve, Ash’s UK
agents are different.
His team may rock the bespoke suits,
CRACKIT PRODUCTIONS/CHANNEL 4
In the opening credits, see Ash raise two
middle fingers and a triumphant “f*** you”
to the world as £75,000 in commission rolls in.
Marvel as former gang-member Quas Miah
cold-calls a man on the doorstep of his north
London mansion. 
“Mate, are you selling your ass?” he calls
out. Of course he means “house”, but Miah
wears his East End roots proudly.
More than anything, Property Porn Stars
shows us just how much money Tyron Ash’s
crack team of “super-prime” are managing
to rake in. Take the example of Alex Moisii,
33, a Romanian/Italian firebrand and the
company’s top “closer”. Two years ago he was Poole, Dorset, £2.75 million
a chef at a takeaway in Northamptonshire.
Last year he earned more than £200,000
in commission. 
Then there’s 20-year-old Chloe Cable, who
used to work in a nail bar on the south coast
but is now a partner in the firm. The video
walk-throughs she posts on social media (in
black thigh boots and miniskirt, she executes
a slow-mo catwalk strut through her clients’
living rooms to a hip-hop soundtrack) helped
her earn more than £100,000 in the past year. 
And then there’s Sophie Leigh, 27, a sport
nut and former personal trainer who became
an estate agent after suffering an injury
playing American football. “I am not cut out
for 9-5. I came to work for Tyron to make Bursteads Barn, Hertfordshire, £4 million
money and have an adventure,” she says.
I meet them at a £3 million penthouse in
company’s listings. This two-bedroom home
boasts 360-degree living-room views and
benefits from marble floors and a spacious
 
So much for standard estate agent blather.
To get the full effect you have to watch Sophie
Leigh’s social media film. As she stalks through
the penthouse to Kanye West’s Praise God,
the property ad becomes a hip-hop video. In
other promo clips, Leigh dives into her clients’
swimming pools or does back-flips on their
garden trampoline. “We are performers to an All his agents are gym-toned, good-looking
extent,” she says. “Younger buyers particularly and smell nice. Ash and Moisii are in Gucci
love seeing us pull up in a supercar, dive in the slippers, bespoke suits and, quite daring for
pool or lie on the bed.” grimy London, white overcoats. Cable and
Leigh’s American football knee injury was Leigh look as if they’re waiting to board a
so bad she says she needed a “skinny BBL” superyacht. “The secretary look is not good
to cheer herself up. I thought it was a drink enough for luxury sales,” says Cable. “And
from Starbucks. It isn’t. A BBL is a “Brazilian buyers get a bit anxious if you turn up with a
bum lift”, a surgical procedure enhancing the carrier bag. You have to make them feel this is
volume and projection of the buttocks. “My a world you’re comfortable in.”
knee injury compromised my ability to shape While Ash tells me he took 30 calls from

frocks, nails, hair and teeth of the super-
wealthy but they are working class, with
none of the entitlement of their Californian
cousins. “There’s an authenticity to what
we do,” says Ash. “For old money, we can
be too much. But we work with new money
– a younger generation who respect how
real we are.”
my glutes. The BBL gave me confidence,
which you need in this business,” she says.
Tyron Ash agrees. “To sell a pad for a
million you have to look a million,” he says,
fiddling with his tie clip. Do you have to be
beautiful to sell super-prime? “Unconventional
looks can sometimes work,” he says with a
shrug. “As long as you can sell.”
TV production companies wanting to make a
programme about his firm, Cable handles a call
from a stressed seller. Her husband is worried
about complications with “the chain”. “You have
to be available 24 hours a day and you become
their therapist,” she says when the call ends.
“The men often get more stressed about a sale
than the women, but they make her call.”

12 The Times Magazine

Tyron and Reis Ash
arriving for a valuation
‘IT’S A WORLD OF EXCESS. OUR CLIENTS LIKE TO SHOW
OFF. OUR JOB IS TO BE A PART OF THAT PERFORMANCE’
It seems the deal will be OK. But it leads
to some interesting small talk. While Cable
has to offer counselling, Alex Moisii doesn’t.
His sales technique is more uncompromising.
“People try to screw you over all the time
when a deal is closing. You have to be ready
to have a serious conversation,” he says.
Cable sighs and says Moisii is a “dick-
waver”. He gets away with an arrogance that
no woman would. “I’m arrogant because I’m
pretty good at what I do,” he says. “I guess
you could call me the bad boy of real estate.”
Everybody has had an adverse estate-agent
experience at some point in their lives. The
agent who rhapsodises over the master
bedroom while stumbling into a broom
cupboard. The agent who fakes a rival bid to
hike up the price. My worst experience was
a guy who rented me a flat in Brixton, south
London, in the Nineties. He said the landlord
was looking for someone responsible and
flexible. On my first day home from work in
the new flat I found a man drinking a cup
of tea and using the washing machine in the
kitchen. He was the landlord. He said his new
place didn’t have a machine and this was what
he meant about being flexible.  It’s no different at Tyron Ash. In one episode
No wonder there have been attempts to
“disrupt” the property-buying process. In the
past decade the company Purple Bricks has
pioneered a hybrid model where you sell via
its online portal for a flat fee. More recently
the US company Zillow pioneered “iBuying”.
Using a sophisticated algorithm, the company
offered homeowners an estimate (known
as a “zestimate”) of their home’s value. The
company itself then bought the home for cash
and, after doing an upgrade, tried to sell it
on for a profit. It didn’t work. Zillow stopped
buying houses in November 2021 and laid off
2,000 staff after losing a lot of money.
So, no one has so far managed to change
the game. Even Tyron Ash’s model is quite
old-fashioned. There’s no innovative use of
data; just creative social media backed by
hungry agents who work commission-only.
However, that commission is 2.5 per cent. On
a £4 million property, that is £100,000. Tyron
Ash keeps half of that, with the agent taking
25 per cent for listing the property and the
other 25 per cent going to whoever sells it.   men in this game. They don’t get that hassle.”
“You eat what you kill,” says Ash. “We are
working-class outsiders in this game and what
you get is that hunger and energy. We are
busy closing [the deal] while everyone else
is sitting in an office on their arse.”
David Mamet’s classic play Glengarry
Glen Ross portrays extraordinary venality and
rivalry in the world of Chicago property sales.
The agents plot and fight over the best “leads”.
Leigh and Moisii have a blazing row over a
prospective sale in Cornwall. Moisii says he
found the client. Leigh claims she closed the
deal. “I tried to help you,” he cries. “Why are
you such a prick?” she demands.
The anger is born of ambition, maybe
even a sense of desperation. All the Tyron
Ash agents I speak to see this as their big
break. They performed badly at school.
They’ve done a lot of crap jobs. This is their
chance. Chloe Cable grew up in Warsash, a
village between Portsmouth and Southampton.
Aged 13 she got work in a nail bar and, after
that, a tanning salon. When she was 15 she
bought herself a Gucci belt. Her dad went mad.
“He said, ‘What a waste of money,’ but
I always liked nice things. And when I saw
Million Dollar Listing [a US reality TV show
about property], I thought, ‘I could do that.’
But my dad was like, ‘Don’t kid yourself. Not
everyone gets paid that well.’ ”
Cable was working as a local estate agent
when the pandemic struck and she was laid
off. Tyron Ash contacted her on social media
and within months she had sold her first
luxury property and taken home a £20,000
commission. In 2021 she became a partner
and now leads a team of six.
“I hammer my guys to perform because
when they sell, I get an extra 10 per cent,” she
says. “My plan is to pay off my dad’s mortgage
for him.” 
Tyron Ash expects each agent to knock on
150 doors each month. What’s it like for the
girls, I wonder, dressed to the nines, cold-
calling at multimillion-pound properties?
“Mostly people are respectful,” says Cable.
“You have less than two minutes to add value
to that initial conversation. But people want to
sell their houses and so they welcome a deal.”
However, she admits that one time a
boxer lost interest describing his bathroom
and asked her to be the bikini-clad “ring girl”
at his next fight. Another man texted her
after a viewing and invited her to accompany
him on an all-expenses trip to Los Angeles.
“It doesn’t matter if you have a £10 million
property to sell, you have to be professional.
It’s disgusting.”
Sophie Leigh has had bad experiences too.
“You chat and it seems OK, but then very
occasionally you get a message asking for
extras.” She sighs. “I do think it’s easier for
I sit down with Alex Moisii in the
penthouse office. He swivels in a high-backed
chair while I flip through my pad and try to
ask questions. It’s like doing a property deal.
“I can’t give you everything about my life
because I’m saving my story for a book,” he
says. Moisii oozes confidence and machismo.
He reminds me of Al Pacino playing Richard
Roma in the 1992 film version of Glengarry
Glen Ross. Wily, fast-talking, looking for the
angle no one else can see.
In 2018 Moisii had a great business
idea. He developed “edible gold”, a health
supplement that contained gold nanoparticles,
which he sold for £39.99 a pop in Northampton.
After that he became a chef at the Food Plug,
a local takeaway.
The Times Magazine 13
 He still remembers the night he became
an estate agent. He was cooking a steak at the
Food Plug. The customers were annoying him.
“I am a great chef, let me tell you,” he asserts.
“But I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t be myself. And
people see a guy trying his best but they keep
making extra demands.”
Moisii is good-looking and charismatic.
I can’t help wondering what these extra
demands were. “Salt, man. The customers
wanted extra salt or more sauce, but it was
too fast-paced an environment for these extra
demands. Eat what I give you.”
Moisii grew up in Palermo, Italy, and came
to the UK as a boy. He was expelled from
college for fighting and thrown out of the
family home when he was 16. “My dad said,
you wanna be a gangster, then go do that on
the street, but not here.”
He has made some bad decisions and been
in trouble. He won’t tell me exactly what. “I’m
quite an edgy guy, you know,” he says, flexing
his neck. Moisii is an unlikely luxury estate
agent. He wears rings on all his knuckles
and crucifix earrings in his left ear. When
the company first launched, Tyron Ash
was nervous that Moisii’s look might put
off clients. In one episode, a vendor looking
to sell a substantial property in Thrapston,
Northamptonshire, admits that when he saw
Moisii coming up the gravel to cold-call he
thought he was the “parcel guy”.  I’m too old and scruffy for “super-prime”.
But Moisii says his look, his demeanour,
is part of the authenticity that a young
generation of property-buyers like. “I don’t
change nothing about myself,” he says. “And
when people see that I am real and consistent
and deliver on a promise, they get it.”
I love watching Moisii sell property. In
one episode a man arrives to view a £7 million
apartment with private river access in London
Bridge. This is a man of substance. Nevertheless
Moisii treats him like a guy bending the
magazines in a newsagents.
“I recommend you to love it or it’s gone,”
he says.
“Yeah, he does like an ultimatum, does
Alex,” chuckles Tyron Ash.
Moisii believes the ability to purchase
luxury goods says something about one’s
manhood. He tells me you are not a man until
you own a Rolex (he is wearing one). And
in one of his online property ads he stands
outside a country house, staring moodily into
the distance in sunglasses next to a vintage
Jag. The ad doesn’t even say anything about
how many bathrooms or bedrooms the
property has, just Moisii’s thoughts: “Too
many guys in the world. Be a man.”
What does that mean exactly?
“It means you have to have balls to buy a
luxury property. And to sell it. On the streets,
when you get in a fight, you know who you’re
fighting. In property, it’s more vicious.”
14 The Times Magazine
‘WE ARE SHARKS AND
I DON’T SEE ANYTHING
WRONG WITH THAT TERM.
WE KEEP MOVING’
Tyron Ash’s gang is full of hungry hustlers.
He was one himself once. We meet in a coffee
shop near his Chelsea Harbour apartment.
He is a big guy with meticulous facial hair,
trimmed as close as the felt on a card table.
On his left lapel is a diamond badge in the
shape of a crown. Why?
“That tells you I’m the king of real
estate,” he says, his tone factual rather than
explanatory, like someone telling me today’s
date. We are the only proper punters in
the café. Everyone else is in a hard hat and
wearing a tool belt – the labour workforce
building more grand vistas of luxury. Ash and
his French bulldog, Rocky, live here among
the trucks and cement mixers. I mention
I’m not sensing a lot of local community.
“I reckon you’d be more of a Victorian
property guy,” he says.  insurance, a website and registration with
Ash says he can divine a person’s property
preferences in a second. There are a lot of
“tells” – clues – he says. I think that means
“This world is about new money,” he says.
“I sell to social media stars, tech entrepreneurs,
Premier League football players. I sold a
property to Jadon Sancho’s family recently.”
Ash likes it here. I visited his apartment
earlier and saw his vast collection of shoes
and trainers, his coffee-table book about
collectible watches, and his diamanté skull.
He has a £200,000 Lamborghini Huracán
parked in the garage below. “It’s already paid
for itself several times over. When I drive that
to an MA [market appraisal], clients know I’m
a serious player. Don’t look like you need a
loan; look like you own the bank.”
It’s a long way from his roots in Milton
Keynes where he grew up. His Pakistani
father, Maz, was an engineer for Rolls-Royce.
His Italian mother, Maria, worked for the
council. By 17 he had left school and was
working locally as an estate agent. He was
good at it, but didn’t feel his career was
progressing quickly enough. That’s when
he made a big mistake.  cabinet feels too much. Isn’t some luxury a bit
“I couldn’t get the finance to open my own
agency,” he says. “Angry and frustrated is a
bad combination for a young man, and I got
in with the wrong crowd.” On his right arm
there’s a tattoo that says “Only God Can
Judge Me”. In 2015, he found out that isn’t
strictly true. A judge judged him. Ash, then
known as Tyron Ashraf, received a 40-month
sentence for intent to supply class-A drugs.
“It was cocaine, not a large amount but,
no excuses, I did it. It’s the most stupid thing
I have ever done.” He served 20 months, first
at HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes, then
HMP Ranby in Nottinghamshire and finally
in an open prison. Open prison was the worst.
“At an open prison men have freedom to
socialise, but I preferred the safety of the cell
because I didn’t want to mix. My stance was,
‘Why socialise? I am ashamed to be here.’
I watched my dad cry in the visiting room,
and if that doesn’t wake you up nothing will.”
While in prison he trained as an electrician
and, on release, he tried making a go of it but
hated it. Luckily, an old friend from his estate
agent days got him a job at a firm called Fine
& Country. Ash began posting his properties
on social media and one month he earned
£28,000 in commission. “People would say,
‘Why are you acting like you’re a millionaire
on Insta?’ But I could see it was the future.”
By 2019 he’d ploughed his £100,000
life savings into starting his own company.
Even without renting an office he had
to pay for access to property portals like
Rightmove and Zoopla, a CRM (customer
relationship management system), buying
the property ombudsman. 
“Six weeks in I was hungry and I had to
ask my mum for £5,000 so I could eat,” he
says. “There was no plan B. This had to work.”
Then, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic hit
and things looked grim. But when traditional
estate agents shut their offices, their
employees flocked to Ash’s online operation.
He recruited 40 agents in 6 weeks and they
went to work. Initially, they sold anything. 
“We sold a house for 300 grand. Even a
garage at one point. But then in the summer
of 2020 I told them, ‘Go for luxury.’ ”
Now he has 65 agents in all, selling luxury
property all over the UK. “In Wales, luxury
can start at £500,000,” says Ash. “In London,
it can be anything up to £10 million.”
But the world of luxury property is
sometimes baffling. When one of his agents
shows off a £7 million apartment owned by
a billionaire in Kensington in London, the
highlight is an automated wooden cabinet
that rises up from a chest of drawers. It’s for
displaying a collection of luxury wristwatches. 
A nice view, a fancy kitchen, those I can
drool over. But an automated wristwatch
pointless? “We live in a world of excess. No
one needs a watch display cabinet, but then
no one needs to go to Harrods or Selfridges
and bang ten grand on a credit card. But it
happens. Our clients like to show off. And our
job is to be a part of that performance.” n
Property Porn Stars will air on Channel 4
later this year
 PTSD. DEPRESSION. SUICIDE.

Paul Jacobs, left, who was blinded in Sangin, and boxing coach Luke Nevin at Hard Hitters, Liverpool

The shocking truth about what happened when

British soldiers returned from Afghanistan
 Caroline Bull, the combat
medic who attended the
attack in which Paul Jacobs,
opposite, was injured – and
who also suffered from PTSD

PORTRAITS
Jude Edginton

The award-winning war correspondent Anthony Loyd was embedded with 2 Rif les, part of the
British Army’s largest regiment, in Helmand during the bloodiest fighting. Fifty-five were killed
during the campaign. But why have so many veterans suffered since they got back?
 Anthony Loyd, far left, in
Sangin in 2009 with 2 Rifles
see your children, your wife. For me, whenever
I am in a dark space, the last thing I see is
Private Young stepping in front of me, as close
as you are sitting to me now, triggering an IED
[improvised explosive device]… I just thought,
‘Oh f***, here we go,’ and it was down to me
to get a claw around what was left of his body
and find his rifle. But then I saw the second
device. And the sun is beating down, I’ve
got an earpiece in and I am covered in claret
– Young is all over me, I mean all over me –
and at that moment, unfortunately Serjeant
McAleese stepped over me and triggered the
second device. It took him. I never saw again.”
In this way Paul Jacobs, George Medal, told
me of his patrol of August 20, 2009. Blinded,
the two soldiers in front of him dead, the

T
rifleman staggered back out of the kill zone,
severe shrapnel wounds to both thighs, his
here is a kind of love that only those at war have known. groin, arm and face and eyes. His last recall
It is the kind of love that makes soldiers brave when they of vision is of horror. He was 20 years old.
I happened to be in Sangin with Rob
are together but smashes some apart when they are alone. Thomson, who was then a lieutenant colonel,
I encountered its thrall again and again as I began to journey that August day, embedded with 2 Rifles.
through the reflections of the riflemen who had fought in Jacobs was one of his soldiers.
It was an Afghan presidential election. In
Helmand: a voyage so intimate in the footsteps of a lost war the sandbagged operations room in Sangin
that, were it not for the recall of the horror, I might have been district centre, Thomson and his headquarters
staff wore body armour and helmets as
walking through the glowing embers of an impassioned affair. Taliban rocket fire and mortars detonated
about the base, while along the gun
Some said it directly. me as if in epitaph to the Afghan war. “And emplacements on the flat roof above them
“I had a love for that man,” a 2 Rifles we were friends alongside each other. You riflemen blazed away at the Taliban in the
veteran told me last November as he recalled can’t undo that.” tree line beside the Helmand River to the
recognising the body of a bomb-torn rifleman, At the beginning of this journey, speaking north. I recall the air of feverish payback as
killed in Sangin that savage summer of 2009, to veterans of the campaign after reporting on those guns ripped away and the brass bullet
by his jawline. He said it so matter-of-factly the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August last cases jangled at the soldiers’ feet: rage and pain,
during an account of such horror that I was year, I thought I was at the start of a story pent-up frustration and vengeance ploughing
caught unawares and spun from a desert to about a scourge of suicide and post-traumatic the river reed lines with every burst of fire.
an ocean in the space of seven words. stress disorder – PTSD – among them; about A sudden chatter of radio traffic announced
In others, it fell as tears. what happens to those who served in the an IED incident. It was Jacobs’ patrol. Serjeant
“We were among friends,” remembered war in the echoes of strategic loss as Britain’s Paul McAleese and Private Johnathon Young
Major General Robert Thomson, who had attention moves elsewhere; about government were dead; Paul Jacobs seriously injured.
commanded 2 Rifles that most bloody of carelessness over veterans’ mental health; and “Beneath the lip of his helmet the colonel’s
years. “We felt we were a tight gang. We about the fightback by serving and former face had the grey luminosity and glowing eyes of
had had ten operations in ten years. We knew soldiers to look after their own within the intense grief,” I wrote of Thomson at the time.
we were going into an area that would be veterans’ community. “I’ve just lost one of my best soldiers,” he
really hard.” In some ways, suicide and trauma and said. His words, so quiet that they were nearly
His voice caught three times in grief as he veterans’ outreach were at the start of it all. a whisper, could almost have been a question.
recalled all that his battalion had endured, and Yet as I travelled through the autumn across the The same grief was still there when I saw
the emotion in what he said – “Tears will fall,” Rifles’ recruiting grounds in London, Liverpool him as a general a few weeks ago, yet pity had
he acknowledged at one point, pushing on and Mansfield, talking with veterans of the no place among the silent tramp of patrolling
regardless after I had offered to stop the tape Afghan campaign about war and death and ghosts through the ministry room.
– together with the sincerity of the way he trauma and memory, I ended up elsewhere. “We don’t want sympathy,” the general
addressed his riflemen across the passage of As much as war, the stories they told me said. “We want empathy. We want people to
years filled the austere space of the room in were about something so deeply shared amid understand what we have been through and
the Ministry of Defence where we met in the best and worst of times – I cannot think of recognise that we dug deep.”
such a way that, later, after I walked out a better word than love – that it seemed as if The six-month operational tour undertaken
of the building’s grey looming doors into some soldiers were broken not just by war, but by 2 Rifles that year, known as Herrick 10,
the autumnal bleakness of the Embankment, by its farewell. was among the bloodiest of any during the
EROS HOAGLAND

it was not until Baker Street more than two entire 20-year Afghan campaign. Their battle
miles away that I could collect myself. “It’s OK when you are sighted, because you can group suffered 111 casualties, including 24 men
“You can never undo the fact that we take your mind away from whatever is going on killed, in Sangin district over the summer
fought well together,” his words echoed with in your head: you can look at flowers, you can months in which they fought there.

The Times Magazine 19

 That summer was also a fulcrum in the
Afghan war, the point at which advantage
slipped from the coalition’s grasp and the
conflict became an attritional waiting game
that was to culminate in August last year,
when America blinked first and ceded
Afghanistan to the Taliban.
2009 has since become infamous for
another reason: as the source of clusters of
suicides among British veterans who served
in Helmand on Herrick 10, whose deaths
are the most public manifestation of the
wider-scale mental health crisis affecting those
who fought in the Afghan campaign.
The Rifles are central to this story. As
the largest British infantry regiment, which
had undertaken more operational tours there
than any other, they had suffered the highest
corresponding casualty rate in the army
during the Afghan campaign: 55 soldiers
killed and 258 wounded among its five regular
battalions of the time.
The war followed many home. At least
22 serving or former Rifles soldiers have died
through suicide or misadventure since 2011,
according to figures gathered by the veterans’
activist group Veterans United Against Suicide.
Ten of these dead soldiers served with 2 Rifles.
Each suicide followed a unique path
involving different factors, but for many of
those who came back with PTSD, it was the
loss of connection with their fellow soldiers in
the aftermath of leaving the army, the sense of
“thwarted belongingness”, that served to amplify
the trauma of the war, multiplying the mental
impact of the original horrors. Bad things
happened in war, but peace could be hell too.
Since being wounded in Sangin, Paul Jacobs has
emerged as one of the most inspiring soldiers
of the Afghan campaign, fighting to redefine the
boundaries of what can be achieved as a blind
survivor, climbing Kilimanjaro, undertaking
triathlons, marathons and parachute jumps. He
speaks of his physical challenges and PTSD
with searing emotional articulation. There
are multiple dimensions to his own trauma,
beyond the savagery of his blinding moment
and last recall of sight. Severance was one.
As a child he was raised in care and
experienced an upbringing that had included
violence, hardship and trouble. He was hungry
and sleeping rough before joining the army. As
a soldier he found a place of belonging and
security that he had never known before.
“I came from nothing,” he told me. “Next,
I’m so proud to be wearing the greens, my
COURTESY OF REHAN PASHA
boots are dead clean. I’ve got a bathroom,
a wardrobe, a TV, a bed. And I felt safe. For
the first time in a long time, I felt safe. And
I wanted to prove myself so badly.”
“The army taught me how to love,” he
said on another occasion, “when I’d never
had love in my life.”
‘WHENEVER I AM IN A DARK SPACE, THE LAST
THING I SEE IS PRIVATE YOUNG TRIGGERING AN IED’
Paul Jacobs on patrol in Afghanistan
He was also a natural soldier, who as a
“Vallon man”, so called because he was at the
front of Sangin patrols sweeping the ground
for IEDs with a Vallon detector, became one
of the most trusted riflemen in his company.
“Jakey was up for everything,” recalled
Rehan Pasha, a corporal with 2 Rifles in
Sangin. “You just knew that, in going to him,
you’d get a volunteer. He was so up for it.”
Discharged from the army due to his
wounds, Jacobs had to readjust from being the
ambitious, go-to young fighter in 2 Rifles, a
soldier everyone wanted up front on patrol,
to being a blinded civilian with severe PTSD
who needed help to cross a road. “I still
struggle with it,” he said. “Unfortunately, I am
vulnerable. I may be a big, burly 6ft 2in man
with all the mouth and the get up and go. But
how can I get up and go if I need assistance
to cross the road? I have to accept this fact. In
my head I’m still me, but physically I am not.”
Last year added to his psychological
burdens. In January Jacobs received word
that a badly wounded soldier he had helped
evacuate after an IED blast in Sangin had
been found dead in his sleep. Not long
afterwards, three 2 Rifles veterans, all in
their thirties, died by suicide or misadventure
over a three-week period.
He reached out to a veterans’ mental health
agency. “I begged them for help,” he said. Covid
restrictions delayed the response. Eventually he
was offered an appointment with a counsellor
in a room at the back of an Asda store.
“I’m struggling with my head, and they
wanted me to walk through Asda to meet
some tosser in a back room who has probably
never seen or had any experience like that.”
He turned down the appointment. Soon
afterwards came word of the fall of Kabul.
“I mean, what came out of my eyes was
like a bloody waterfall,” he told me. “I cried
and I cried and cried.”
Yet when we met, Jacobs was on the up
again, this time boxing blind, sparring with his
coach, Luke Nevin, another former rifleman
and onetime battalion boxer. Nevin was one
of the founders of a Liverpool boxing charity,
Hard Hitters, established last year as a place
for ex-soldiers to meet and train. He had met
Jacobs by chance after noticing the scarred
man’s Rifles tattoo in a gym. Ever up for a
challenge, Jacobs was keen to box as a blind
fighter. He found too that boxing alongside
former soldiers, including other men damaged
by the war, gave him an invigorated sense of
purpose during a harsh year in which the war
had loomed over his thoughts.
Recognising the appeal of lost kinship
among the city’s wider community of veterans,
Nevin contacted a new outreach programme
for Rifles veterans, Always a Rifleman, and
sought advice from two Liverpool veterans
at its helm, Baz Melia and Danny McCreith,
on how to establish a boxing charity as part
of their programme. The synergy between
Jacobs and Nevin evolved. Other veterans
gravitated towards them to train. Hard Hitters
was formed, and the charity is now branching
out as a space for veterans to meet, train and
spar across several of the city’s boxing clubs.
For Jacobs, at a low ebb, the regathering of
tribe carried immediate positive effect.
“I’m getting back to who I am, because
I’m finding the right people,” he told me after
a Hard Hitters sparring session with Nevin
at the city’s Willaston Amateur Boxing Club.
“It doesn’t matter how many tours you’ve
done or what medals you have. Once we’ve
closed the door in here, we are all back with
a community that we understand.”
The lonely voyages of traumatised soldiers,
bereft of their clan, journeying through
emotional exile after war, have been described
for thousands of years. Homer’s poems were
replete with the loss, rage, guilt and solitude
experienced by psychologically wounded
warriors. Best known among them, Odysseus,
burdened with PTSD-like symptoms, took a
circuitous ten-year journey in The Odyssey,
beset by trial and challenge, as he tried to
return home after the Trojan war.
The condition entered modern popular
consciousness with the 1982 film First Blood,
starring Sylvester Stallone as traumatised
Vietnam veteran John Rambo, wandering
small-town America, unable to adjust to
peace and primed to clash with authority:
a state many of today’s Afghanistan veterans
would recognise.
The Times Magazine 21
 One young former rifleman I met sparring
at Hard Hitters last autumn, Stephen Murtagh,
who had his leg blown off in Helmand aged
19, described how he spent some of his
compensation payout on a car and two years
later rammed it into a police vehicle during
a chase. Raging at the officers who arrested
him, he was promptly sectioned.
“They told me I had mental health
problems, sectioned me and medicated me for
18 months until I finally managed to persuade
them that I wasn’t ill – that I was 19 when I’d
had my leg blown off and was wild,” he told
me. “But they wouldn’t listen. They came and
signed me out of the army while I was in a
mental health hospital.”
Although debate around PTSD’s origins
continues – some treatment therapies interpret
the condition more in terms of an injurious
trauma stored by the body rather than the
mind – most mental health specialists regard
it as a psychological disorder that results
from the brain glitching during a moment of
extreme trauma and misfiling the event rather
than laying it down as a memory, so that
it repeats itself as part of the present when
triggered, resulting in acute, disturbing recall,
sometimes involving visual flashbacks but
more often intrusive thoughts or emotions.
“The more you are at risk of losing your
life, or the more you witness others at risk of
losing their lives, the more likely it is that you
will get PTSD,” explained Dr Walter Busuttil,
consultant psychiatrist and former medical
director at Combat Stress, the UK’s leading
charity helping veterans recover from war-
related mental health issues. “The condition
is related to dose-response [the greater the
exposure, the greater the effect].”
Most soldiers return from war without
PTSD. Yet among those who are afflicted,
soldiers discharged from the army with the
condition untreated are most at danger of it
worsening. The experience of leaving their
regiment, the break in connection and the
attendant sense of “thwarted belongingness”
this brings, when combined with PTSD, add a
fuse to the trauma of war. In some, it takes all.
When Andrew Francis came back from Sangin,
Sangin came back with him. He was 18 years
old when he went to Helmand with 2 Rifles in
2009, yet the unseen scars of the war remained
with him long after his homecoming, darkening
his moods and troubling his dreams.
A radio operator with A Company, he had
endured the excruciating heat of patrols, laden
with the weight of the radio on his back, his
Osprey armour, rifle, ammunition, grenades
and water; he had dropped to his knee every
JUDE EDGINTON
five metres or so, while the man at the front
sweeping the ground with the Vallon detector
checked out possible IED locations; he had
lost friends and witnessed the grotesque
HIS FIRST SUICIDE ATTEMPT CAME SEVEN MONTHS
AFTER DEVELOPING FULL PTSD. A SECOND FOLLOWED
Ed Lycett, a platoon commander with 4 Rifles in Helmand
in 2009, currently seeking treatment for his PTSD
effects of explosives on the bodies of fellow
riflemen; and when not witnessing the
violence himself, he had heard it through his
headset: a soundtrack that sometimes included
screaming and shouting, a mayhem of garbled
voices and desperate requests to a backbeat of
gunshots and explosions.
He was manning a radio when five soldiers
from C Company were killed on July 10 and
another ten wounded. The incident, the
deadliest of its kind for British soldiers in the
entire Afghanistan campaign, still pulls like a
black hole in the recall of Sangin veterans.
The day went like this:
A patrol set out. An IED went off. It killed
one soldier and dropped his remains over a
wall, badly wounded another and took the
leg from a platoon commander. There was
shooting. A quick reaction force rushed to the
scene to help evacuate casualties. The area
was strewn with daisy-chained IEDs. More
IEDs went off simultaneously, killing three
more soldiers. Their bodies were thrown high
in the air, described to me either as “bodies
up” or “ragdolled” by those who saw it. A flare
in one of the dead soldiers’ chest webbing
ignited as his body hurtled upwards. Another
rifleman was mortally wounded. Some of the
younger soldiers were crying; other men were
shouting and screaming. Some of the dead
had lost their faces. One soldier described
picking up lumps of a comrade and putting
them on a stretcher so they would not be
eaten by dogs. The survivors, the wounded
and the dead made it back to the patrol base.
The sound of weeping came with the night.
“There was a lot of sobbing,” I was told
by Rehan Pasha, the C Company veteran,
recalling the day. “Many of the riflemen were
just 18, 19 years old. Beyond reminding them
that those who had just died were good guys,
what can you say to someone at that point?
You have to leave them with their grief.”
I was told that, at day’s end in a nearby
patrol base, knowing that friends were
among the dead, Andrew Francis wept too,
overwhelmed by all that he had heard on his
radio headset. Another incident also troubled
him. During that tour he had killed a 15-year-
old Afghan during a firefight. It was unclear
if the teenager was a combatant.
Back home after the tour had finished, the
rifleman drank heavily. His moods dipped.
Late one night in 2010, the soldier’s mother,
Sharon Garton, heard him talking angrily
to himself while he was home on leave in
Mansfield. She went downstairs to find him
in deep distress.
“He was crying. He was angry. And I tried
speaking to him to ask him what was wrong,”
she told me when we met. “He said, ‘I can’t
tell you. You are my mum. I don’t want to
burden you with what is in my head, what
I’m thinking, what I’ve seen, what I’ve done.’ ”
They spoke for a while. At one point
Andrew Francis confided that he had killed
the teenager and mentioned that he had later
learnt the dead youth “had not carried a real
gun”. He never referred to the incident again.
Continuing his career as a soldier, he
completed a further tour of Afghanistan
in 2011, much quieter than the first. Later,
his regiment’s bugle badge tattooed on his
chest, Francis became a lance corporal in the
reconnaissance platoon, the battalion’s most
skilled formation. The gangly teenager-at-arms
had developed into a proud and dedicated
soldier, a veteran of two Afghan tours.
Yet the anniversaries of friends killed in
Sangin would often plunge him back into
grief. His medical records on his discharge
from the army in 2016, after he had been
medically downgraded following a back injury,
include the observation that the soldier, still
then only 25 years old, was suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder. Although he
had a few token counselling sessions before
he left, the army made little effort either
to treat him before he was discharged or to
co-ordinate further treatment with the NHS.
Even the most cursory examination of
Andrew Francis’s service record should have
highlighted him as being vulnerable. His age
when exposed to multiple combat traumas
including the deaths of friends, the way he had
experienced moral injury in killing a possible
non-combatant, that he was diagnosed with
PTSD while in the army but then hastily
The Times Magazine 23
 discharged without being properly treated,
are all textbook preconditions for a further
worsening of injurious mental health. In this
way he left the organisation he had loved.
Later, after receiving treatment for PTSD
following a referral from his local NHS
surgery, Francis regained some of his zest for
life. The bouts of introspection, anger and
guilt seemed to subside. His back injury fully
healed. A handsome, popular young man,
he qualified as an overhead linesman on the
electricity network and began working on a
contract in Scotland, where he lived part-time
in a caravan on a farm with his team.
Father to a four-year-old daughter from a
previous relationship, in May last year he told
his mother that he was about to propose to his
girlfriend. The shadows of Sangin appeared to
have left him at last.
Yet in the darkness of the night, the war
came for him again.
Shortly after 6am on Sunday, May 23, a
colleague went to Francis’s caravan to wake
him for an early shift. The former soldier
had hanged himself. There was no note, no
explanation, no words left behind. Yet the
regimental flag was tied around his shoulders.
In death, he belonged to the Rifles once more.
Worse followed. Two more 2 Rifles veterans of
Afghanistan died suddenly within three weeks
of Andrew Francis. Senior Rifles officers
were already appalled at the spate of suicides
among their troops. The dead included former
riflemen who had served as teenagers in
Afghanistan, NCOs in their thirties, as well
as one of the most experienced men in the
regiment, Captain Gary Case, 50, a soldier
since 1991 and veteran of Iraq, who was found
dead in a Yorkshire hotel room in 2019, weeks
after receiving an MBE.
In theory, there is no shortage of services
to help veterans. More than 1,800 registered
veterans’ charities exist in the UK, many
professing to offer mental health treatment,
with an annual income of more than £1 billion.
Furthermore, in March last year, the NHS
rolled out Op Courage, a mental health
service specifically designed for ex-soldiers.
The problem lies in trust and timing.
Veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq are often
reluctant to speak with civilian specialists
about complex war trauma, sensing they will
be misunderstood. Paul Jacobs’ “tosser in Asda”
remark was widely repeated in variation.
Major General Thomson put it differently.
“One of the things my riflemen have told me
COURTESY OF SHARON GARTON
is that they don’t want to speak with an NHS
doctor,” he said. “That may not sound helpful,
but there is something around tribal language
that puts them at ease. As riflemen, we have a
similar DNA because of our experiences.”
Other veterans are put off seeking help by
the complex signposting systems within the
THERE WAS NO NOTE, NO
EXPLANATION. YET THE
REGIMENTAL FLAG WAS
AROUND HIS SHOULDERS
Rifleman Andrew Francis, who took his own life last year
health sector. Some have alcohol and drug
problems, typical outriders of PTSD, which
complicate their treatment options. Those at
peak crisis, if they are able to reach out at all,
find that waiting lists delay referrals in their
hour of most critical need.
Shortly after Andy Francis’s suicide, Rifles
trustees and commanding officers contacted
a recently retired soldier, Lieutenant Colonel
Baz Melia, asking him to design a programme
that could fill the emerging void between
crisis and treatment, in the hope of protecting
at-risk veterans until professional help could
pick up their care. Noticing that the isolation
felt by ex-soldiers was a key factor in many of
the suicides Melia, a soldier of 37 years who
had been promoted through the ranks and
was himself a veteran of multiple operational
tours, set out to provide a sense of renewed
community and an early warning system for
those whose mental health put them at risk.
Rebuilding a sense of connection among
those who had served in the regiment, he
established a web of more than 120 volunteers
across the UK from among Rifles veterans,
to act as mentors and guides to those in
difficulty. Complete with its own hotline,
Melia launched the Always a Rifleman
programme last August.
“When a veteran is identified as approaching
a crisis, or on the cusp of one, there is usually
a gap of between seven days and seven weeks
before they can access help from mental health
services,” Melia explained. “In that time, they
could make an attempt on their life, end up
sectioned, or find that things spiral totally out
of control. The health system just isn’t quick
enough to step in and stabilise the situation
before help is delivered. Our programme sets
out to guide and stabilise an individual in
crisis, using the appropriate people – other
veterans who speak their language – until we
can get them professional help.”
To date, unlike its primary allies in wars
since 2001, the UK has yet to chart the scale
of its veterans’ mental health crisis. Coroners’
reports into sudden deaths in the UK make no
reference to victims’ previous military service
although, spurred by criticism, they will start
to do so by 2023. Similarly, two studies have
recently been launched by the MoD and
Manchester University into mortality rates and
causes of death of military personnel, including
veterans, who have served since 2001. The
first report is expected this summer. Their
findings are unlikely to reassure. Research by
the Costs of War project at Brown University
in the US last summer revealed that an
estimated 30,177 serving US soldiers and
veterans involved in operations since 9/11
had taken their own lives, compared with the
7,057 killed in action during the same period.
Hustling the Afghanistan campaign from its
consciousness as the war drops from the news
agenda, and keen to focus on themes such
as rescuing those it left behind rather than
reflecting on who it killed while there or who
has died by suicide since, Britain has given
scant thought to the “moral injury” many of
its returned soldiers feel after fighting there.
Yet moral injury is a frequent factor noted
in PTSD studies, and one which may worsen
in time as soldiers re-evaluate their actions
as part of a campaign that ultimately failed.
“When we are taken to war, our prime
issue becomes the mission, and the mission’s
morals define how the war is being fought,”
explained Dr Butussil. Combat Stress received
double the normal number of calls from
former servicemen in the month following
the Taliban’s capture of Kabul. “But there are
times in an operational situation where those
morals are challenged, and the right thing
isn’t done, or rules are broken or promises not
kept. Perhaps the whole war wasn’t what we
thought we were fighting for. That’s moral
injury, and it complicates mental illness.”
The phrase, with its suggestion of mirrored
victimhood, is weird enough for most soldiers
to laugh at, but those who spoke to me of
civilians they had unwittingly killed were
haunted by the experience. Ed Lycett was a
platoon commander with 4 Rifles in Helmand
in 2009. Fourteen members of his platoon
were wounded during the tour, including
two soldiers who became bilateral amputees.
Twelve years later, Lycett described to me a
summer patrol that echoes with him still.
The patrol went out in the morning. A
rifleman was wounded by an IED, which
permanently damaged Lycett’s hearing.
The Times Magazine 25
Three more soldiers were wounded by another
IED and the patrol came under fire from
the Taliban. The firefight continued as the
riflemen tried to evacuate their wounded
through a labyrinth of village alleyways. Lycett
ordered his men to hurl grenades over the
compound walls to clear a route to a landing
site, so that a helicopter could reach the
injured. By day’s close, the patrol were safely
back in their base. They had fought through
trouble under Lycett’s command. Wounded
comrades had been evacuated. Then a crowd
of about 200 angry Afghan villagers gathered
outside the base. They carried two litters: an
elderly woman lay dead on one; the body of a
little girl, about six or seven years old, lay on
another. They had been killed by British
grenades. Lycett allowed the families into
the patrol base to speak with him. The
conversation lasted three hours. The details
of what was said are wiped from his recall.
“The short version is that the two families
came in and I spent three hours talking with
the son of the old lady that we had killed and
the father of the little girl we had killed,” he
told me. “You don’t know whose grenade it
was, but essentially throughout those three
hours you are the one responsible for having
killed another man’s child.”
After leaving the army – he had wanted to
stay but was medically downgraded due to his
hearing loss – Lycett worked for five years in
security-related positions in the Middle East,
Africa and Afghanistan, restless and high-
functioning, until a sudden panic attack (so
severe that he blacked out) precipitated
full-blown PTSD, complete with nightmares,
hyperarousal and rage. His first suicide attempt
came seven months later. A second followed.
Unable to work, at one point he lived in
a homeless shelter for former soldiers; at
another, he lived on Dartmoor, where he
spent time with drifting communities of
travellers among whom Afghanistan veterans
were a regular presence. “This might sound
dramatic, but, in the past four years, the
number of days of joy I can count on two
hands,” he told me. “There is a rage that I
have not felt before, long periods of insomnia
and an inability to put order in things.”
He is saving to pay for an evidence-based
treatment for PTSD used in America among
Navy Seals, a stellate ganglion block (an
injection of local anaesthetic into a collection
of nerves in the neck). Earlier, Lycett began
a course of eye movement desensitisation
and reprocessing – EMDR – one of the two
principal treatments for PTSD used by the
NHS. The sessions involved him holding
electric paddles as a specialist asked him to
recall moments of extreme trauma. For some
it works. It drove Lycett wild.
“Most sessions would end with me
throwing down these vibrating paddles,”
26 The Times Magazine
‘I THOUGHT, “I CAN’T
DO THIS ANY MORE.” MY
BODY JUST STOPPED. MY
MIND STOPPED WITH IT’
he said. “I just couldn’t f***ing do it. I just
wanted to tear the place up.”
There was no element of moral injury
involved in Caroline Bull’s work in Sangin.
As a 26-year-old combat medic with 2 Rifles,
she had treated wounded British soldiers and
Afghans alike. Yet the repeated anticipatory
stress of waiting in her small aid post for the
sound of explosions or shooting that could
either signify the arrival of damaged riflemen,
or her requirement to run to them amid
screams and shouts and gunfire, carried a
hidden mental barb. She healed people. The
war got her anyway.
Most of her tour was spent with C Company.
On her first night in the patrol base at Wishtan,
a soldier became a triple amputee. Ten days
later she had helped triage the casualties of the
July 10 daisy-chain bombings. She was waiting
as part of a quick reaction force on August 20,
2009, when Paul Jacobs went out on patrol.
As soon as the first bomb went off, killing
Private Young, she ran towards the explosion
to treat the wounded. By the time she got
there the second bomb had detonated, killing
Serjeant McAleese and blinding Paul Jacobs.
Bull gave immediate treatment to Jacobs,
whom she found standing upright, covered in
blood and with dreadful injuries, swearing
loudly as gunfire rippled across the scene.
The wounded soldier was loaded on a
stretcher into the bucket of an engineers’
digger, and Bull perched beside him as the
vehicle bumped its way back to the patrol
base. “Jakey had a lot of injuries and was in
intense pain,” she recalled. “So every time we
went over a bump he’d gasp. At least I knew
he was still responsive.”
Originally a reservist, her return to civilian
life after the Sangin tour was immediate, and
her subsequent career working in the security
crisis management and kidnap and ransom
sectors accelerated, taking the former combat
medic around the world. Then, suddenly, one
morning in 2017, eight years after her tour, she
could not get out of bed.
“I woke up one Friday and thought, ‘I can’t
do this any more,’ ” she told me. “And that
was just the thought of getting up for work…
I couldn’t see past it. Suddenly your cup
overflows and you are unable to function as
a normal human being. My body just stopped.
My mind stopped with it.”
As symptoms of PTSD developed, any form
of waiting, even a queue in a supermarket,
triggered a response in which Bull, nauseous,
her heart hammering, was overwhelmed by
feelings stored from her experience of waiting
daily to treat victims of violence in war.
Crowded spaces; bars; loud, hyperactive
individuals – all became unbearable,
resurrecting chaotic sensations attached to
Sangin’s shouts and cries. Her life froze for a
two-year period. Incapacitated and unable to
work, she took to wearing noise-cancelling
headphones to silence the world.
“There were times when I wanted to go to
sleep and not wake up,” she said. “I never had
suicide ideation as a thing, but I can see how
easy it is if you want the pain to go away and
you don’t feel there is anything else to help you.”
Bull’s experiences trying to seek help
through the NHS were disastrous. The first
therapist assigned to her case announced that
they were unable to cope with Bull’s level of
combat-related PTSD trauma after only the
second session. Reflecting on her lowest ebb,
she described herself as “dead wood”.
Yet she survived. Regeneration is a shoreline
that most soldiers afflicted by the tangled
trauma of their war can reach, provided they
can first master the riddles of accessing the
right treatment. Caroline Bull’s recovery began
with a six-week residential course of treatment
at Combat Stress. A long journey followed,
much of it orientated towards redefining her
identity in the place beyond war. Today, her
headphones remain in her study. She is in the
final stages of retraining as a paramedic and
can bear the noise of the world once more.
“The blood, guts and gore were never my
trigger,” she said. “That wasn’t my problem.
My problem was being in a country full of
IEDs and people shooting. Operating at a
certain level again is good for me. Being on
an ambulance in London gives me a buzz. It
gives me the buzz back.”
We talked for a while longer, as outside the
room unseen London traffic droned past the
window and Tube trains rumbled through
the floor, reflecting on the war gone by and
that August day 12 years ago when I listened
to her fate though the crackle of radios in
Sangin as Paul Jacobs’ world went dark and
Rob Thomson’s eyes glowed in grief. We
spoke of the fall of Kabul, Helmand and
the blood of summer.
Just before she left, I asked if she were to
have her time again, would she go to Sangin
with 2 Rifles. I knew the answer already:
war’s great paradox is no surprise. Thomson’s
“tight gang” remained tighter than perhaps
the general knew.
“Yeah,” she said smoothly. “Hands down.
I don’t regret going at all.” n
THE CONMAN
WHO STOLE
OUR MOTHER

Sophie and Jake Clifton believe that their mother,

Sandra, is the latest victim of Britain’s most notorious
fraudster, a master of coercive control. It’s eight years
since Robert Hendy-Freegard convinced her
to cut off all ties to her loving family. Now one
remarkable woman has stepped forward to help
– and she knows to her cost what he is capable of…
REPORT Louise Carpenter PORTRAITS Mark Harrison
Sophie and Jake Clifton,
28 and 25. Opposite:
Jake and Sophie aged 7
and 9 in 2003, with their
mother, Sandra

Story continues
on page 40
Eat!
PU D K
LL EEP
AN
OU
T
SOUP AS THE MAIN EVENT

EASY AND DELICIOUS RECIPES FROM A MICHELIN-STARRED CHEF

F
or Michelin-starred chef PHOTOGRAPHS Romas Foord
Merlin Labron-Johnson, part RECIPES Merlin Labron-Johnson
of the pleasure of cooking lies
in picking the produce from
the kitchen garden of his
Somerset restaurant, Osip, in
Bruton. At this time of year, the
pickings may seem slim, but there’s
still plenty to enjoy, from colourful
squashes and knobbly celeriac to
leafy kale. All it takes is the
judicious addition of a few store
cupboard ingredients to create
the kind of quick, easy, restorative
soups that will power you through
the rest of winter. Tony Turnbull

Osip, 1 High Street, Bruton, Somerset

(osiprestaurant.com)

BUTTERNUT SQUASH
AND GINGER SOUP
Serves 4

• Olive oil, for frying

• 1 large onion, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic, peeled and
finely chopped
• 5cm piece of fresh root ginger,
peeled and finely chopped
• 1 red chilli, deseeded and
finely chopped
• Salt
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 medium carrot, peeled
and diced
• 1.5kg butternut squash, peeled
and cut into equal-sized cubes
• 1.5 litres vegetable stock
• 100ml natural yoghurt, to serve
• 1 small bunch of fresh
coriander, leaves picked

1. Add some olive oil to a large pan

and add the onion, garlic, ginger
and chilli, sweating gently for a
few minutes until soft. Season with
a small pinch of salt and add the
cumin seeds to toast slightly, before
adding the carrot and butternut
squash. Give everything a nice stir,
at which point you may add the
stock. Bring to a simmer and cook
until the vegetables are nice and
tender, around 20-30 minutes.
Transfer to a blender and pulse
until smooth, then pass through
a sieve and season.
2. Divide between four bowls and
add a spoonful of natural yoghurt
to each one and a scattering of
torn coriander leaves.

32 The Times Magazine

 Eat! SOUP
FRENCH ONION SOUP
WITH COMTÉ TOASTS
Serves 4

A classic for a reason, this soup is

the king of winter soups. There is
nothing more gastronomically
pleasing than a bubbling cheese
toast soaking up the rich onion
broth. For an English twist,
replace the wine with cider and
the Comté cheese with cheddar.

• 100g butter
• 6 onions, sliced
• 1 bay leaf
• 1½ tbsp plain flour
• 250ml dry white wine
• 1 litre chicken, beef or
vegetable stock
• Salt and pepper
• 1 small baguette, sliced
• 100g Comté or Gruyère,
grated

1. Take a large ovenproof

casserole and place it over a
medium heat. Melt the butter
and when it is foaming, add
the sliced onions and bay leaf,
stirring well to coat. Sweat until
translucent and continue to
cook gently for a minimum of
45 minutes. They should be an
even golden colour but without
any burning or caramelisation.
Stir in the flour and cook for
a further 3 minutes. Add the
wine and stock and bring to
a boil while stirring.
2. Once boiling, place the
casserole in an oven that has
been preheated to 170C fan
(190C non-fan). Cook for one
hour, remove from the oven
and season well with salt and
lots of cracked black pepper.
3. Toast the baguette lightly on
both sides and cover each slice
with grated cheese. Place the
toasts under a grill until the
cheese is golden and bubbly.
Divide the toasts between the
bowls and ladle the hot soup
over and around.

The Times Magazine 33

 Eat! SOUP
ROOT VEGETABLE
MINESTRONE WITH PESTO
Serves 4

We serve a rendition of this at

our wine bar the Old Pharmacy,
where we use whatever veg we
have. A fresh pesto, made with a
mix of herbs, adds brightness to
this otherwise rather earthy soup.

• Olive oil
• 2 onions, diced
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 sticks celery, diced
• Half a celeriac, diced
• Half a swede, diced
• Salt
• 1 litre vegetable stock
• 200g ditalini pasta (or similar)

For the pesto

• 2 garlic cloves
• Pinch of sea salt
• 25g whole blanched almonds,
lightly toasted
• 1 small bunch basil, stems
removed and roughly chopped
• 1 small bunch parsley, stems
removed and roughly chopped
• 25g parmesan, finely grated
• Juice of half a lemon
• 125ml olive oil

1. Add a healthy amount of olive

oil to a large pan, along with the
onions, carrots and celery. Sweat
them gently for five minutes
without allowing them to colour.
2. Add the celeriac and swede
and season the vegetables with
a small amount of salt, cooking
everything together for a few
minutes, before adding your
stock and the pasta. Bring to a
boil and simmer the vegetables
for around 20 minutes, in which
time the vegetables will soften
and the starch from the pasta
will add body to the stock.
3. As the soup cooks, prepare the
pesto. In a pestle and mortar (or
food processor on pulse), pound
the garlic with the sea salt until
a smooth paste forms. Add the
almonds and crush, then the
herbs, pounding these until the
mixture is almost homogeneous.
Stir in the parmesan.
4. Transfer to a bowl and add the
lemon juice and olive oil. Season.
5. Serve the minestrone, with
the pesto in a separate bowl.

The Times Magazine 35

LENTIL STEW WITH HAM
HOCK AND POTATOES
Serves 4
Ham hock is an underrated,
inexpensive cut. This makes a
very fine dinner when paired
with a dressed salad, crusty bread
and a nice bottle of beaujolais.

• 1 ham hock, soaked in

water overnight
• 1 onion, quartered and
studded with 8 cloves
• 2 sticks of celery,
roughly chopped
• 3 medium carrots,
finely chopped
• 3 bay leaves
• 6 peppercorns
• A small handful of fresh flat-
leaf parsley, leaves separated
from the stalks and chopped
• 400g puy lentils
• 500g waxy potatoes, peeled
and cut into bite-sized pieces
• Salt and pepper
• 1 tbsp white wine or
cider vinegar
• Juice of half a lemon
• Wholegrain or Dijon mustard,
to serve

1. Discard the liquid in which the

ham hock was soaking and place
the joint in a pot big enough to
accommodate it comfortably,
along with the onion, celery,
carrots, bay leaves, peppercorns
and parsley stalks. Cover with
2.5 litres water and bring to
a boil, removing any scum.
Reduce to a gentle simmer
and cook for 1½ hours, or
until the meat is tender.
2. Remove the ham from the
cooking liquor and leave to cool.
Strain the liquid through a sieve
into a clean pan and discard the
contents of the sieve.
3. Put the lentils and potatoes
into the ham liquor, bring to a
boil and simmer for 30 minutes,
or until both are cooked through.
Check the seasoning of the broth
and adjust as necessary with salt,
freshly milled black pepper, the
vinegar and a squeeze of lemon.
Place the ham back in the pot
and add the chopped parsley.
4. Serve in the middle of the
table, so people help themselves,
separating the meat from the
bone. Serve with mustard.

36 The Times Magazine

 Eat! SOUP
PASTA E FAGIOLI
Serves 4

“Fagioli” refers to the beans, with

pancetta or guanciale often
included for depth. If you have
parmesan rinds, toss these into
the soup when you add the stock.

• 70ml olive oil

• 1 large onion, diced
• 2 sticks of celery, diced
• 2 medium carrots, diced
• 1 sprig of sage
(about 6 or 7 leaves)
• Salt and pepper
• 100g smoked streaky
bacon, diced
• 1 x 400g tin whole
plum tomatoes
• 1.5 litres chicken stock
• 2 x 400g tins of borlotti beans,
drained and rinsed
• 175g conchigliette
or ditalini pasta
• 25g parmesan cheese

1. Heat the olive oil in a wide-

bottomed saucepan and add the
onion, celery and carrots, along
with the sage. Season with a
pinch of salt and cook very
gently for around 45 minutes,
over which time the vegetables
will give up the majority of their
moisture, reducing in volume but
increasing vastly in sweetness
and intensity of flavour.
2. Add the bacon to the pot,
letting the fat render for a few
minutes before adding the
tomatoes, breaking them up with
a spoon and reducing everything
together slightly for 5 minutes.
Add the stock and three quarters
of the beans to the pot.
3. Using a potato masher,
mash the remaining beans into
a rough paste that will help
thicken the soup, before stirring
in. Bring to a boil and simmer
for 20 minutes or so.
4. While the soup is simmering
together, cook the pasta in a pot
of salted boiling water. Drain
and add to the soup. Taste and
season with salt and pepper and
a good glug of olive oil. Divide
between bowls and top liberally
with grated parmesan, olive oil
and extra black pepper.

The Times Magazine 37

Eat! SOUP

CHESTNUT MUSHROOM
SOUP WITH SHERRY
AND TARRAGON
Serves 4
A play on the old-fashioned
cream of mushroom soup. The
sherry adds complexity and a
lovely nuttiness.

• 40ml olive oil

• 75g unsalted butter
• 500g (2 punnets) chestnut
mushrooms, quartered
• 2 banana shallots, finely sliced
• 2 glasses of dry sherry
• 2 litres hot chicken stock
• 10 sprigs of tarragon,
leaves removed and chopped,
stalks reserved
• Salt and pepper
• 100ml crème fraîche, to serve

1. In a large pot, heat the olive oil

with the butter and when it starts
to foam, add the mushrooms. Fry
for 5-10 minutes; you are looking
for a nice roasted colour. Add the
shallots and sherry, bring to a boil
and scrape the bottom of the pan
with a wooden spoon, getting
all the caramelised mushroom
goodness into the broth. Add the
stock and tarragon stalks. Simmer,
uncovered, for 30 minutes.
2. Remove the tarragon stalks
from the soup and transfer it to
a blender. Allow to cool a little
and then blitz until very smooth.
Return the soup to a saucepan,
rectify the seasoning and reheat
until piping hot. Divide into
bowls, serving with a generous
spoonful of crème fraîche and
a sprinkling of tarragon.

TUSCAN BEAN SOUP

WITH CAVOLO NERO
Serves 4
This is a really quick, easy soup
– and you can substitute the
cavolo nero for another green such
as curly kale or Savoy cabbage.
• 50ml olive oil
• 2 onions, peeled and sliced
• 5 garlic cloves, peeled
and sliced
• 2 bay leaves
• ½ tsp crushed chilli
• 4 carrots, peeled and diced
• 5 sticks of celery, diced
• Salt
• 2 x 400g tin of cannellini
beans, rinsed and drained
• 1 x 400g tin of flageolet beans,
rinsed and drained
• 1.75 litres vegetable stock (you
can use Marigold bouillon
powder if in a rush)
• 1 large bunch of cavolo nero
leaves, thick stem removed
and roughly chopped
• Cracked black pepper
• Very good olive oil,
for drizzling
1. Heat the olive oil in a large
saucepan. Add the onions, garlic,
bay leaves and chilli and sweat
for 5 minutes over a medium heat
without allowing them to colour.
Add the carrots and celery, season
with a little salt and sweat gently
for a further 45 minutes. Do not
allow the vegetables to colour:
this stage of the recipe is where
you are building the flavour
foundations and should not be
rushed. You are looking for a
lovely sweet vegetable “compote”.
2. Once satisfied with the
compote, add the beans and the
vegetable stock and bring to the
boil. Taste the broth. Depending
on the stock used, it may require
a little more seasoning. Add
the cavolo nero and simmer
for 5 more minutes.
3. Use a ladle to distribute the
soup between bowls and add
a generous amount of cracked
black pepper, straight from the
mill, and a really healthy glug
of the finest olive oil you can
get your hands on. Enjoy with
crusty bread. n

38 The Times Magazine

 The conman who stole our mother Continued from page 29

T
he small rented brick bungalow
where Sarah Smith lives with
her husband and her dog is like a
house a child might build out of
Lego: two windows either side of
a front door, with a low roof and
a little patch of grass out front.
Inside, she has lined the walls
of the sitting room with family
pictures: her wedding to Miles
seven years ago; her 87-year-old father, Peter,
and late mother, Gill, holding her tightly to
them; her nieces and nephews, all seemingly
ordinary to the outside eye. But to her, each
one is a reminder of a life filled with love that
for a decade she thought was lost for good.
For ten years, between the ages of 24 and
34, Smith, now 52, was coercively controlled
by a con artist who took from her everything
she had. She was one of multiple women
defrauded of money by Robert Hendy-
Freegard. In Smith’s case, it was her entire
£180,000 inheritance, which Hendy-Freegard
(at the beginning he was just Freegard)
obtained over time by convincing her that
PREVIOUS SPREAD: COURTESY JAKE AND SOPHIE CLIFTON. STYLING: HANNAH SKELLEY AND HARRIET ELTON. HAIR AND MAKE-UP: CAROL SULLIVAN AT ARLINGTON ARTISTS
Hendy-Freegard was always one step ahead, Sarah Smith, 52
spending money he stole on fast cars, watches
and suits. But Peter Smith never gave up.
Hendy-Freegard was dubbed “the puppet
master” in the tabloid press. He was tried in
2005 after an investigation that took 18 months
and cost £2.5 million. He was convicted of ten
counts of theft and eight counts of obtaining
money by deception, including every penny
Smith owned. But more important than this,
the trial in 2005 also obtained two convictions
for kidnap by fraud, relating to the lost lives
of Sarah Smith and another victim, John
Atkinson, Smith’s student boyfriend, the first
person he ensnared in the bizarre web of lies
after befriending him in a bar.
The basis of his deception rested on an
IRA gunrunner having been already exposed
in the college. The IRA were around them,
Hendy-Freegard told the unsuspecting
students. Atkinson, whose family also handed
over hundreds of thousands of pounds,
allowed Hendy-Freegard to throw darts at his
knees and beat him up in order to toughen
him up before their “mission”. Sarah Smith

he was an undercover MI5 agent and that
their friendship put her family’s safety at
grave risk from the IRA.
She dropped out of her degree course, a
bachelor of science in agriculture at Harper
USING MAC COSMETICS. SOPHIE’S DRESS, ALLSAINTS.COM; JAKE’S JACKET, REISS.COM. THIS PAGE: COURTESY SARAH SMITH. JUMPER, REISS.COM
was made to wear a bucket on her head when
she was moved to a “safe house”.
Hendy-Freegard was given two life
sentences to run concurrently on top of the
nine years for fraud. Justice appeared to have

Adams College in Newport, Shropshire, to
go on bizarre missions with him. Slowly
her questions – why can’t I go home? Why
can’t I finish my degree? – ebbed away as he
isolated her, telling her constantly that her
family were targets and her questions were
causing trouble for him with his “superiors”.
She gradually lost contact with everybody
she loved. When she was allowed to speak
to her parents in public telephone boxes, her
mother would sob and so would Smith until
Hendy-Freegard snatched away the phone.
Red phone boxes – along with the Duran
Duran music he played on a loop in the car
– are her remaining trauma triggers.
By the end, ten years on, she was sleeping
on floors and working menial jobs under
aliases, with all her money going into an
account controlled by him. He was living a
fantasy life, James Bond-style. Though Hendy-
Freegard was not and had never had been her
boyfriend, by the end she did have sex with
him in the hope of improving her fate.
When the police finally found her, in 2003,
part of a much bigger operation involving
the FBI and other female victims including a
businesswoman and a psychologist, she barely
recognised the name “Sarah Smith”. Her father
had spent years looking for his daughter,
taking on the role of private detective when
the police seemed at a loss. A map tracking
her movements was erected at the family
farm. Once he broke into a so-called
“safe house” where she was being kept.
been done. It was, however, temporary. Two
years later, his life sentences for kidnap were
quashed by the Court of Appeal, which ruled
that neither of the victims had been physically
detained. This ruling sent a clear message:
coercive control, in the eyes of the law, counted
for nothing in 2007. By 2009, after finishing his
sentences for fraud, Hendy-Freegard was a
free man.
“A damaged soul, yes,” Sarah Smith says
of herself today. It took her years to recover
and learn to trust, helped by the kindness of
her younger brother with whom she lived in
Wimbledon once she found freedom again.
She met her husband on the internet in 2008
and blurted out her story on the first date. It
was a good sign. He was not deterred.
“You find a way of coping with it. The
damage is definitely there, but why let that
define you? Then he really wins.”
She looks around the bungalow as she
sits in a chair, relaxed in stockinged feet. “It
grates,” she says of the fact that 30 years on
she cannot afford to buy a home.
She grew up in a large house on a family
farm, rode horses and went to boarding
school. She is neither spoilt nor bitter, but had
she not been Hendy-Freegard’s victim, there is
no question her life would have been different.
At the very least she would have finished
her degree at Harper Adams College, quite
possibly successfully pursued her ambition
of becoming a farm manager, and bought
a home. “People aspire to owning their own
She had to work in a
chip shop, all earnings
handed to Freegard
– hunger forced her
to eat raw batter
home. But not everybody can be that lucky.
Unfortunately, my money got squandered by
Robert Freegard, so that’s the way it goes.”
Sarah Smith is an extraordinary example
of the resilience of the human spirit. On
the kitchen windowsill facing out onto the
winding street of the housing estate, there are
at least ten different species of orchid bearing
varieties of white, purple and pink flowers.
Orchids are notoriously tricky to grow, but
these have strong stems and blooms that seem
perfect, each one reaching up to the ceiling,
thriving on the light and care. It is the same
with the containers in her back garden. There
are cookbooks everywhere. She loves to cook
– and to eat, she says, smiling and looking at
her stomach. In the old days, when she had
to go by the name of Betty and work in a fish
and chip shop, all earnings handed over to

40 The Times Magazine


From top: Daily Mail, 2007; John Atkinson,
Smith, Maria Hendy and Freegard in 1993
her captor, hunger forced her to eat raw
batter. When she was found by the police, she
had a stale crust in her bag.
When Smith was released, she received
neither adequate therapy nor compensation.
She was entitled to nothing from the Criminal
Injuries Compensation Authority because of
the lack of physical scars. “I fell through the
cracks on every category of compensation
or assistance,” she explains. “They told me,
‘Because there was no physical injury you
are not due anything. Sorry.’ I was a bit
devastated by that one.”
Smith has a cheerful manner. She was an
innocent young woman when she fell victim,
prone to shyness. She says she learnt to cope
by training herself to expect nothing. She learnt
to flick a switch internally so her predisposition
for optimism was replaced by pessimism.
“I found if I expected nothing, it was easier.”
Thirty years on, the old self is back. There
is something deeply upsetting about the way
she does not want to sound like a moaner, as
if the unfairness and horror of what happened
to her might sit in the same bracket as being
flogged a dodgy car. Latterly, while Smith was
kept at various different addresses, Hendy-
Freegard did in fact operate as a car salesman
to ensnare other wealthy women.
Smith understands how strange her
story sounds. “You can’t actually say, ‘Oh,
I’d never fall for it,’ ” Smith says, “because
these people are actually very convincing.
“How would Freegard have managed to
con the range of people he did?” she says. “He
knew everything about me. My bank account,
my trust fund. I thought, ‘How can he not be
MI5 with that knowledge?’ And how would
I even know what an MI5 officer looked like?’’
She has a point. There was also a strong
element of fear and, crucially, respect.
Initially, she says, she thought she would
return. But when she asked why she couldn’t
see her parents, “He would say, ‘This car is
bugged. You’re getting me into trouble with my
superiors. You’re threatening the operation.’ ”
The power Hendy-Freegard wielded over
the law-abiding students was successful because
he played on their innocence, their love for
their families, their fear of the IRA and their
ingrained respect for those in authority. (The
same deference that Wayne Couzens abused
to lure Sarah Everard into his car.) He twisted
all these things and manipulated the students,
separating them off, to the extent that before
long they lost the power to fight back.
If Sarah Smith’s early adult life was shaped
by deceit and loss, she has ensured that it is
now defined by love. Her family welcomed
her back after she was found, despite the
appearance over the years that she only
wanted money from them.
She begins to cry when she revisits their
pain, particularly that of her late mother, who
died four years ago. “There is still a lot of guilt
around the money,” she says. “There is still a
massive amount of emotion. I’m sorry.” Her
misplaced guilt is painful to witness.
“I’ve had moments where I’ve been very
angry and bitter but, at the end of the day, it’s
a waste of energy and I can’t do anything to
change it.”
She works part-time on the family farm,
doing the paperwork. It is a simple life, as she
tells it, but rich in ways except the material.
“He didn’t manage to break my spirit. He tried.”
Revisiting the decision to quash Hendy-
Freegard’s conviction for kidnap is the only
time she becomes animated. “The judge at our
hearing said he was giving those sentences
because he believed Freegard to be a risk to
people – not [specifically] men or women, just
people in the future. How did I feel when he
got let out? Pretty shit. He’d served less time
than I did [with him]. Which was no justice.”
Over the years there has been the inevitable
media interest, including interviews and a
co-authored memoir, Deceived: A True Story
(2007), which she did not enjoy working on.
She did not court any of this publicity, and
would certainly not be talking to me now had
the story of Robert Hendy-Freegard not taken
a disturbing twist.
Last year Smith was contacted by the
production company Raw, which was working
on a series for Netflix called The Puppet
Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman, which
will be aired this month.
Since 2014, the family of a woman named
Sandra Clifton, who was in a relationship
with a man calling himself David Hendy, have
been unable to locate her. The man had come
into her life in 2012 (three years after Hendy-
Freegard was released from prison) via a dating
app and bought her a flashy car. He told her
he sold advertising space, although he never
seemed to go to work. Slowly, her previously
loving relationship with her two children
became fractured beyond repair despite her
having always been a doting and loving mother.
The man insinuated that her son, Jake, was
gay, and alleged that jewellery had been
stolen. Jake Clifton, then 16, left the house to
live with his father, devastated and confused
about what had happened to his mother. His
sister, Sophie, later became estranged from
both Jake and her father, Mark.
Eventually, Sandra Clifton disappeared
with “David Hendy”.
These children, Jake and Sophie Clifton,
now 25 and 28, with the help of their father
(Sandra’s ex-husband), were now searching for
their lost mother. They had finally found out,
via a Google search, that David Hendy was
in fact Robert Hendy-Freegard, the convicted
fraudster. Sarah Smith was a known victim.
Could she help with some background?
Almost 30 years had passed since Smith
had climbed into Hendy-Freegard’s car, not to
return for 10 years. Her own father had never
given up. This time, despite all the pain that
it would reopen, it was her turn to help – a
second profound act of bravery.
Sophie and Jake Clifton met Sarah Smith in
a café. Sophie was nervous, she remembers,
“because I’d read bits of her book and she was
this story to me”.
Jake Clifton, a quiet, sensitive young man,
did not know much at all of Sarah Smith’s
story, only that she too had once been a victim
of the man who had disappeared with his
mother. Smith remembers talking the young
adults through the extent to which she had
been controlled. “I wanted to help them to
be able to think back and, where they had
blamed their mother for her strange and
unfair behaviour, to firmly point the blame
where it truly lies, at Freegard’s feet, not hers.”
The meeting was an emotional one for
all of them. Hearing what had happened to
Smith, Jake began to cry. “And he hardly ever
cries,” remembers Sophie. “On the drive home
he sat quietly. I knew he was trying to process
what Sarah had said.”
“My hope for them is that at some point
Sandra is brought to reality, as I was,” says
Smith. “I want her to be delivered back to the
arms of her loving children, but I fear they
The Times Magazine 41
 will need to be patient because this is not a
simple issue and may take time.”
But in that meeting, some comfort was
taken at least: two siblings without a mother
and a woman with no children of her own,
who felt protective over them and in some
way could now try to help as she had been
helped. “I hadn’t really appreciated the level
of their trauma until I met them,” she says.
For Sophie, it was an instant connection.
“I’m extremely attached to her because she
understands us so well, despite having only
met us the once. We gained an extremely
important ally as she showed us that it is
possible to come out the other side.”
The police have tracked down Sandra
Clifton and made her aware of who she is
with, but she dismissed the inquiries, saying
she was perfectly happy. She has not seen her
children for seven years. “She adored us. She
lived for us,” explains Sophie sadly. “We just
want her back.”
During her absence, Sandra’s elderly
parents have died. She was a much loved
only child. She did not return for the funerals.
Last year, Jake Clifton attempted to get the
house his mother inherited from her parents
protected for her by putting it into trust.
Sandra successfully challenged the attempt.
Jake saw her for the first time via video link
six months ago, in a virtual court case, her
face mostly covered by a hood and scarf.
She accused him of trying to steal from
her, despite the judge making it clear that
no such thing was legally possible.
“The judge was very sympathetic to us,”
explains Jake. “The problem is my mum
has been trained, controlled to do whatever
Freegard wants her to say and do. When the
police found her to tell her that we wanted
to hear from her and to tell her who she was
with, she said, ‘I’m not bothered. I know who
I am with.’
“The police technically don’t have any
grounds to say or do anything because as far
as they are aware she is happy and healthy,”
Jake says. “Sadly, the law doesn’t do a lot for
people like my mum.”
The loss of their mother to her new
relationship, the appearance at least of her
having abandoned them, has had lasting effects
on both children, who now live in Berkshire.
Hendy-Freegard locked Jake out of the
house at 16. He went to live with his father.
Sophie says she was brainwashed to believe
that her father was destructive, that Jake had
“made his choice” and that contact was
detrimental to her. She had an envelope titled
COURTESY SOPHIE CLIFTON
“The Lies and Slander of Mr Mark Clifton”
pinned on her bedroom noticeboard for all her
father’s letters telling her he loved her. It took
a friend, and her leaving the family home, to
reunite Sophie with both Jake and her father.
“I’d been totally brainwashed. Every day,
Sophie and Sandra Clifton in 2010
‘Mum adored us, she
lived for us. We just
want her back’
David [Hendy-Freegard] would say, ‘You don’t
ever want to speak to your dad again, do you?’
Again and again and again. It was like a drill.
It doesn’t start like that. It was drip-feeding.”
When asked in the documentary, “What if
your mother is happy and Freegard is living a
new innocent life?” Jake responds, “Why has
he done what he has done to us then?”
Hendy-Freegard was not able to break
the bond between the siblings, just as he was
unable to break it between Sarah Smith and
her family. “We didn’t speak for two years, but
when I saw her face again it was like nothing
had ever happened,” Jake says.
Hendy-Freegard has been made aware
of the upcoming film via a letter sent to the
last known address. It is not known if Sandra
Clifton received the letter that was sent to her.
Key to maintaining the Cliftons’ mental
well-being during filming has been the
involvement of two psychologists, Dr Linda
Dubrow-Marshall and Professor Rod Dubrow-
Marshall, both of whom specialise in the study
of coercive control and lead a course on it at
the University of Salford.
The clinical belief of the doctors is that
this kind of behaviour – the web of lies, the
coercion, the delight in control – is suggestive
of a traumatising narcissist.
Dubrow-Marshall explains, “They gain
pleasure and power from traumatising others.
The behaviour exhibited with Sandra Clifton
shows all the red flags of coercive and
controlling behaviour, and if you put that
together with what is known already about
[this person’s] propensity for deception and for
coercion, clearly [he] presents a significant risk.
“What we don’t have [as a society] is a
coercive and controlling register. There is no
evidence that this particular individual has
reformed. He might argue differently. You
would think he would come forward and make
that argument if he really believed it to be
true. So in this instance one is inclined to
come to the opposite view. So I do think
there’s an issue here of public protection and
I do think the government should be thinking
about it. Where there is evidence of people
convicted of coercive and controlling
behaviour not mending their ways, I think
the public need to be warned.”
As Sarah Smith understands more than
anybody, following the quashing of his kidnap
convictions Hendy-Freegard is not guilty in
law of coercive control, which did not exist
back he was tried. His convictions relate only
to fraud. (He could have been tried under the
new law in relation to Smith as, by the end,
she had sex with him.)
Dubrow-Marshall says, “Unfortunately,
the legal system seems to fail the victims.
I think it is really important, almost as a
matter of public service, that it’s highlighted
that individuals [like this] exist. My point is
that the government needs to take notice. It
needs to make it easier for the public and for
the Crown Prosecution Service to take actions
against perpetrators of this nature and it needs
to create warning lists so that people can be
aware of the risks.”
One of the heartbreaking questions Sophie
Clifton asked both psychologists was, “How
do I know if I have learnt the behaviour from
him – how to manipulate people?”
“And it showed what a thoughtful, sensitive
person Sophie is,” explains Dubrow-Marshall.
“It is exactly that kind of sensitivity that
would protect her from hurting people. There
were definitely attempts [by Hendy-Freegard]
to control the Clifton children. But I am
always in awe of the capacity for resilience
and recovery in people.”
“My hope for them is that at some point
Sandra is brought to reality like I eventually
was,” Sarah Smith says.
“Perhaps other women might come
forward. Perhaps somebody will reach out and
Sandra Clifton might just come home. Perhaps
other families too will now be on the lookout.”
“What comes across to me so powerfully,”
says Dubrow-Marshall, “is just how, by bad
luck, a person of this nature can show up in
your life and how really important it is for
people to be able to recognise the warning
signs, to be able to draw on support and
resources to prevent harms from happening.
It’s about getting the message out that con
artists, fraudsters, traumatising narcissists are
around us and we need to better detect these
people when they come into our midst.”
“We are better than this situation,” says
Sophie Clifton. “We are going to fight for
our mum.” n
The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate
Conman launches on Netflix on January 18
The Times Magazine 43
With his one-time
ts,
fiancée, Julia Rober
0.
at the Oscars in 199
,
Below: with his father
Donal d, in 199 5

‘I HAVE REGRETS, BUT I’M

NOT GOING TO PRETEND I
DIDN’T HAVE A GREAT TIME’
Kiefer Sutherland is the son of acting royalty who
found fame in his own right, first as a film star and then
as the hard-hitting Jack Bauer in TV series 24. He was
also a Hollywood hellraiser, with three spells in prison
to prove it. Now he’s reinvented himself as a country
and western singer. Interview by Sarfraz Manzoor
 Kiefer Sutherland,
55, photographed by
Barry J Holmes in the
Thompson Suite at
Thompson Hollywood
 K
iefer Sutherland is showing me
his tattoos. “They’re a poor man’s
diary,” says the actor best known
for his role as counterterrorist
agent Jack Bauer in the TV series
24. They chart the journey of his
life. The first tattoo he had done
was of a Japanese symbol that
represented strength of heart.
“I was a broody 17-year-old
taking himself way too seriously,” he tells me.
“And next to that is a sword to remind me of a
fight I got into with a friend of mine.” There is
the tattoo of the Douglas clan to remind him
of his actress mother, Shirley Douglas, who
raised him when she divorced his father, the
Hollywood actor Donald Sutherland.
He continues his tattoo journey, pointing
out the Virgin Mary – which he got after
noticing how many of the Latin-American
men in his neighbourhood in east Los Angeles
had stickers of Mary on their cars. “Where
these men came from in life is so cruel,” he
explains. “They’ve been praying to Jesus and
God their whole life, so they started praying to
Mary thinking she might be kinder. I thought
that was really profound and so unique to my
neighbourhood that I got that tattooed.”
Sutherland, 55, has in the past had a well-
deserved reputation for enjoying a drink and
a fight. He has three bird tattoos to represent
the three times he has been in prison – the
most recent was a 48-day sentence in 2007 for
drink driving. “I was never going to put myself
in that position again,” he says. “And these
birds were going to remind me to smarten up.”
Along with the three prison spells, other
lowlights in Sutherland’s roll call of bad
behaviour include a brawl with two off-duty
soldiers in Montana that left him with a piece
of broken glass from a beer bottle embedded
in his elbow; downing eight shots of Scotch
and gyrating topless before lapdancing on a
THIS SPREAD: BARRY J HOLMES, MOVIESTORE/SHUTTERSTOCK, BACKGRID, SHUTTERSTOCK
PREVIOUS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES. GROOMING: TERRI APAASEWICZ FOR CLOUTIER REMIX.
man’s knee at a strip club; and rugby-tackling
a 9ft Christmas tree to the ground at the
Strand Palace Hotel in London.
It is hard to believe the Sutherland I am
talking to today via Zoom – dressed in a sober
black turtleneck sweater and horn-rimmed
spectacles – is the same man who once
launched himself fully clothed into a pool
at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Did you really have 140 stitches in your
head, I ask. “Oh, at least,” he says. “Different
injuries, but yes.”
When I ask him to reflect on his youthful
misadventures he makes no attempt to deny
or underplay them. “I had a great time,” he
says. “I’ll make no bones about it. There are
moments where I embarrassed myself and did
some things I really regret and I wish I hadn’t
put myself in those positions. But the great
stories I have in my life and great times with
my friends were certainly centred around a
46 The Times Magazine
bar, having a drink. I’m not going to pretend
I didn’t do it.”
This is, I am to learn, how Sutherland rolls
these days. In our conversation he is polite
and gracious and unapologetic. “When I look
back at the actors I really admire, there was
Gene Hackman or Peter O’Toole or Richard
Harris,” he says. “These were people who
really lived a life and you could see it in their
face and feel it in their words. I was always
impressed by that, and I think maybe as a
young person I tried to keep up a little more
than I should have.”
Sutherland first found fame as part of
the Eighties Brat Pack alongside Sean Penn,
Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, starring
in a string of hit movies including Stand by
Me, Flatliners, The Lost Boys and Young Guns.
Huge success in the Eighties was followed by
a decade in the wilderness as Sutherland was
bruised by a series of flops. “I wasn’t prepared
for how fast it went away,” he admits.
He quit Hollywood to buy a ranch and
reinvent himself as a championship rodeo rider.
It was the iconic role of Jack Bauer in the
hugely successful 24 – which ran for nine series
from 2001 – that revived Sutherland’s career.
If films defined the first act of Kiefer
Sutherland’s career and television shaped the
second, it is music that dominates the third
act – these days he is playing a new role as
a country singer. His debut album, Down in a
Hole, was released in 2016 followed by Reckless
& Me in 2019. His latest album, Bloor Street, is
released this month.
It would be easy to mock Sutherland for his
musical ambitions but it would also be unfair
– he may be an actor but as a singer he is the
real deal, with a world-weary tobacco-stained
voice and songs that recall Merle Haggard,
Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash.
“There are always going to be people
who are not going to be a fan of what you’re
doing,” he says. “I’ve also found that if you
stick around and don’t give up, you will find
the people who are enjoying that music.”
Kiefer Sutherland was born in 1966 at St
Mary’s Hospital in Paddington in London,
where his father was working on the TV series
A Farewell to Arms, but the young family,
which included Kiefer’s twin sister, Rachel,
moved to Los Angeles the following year
as Donald’s career flourished. His parents
divorced when Kiefer was three – work
commitments that took his father away from
home was one factor, a three-year affair with
Jane Fonda another – and he moved with
his mother to the Toronto neighbourhood
of Bloor Street.
“I had my first kiss on Bloor Street and
had my first fight on Bloor Street,” he recalls.
“I got beat up for the first time in my life
on Bloor Street.”
Did you really have
140 stitches in your
head? ‘Oh, at least.
Different injuries,
but yes’
That sounds like one hell of a night, I say.
“It was many, many nights,” he says. “But
every seminal moment I had as a young boy
to a young man seemed to happen around
Bloor Street.”
He did not see much of his father in his
early years. “I think both of us would say we
wish we spent more time together and that’s
just the truth,” he says. He cherishes the
childhood memories he does have. His dad
driving young Kiefer to school in a Ferrari he
had won in a poker game. When Kiefer was
14 and obsessed with David Bowie, his father
took him to see the singer – with whom he
was friendly – and later led him backstage.
“We knocked on the door,” he recalls. “And
Bowie said, ‘Donald, I am so glad to see you.
Oh, you’ve brought your family?’ I think
I interrupted what was going to be a very fun
night for the two of them out on the town.”
It might have seemed inevitable with both
parents as actors that Kiefer Sutherland would
end up following in the family business, but he
tells me his decision was more based on a lack
of other choices.
“I didn’t have that many options,” he
says. “I was not a great student. I was really
interested in law but I was a terrible student.
There was no way I was getting into law
school. I had done a play when I was about
11 years old and it was the first thing that
people told me I was good at. I was just
old enough to have a crush on a lady in the
play. It ticked a lot of boxes for me. I can’t
underestimate the value of someone telling
you you’re good at something. And so
I naturally gravitated towards that.”
Sutherland dropped out of school at 15 and
his father managed to get him a small part in
Max Dugan Returns, a film in which he was
starring. Did the young man think being
Donald Sutherland’s son had helped his career?
“I’ve certainly seen moments where it has
helped me and I’ve seen moments where it
really has not,” he says. “My father is not a
wallflower. He’s had a colourful life and there
are a few people he might have rubbed the
wrong way down the road. I certainly know
one director – I sat in his waiting room for
six hours and that director would not see me
because he’d had a falling-out with my father.”
After landing his first leading role in a
Canadian drama, The Bay Boy, Sutherland

With Casey Siemaszko and Bradley Gregg in Stand by Me
Awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, 2008
With his partner, Cindy Vela, in Los Angeles last year
With his daughter, Sarah, now also an actress, in 2003
moved to Los Angeles, living for the first
three months in the city in his ’67 Mustang.
“It was so exciting,” he recalls. “California has
a great climate and they have showers at the
beach to rinse off the sand. I remember it so
fondly. I remember the showers being really
cold. But there I was, 17 years old, and I was
making a go of it.”
It was while he was living in his car that
Sutherland was hired by Steven Spielberg to
do a pilot episode of a TV series.
“If you get hired by Spielberg you get to
ride on that for a while,” he says. “And so for
seven months, I kept getting jobs. In that time
I got Stand by Me, At Close Range and The Lost
Boys. Those three films just changed my life.”
He went from living in a car to sharing a
house with three fellow young actors trying
to kick-start their careers: Billy Zane, Sarah
Jessica Parker and Robert Downey Jr. “I
remember how new and exciting everything
was back then,” he says. “We could afford to
be supportive of each other because one of us
wasn’t taking the work away from everyone
else. It was a really exciting time for all of us.
Our lives were unfolding and happening before
us and it was all really exciting and cool.”
The streak of success continued with
A Few Good Men, Young Guns, Young Guns II,
Flatliners and Bright Lights, Big City, where he
first worked with Michael J Fox. The first time
they met, Sutherland showed him a Canadian
magazine that had Fox on the cover. “I told
him I didn’t want to freak him out or make
him think I was a crazed stalker,” he says.
“I just said, ‘I have this TV guide. I’ve had
it with me for four years. I held on to it for
dear life because you were a Canadian guy
and you were making it in the US. You were
a real inspiration to me.’ ”
They became good friends, even though
Sutherland had also auditioned for the role
of Marty McFly in Back to the Future. “My
life would have changed dramatically,” he says
when I ask if he regretted missing out on the
role. “But I was not right for the part. Michael
was the guy for it.”
Even without Back to the Future, Sutherland
had 11 No 1 films in a row. “There was a
moment when I had the No 1 and No 2 film
in America – Flatliners and Young Guns II,” he
recalls. “That’s about the highest point in my
career. I thought, this is going to be the rest
of my life. My father had been successful
my whole life, so why wouldn’t it last? And
then, like a light switch, it was done, over.”
Sutherland turned 30 and the hits dried up.
“In my thirties the films kept getting further
and further away from home,” he says. “You
find yourself in New Zealand or South Africa
doing a film for no money.”
Sutherland’s love life was also troubled. He
had first got married at 20 to actress Camelia
Kath, with whom he had a daughter, Sarah
The Times Magazine 47
 – named after Sarah Jessica Parker – but the
marriage lasted less than two years, allegedly
falling apart due to Sutherland’s fondness
for drinking and other women. He married
former model Kelly Winn in 1996 but that
relationship ended after four years. Those
marriages bookended an ill-fated engagement
to Julia Roberts, who called off their wedding
three days before the big day – he had allegedly
been enjoying a dalliance with a stripper
called Raven, something he has always denied
– and flew to Europe with Kiefer’s best friend
at the time, Jason Patric. Sutherland has in
the past admitted that he was heartbroken
but believes Roberts did the right thing.
“We were young,” he told another
interviewer, “and I think she very smartly
realised, ‘Oh gosh, this is for life. I’m not ready
to do this.’ And fair enough. Good for you.
Thank you – in hindsight.” Sutherland was not
quite so equanimous at the time – the public
humiliation sent him into a spiral of boozing
and womanising and, with his film career
faltering, Sutherland quit Hollywood.
It was a phone call from a British director
friend who was working on the pilot for a new
real-time TV series that lured Sutherland back
to acting. The show was to be called 24 and the
director wanted Sutherland to play the lead.
“I thought it was a huge long shot,” he
says. “Television in America is designed to feel
familiar and it is not something that changes
easily. It took me a full season to accept that
the show was becoming a hit.” 24 first aired
in November 2001 and eventually ran for
nine series. It won 20 Emmys, 2 Golden
Globes and was watched by a global audience
of more than 100 million viewers. The role
of Jack Bauer brought Sutherland his second
career peak: his salary of $40 million for three
seasons made him the highest-earning actor
on television.
“It was incredibly exciting to be a part of
something people were enjoying,” he says. “I’d
done films, some that I’d been proud of, but
no one would see them. And suddenly I was
part of a show that millions and millions of
people were watching every week and they
were really enjoying, and that ended up being
a fantastic ten-year period for me.”
24 ended in 2014 and suddenly Sutherland
was unmoored again. “I’m not the kind of
person to curl up by the fire with a good
book,” he says. “I have tried that and by page
six I can smell it: there are people outside
having a much better time than I am right
now. And before I know it, my jacket’s over
my shoulders and I’m out the door. When you
start finding yourself walking into a bar during
the day, it’s time to say, ‘Let’s figure this out
and go do something else.’ ”
GETTY IMAGES
He found other things: he started dating
actress and model Cindy Vela, to whom he
dedicates a song on the new record. He also
On stage at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, 2019
‘At my first gig, my
right hand was shaking
so badly. It took time
to realise the audience
wasn’t there to kill me’
starred opposite his father in the 2015 western
Forsaken. “There was a moment [during
filming] where I caught myself watching
him work and I forgot that I was even in the
scene,” he told one interviewer, “because I was
so moved by what he was doing.” I ask if he
felt he learnt anything about acting from his
father. “I’m so inspired by what he’s managed
to do,” he says. “If you look at films like Don’t
Look Now or Ordinary People and Bertolucci’s
1900, the fact that one actor did them is
just extraordinary – he’s an extraordinarily
talented guy. He’s seen things in the world.
Hearing my father tell stories about what
it was like to do The Dirty Dozen or Kelly’s
Heroes – that’s a really nice evening. What
I’ve learnt just from watching his work is
profound. I’ve had very few conversations with
him about work, but the ones that I have had
I can recite word for word.”
Sutherland had thought that his 40 years
of acting experience might have helped when
embarking on his music career. “I was really
wrong,” he admits. “I remember the very first
show – my right hand was shaking so badly.
I was so nervous. [Since then] we have played
easily 700-odd shows in the past five years
and it took me a long time to realise that the
audience wasn’t coming there to kill you. They
wanted you to do well.”
The list of actors who have tried their hand
at music is long – Bruce Willis, Keanu Reeves,
David Hasselhoff, William Shatner – but
hardly distinguished. “I’ll be very honest with
you, I am aware of that list,” Sutherland tells
me. “When you talk about actors doing music
it’s an instant eyeroll – I’m one of the people
rolling their eyes.” So why do it? The short
and honest answer is probably because he can.
The longer answer is that Sutherland has
been loving and playing music his whole life.
He used to have a collection of more than
100 guitars, which he has whittled down to
20. He had started writing songs during the
second season of 24, but the plan was to sell
them to a record company for another artist
to record. It was around 12 years ago that he
played them to a musician pal who suggested
Sutherland record them himself.
“I said I wasn’t interested,” Sutherland
recalls. “He got me a couple of drinks and
I was more agreeable and so we recorded a
couple of songs. He said we should make a
record and I said, ‘Over my dead body.’ ” Once
the record was made, Sutherland changed his
mind. “I was really proud of them,” he says,
“and I wanted to put them out.”
Our time is nearly up, but Sutherland says
he is happy to keep talking. So I pitch him the
question I had most wanted to ask: is it true
that he is a fan of Blackadder?
“I thought it was amazing” he says,
recalling how he felt watching the last episode
of the First World War-set Blackadder Goes
Forth. “It ended with them all coming out
of a trench and machinegun fire and they’re
all dead,” he says. “Man, that was just like a
sock on the jaw. That blew my mind. It was so
profound, I was thinking about it for days.”
Would you be up for starring in a British
sitcom? “I would be thrilled to be given an
opportunity to try something like that,” he says,
adding that, “Acting is the great love of my
life and I hope they let me do that to the day
I die.” While the world waits for Jack Bauer
meets Baldrick, Sutherland will be on our
cinema screens in the upcoming action thriller
The Contractor and as Franklin D Roosevelt in
the new Showtime TV series The First Lady.
“It’s good for me to stay busy,” he says. “Me
with nothing to do is not a good thing.” I have
time for one more question: how does 55 feel?
“It is what it is,” he says. “There’s no getting
around it, you’re going downhill. You’re skiing
now – get in as many turns as you can and
make it last as long as you can make it last.” n
Kiefer Sutherland’s latest album, Bloor Street,
is released on January 21
The Times Magazine 49
THE LEGENDARY CLIMBER WHO
DISAPPEARED IN AN AVALANCHE

Main picture: Alex Lowe

during an expedition to
the Ellsworth Mountains in
Antarctica in 1998. Above: on
Great Trango, Pakistan, 1999.
Right: with his son Max in
Zion National Park, Utah
 The Lowe-Anker family in Tibet in
June 2016, at the memorial on Mount
Shishapangma for Alex Lowe and David
Bridges (who died the same day).
Below: Conrad and Jenni’s wedding
in Ravello, Italy, 2001, with sons (in
height order) Max, Sam and Isaac

AND THE BEST FRIEND WHO

SURVIVED AND MARRIED HIS WIFE
They were two of the world’s best
mountaineers – so what happened when
Conrad Anker lost his climbing partner,
Alex Lowe? United by grief, Anker and
Lowe’s widow fell in love and he became
father to her children. Now the eldest son
has made an extraordinary documentary
about a family changed for ever by tragedy.
Ben Machell hears their story
 I
n September 1999, a pair of American Alex Lowe (left) and
climbers travelled to Mount Conrad Anker on the
Shishapangma, in the Himalayas. peak of Mount Evans
Their names were Alex Lowe and in Antarctica
Conrad Anker, and they were
experienced professionals. Lowe,
in particular, was a celebrity
within the world of climbing and
mountaineering. Despite his mild,
almost professorial appearance, the
40-year-old had developed a rock-star
reputation for his daring and virtuosity,
and was known within the profession as
“the Mutant” or “Lungs with Legs” on account
of his remarkable strength and stamina.
Anker, though a gifted climber himself, had
spent most of his career in the shadow of his
best friend. But there was no resentment. The
two men loved each other and they loved
climbing together. “We had a connection,”
says Anker. “The gift of friendship is rare. So
when you have it, you support each other.”
The plan of the Shishapangma expedition
was simple but audacious. Lowe and Anker
would climb to the 8,000m (26,200ft) summit
before skiing down the southwest face in a
smooth, seemingly endless run that would
be captured by an NBC camera crew.
On October 5, Lowe, Anker and a
cameraman named David Bridges left base
camp and set off on an exploratory trek,
scouting for a route up the peak. The three
men were crossing a glacier when a serac – a
huge column of ice – collapsed approximately
1,800m above them. As it tumbled downhill,
‘IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ME, NOT ALEX.
it caused an avalanche. The three men HIS LIFE WAS WORTH MORE THAN MINE’
on the glacier had no time to escape the
PREVIOUS SPREAD: GORDON WILTSIE, MICHAEL GRABER, JENNIFER LOWE-ANKER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/MAX LOWE,

150m wide wall of snow and ice that was

KIM GAYLORD. THIS SPREAD: GORDON WILTSIE, COURTESY OF MAX LOWE, AMERICAN ADVENTURE PRODUCTIONS

suddenly cascading towards them.
“We looked up and we saw that an
avalanche had triggered,” remembers Anker.
It bore down on the exposed men at hideous
speed. For Anker, it seemed oblivion was the
only possible outcome. “I thought, ‘I’m going
to die today. Death is happening.’ ”
Instead, a shock wave preceding the
avalanche hurled Anker 30m through the air.
And though he was left buried under snow
and ice and had suffered head wounds, broken
ribs and a dislocated shoulder, he managed to
dig himself free.
But when he resurfaced, he was alone
on a silent mountainside. Lowe and Bridges?
They were gone. Not a trace of either man
remained. Anker would lead a desperate
search for them, but they couldn’t be found.
It was as though they had been erased by the
sheer physics of what had happened.
It was Anker who telephoned Lowe’s wife,
Jenni, to break the news. She in turn did her
best to explain to her three young sons – Max,
Samuel and Isaac – that their father was gone.
In the weeks that followed, Anker was haunted
by feelings of shame and worthlessness, feelings
he would later learn were caused by the
psychological phenomenon of survivor’s guilt.
“Like it should have been me instead of Alex,”
he says. “Because he had a young family.
Because his life was worth more than mine.”
This, combined with the PTSD he suffered
following the avalanche, left him feeling
suicidal. The only thing that gave him
any sense of purpose was a promise he had
made to Jenni that he would do whatever
he could to support her and her boys. And
so in December 1999, he drove from his home
in California to Montana to spend Christmas
with the Lowes. He accompanied them on
a trip to Disneyland. He became a regular
presence, a steady, phlegmatic figure for a
family who were grieving and disorientated.
And then one day, Max walked into a room
to find his mother and Anker were kissing.
Within three months of the avalanche, the
two of them had begun to fall in love. Within
a year, Anker had moved into the Lowe
family home. Within two years, they were
married. While Anker admits that the
“optics” of their relationship and the speed
at which it unfolded caused some people
to rush to judgment, their own families and
the mountaineering community in general
were entirely supportive.
“People have their views one way or
another,” he says slowly. “But our love was
forged under duress and loss, and we were
both in the grieving process.” It was a love,
he continues, “that just happened”.
Anker raised Lowe’s sons as though they
were his own. He was a hands-on and loving
figure, adventurous but dependable. Yet he was
surrounded by constant reminders of the man
he replaced. Lowe’s climbing gear was still in
the house. His car was still in the driveway.
Anker was living, more than ever, in his best
friend’s shadow. “There was always that feeling
of being an imposter,” he says. Both he and
Jenni would wake from vivid dreams in
which Lowe had returned to his home, angrily
demanding to know what was going on.
Over the next 15 years, the three boys grew
into young men and their memories of their
biological father grew ever more hazy and
dreamlike. To Max, the eldest, he was like an
“astronaut lost in space”, but to Samuel and
Isaac, Anker was “Dad” while Lowe was this

52 The Times Magazine

Lowe and his family in Venice after a stint guiding
climbers in Italy’s Dolomite mountains
Anker receiving medical aid after the fateful avalanche
Jenni and Anker on a visit to Shishapangma, 2002
vaunted, almost mythical figure who had left
their lives a very long time ago.
But then one day, he returned. In April
2016, Anker received a call from a Swiss
mountaineer named Ueli Steck who was on
the southwest face of Shishapangma. During
his expedition, something had caught Steck’s
eye: a jarring splash of colour in what should
have been a vista of white and grey. Moving
closer to investigate, it became horribly clear
what he had found: two bodies still in their
climbing gear.
“He said, ‘I think we’ve found David and
Alex. They’ve melted out of the glacier,’ ” says
Anker. Suddenly, for everybody, more than a
decade and a half’s worth of grief, doubt and
unspoken pain was laid bare. Anker sighs.
“Everything resurfaced.”
I meet Max and his mother, Jenni, in the
restaurant of a central London hotel. Max is
tall, lightly bearded and has a sonorous but
gentle voice. Jenni is bright-eyed and warm
and wears her long grey hair in a thick plait.
They are visiting from Montana and there is
something of the frontier about them. A stolid
Americanness. You can imagine them sitting
together, straight-backed, in an old sepia
photograph. The survivors of a man who
went missing in the mountains.
After the discovery of Lowe’s body, Max,
who is a film-maker, began to document the
impact it had on his family. As they all travelled
to Tibet in order to recover his biological
father’s remains, it became increasingly clear
that deep, unprocessed emotions were being
dredged up within everybody.
“I was thinking about all the things I had
always observed, about my mum and how
she still held on to Alex, and Conrad with this
survivor’s guilt and imposter syndrome,” he
says. “But as a kid, I never knew how to help
them address it and work through it. But as a
director and a storyteller, I saw this door.”
The result is a feature-length documentary
called Torn, in which the life and character
of Lowe are examined, the circumstances of
Jenni and Anker’s relationship explored and
the many unvoiced questions and resentments
of the three sons finally aired. It is a study
in grief, love and family life, and it is all
the more affecting for its simple relatability
despite the dramatic circumstances of Lowe’s
disappearance and return.
During the documentary, everybody is
interviewed by Max – probed, questioned
and sometimes challenged. How, for instance,
could his mother move on so quickly? Was
Anker acting out of genuine love or just a
sense of duty and obligation? “Max likes to
say, ‘Maybe we should just have gone to family
therapy,’ ” says Jenni, smiling. “Along the way
we certainly had some conflict that we had to
work through. But we all wanted to help Max.
For him, it was this exploration and figuring
out of who Alex was to him. And I saw how
important that was.”
Alex Lowe, we learn, was a magnetic,
energetic character who possessed what
seems like a compulsive desire to be outdoors.
“He had this primal need to see what was
on the other side of that river or at the top
of a mountain,” says Anker, who is speaking
from Antarctica where he is about to lead
an expedition. “He had this very strong sense
of adventure.”
Jenni first encountered Lowe when he
walked into the shop where she was working.
It was a case of instant attraction – she says
she remembers thinking, “This guy is like
out of a dream” – and when they hooked
up, it was more in the expectation of a “fun
fling” than anything else. After several years
of adventure together, though, they married
and started a family. Even after the birth of
all three sons, Lowe continued to travel the
world on mountaineering expeditions in some
of the most dangerous places on earth. And
Jenni accepted this.
“I could see how much joy it brought him.
I completely understood it. It was his purpose.
It was where he found meaning,” she says.
“I admired that.” So did Max. “I grew up
wanting to be Alex,” he says. “He was my hero.”
When Lowe vanished on Shishapangma,
the ten-year-old Max found it impossible to
let go of the possibility – the fantasy – that
his father may one day return alive. But when
interviewing his younger brothers about their
memories of Lowe, he was surprised to find
that they could both recall far more about
their time with their father than he could.
“I think for whatever reason, I kind of shut
that part of myself down,” he says. “Because
after Alex died, I would sit in those memories.
I’d sit in his car and listen to the songs that he
used to play, just to kind of punish myself. And
I think at some point thereafter, I just turned
all that off. Because it was just too much.”
Jenni, who is sitting beside her son, says
that her biggest concern about the whole film
project was that Max would question the love
that Lowe had felt for him. That he would
come away thinking that his biological father
had faced a choice between a steady life with
his family or a life of danger on the mountains
and had ultimately chosen the latter.
“But he loved you fiercely. And he
didn’t want to die,” she says. “He didn’t
want to put us through what Max saw as
this misery and sadness. I don’t think Alex
ever envisioned that.”
She thinks the fact that Max had loved
and admired his father so much only made
the circumstances of his disappearance all
the more hurtful. She looks across at her son,
who is studying the coffee table between us.
“You trust someone, when you give them
The Times Magazine 53

your heart, that they’re going to care for it.
And I think for Max, he felt a bit betrayed.”
Over the course of making Torn, Max
delved through hours and hours of video
footage of both Lowe and Anker. In one clip,
we see Lowe sitting in a tent in Antarctica
on Christmas Day, reading a card that Max
had sent him and doing his best not to seem
emotional. We learn, through Anker, that
Lowe had been feeling increasingly as though
he was spending too much time apart from his
sons, and that the Shishapangma expedition
was perhaps one job too many.
“You know, I had this memory, this final
memory of him asking me whether I thought
he should go to Tibet,” says Max, gently
drawing the sentence out of himself. He told his
father that he should, though he does not today
blame himself for Lowe’s decision to go. “In
his mind, he never thought he might not come
back. It was more just him asking himself.”
Lowe was, in his final year or so of life, a
man in deep conflict with himself. And for Max
the discovery and understanding of this conflict
helped to make him feel more real. “It meant
I had this much more complex picture of
him, not only as a man who was driven to do
this amazing work in the mountains, but as
someone who questioned himself, and who
wasn’t sure about the way he was going in life.”
Max also came to understand more about
Anker. Whereas his younger brothers both
changed their surnames to Anker after Jenni
remarried, Max kept his as Lowe. Part of
him always wondered just how much this
man truly loved them, and how much he was
simply fulfilling a responsibility he believed
he had. “Was he maybe like… stuck with us?
Because of his survivor’s guilt?”
Instead, during the documentary Max is
shown letters Anker had sent to Jenni in the
immediate aftermath of the avalanche. In
them, it is painfully clear just how damaged
Anker was by his experience, and that his
desire to be close to Jenni and the boys
stemmed from something far more urgent
than duty or chivalry. While reading the
letters, Max breaks down in tears. “And that
was a kind of breakthrough moment in seeing
how much he needed us as well,” he says. “We
needed him as a father, and my mum needed
him as a partner. But Conrad wanted to be
there for us. He needed that after losing Alex.”
“We were both traumatised,” says Jenni.
“And I could see, after he came back, that
he was filled with so much guilt. And I am
a care-giver. That’s what gives me strength
– to rise up and defend or care for other
people. And he was struggling. He was
LOWE ANKER FAMILY
suicidal. And I was like, ‘I have to care
for this man.’ So we were drawn together.”
As their mutual need deepened into mutual
love, “we were criticised instantly” in some
parts of the media. They had surely been
From left: Jenni, Isaac, Max,
Anker and Samuel at Alex
Lowe’s memorial, June 2016
FINDING HER HUSBAND’S BODY WAS ‘A
HORRIBLE EXPERIENCE. BUT GOOD TOO’
having an affair that had predated Lowe’s
death. Or if not, they were certainly now
disrespecting his memory. But the families
of everyone involved – Lowe, Anker and Jenni
– seemed to understand and accept their
desire to be together. Part of the reason they
married quickly was because Jenni’s mother
had been diagnosed with leukaemia three
months after the avalanche.
“She was watching me fall in love with
Conrad and she was saying, ‘Jenni… another
climber? Is this going to be OK?’ But she also
wanted to wrap up the package and know that
I was going to be all right when she was gone,”
she says, her voice straining and breaking. “So
Conrad and I made the decision to get married.
So that my mum knew that before she died.”
The discovery of Lowe’s body and the
journey the family made to Tibet was, as
Anker says, the point at which so many of
these emotions came rushing back. “Even
17 years later, Conrad was struggling the entire
trip,” says Max. “He would just disappear. He
was emotionally vacant.”
“The self-doubt that had hung over me
resurfaced,” says Anker. Returning to the place
where two of his friends died was traumatic
enough. But for all the love he and Jenni
may have felt for Lowe, there was something
inescapably morbid about coming face to face
with his frozen remains. “The physical trauma
of having to attend to their bodies and then
take them from the glacier and wrap them up
and bring them down… That was a very intense
thing to have to do.” In Lowe’s backpack, Anker
found an old water bottle of his that he had
lent to his friend. It was an inconsequential
thing really, but reliving the memories caused
“a flood of emotion to come back”.
Kneeling beside Lowe’s body on the glacier,
Jenni removed his wedding ring before taking
his hand and holding it against her own. Lowe’s
body, along with that of Bridges, was then
carried down the mountain and cremated on
a large outdoor pyre. “I don’t want to act like
there’s closure here, because there’s not,” says
Jenni. “When you love someone, they’re going
to remain with you and your heart for ever.”
But there was, nevertheless, a
“peacefulness” to the journey back down
the mountain and the cremation. “To me, it
was kind of a gift that we were all able to go
and finish that. There are so many people
who lose loved ones in plane wrecks or in
war and who never retrieve the bodies or have
ashes or anything,” she says. “It was a horrible
experience. But also a good one.”
Since working with Max on Torn, Anker
says that he has learnt to stop doubting
himself. “I can give myself credit for what
I have done,” he says. “And be more confident
in who I am. The film has shown me how
much Max and the boys and Jenni care for
me.” Perhaps, he says, he could have been
better at expressing just how much he loves
and cares for them back. But they all know
now. “We’re better connected as a family,” he
says. So far he has watched Torn seven times.
“And I’ve always ended up in tears.”
Max says that, for a very long time, he
considered the love shared by his mother and
Lowe to have been a “romance that anybody
would be envious of”, while the love she
shared with Anker was something altogether
more complex and fraught. “But by making
this film, I came to realise that every love is
complicated and hard, you know?”
His mother nods. “Love is really the biggest
risk we take in life,” she says. “It’s bigger than
climbing mountains.” n
Torn is released on January 21
The Times Magazine 55
 THEN: Gillian Anderson, 2001

THONGS
C A N O N LY
GET B ET T E R !
We thought we’d seen
the backside of them,
but thongs are enjoying
a resurgence, with Gen Z
poster girls such as Hailey
Bieber, Dua Lipa and,
inevitably, the Kardashians
driving up sales. Fashion
editor Harriet Walker,
no stranger to a whale tail,
investigates what’s, um,
behind the revival

56 The Times Magazine

NOW: Hailey Bieber

I
n summer 2016, Vogue described the
stringy style of underwear known as
a thong as “pre-crash, pre-smartphone
and pre-Hillary for president”. It had,
the magazine said, been consigned to
sartorial history: never again would
women suffer its cheese-wire embrace
in the pursuit of a VPL-free silhouette.
In light of what happened to Hillary
Clinton’s presidential bid later that year,
it seems apt to point out that progress is never
nailed on – and it looks, in 2022, very much as
if thongs are back.
Yes, after almost a decade’s grace in which
high-waisted big knickers were so cool they
were meant to be seen through your dress,
pants are inching back towards the itsy-bitsy-
teeny-weeny end of the spectrum instead.
This despite the underwear market undergoing
a woke revolution in recent years that saw
the size zero/32DD Victoria’s Secret Angels
knocked off their pedestals and replaced
not just with more realistic-looking models,
but also more comfortable styles. Thongs,
Wonderbras and underwires generally: all
were tossed onto the bonfire of the vanities
ignited by Millennial Savonarolas who saw
their smalls as part of a much bigger picture.
Thongs are a Gen Z thing. This cohort’s
interest in what now counts as vintage
clothing has seen influencers and brands
hail the return of “Y2K fashion”. Those who
remember it from first time around might
prefer to think of it as the Millennium Bug:
stretchy bootcut trousers, baguette bags,
slicked hair with giant hoop earrings and, of
course, thongs. Dua Lipa, 26, has been spotted
in one; likewise Bella Hadid, 25. In 2019,
Hailey Bieber (then 23 and still a Baldwin)
showed up to the prestigious Met Gala with
a baby pink diamanté thong matched to her
scoop-back Alexander Wang column dress.
Bieber’s look recalled Gillian Anderson’s
2001 Oscars dress – worn with a mesh
thong visible at the back (and with the care
instructions label visible thereupon) because,
when the actress tried on the gown at the
last minute, her pubic hair showed through
the front.
Thongs are also yet another Kardashian
thing. Having popularised a style of shapewear
known as the “butt-lifter” – think cycling
shorts with the cheeks cut out – they have
now thrown their weight behind (or their
behinds behind) a full blown G-string revival.
Kylie Jenner wears them on Instagram, where
she has 298 million followers. Kim, Kourtney
and Kendall have all been papped in thong
bikinis – a style very much suited to the klan’s
most famous assets – in the past few months.
Not only that, thongs seem to suit the
moment as envisioned by some of Paris’s

The Times Magazine 57

 top designers. Balenciaga’s unisex version costs
£150 and comes with a rainbow Gay Pride
waistband. In October 2020, Kim Kardashian
posed on Instagram in a low-cut open-back
dress from 36-year-old Matthew M Williams’
first collection for Givenchy – the house that
gave the world Audrey Hepburn’s classic LBD
in Breakfast at Tiffany’s now adorns them with
the visible scarlet “T” of a thong. Fifteen years
ago, this common enough sighting – and even
then, common was the operative word – was
known as a “whale tail”. These days, it is
something close to couture.
Emma Ilori, head of womenswear elevation
at the designer boutique Flannels, says sales
of thongs are up 40 per cent on the year.
“It’s clear that daring lingerie and risqué,
exposed thongs are back,” she says. “So we’ve
bought heavily into Agent Provocateur this
season to meet the demand for thongs.”
The high street is following suit. M&S
reports that sales of thongs have been rising
consistently since 2019 – they now account for
14 per cent of pants sales, as opposed to fewer
than one in every ten pairs five years ago.
The store has around a third more on sale
this year than last, in line with the trend for
tighter, more revealing clothes as the glamour-
sapping pandemic draws to a close.
The thong’s original raison d’être was to
banish the visible lines of underwear through
clothing by eliminating the parts of pants
that dug into the softer skin of the buttocks.
(In fact, it was created in the Seventies by
the swimwear designer Rudi Gernreich in
response to the city of Los Angeles banning
nude bathing.) However, like so many lifestyle
signifiers, thongs became less about function
than fashion the more women bought into
them. By the Noughties, they were designed
not to be invisibly smooth but to be seen,
stringy straps peeping over the low-rise jeans
of the millennium. The supercool New York
designer Heron Preston revived exactly this
look on the catwalk in 2019, mimicking Tom
PREVIOUS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES, SHUTTERSTOCK. THIS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES
Ford’s Gucci and Jean Paul Gaultier’s shows
in the late Nineties.
Back then, every independent young
woman was in a thong whether her outfit
required it or not. Paris Hilton wore them,
but so did Monica Lewinsky. Bridget Jones’s
was an important plot point, with its pulling
potential evaluated in stark contrast to what
she, in the 2001 film, called “scary stomach-
holding-in pants very popular with grannies”.
In the video for I’m a Slave 4 U the same year,
Britney Spears wore a pink leather thong on
top of her jeans like some madly sexed-up
comic-book superhero.
In their early Noughties heyday, G-strings
accounted for more than a third of knicker
sales at Debenhams. Topshop and H&M used
to sell three for a tenner, offering them up
on racks by the colourful multitude, decked
58 The Times Magazine
gaudily along an entire wall like pick-and-mix
sweets. There were frilly ones and slogan ones,
bejewelled versions and seamless varieties.
There were high-waisted “support thongs”
that offered to flatten your stomach while
letting everything else hang out at the back,
and minuscule T-strings that amounted to
little more than a mesh triangle on a Möbius
strip – perfect for the pink and glittery slit-to-
the-waist Julien Macdonald gown that Kelly
Brook wore in 2000 to the premiere of
(checks notes) Snatch.
Because it felt innately frilly and funny,
the G-string’s role in the hyper-sexualisation
of the young women who came of age and
wore them to school during the era (hi!) went
unnoticed. Ditto its mainstreaming of what
we now understand to be porn culture: after
all, the fully bare Hollywood bikini wax is
the ebony to the thong’s ivory. Pole dancing
for fitness, skimpy clothing as a sign of self-
assertion – these were tenets of what was,
at the time, dubbed “thong feminism”.
In 2002, Argos was selling thongs for
girls aged 9 to 16. By the time Britney’s
was captured in an upskirt shot during her
turbulent 2007 phase, tastes had moved on
to the French knickers, boy shorts and high-
waisted Fifties pin-up pants of Dita von Teese
and Katy Perry. When the crash came a
year later, it was assumed that only strippers
– whose business boomed during the Great
Recession – were still wearing them. When
they featured in Vogue in 2016 it was as an
out-of-step museum piece, a scold’s bridle
for the nethers.
It stands to reason, then, that neither
I nor any of my contemporaries want to
wear thongs again. So why are those whose
crevices have not yet endured them chafing
at the opportunity?
“Retro fashion centres on a new generation
discovering a look,” says Susanna Cordner,
archives manager at the London College
of Fashion and curator of the V&A’s 2016
Undressed exhibition. “They pick and choose
their references and perhaps ignore the
problematic connotations. I don’t think it’s
coincidence but it could be unconscious.”
Somebody pass these young women the
Canesten. Is there – and I’m asking for a
friend worried her knicker drawer is stuck
in a fuddy-duddy rut – such a thing as a
thong for grown-ups?
“Our customers find ours supercomfy and
they like the seamless sides,” says Jo Rossell,
owner of lingerie brand Rossell England. Her
thongs – organic jersey in shades of bordeaux,
blush and apricot – are chic and minimal.
“Thongs never went away for us,” she says.
“It’s about personal preference.”
Different strokes for different folks, as
they say. Or in this case, different ruts for
different butts. n
Ditch
or keep?
Dysfunctional wardrobe
driving you to despair? Time
for an audit – Harriet Walker
on the pieces that deserve
their place and those that
can safely be packed away
H
ow do you feel when you open your
wardrobe? Invigorated? Organised?
Unlikely. If yours, like mine, is a
haphazard and stress-inducing cram
of things you used to like and now
don’t – or worse, don’t like but tend
to use – January is the perfect time
for an audit. Or, as fashion types like
to call it, an edit.
No need to go mad in a fit of new year self-
improvement pique, and a cull doesn’t have to
mean a replacement spree. Trends roll around
so slowly these days that most of what you
have will soldier on indefinitely. Yet now is
the time to review what’s in there – freeing up
space on your rails is almost as good for you
as going to the gym. Almost. Here’s what to
keep and what to ditch (ie pack away) now.
Ditch Parkas Keep Padded puffer jackets
There was a time when a furry hood was the
signifier of urban elegance, but times move
on and the coolest outerwear is now more
Michelin Man than Madchester. If you love
your parka to bits, as I do, then this advice will
be hard to hear, but it’s worth taking on board:
removing the fur trim will extend its lifespan.
Keep Fake fur
Despite what I just said, the BFJ (big furry
jacket) is alive and well – alive not being the
operative word, given these teddy bear-ish
numbers are fake. Any other type of fur is
very definitely a no-no.
Keep Kitten heels and clogs
It might seem as though these are two of the
silliest styles of shoe known to man, but please
keep the faith. I bought a pair of Birkenstock
clogs during the first lockdown and now
I intend to be buried in them.
 Keep: boiler suits
Keep: puffer coats
Ditch Dungarees Keep Boiler suits
Remember the dungarees phase of lockdown?
It hit shortly before Barnard Castle. And like
the latter, it was all you could think about at
the time but hasn’t crossed your mind for a
while. Keep hold of boiler suits – these are
very much still in play.
Ditch Prairie dresses Keep Wrap and
shirt dresses
What a strange blip it was that stylish women
dressed like the Amish for much of 2018/19.
Show up to the pub in one now and you’d be
mistaken for a pair of curtains. Keep, on the
other hand, any dress that shows off your waist,
can be unbuttoned lower when the lights are
dimmed and doesn’t look as if it comes with
its own giant religious-order pants.
Keep: fake fur
Ditch Denim jackets Keep Army jackets,
shirt jackets, leather jackets
I am saying this because my denim jackets
have survived two house moves and I still
haven’t worn them for years. Box yours up for
now; if you toss it completely, you’ll probably
want it again next week.
Ditch Bombers Keep Blazers
Blazers of all stripes – except, actually, the
striped ones – should serve you well for the
foreseeable. After so much leisurewear in
2020, I found myself craving the structure of
a tailored jacket. Wear with jeans for a front
row fashion editor look, or use to smarten up
a swishy dress. A double-breasted blazer plus
miniskirt is very much the shape of things to
come next year. Bombers, on the other hand,
feel a bit shapeless.
Keep Every pair of jeans you own that fit…
Forget the “skinnies are over” diktat. What
you need is a portfolio of jeans: cropped
wide-legs and flares to wear with ankle boots
now and trainers/loafers in spring; skinnies
to wear inside tall boots; high-waisted straight
legs for feeling current. Blue denim should
be bright rather than stonewash or indigo;
I’d always go black for cropped flares and
skinnies. Add one white, not too tight, pair
in the mix too. If you insist on being cutting
edge go for full-length flares or bootcuts, but
these are optional.
…apart from anything low-slung (ditch)
If flesh shows when you bend down, then the
waistband of your jeans is too low and, in all
likelihood, not doing you many favours. It’s
time they went.
Ditch Hoodies Keep Cardigans
Perhaps you were sceptical about the vogue
for “chic hoodies” – well done on your
prescience if so. Just looking at mine now
makes me feel ill. Slip into your most Miss
Marple-ish cardie instead.
Ditch Pearls Keep Gold hoops
Pearls will be back; it just that gold hoops
feel more modern at the moment. Choose
from thin, chunky, big or lobe-hugging, but
anything too fussy – stones, jewels, danglers
– can look a little dated. Add a gold link
necklace if you fancy an update.
Ditch Heeled boots Keep Bovvers and bikers
I appreciate heels are sacrosanct for many but
flat ankle boots – bikers, DMs, Chelseas and
hiking-esque versions – are here to stay. The
exception with heels is Cuban or cowboy
styles – there will be lots of these creeping
into the shops, so dust off any you own. The
footwear memo – for now, at least – is as
stompy as possible.
Ditch Stilettos
Or at least ask yourself if you’ve worn yours
after lockdown lifted. If the answer is no, you
never will again.
Ditch Satin skirts Keep Leopard print
Two of the big trends of the past five years,
these, and both a little overexposed because
of it. While there will always be a place for
leopard print in your wardrobe, you should
probably dial it back down to one item per
outfit. As far as the satin skirt is concerned,
keep for summer at a push.
Keep Tank tops
I once gave a great tank top to the charity
shop and rue it every time they come
back round.
Ditch Black trousers Keep Black trousers
If they’re slim-fit cigarette pants keep them;
if they’re the wide and flappy style, you’re
better off without them. The time for swathing
your lower half in over-ample material is now
over; you’ve just spent 18 months under a
duvet. If you have the bum for them, get
a pair of Gen Z retro-comes-round-again
stretchy bootcuts. Now just try to stop
humming Freed from Desire by Gala while
wearing them. Impossible.
Keep Masks
You don’t need me to explain this one. n
The Times Magazine 59
 Eating out Giles Coren
‘If this kind of thing is what’s
left of our restaurant culture
then, like Winston Smith
with Big Brother, we’re going
to have to learn to love it’
Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen
T
hey’re coming: the giant, always
hungry fast-food corporations, red in
tooth and maw, slack-jowled, heavy
with drool, seeking out new lands
to conquer, pockets to plunder, new
year’s resolutions to sunder, irresolute
guts to fill, waistlines to bloat… And
they are beside themselves with
baser appetite and more rank cupidity than
ever, this January, as post-Covid Britain lies
broken and defenceless before their advance.
Decimated during the pandemic by two
years of ineffective and mistimed government
responses, hysterical lockdowns, mysterious
U-turns, laughable curfews, arbitrary
drinking bans, unfathomable social distancing
regulations, cynical landlords, baffling
TOM JACKSON, MARY TURNER/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE
paperwork, steepling debt, general public
wussiness and closure after closure after
closure, the British independent restaurant
scene lies battered and groaning and close to
death – think of the famous crane shot of the
military hospital after the Battle of Atlanta
in Gone with the Wind, with you as Scarlett
O’Hara, the winsome foodie in a wide-
brimmed straw hat and long pink dress, vainly
searching for somewhere nice that’s survived…
But it’s not all bad news. Not if you’re a
heavily funded megachain with cash to burn,
such as PizzaExpress, for example, under
new finance and rubbing its hands like Fagin
at the vacant high street sites popping up
60 The Times Magazine
all over Britain, which has announced plans
to capitalise upon the slaughter by opening
50 new restaurants in the next three years. And
that’s small fry compared with foreign invaders
like Wendy’s, with its square hamburgers and
position in the American market second only
to McDonald’s, which has seen the carnage
here and promised a 400-outlet invasion of its
own, or Popeyes, the “Louisiana fried chicken”
chain that is aiming for 350 in double-quick
time, in this relatively small country, which
towards the end of the past decade was
– laughably now – beginning to think of itself
as one of the restaurant capitals of the world.
These last two, Wendy’s and Popeyes,
launched their respective putsches in
Stratford, east London, at the end of 2021,
and so, on the last day of the school holidays,
with two young children to entertain, I hauled
them down there for a crack at two cuisines
that they enjoy a lot more than I do.
I thought we’d try Popeyes first, as fried
chicken is a marginally more interesting
dish than hamburgers, carrying with it, as it
does, the lively political backstory of a recipe
derived from the marrying of West African
culinary traditions with indigenous North
American and colonial ones during the slavery
era, followed by the appropriation of an
essentially black dish by white cooks and
recipe writers, the century-long racist mockery
of African-Americans as primitive hungerers
after a single foodstuff, and the wholesale
profiteering on the dish by Colonel Sanders and
what activists now call his “plantation imagery”.
But I tend to think, yes, sure, white
exploiters stole fried chicken from the black

people they disenfranchised and impoverished,
but look at what the theft has brought to white
communities in terms of obesity, sloth, waste,
high street degradation, dismal culinary
monoculture, low pay, animal welfare atrocities…
Isn’t fried chicken, in a weird way, a form of
race revenge? The thrusting young economies
of West Africa now must surely look at a KFC
bargain bucket and high-five themselves that
their ancestors had the forethought, all those
years ago, to provide the means by which white
culture would one day poison itself to death.
Still, my kids love fried chicken and eat it
all the time. Or at least Sam does. He is right
in its slot: male, hefty, impulsive, the servant
of his appetites, he’ll do 12 or 15 pieces of
deep-fried boneless thigh meat when Esther
fries up (no sides, no sauces, no greens), and
is almost equally happy with the twice-fried
Korean-style chicken (KFC) at Kkini on
Fortess Road NW5, or the standard, well-
sourced, brined and buttermilked options
you get on most decent pub menus round our
way. He’s never had actual KFC, but would
no doubt do a 20-piece bucket, on his own,
in under an hour, just like his dad used to.
Kitty, on the other hand, is wiry, bookish,
thoughtful, not a natural fried chicken
consumer. But she was curious to join us
because she’d seen Popeyes on TikTok. She
knows that its new chicken sandwich “broke
the internet” stateside when it was launched
in 2019 and that the UK opening in November
generated massive queues, fights, shortages,
tears, all the usual tantara.
We found it easily, marching from the
station and through the doors in a couple
Popeyes Louisiana
Kitchen
Westfield Stratford
City, London E20
(popeyesuk.com)
Sam’s score 7.5
Kitty’s score 3.25
Dad’s score 7
Score 5.92
of minutes and straight into a long queue that
cleared quickly, being nowhere near as long as
the space they had cordoned out in expectant,
empty columns. When I got to the front of the
queue (the kids having gone shoplifting at the
Lego store), a young woman who spoke very
fast and called me “bro” a lot (which was nice)
explained about the various sandwiches and
signature boxes and what “tenders” were, as
opposed to pieces (I’m still not sure), and I got
the kids a couple of three-piece meals (trying
and failing to specify thigh meat) with fries
and fizzy drinks, and for myself a sandwich,
“spicy” but not “deluxe”.
“The only difference with the deluxe is
that it has lettuce and tomato in,” the young
woman said dismissively. She didn’t look like
a salad person.
As I paid (£25 for the three of us), I leant
in and said, “You obviously eat a lot of this
stuff. Is it better than KFC, honestly?”
She hesitated, looked left, then right, then
left again, and said, “Bro, it’s fine.”
She gave me a ticket and I waited maybe
20 minutes for my number to be called, which
meant that by the time I was hefting my giant
bag of dubiously farmed, deep-fried fowl
portions towards the communal eating space
that Popeyes shares with such fashionable
stalwarts of the east London dining scene as
Chopstix, Subway, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut
Express (can you get a Veneziana with a cheese-
filled crust there, I wonder?), Sam and Kitty
were being escorted towards me by a spotty
guy in a Lego hat asking, “Are these yours?”
So let me tell you: the chicken sandwich, by
the standards of the genre, is extremely good.
The batter is unexpectedly light and crisp and
clings impressively to the meat. It doesn’t fall
away in patches, nor does it reveal, between
itself and the flesh, that film of spumy
ejaculate familiar to patrons of the goateed
Colonel. The cayenne-spiked mayo is really
good, the delicate slices of not-too-far-gone
cucumber are tart and crunchy and the whole
mouthful coalesces into something more
intriguing than the sum of its parts. But
I don’t like brioche buns and there’s only
so much chicken breast I can eat. Here it
is admirably robust and flavourful, but it
is still a vast cliff face of white meat. I got
halfway, sighed, pulled a long slug of Diet
Coke, and retired.
“How’s the food?” I asked the kids.
“Great,” said Sam. “Best chips ever!” So
I tried some and, yes, they had a dusting of
something more interesting than salt (Cajun
seasoning, apparently) and delivered far more
of interest than any chain-store fry I’ve ever
had. Although they weren’t hot enough.
“And the chicken?”
“Great!”
“As good as Kkini?”
“No way!”
“As good as Mum’s?”
“Dad! Don’t even say that. Mum’s is the
best in the world!”
Good answer. The whole basis of the fried
chicken shop is that it should be better than
you’ve ever had, apart from your mum’s. But
Esther is my wife, not my mum, so I can say
honestly that I don’t think hers is as good as
this, from a technical point of view. I took one
of Kitty’s thigh pieces (she flagged halfway
through her second piece and two thirds of
the way into her Cajun fries – Sam pushed
manfully through to the bottom of both) and
found it fantastic in every way. Apart from
the butthole bird itself, which is where Esther’s
organic, free-range, named farm efforts have
the advantage.
So, in short, this was the worst fried
chicken my kids have ever had, but still great.
And by no means the worst fried chicken I’ve
ever had, because I have been to KFC. If this
kind of thing is going to be all that’s left of
our restaurant culture then, like Winston
Smith with Big Brother, I guess we are going
to have to learn to love it.
As we headed back towards the train
I suddenly remembered part two of the plan,
Wendy’s, and offered my little troopers a
swift, square burger by way of dessert.
“Maybe next time,” said Sam, with a
loud belch.
“Maybe never,” said Kitty, cuffing Sam’s
ear with disgust. n
The Times Magazine 61
INTERIORS
INTERIORS
LIFESTYLE
LIFESTYLE
 Beta male
Robert Crampton
As I always say at this time of year, it may
Death in Paradise? be the absolute depths of winter, some days
Admit it, you love it barely bothering to get light at all, but at
least there’s a new series of Death in Paradise
under way. With Death in Paradise, the very
too. It’s the one definition of so bad it’s good, back on our
screens for January and February, life
thing that gets me won’t be all bad. It’s a bit like the Six Nations,
only a month earlier: DinP, as we call it
through the dark in my house, starts in midwinter, but by the
time it’s over, spring is around the corner.
nights of January And in the intervening weeks, you’ve been
royally entertained.
I don’t mind admitting I fancy Catherine
Bourdey, the restaurant owner and mayoress.
And Detective Sergeant Florence Cassell. And
now this new sergeant, Naomi Thomas. I don’t
fancy the commissioner, played by the great
Don Warrington of Rising Damp fame, but I do
love him all the same. When we play “Which
character are you in DinP?”, my wife and kids
agree I’m the commissioner. He’s a fat, lazy,
pompous snob, but hey, they mean it nicely.
It’s not pervy to fancy Catherine, by the
way: she’s 65, 7 years my senior. Florence
is 36, so she’s just about acceptable too.
Naomi is 28, so yeah, fair enough, that’s less
than half my age. That’s getting creepy. My bad.
They’re kept busy in the Saint Marie force.
The homicide rate is shocking, worse than
Medellín at the height of the cartel wars. If you
live on or visit Saint Marie, you’ve got a one in
five chance of getting topped and a one in five
chance of being put away for murder. Forty per
cent of the island’s population is either getting
murdered or doing the murdering. It’s carnage.
Talking of Rising Damp, I’ve been watching
some shows from the golden age of British
sitcoms on iPlayer and YouTube. Porridge
stands the test of time, thanks to the genius
of Ronnie Barker, whom Laurence Olivier
once said was the best actor in Britain. Fawlty
Towers, I found to my surprise, has dated
terribly, or maybe I’m biased because John
Cleese turned out to be such an arse. Yes,
Minister is perfection. Mind Your Language
is astonishingly racist, with not one but two
subcontinental characters (a Muslim and a
Sikh) who both waggle their heads, clasp their
hands together and offer ingratiating smiles and
“a thousand apologies, my goodness me, yes”.
References to “poofs” and “fairies” are
rampant. When people moan now about
TOM JACKSON
wokery and political correctness, they
should imagine what it must have been
like as a kid growing up in the Seventies,
© Times Newspapers Ltd, 2022. Published and licensed by Times Newspapers Ltd, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF (020 7782 5000). Printed by Prinovis UK Ltd, Liverpool. Not to be sold separately.*
realising you were gay and then settling down
with the family to an evening of casually
offensive homophobic disparagement in the
guise of light entertainment.
Back in the more enlightened 2020s,
we snuggle down for a serious Emily in
Paris season two binge. There’s been some
competition in the office over who can log
the greediest EinP session. All ten episodes
were released just before Christmas. We
inhaled them in three nights: a batch of
four, then a five, then, fighting to stay awake,
showing a modicum of self-discipline, we saved
the season finale for the next evening. That
meant ditching Sam, who was out.
“You’ve snaked me on Emily in Paris!”
he stormed when he came in from the
cinema and learnt the extent of his loved
ones’ treachery.
That’s the trouble watching series with
my Sam and Rachel: they have an annoying
tendency to not be in the house quite
frequently. Sometimes (Ozark, Fauda, The
Bureau, Succession) we have to be ruthless
and bin them. It helps that they have higher
standards than we do: we watched five
episodes of The Tourist, which started
promisingly and got worse, together. The
children didn’t bother watching the sixth
and final part. No stamina.
The other problem with all four of us
in front of the telly is the multiplication
of bickering. Luckily, the seating/sprawling
positions never vary: my wife in the best
position on the left of the sofa; me in the
third best at the other end; daughter Rachel
in the second best in the middle; son Sam
on a beanbag on the floor. He’s banned from
the sofa because he jiggles. Even Tiger the cat
has a better view of the telly than Sam.
The arguments arise over cats in or cats
out, lights on or off, cushions, footstools, which
remote control to use to find which show
on which service, volume control (Sam went
through an OCD phase of it having to be
on an even number; Rachel naturally always
made sure it wasn’t), subtitles, snacks, drinks,
smart-alec plot predictions, footnotes on
what other shows an actor has been in, etc.
I’d say on an average TV night the ratio of
minutes viewing to minutes on pause while
squabbles break out is about one to one.
Still, these long dark winter nights, you’ve
got to pass the time somehow. n
robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk