S T E R L I N G M E S S !

B R I T A I N ’ S T R U S S O N O M I C C A R C R A S H 18
A week in the life of the world | Global edition
30 SEPTEMBER 2022 | VOL .207 No.14 | £4.95 | €7.99

PLUS

Holy
Meloni
Fears over
Italy’s new
far-right PM
15

All in
Smiley
culture
Behind the
iconic face
Is this Putin’s last, of rave
desperate gamble?
40

10

18
18
 A week in the life of the world Inside
30 September 2022

Putin’s downfall in sight, Italy

4 -14 GLOBAL REPORT
Headlines from the last
seven days

turns right with Meloni, Trump 10 Russia Has Putin gambled

the house on Ukraine?

in trouble and farewell to Mantel 15-33 SPOTLIGHT

In-depth reporting
and analysis
15 Italy Why a far-right PM is
As Vladimir Putin’s war effort in Ukraine As expected, the Italian elections saw not all right for Europe
faltered badly, the Russian president victory for Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of 19 UK Sterling on the slide
turned decisively away from any hope Italy, and she is now set to become the 22 India Bollywood’s bubble
of peace. A sudden mass mobilisation country’s most right-wing prime minister bursts
of Russian men led to rare instances since the end of the second world war. 26 Qatar The World Cup of
of protest across the country and long Patrick Wintour asks what it means for worker exploitation
queues of would-be conscripts at the Europe, while Angela Giuffrida reports 30 US What goes on after dark
borders. Simultaneously, Russia sought on the mood in Italy over the prospect of at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago
to legitimise its territorial gains in Ukraine a far-right coalition including the likes 33 US New York’s early nights
with hastily arranged “referendums” and of Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi.
nuclear threats against the west. Then, in the Opinion section, Italian 34-44 F E AT U R E S
It feels like Putin has staked everything writer Roberto Saviano outlines why he Long reads, interviews
on triumph or disaster, as depicted by thinks the result spells danger for his and essays
Pete Reynolds’s cover art this week. homeland and for the continent. 34 The friends who forsook
“With Putin it seems to become all about Spotlight Page 15 ; Opinion Page 47  comedy for the cloth
the eyes,” he says. “His nose, mouth, the By Lamorna Ash
arrangement of the features all seem to be With the net seemingly closing around 40 How the smiley face
the obvious descriptors of his face but his Donald Trump on several fronts, we became big business
eyes always end up being the focus and go behind the scenes at his Mar-a-Lago By Will Coldwell
challenge. And they insist on looking Florida residence, where Julian Borger
straight at you.” reveals how cash meets influence after 45-50 OPINION
Pjotr Sauer, Andrew Roth and Luke dark. And Hugo Lowell explains why 45 Jason Burke
Harding report on a week of growing a civil fraud suit against the former Beware false optimism
chaos enveloping Russia’s war effort. president and several members of his over the Iran protests
Then, foreign affairs commentator Simon family could result in the end of the 47 Roberto Saviano
Tisdall predicts that Putin’s downfall is Trump Organization in its current form. The tragedy of Meloni
within sight – the only real question is Spotlight Page 30 48 Jonathan Freedland
who else he will drag down with him. Truss and Kwarteng’s
The big story Page 10  The career path from stand-up comedian economic class war
to the priesthood is not exactly a road
well travelled. Lamorna Ash finds out 51-59 C U LT U R E
what motivated two close university 51 Screen
friends to abandon a world of absurdist Jungle, the dark world of
jokes on stage for a life in service of God. a drill musical drama
Divine comedy Page 34  55 Music
Country star Margo Price
Finally, the literary world is in mourning on her wilderness years
for the two-time Booker prize-winning 57 Books
writer Hilary Mantel, who died suddenly Darwinism’s outriders
last week. Our leader column pays tribute
to a glorious original, the likes of which 60-61 LIFESTYLE
we may never see again. 60 Ask Annalisa
The Guardian view Page 49  Being the other woman

Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian
and Observer newspapers in the UK and the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and
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The Guardian Weekly Australia. The weekly magazine has an international focus and three editions: global,
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COVER: PETE REYNOLDS

Vol 207 | Issue № 14
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4
Global
report
Headlines from the
last seven days
1 CANADA
Military sent in to clean up
after storm Fiona damage
Troops were sent to assist the
recovery from the devastation
of storm Fiona, which swept
away houses, stripped off roofs
and knocked out power across
Canada’s Atlantic provinces.
Copyright © 2022 After surging north from
GNM Ltd. All rights the Caribbean as a hurricane,
reserved
Fiona came ashore before
Published weekly by
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Kings Place, Newfoundland and Quebec with
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London, N1 9GU, UK rains and huge waves.
The defence minister, Anita
Printed by Anand, said troops would help
Walstead UK, remove fallen trees and other
Bicester
debris, restore transport links and
do whatever else was required
Registered as a
newspaper at the
for as long as it took. She didn’t
Post Office specify how many troops would
be deployed.
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The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
2 RUSSIA
Putin grants citizenship to
whistleblower Snowden
Vladimir Putin signed a
decree on Monday granting
Russian citizenship to the US
whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Snowden, 39, a former US
intelligence contractor, has been
living in Russia since 2013 to
escape prosecution in the US after
leaking secret files, published
by the Guardian, that revealed
vast domestic and international
surveillance operations carried
out by the US National Security
Agency. In 2020, Snowden said
that he and his then-pregnant
wife were applying for Russian
citizenship in order not to be
separated from their future son
in an era of pandemics and closed
borders. Russia granted him
permanent residency rights the
same year, paving the way for him
to obtain Russian citizenship.
3 S PAC E
Nasa crashes spacecraft
into asteroid in defence test
A multimillion-dollar spacecraft
collided head-on with an asteroid
the size of a football stadium on
Monday in an unprecedented test
of Nasa’s capacity to defend Earth
from a doomsday scenario.
Nasa’s craft crashed into the
asteroid Dimorphos 11 million km
from Earth. The mission,
known as Dart (Double Asteroid
Redirection Test), was an attempt
to see if an asteroid hurtling
towards our planet could be
diverted. The spacecraft collided
with the asteroid at 24,000km/h.
Live-streamed video showed the
asteroid looming into focus before
the spacecraft hit.
4 U N I T E D S TAT E S
‘Decisive’ action pledged if
Russia uses nuclear arms
America and its allies will act
“decisively” if Russia uses a
tactical nuclear weapon in
Ukraine, US national security
adviser Jake Sullivan said on
Sunday, reaffirming the White
House’s previous response to
mounting concerns that Vladimir
Putin’s threats are in increased
danger of being realised.
“We have communicated
directly, privately and at very
high levels to the Kremlin that
any use of nuclear weapons
will be met with catastrophic
consequences for Russia, that
the US and our allies will respond
decisively, and we have been clear
and specific about what that will
entail,” Sullivan told CBS’s Face
The Nation.
Sullivan said that the Russian
leader Putin had been “waving
around the nuclear card at various
points through this conflict”, and
it was a matter that Joe Biden’s
administration has “to take deadly
seriously because it is a matter
of paramount seriousness – the
possible use of nuclear weapons
for the first time since the second
world war”.
The big story Page 10 
5 U N I T E D S TAT E S
House January 6 panel to
hold its final public hearing
The House January 6 select
committee was expected to
hold its final public hearing this
week, with the congressional
investigation into the attack on
the US Capitol in Washington
nearing its conclusion.
The select committee was
expected to make headway
on some of the most pressing
questions about 6 January that
remain unanswered since the
panel last convened in July and
made the case that Donald Trump
violated the law by refusing to
take action to call off the Capitol
attack, sources said.
Spotlight Page 30 
UK headlines p9
6 RUSSIA
15 killed as country suffers
another school shooting
A gunman with a swastika on his
T-shirt killed 15 people, including
11 children, and wounded 24 at a
school, before killing himself.
The attacker, named by
authorities as Artem Kazantsev,
was armed with two pistols and a
4, 5
large supply of ammunition. He
had once been a pupil at the school
in Izhevsk, about 950km east of
Moscow. The regional governor,
Alexander Brechalov, said
Kazantsev had been registered
with a “psycho-neurological”
treatment facility.
Russia has experienced several
school shootings in recent years.
In April, an armed man killed
two children and a teacher in the
central Ulyanovsk region before
killing himself.
7 U N I T E D S TAT E S
Brands and banks urged to
stop backing deforestation
Indigenous leaders from the
Amazon implored major western
brands and banks to stop
supporting the destruction of the
rainforest through mining, oil
drilling and logging, warning that
the ecosystem is on the brink of a
disastrous collapse.
Representatives of Indigenous
peoples from the Amazon region
descended on New York last
week to press governments
and businesses to stem the
flow of finance to polluting and
deforesting activities.
A report by the Association
of Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples
alleges that major brands have
products that may be tainted by
gold illegally mined in Amazon
Indigenous territories.
9 POLAND
2
Roger Waters scraps gigs
8
1 amid Ukraine war backlash
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger
Waters cancelled concerts planned
in the country amid outrage over
his stance on Russia’s war against
Ukraine, Polish media reported
on Saturday.
An official at the Tauron Arena
in Kraków, where the musician
was scheduled to perform two
concerts in April 2023, said they
would no longer take place.
Waters wrote an open letter
to the Ukrainian first lady, Olena
Zelenska, early this month in
which he blamed “extreme
nationalists” in Ukraine for having
“set your country on the path to
this disastrous war”.
10 I T A LY
8 FRANCE
Minimum book delivery fee
set in anti-Amazon fight
The country’s crusade to protect
independent booksellers was
stepped up last Friday as the
government proposed a €3 ($2.89) Pope urges Italians to help
minimum delivery fee for online
migrants as right wins vote
book orders of less than €35.
The fixed fee is part of a quest to Pope Francis urged Italians to help
support independent bookshops migrants amid a general election
against the domination of big that brought an anti-immigration
tech firms, such as Amazon. rightwing coalition into power.
France is seeking to stop what Speaking at the end of an open-
ministers have called “distorted air mass in the southern Italian
competition” against independent city of Matera, the pope recalled
bookshops from online firms. that last Sunday coincided with
Legislation was passed at the the Catholic church’s World Day of
end of last year to close a legal Migrants and Refugees. “Migrants
loophole that had allowed big are to be welcomed, accompanied,
online companies to charge a promoted and integrated,” he told
single cent for shipping a book, the assembled faithful.
while independent bookshops had Migration was a central theme
to charge higher post-office prices. in the electoral campaign of
extreme right parties.
Spotlight Page 15 
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly

11 SAUDI ARABIA
Foreign minister defends
role in freeing of prisoners
Foreign minister Prince Faisal
bin Farhan al Saud denied that
Saudi Arabia’s efforts to secure the
release of international prisoners
held by Russian proxies in Ukraine
was an attempt to improve the
country’s image after the killing of
Jamal Khashoggi.
Saudi Arabia has previously
said Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman was involved in a major
diplomatic effort, which appeared
to have involved the Russian
billionaire Roman Abramovich.
Five Britons were among 10
people facing the death penalty
from pro-Russia separatists who
were released unexpectedly last
week. They had been accused of
fighting as mercenaries.
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
13 LEBANON
Death toll from sinking of
migrant boat rises to 94
The death toll from a boat that
sank off the Syrian coast after
sailing from Lebanon last week
has risen to 94, Syrian state TV
said last weekend.
The country’s transport
ministry has quoted survivors
as saying the boat left Lebanon’s
northern Minyeh region bound for
Europe with between 120 and 150
people on board. Filippo Grandi,
the UN high commissioner for
refugees, described the incident as 17
18
a “heart-wrenching tragedy”.
19
At least 14 people rescued
were recovering in hospitals
in Syria, while six others were
discharged and two remained in
intensive care, Syria’s Sana news
agency reported. 15
16
14 INDIA
Lightning and heavy rains
kill 39 people over five days
12 HORN OF AFRICA Officials said 39 people had
been killed by lightning in a
Drought puts 3.6m children five-day period until last Friday,
at risk of missing school prompting authorities to issue
new guidelines advising people
Some 3.6 million children are at how to protect themselves during
risk of dropping out of school a thunderstorm. Lightning strikes
due to the drought in the Horn of are common during the monsoon
Africa, the UN has said. season from June to September.
Unicef estimates that the Col Sanjay Srivastava, whose
20
children in Kenya, Somalia and organisation Lightning Resilient
Ethiopia are in danger of leaving India Campaign works with
school as a result of the cumulative the Indian Meteorological
pressure on households caused by Department, said deforestation,
the drought. In a sign of how acute pollution and the depletion of
the situation is becoming in many bodies of water all contributed to
areas, that number has more than climate breakdown, which was
tripled – from 1.1 million – in the leading to more lightning. There
past six months. has been a 34% rise in lightning
Four consecutive failed rainy strikes across India over the past
seasons have pushed millions of year, causing deaths to jump.
families to the brink, increasing
the number of deaths of children
from malnutrition and forcing
people to flee their homes in
search of more resources.

Global report
15 H O N G KO N G
Cardinal Zen on trial over
fund defending protesters
Cardinal Joseph Zen has gone
on trial alongside five fellow
democracy supporters over their
role in running a fund to help
defend people arrested in anti-
government protests.
The 90-year-old, one of Asia’s
most senior Catholic clerics, was
first detained earlier this year
under a national security law
that Beijing imposed to quell
dissent. His arrest shocked the
city’s Catholic community and
renewed criticism of the Vatican’s
warming ties with Beijing. Police
have not yet charged Zen with a
national security offence, which
can carry a sentence of up to life
in jail. Instead, he and his fellow
defendants are being prosecuted
for the less serious offence of
failing to properly register their
defence fund as a society.
16 PHILIPPINES
Five rescuers die after
typhoon batters north
Five rescuers died after Super
Typhoon Noru slammed into
the north of the country, causing
floods and power outages.
The most powerful typhoon
to hit the country this year hit
the coastal town of Burdeos, in
Quezon province, before nightfall
last Sunday then weakened as
it barrelled overnight across the
main Luzon region. Thousands of
people were moved to emergency
shelters, some forcibly. Daniel
Fernando, the governor of Bulacan
province north of Manila, said the
rescuers were helping trapped
residents when they were hit by a
collapsed wall.
The big story p10 
7
17 CHINA 19 JA PA N D E AT H S
Beijing says US sending State funeral for Shinzo Abe
‘wrong signals’ on Taiwan met with anger from public
Beijing accused Washington of A state funeral for the country’s
sending “very wrong, dangerous longest-serving prime minister,
signals” on Taiwan after the US Shinzo Abe, was held in Tokyo Hilary Mantel
secretary of state told his Chinese amid public anger over the cost of Celebrated author
counterpart that the maintenance the ceremony and revelations over of the Wolf Hall
of peace and stability over Taiwan his party’s ties to a controversial trilogy and double
was vitally important. religious group. Booker prize-
Taiwan was the focus of the More than 4,000 guests, winner. She died
90-minute, “direct and honest” including the US vice-president, on 22 September, 
talks between the secretary of Kamala Harris, attended aged 70.
state, Antony Blinken, and the the ceremony at the Nippon The Guardian
Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, Budokan hall, where a 19-gun View, page 49
on the margins of the UN general salute sounded in honour of the
assembly in New York, a senior US assassinated former leader. Louise Fletcher
official told reporters. Abe’s widow, Akie, carried Actor who won an
“The secretary made crystal her late husband’s ashes into the Oscar for her role
clear that – in accordance with hall, followed by crown prince as Nurse Ratched
our long-standing one-China Akishino and other members of in the 1975 film
policy … the maintenance of peace the imperial family. One Flew Over the
and stability across the strait is Abe was shot in July by a man Cuckoo’s Nest.
absolutely, vitally important,” the who reportedly said he targeted She died on 23
US official said. the politician over his support for September, 
China’s foreign ministry, in the Unification church. aged 88.
a statement on the meeting,
said the more rampant Taiwan’s John Hamblin
independence activity, the less Host of Australian
likely there would be a peaceful TV’s children’s
settlement. “The Taiwan issue is show Play School
an internal Chinese matter, and for nearly 30
the United States has no right to years. He died on
interfere in what method will be 21 September,
used to resolve it,” the ministry aged 87.
cited Wang as saying.
Pharoah Sanders
Jazz saxophonist
known for his
18 N O RT H KO R E A 20 NEW ZEALAND unique playing
style and
Pyongyang ‘fires ballistic Museum to return items to
collaborations
missile towards sea’ Indigenous Australians with John
Pyongyang fired a short-range Four objects from the Warumungu Coltrane. He died
ballistic missile last weekend people will be returned from a on 24 September,
towards its eastern seas, extending New Zealand museum to country aged 81.
a provocative streak in weapons in Australia’s Northern Territory.
testing as a US aircraft carrier visits Two hooked boomerangs Valery Polyakov
South Korea for joint military (wartilykirri), an adze (palya/ Cosmonaut who
exercises in response to the kupija) and an axe (ngurrulumuru) holds the record
North’s growing nuclear threat. were collected by anthropologist for the longest
South Korea’s joint chiefs of Baldwin Spencer and telegraph single stay in
staff said the missile launched operator James Field. In the early space – 437 days
from the town of Taechon flew 1900s, the men amassed more aboard the Mir
600km cross-country on a than 6,000 items from central space station.
maximum altitude of 60km before Australia that have since been He died on
landing in waters off North Korea’s dispersed around the world. 7 September,
eastern coast. Seoul’s military The four objects now in the aged 80.
condemned the launch as a Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland
violation of UN security council War Memorial Museum will be
resolutions. returned later this year.
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
8 Global report
SCIENCE A N D EN V IRON M EN T
A RCH A EOLOGY
Traces of opium found in
3,500-year-old pottery
Israeli archaeologists have
discovered opium residue in
3,500-year-old pottery pieces,
providing evidence to support the
theory that the hallucinogenic drug
was used in ancient burial rituals.
Excavations in the central Israeli
town of Yehud revealed a series of
late bronze-age graves. Vessels at the
site that resembled poppy flowers
– from which opium is derived –
dating to the 14th century BC and
found “opium residue in eight
vessels”, the researchers said.
S PA C E
Asteroid dust found to
contain drop of water
Specks of dust that a Japanese space
probe retrieved from an asteroid
about 300m km from Earth have
revealed a surprising component: a
drop of water. The discovery offers
new support for the theory that life
on Earth may have been seeded from
outer space. The findings, published
in the journal Science, are in the
latest research to be published from
analysis of 5.4 grammes of stones
and dust that the Hayabusa-2 probe
gathered from the asteroid Ryugu.
The sample has already yielded
several insights, including organic
material that showed some of the
building blocks of life on Earth,
amino acids, may have been formed
in space.
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
MEDICA L R ESE A RCH
Drug shown to slow progress
of motor neurone disease
An experimental drug for motor
neurone disease has shown signs
of slowing the progress of the
devastating illness in a landmark
trial. The results, published in the
New England Journal of Medicine,
provide fresh hope after a phase-
three trial of the same drug
had previously failed to make a
meaningful difference to patient
outcomes after six months of
treatment. The latest results suggest
that when patients continued
taking the Biogen drug Tofersen
for another six months they
experienced better mobility and
lung function, with some reporting
remarkable outcomes.
PHYSICS
$3m prize for ‘father of
quantum computing’
Theoretical physicist David
Deutsch, who is affiliated with the
University of Oxford, along with
three other researchers won the $3m
Breakthrough prize in fundamental
physics, the most lucrative prize
in science. Deutsch, 69, became
known as the “father of quantum
computing” after proposing an
exotic – and so far unbuildable –
machine to test the existence of
parallel universes. His paper in 1985
paved the way for the rudimentary
quantum computers scientists are
working on today.
A second prize went to
Clifford Brangwynne at Princeton
and Anthony Hyman at the Max
Planck Institute of Molecular Cell
Biology and Genetics in Dresden,
Germany, for discovering that
proteins – the workhorses of
cells – form teams that resemble
flashmobs, with implications for
neurodegenerative disease. A team
at DeepMind in London scooped
the third life sciences prize for
AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence
program that predicted the
structures of nearly every protein
known to science.
United Kingdom
ECONOMY
Kwarteng faces crisis
meeting with bankers
Kwasi Kwarteng met Britain’s top
bankers and other senior City
figures this week in planned talks
that became a crisis meeting after
an earlier sell-off of the pound
and government bond market
meltdown.
 Researchers Banks emerged among the
believe that the biggest beneficiaries of last
Canaanites used Friday’s mini-budget when the
the psychoactive chancellor scrapped the EU banker
drug opium as an bonus cap and the top 45% rate of
offering for the income tax, cut stamp duty and
dead trailed “an ambitious package
ATEF SAFADI/EPA of regulatory reforms” to be
unveiled in the coming months.
However, the announcement
sent the pound and government
bonds plunging, as the scale of the
tax cuts, which overwhelmingly
benefit the better-off, shocked
markets and prompted worries
about how they will be paid for.
The Treasury moved to settle
the markets with the promise of
a budget next year as sterling on
Monday tumbled to its lowest
level against the dollar for at least
half a century. Meanwhile, the
Bank of England said it “will not
hesitate” to raise interest rates to
prop up the value of sterling.
Meanwhile, in her speech to the
Labour conference, the shadow
chancellor, Rachel Reeves, vowed
to reinstate the top 45% rate of
income tax and put the money
into NHS recruitment. In her
speech on Monday, she insisted
the government’s chaotic handling
of the economy underlined that
Labour was now the party of
economic competence.
A YouGov survey put Labour
17 points ahead of the Tories, the
2.5m
party’s greatest lead since the firm
started polling in 2001.
Spotlight Page 18 
The number of
ants for every
human across
the planet,
based on 489
studies of ant
populations
spanning every
continent
where the
insects live

Eyewitness
 Here be See Monster
A decommissioned North
Sea offshore platform,
which has been transformed
into one of the UK’s largest
public art installations as
part of the Unboxed festival,
began welcoming the public
on board for the first time last
weekend at the Tropicana
venue on Weston-super-
Mare’s seafront. See Monster
is 35 metres tall and covers
four publicly accessible levels.
It features a 10-metre-high
waterfall and a multi-level
slide offering an alternative
route through the monster.
BEN BIRCHALL/PA
LABOUR
PR motion backed by
conference delegates
The Labour conference backed
a motion calling on the party to
embrace a proportional electoral
system, sparking celebrations
from campaigners even though
Keir Starmer seems certain to
ignore the move. The motion,
which says a Labour government
should ditch the current first-past-
the-post system in favour of a form
of proportional representation
(PR), passed easily via a show of
hands in the conference hall in
Liverpool, prompting loud cheers.
The motion based on one
submitted by about 140 local
parties, says the form of PR used
should retain constituency links.
It ends: “Labour must make
a commitment to introduce
proportional representation for
general elections in the next
manifesto.” However, it is not
binding on the leadership, and
while Starmer has previously
expressed some interest in voting
reform, his leadership team has
made it plain they will not do as
the motion says.
NORTHERN IREL AND
Catholics outnumber
Protestants for first time
Catholics outnumber Protestants
in Northern Ireland for the first
time, a demographic milestone
for a state that was designed a
century ago to have a permanent
Protestant majority. Results from
the 2021 census showed that 45.7%
of inhabitants are Catholic or from
a Catholic background compared
with 43.48% from Protestant or
other Christian backgrounds – the
2011 census figures were 45%
Catholic and 48% Protestant.
The demographic tilt will deliver
a psychological hit to unionists,
who relied on a supposedly
impregnable Protestant majority
to safeguard Northern Ireland’s
position in the UK.
Opinion p48
9
I M M I G R AT I O N
Home Office to open two
new immigration centres
The Home Office plans to open
two immigration detention
centres to detain 1,000 male
asylum seekers in a scheme that is
projected to cost £399m ($425m).
The home secretary, Suella
Braverman, has indicated she will
take an even harder line than her
predecessor, Priti Patel, and plans
to increase the use of detention.
The government currently
operates seven immigration
detention centres along with
some short-term holding
centres. Officials say they can
accommodate 3,000 people. If
1k
the two new centres go ahead,
they will represent a significant
increase in the number of people
the Home Office can lock up. Number of “bee
The Guardian understands that bus stops” – bus-
the opening of the two centres is stop roofs planted
linked to the detainment of people with pollinator-
before they are sent to Rwanda. friendly flora
The government is paying £120m – planned by
for the Rwanda scheme – as well Clear Channel
as an extra £20m. Officials have UK, which
not confirmed the total cost of the manages 30,000
Rwanda deal. commercial
shelters
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
As his war effort falters, Vladimir Putin has mobilised hundreds of
thousands of Russian men. Could it be the spark that ignites a rebellion?

The wake-up call

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022

 The big story 11
War in Ukraine
PLUS

Vote riggers Simon Tisdall

Inside Russia’s Putin’s ship of
sham elections fools is sinking
Page 12  Page 14 

RUSSI A Kolesnikov, of the Carnegie Moscow

Center thinktank, who has researched
the country’s attitudes towards the
conflict. But his research, published
By Pjotr Sauer and by the Carnegie Endowment for
Andrew Roth MOSCOW International Peace, also found that

I
Russian public support for the war
n a caricature by the against Ukraine is less solid than statis-
country’s most promi- tics generally suggest, leading him to
nent political cartoonist, believe that Putin’s mobilisation order
Sergey Elkin, Vladimir might prove to be a costly gamble.
Putin is standing on top Several draft centres have been
of the Kremlin wall with torched in recent days, and police
his arms outstretched. “So made hundreds of arrests across the
what else do I need to do country in order to disperse local pro-
for you guys to finally start rebelling?” tests sparked by the announcement.
Putin asks, with a look of desperation. Men recently mobilised by pro-
As images showing thousands Russian occupation officials in Ukraine
of Russian men getting into buses were also being readied for the front-
bound for training centres appeared line, including newly drafted person-
last weekend, many in the west are nel in Crimea as well as conscripts in
asking the same question. Luhansk region who have received
Putin’s decision to call the first draft summonses in recent days.
mobilisation since the second world On the eve of Putin’s address, hun-
war has prompted widespread panic dreds of Muscovites gathered on the
among Russia’s population, and there touristy Arbat Street to protest against
was a growing sense early this week the mobilisation. “No to war!” they
that tensions are rising, as angry chanted. Riot police and national
showdowns at local draft centres guardsmen in camouflage quickly
played out in videos published to blocked off the street and began diving
social media and rumours circulated into the crowds to make arrests, many
over an impending closure of the of those detained being young men.
borders or even martial law. “I have been coming out [to protest]
On Monday a draft officer was shot since the very beginning of the war,”
in Ust-Ilimsk, a town of about 85,000 said Irina, 32, an accountant. She said
people in the Irkutsk region in Siberia, she had considered fleeing the 
by a man angry at his friend’s conscrip- country but ultimately decided
tion. In Ryazan, another man set him-
 Police detain a self on fire in a protest. Angry crowds
man at a Moscow also gathered in Russia’s Dagestan
protest against region, where officers fired automatic
mobilisation weapons in the air to disperse them.
ALEXANDER NEMENOV/ Meanwhile, thousands of cars lined
AFP/GETTY
up at the Russian borders carrying
young men seeking to flee the country
 A rally in Arbat
in order to escape the draft.
Street. The sign
On Monday the Kremlin sought to
plays on the word
calm Russians, saying no decisions
mobilisation,
had been made to shut the borders or
saying ‘No
impose martial law. But the backlash
burialisation’
had already begun.
GETTY
Experts have predicted that the
effect of the call-up on public opinion
will be gradual. “Russian society has
been repressed to the core and has
become compliant,” said Andrei

30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly

12 The big story
War in Ukraine

B
UKRAINE alakliia’s only functioning
shop was packed. Residents
who had spent six months
under Russian occupa-

Food for data

tion queued to buy bread, salami
and frozen mackerel. “When the
Russians arrived, I lost 10 kilograms.

How Russia My wife lost eight kilograms. There

was almost nothing to eat for the first

prepared
two months,” one customer, Valery,
recalled. Showing off his reduced
waistline, he joked grimly: “That’s

the ground the upside of Moscow rule.”

Russian troops came to Balakliia

for its sham

in March. They raised a Russian tri-
colour above the modern brick town
to stay. “It’s important because I’m ▲ People and cars administration building, and parked
against the murder of people in a
neighbouring country and that my
cross the border
from Russia referendums their tanks in a factory. Three weeks
ago the Ukrainian army chased them
people become murderers.” into Georgia out in a dramatic counter-offensive.
More worryingly for the Kremlin, AFP/GETTY Kyiv reclaimed almost all of the
observers say, is the unrest that is Kharkiv region.
bubbling up away from the big cities The Kremlin had been planning to
and in the regions, traditionally hold a sham referendum in north-east-
strongholds of the regime. ern Ukraine. As it was, the “vote” was
Perhaps most strikingly, Chechnya, conducted last weekend in the areas
by far the country’s most repressive By Luke Harding BALAKLIIA Russia still occupies. They include
region, saw its first protest since the
ruthless strongman Ramzan Kadyrov
came to power 15 years ago, when a
few dozen women gathered outside
a mosque to voice anger about their
sons being drafted.
Many Russians have already voted
with their feet, with the mobilisation
leading to a surge in the number of men
of military age leaving the country.
Sam Greene, a professor of Russian
politics at King’s College London and
co-author of Putin v the People, said
that with the call for mobilisation,
Putin has “made the war a lot more
real for people than it was before”.
“For many who were enthusiastic
about the invasion, staying silent was
still the preferred option, given the
risks protesters face. But now, with
the real possibility of being sent to the
front, that calculus has changed.”
In his nightly speech last Thurs-
day, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr
Zelenskiy decided to address Russians
directly in their native language.
“Fifty-five thousand Russian sol-
diers died in this war in six months,” he
said. “Tens of thousands are wounded
and maimed. Want more? No? Then
protest. Fight back. Run away. Or
surrender to Ukrainian captivity. These
are the options for you to survive.”
PJOTR SAUER IS A GUARDIAN AND
OBSERVER CORRESPONDENT COVERING
UKRAINE; ANDREW ROTH IS MOSCOW
CORRESPONDENT

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022


most of the southern Kherson region, a
mere third of Zaporizhzhia oblast, and
large chunks of Luhansk and Donetsk,
two eastern provinces partly run by
Russia and its proxies since 2014.
Over the summer, Russia’s
presidential administration paused
preparations to carry out pseudo-
votes on Ukrainian territory. This
was because of a lack of support.
They were hastily revived last week
after the Russian army’s stunning
military setbacks. Vladimir Putin has
responded by announcing a partial
mass mobilisation at home, designed
to recruit up to a million men for his
floundering campaign.
Putin was expected to announce the
“results” this week. It would be a major
surprise if they showed anything but
an overwhelming mandate for these
new territories to join with Moscow.
▼ Humanitarian aid
is distributed after
Balakliia is liberated
METIN AKTAS/ANADOLU/GETTY
13
Ballot boxed
Provinces subjected to ‘referendums’ this week
The Ukrainians have reacted calmly. Russian-controlled Russian advances Claimed recaptured by Ukraine
Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s senior adviser Kyiv Luhansk
Mykhailo Podolyak described the elec- province
Dnieper river Kharkiv
tion as a “propaganda show”, aimed at
Russian TV viewers. It aimed to boost 1
Izium
support for “Z-mobilisation”, he said, Ukraine
at a time when thousands of men of
Zaporizhzhia
military age have been scrambling to Donetsk
exit the country. Zaporizhzhia
With little in the shops, and no Moldova 2
way of withdrawing cash, the town’s 3 Donetsk
15,000-strong population was forced Odesa 4 Mariupol
to rely on Russian handouts. Human- Kherson Kherson
itarian aid was available. But there Sea of Azov
was a catch: to receive it, locals had
Russia
to give their address, and to hand over Crimea 100 km
Black Sea 100 miles
their passports and Ukrainian identi-
fication number. Source: Institute for the According to Telegram posts from
Study of War with AEI’s
“They photocopied everything. It Critical Threats Project Russian-controlled towns, officials
was a ploy to get hold of your personal went from house to house, coercing
data,” Valery explained. “In return you some people into voting. They targeted
got a packet of spaghetti and some the elderly who have received Russian
tinned beef.” pensions, as well as anyone who signed
Russia’s FSB spy agency was up for humanitarian goods. Serhii
thus able to put together a highly Haidai, head of the Luhansk region’s
accurate list of citizens in occupied Militia man military administration, said the poll
communities – which could then be I founded was a farce. There was no confidenti-
used for election manipulation, and ality, with paperwork filled out in the
Wagner, says
other purposes. open in homes and yards, he said. If
Around the corner from Balakliia’s Putin ally residents refused to open their door,
pink-painted shop was a large crater “commissioners” threatened to break
left by a Grad missile. It landed in May Yevgeny in. The names of those who vote “no”
next to a five-storey building on Sob- Prigozhin, a are recorded in a notebook, he said.
ornaya Street, previously named after close ally of Balakliia has no electricity or gas.
Lenin. Alexander Bayev, a pensioner Vladimir Putin, Andriy, a Ukrainian soldier, went to the
who lives in the block, said the explo- admitted that railway station to recharge his phone
sion killed his 65-year-old neighbour he founded the from a public generator, available for
Vasily, who had been sitting outside Wagner Group four hours a day. He said he would
on a wooden bench. private military carry on fighting, regardless of the
“He staggered to the entrance but company “result”. “We will gradually kick the
didn’t make it,” Bayev said, pointing to in 2014, the Russians out. I’m certain of it,” he said.
blood on the steps. The blast blew out first public Ukrainian citizens who do vote for
nearby apartment windows, shred- confirmation annexation – for whatever reason – can
ded balconies and flipped a car into a of a link he expect a reckoning. One Balakliia pen-
children’s play area. Only 15 residents has previously sioner, Lionia, said he was a diabetic.
were left, he said, out of 250-odd from denied. The When his insulin ran out, he asked the
before the war. Russian Russians for help. “When I collected
Local support for annexation was businessman the medicine they took my photo and
extremely limited, residents said. said he founded put it in their swine paper. Then they
“When our boys came we celebrated Wagner to left. My neighbours came round and
with champagne. I had hidden a support beat me and my wife up,” he said, add-
bottle for that moment,” Natalia Ser- Russian-backed ing: “What choice did I have?”
geyevna said. separatists in Last weekend Ukrainian soldiers
Video of last weekend’s sham eastern Ukraine. were making further gains. They
referendum showed Russian soldiers Wagner has were close to the city of Liman in
in balaclavas escorting “election” been accused Donetsk oblast, and were advancing
workers carrying ballot boxes. of committing towards the southern regional capital
human rights of Kherson. They believe in victory.
‘They photocopied abuses in “Yes, Russia is a colossus. But look
Ukraine, Syria, at its feet. They are made of clay,”
everything … In Libya, Central Valery said. Observer
return you got a African Republic, LUKE HARDING IS A GUARDIAN
Sudan and AND OBSERVER INTERNATIONAL
packet of spaghetti’ Mozambique. CORRESPONDENT
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
14 The big story
War in Ukraine
OPINION
Putin’s sinking ship
The leader is going
down. Will he take
everyone with him?
By Simon Tisdall
M
ore than ever, Vladimir Putin resembles
the captain of the Titanic: steaming full
speed ahead towards disaster, deluded
by inaccurate assumptions about his
ship’s invincibility. There’s no avoiding catastrophe.
In Ukraine, that was not necessarily true until now.
Putin’s speech last week, mobilising reserves, preparing
territorial annexations, and threatening nuclear war,
might easily have followed a different tack.
Instead of escalating, he could have claimed victory,
declared a ceasefire. An offer of negotiations would have
wrongfooted Kyiv, freezing the conflict and dividing
Moscow’s enemies. He could have won time to regroup.
He could even have put his hand up, swallowed humble
pie. But, ever resentful and vindictive, Putin lacks
courage and imagination. Now it’s Russia’s regime, not
Ukraine, that faces shipwreck.
From the moment he skulked into the limelight
in 1999, using suspect terror bombings to fortify his
image as a tough guy, Putin looked like a wrong ’un. The
tragic sinking in 2000 of the Russian nuclear-powered
submarine Kursk, with the loss of more than 100 lives,
gave an early glimpse of Putinism. He was slow to react,
seemed uncaring, and furiously rejected criticism.
Over the ensuing decades, Putin has run Russia the
way his KGB handlers taught him to run operations:
co-opt, bribe or intimidate the people you need, silence
or eliminate those you don’t. Corpses continue to pile
up behind his throne. During his TV address, Putin’s lack
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
of political skills was matched by a chilling absence of
warmth. His eyes were cold and lifeless as the grave.
The extent to which Putin is getting it wrong again
over Ukraine is stupefying. Ukraine, a fragile democracy
racked by political feuding and endemic corruption, has
been united in nationhood in defiance of the aggressor.
The Nato alliance, blamed by Putin for causing the
conflict and denigrated by his admirer Donald Trump,
is stronger than ever. European defence spending is
rocketing. Neutrals Sweden and Finland scramble to join.
In contrast, the poor performance of Moscow’s once-
respected armed forces, their battle embarrassments,
logistical nightmares and weak leadership, have
exploded the myth of Russian superpower. Russia’s
economy is bleeding out. And despite western worries
about the Kremlin propaganda offensive in Africa and
Asia, it is largely isolated internationally. In March, 141
out of 193 countries condemned the invasion in a UN
vote. Most of the remainder abstained.
Last week the UN general assembly overruled Moscow As the war
and allowed Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy,
to make a virtual address, sketching a path to peace. Even hits home,
Putin was forced to take notice when China expressed Putin is
“concern” at the damage he is doing. Narendra Modi, blamed for
India’s prime minister, scolded him: “Today’s era is not
an era of war.” The war is shifting the power balance in everything
Beijing’s favour. “That asymmetry is destined to become that’s gone
only more pronounced … as Putin’s regime depends on
Beijing for its survival,” wrote analyst Alexander Gabuev.
wrong,
Putin was turning Russia into a “vassal state”. before
None of these blunders takes into account the war’s and since
destabilising impact on Russia’s “near abroad”. Old
grievances are re-igniting as local rivals sense Kremlin
weakness. Renewed fighting between Armenia and
Azerbaijan is one flashpoint. Central Asia is smouldering.
Georgia and Moldova joined the EU’s membership
queue in June. The people of Belarus are awaiting their
chance, too. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the opposition
leader who was robbed of her 2020 presidential election
victory, predicts a democratic revolution could erupt
at any time. Alexander Lukashenko’s Moscow-backed
regime is “ripe for destruction”, she wrote. When that
happens, Putin will lose his “Belarusian ‘balcony’, which
looms over eastern Europe and provides strategic access
to Poland and the Baltic states”.
How can anyone with such a uniquely incompetent
record expect to remain in power much longer? As the
war hits home, Putin is blamed for everything that’s
gone wrong, before and since. Anti-mobilisation street
protests and an exodus of fleeing conscripts are the  Putin has run
latest omens of change. Additional, prominent voices are Russia the way
raised in opposition. The elite swivels. his KGB handlers
What happened last week was not even mostly taught him to
about Ukraine. It was about the future of Russia, the run operations
dangerous, desperate unravelling of its regime, and ADRIEN FILLON/ZUMA /
REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
whether what follows will be more democratic, more
law-abiding, less aggressive. The Russian people, not the
western powers or regional neighbours, will ultimately
decide. But Putin’s reign of impunity is drawing to a
close. His ship of fools is holed beneath the waterline.
He’s going down. The question is, will he take everyone
down with him? Observer
SIMON TISDALL IS AN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
COMMENTATOR
 15
In-depth reporting and analysis

INDIA
Bollywood’s
cinematic star
on the wane
Page 22 

A N A LY S I S | I T A LY

Far-right turn
What Giorgia Meloni means for Europe
By Patrick Wintour

 Giorgia
Meloni at a press
conference
after her party’s
election victory
VALERIA FERRARO/SOPA /
REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
16 Spotlight
Europe
As the European political
elite responded with
shocked silence, and
then horror, to the
stunning Italian election victory
of Giorgia Meloni, congratulations
poured in from resurgent
nationalists, hailing a decisive
and irreversible turning point in
European politics that spells deep
problems for the European project.
For the Hungarian president,
Viktor Orbán, and for Vox, the
Spanish far-right party that can
only dream of emulating Meloni’s
victory in the Spanish polls next
year, a path to a sovereign Europe
had been opened. Marine Le Pen,
her party installed as the leaders
of the opposition in the French
parliament, said the Italian people
“have decided to take their destiny
in their hands by electing a patriotic
and sovereign government”.
In Stockholm, Jimmie Åkesson,
the leader of the far-right Sweden
Democrats, with 62 seats in the
349-seat parliament, expressed
his delight.
But the silence from the Franco-
German leadership on Monday
was partly because it is waiting
to discover Meloni’s true political
identity. Her career’s roots lie in
fascism, and she later seemed to
be happy to pose as a sovereigntist
opposed to the euro, but over the
past five years and by the time of
this election she had adopted many
of the economic and foreign policies
associated with Mario Draghi, the
technocrat prime minister she will
now replace.
The minor rightwing parties in
clear,” she said, adding in an
interview in the Washington Post on
13 September: “I don’t feel I need to
be accepted by the European Union.
I don’t consider myself a monster,
a threat or a dangerous person.”
Many Italians seemed willing to take
her self-characterisation on trust,
seeing her as the latest best vehicle
to express their anger over prices,
migration and cultural identity.
There is a large Italian constituency
– perhaps a third of the vote – with
ambivalent feelings towards Russia,
but no mandate was sought by
Meloni for Italy to abandon Kyiv.
So if Orbán hopes she will join
him in obstructing “self-defeating”
European sanctions against Russia,
he may be disappointed. Nor is there
any sign that Poland, once Hungary’s
ally, would welcome such a move.
The first to congratulate Meloni was
the Polish prime minister, Mateusz
Morawiecki. Brothers of Italy is
aligned with the Polish PiS in the
European parliament – but Warsaw
remains at the helm of Nato’s anti-
Putin alliance.
Sweden preceded Meloni’s shuffle
towards traditional conservatism.
Åkesson campaigned on a version
of “Sweden first”, but he had
previously expelled extremists from
his party, and said in 2019 he was
no longer in favour of “Swexit”. He
Summary of Italian election results 2022
The two chambers of parliament have equal weight in the legislative
process, and government must have the support of both
Chamber of Deputies
Vote share 50%
dropped his pro-Putin positions
and said: “Russia today is more
or less a large-scale dictatorship The
that is also perpetrating crimes
against international law against its contours of
neighbours.” He backed Sweden’s her politics,
membership of Nato and the party’s or her
logo, an aggressive torch, was
dumped in favour of a flower. The definition
Sweden Democrats performed well of the
in elections earlier this month.
To gain the keys to power, the
pursuit
new populist right led by straight- of the
talking anti-elitist leaders have been national
prepared to reinvent themselves.
The test ahead is how they will interest,
behave in practice. They were not are unclear
elected to provide continuity, but
their first theatre for disruption is
not yet chosen.
The most obvious is if Meloni
will seek to renegotiate Italy’s
€191.5bn ($185bn) recovery fund
and implement a new plan that
will lead to higher borrowing.
But she is expected to appoint a
technocrat finance minister and she
even travelled to London in early
September to reassure investors
and present herself as no threat to
the markets.
A more likely point of contention,
according to Luigi Scazzieri of the
Centre for European Reform, is if
the EU tightly links recovery funds
to Italy’s completion of judicial
Senate
50%

her coalition, from whose decline

she benefited, Forza Italia and the
League, were the clearest Putinists.
Both Salvini and Berlusconi, 26.1% 15.4% 7.8% 6.9% 43.8% 26% 15.6% 7.7% 6.7% 44% SOURCE: ITALIAN
who turns 86 this week, emerged Left Five Star Centre Others Right Left Five Star Centre Others Right INTERIOR MINISTRY.
SEAT DISTRIBUTION
battered from these elections, and BY COALITION WILL
The rightwing coalition will have a majority in both chambers when their vote share is translated to
ironically it was Giuseppe Conte, the seats because one third of seats are allocated to first-past-the-post single-member constituencies
BE KNOWN ONCE
PROPORTIONAL SEATS
leader of the Five Star movement, HAVE BEEN CALCULATED

who fared better, campaigning on

citizenship income and seemingly
undamaged by accusations that it
was his bizarre manoeuvring that
led to premature elections for which
a divided left was not ready.
Meloni, by contrast, said in
a YouTube address issued on  Brothers of
10 August she was pro-Nato and Italy supporters
opposed “the brutal aggression” celebrate
against Ukraine. “Our position in ROBERTO MONALDO/
the pro-western camp is crystal LAPRESSE/AP

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022


and civil service reforms started by
Draghi. If a conflict develops over
the EU’s interpretation of the rule of
law, there are genuine prospects of
a Poland-Hungary-Italy triangular
alliance, Scazzieri argues.
The European Commission
has threatened to freeze a third of
Hungary’s EU funding – or €7.5bn –
and has given it until mid-November
to comply. Punishments will be
imposed in December if at least 15
member states – or 65% of the EU
population – back the move. The loss
of Sweden and Italy would be fatal
for the commission’s plan. Battles
over asylum also seem inevitable.
For the moment, the commission
may proceed with caution: there are
elections ahead in Spain and Poland
next year, and the commission’s
decision on matters such as the
energy crisis and economic recession
will be critical to their outcome. As
it stands, if the left can unite and
find the right candidate, Poland’s
rightwing government is on course
to lose. Premature veiled threats
– something the commission
president, Ursula von der Leyen,
unwisely appeared to issue to the
Italian right last week in New York
– would only help the nationalists
in Poland and Spain, and push
Meloni into the arms of a currently
friendless Orbán.
Moreover, Meloni has not yet
chosen a path of confrontation.
The contours of her government,
or her definition of the pursuit of
the national interest, are unclear.
The one thing she knows is that
the course of confrontation did
not do Salvini any good. Draghi, by
contrast, took Italy to the centre
of European decision making. In a
message to Meloni, he said at his
last press conference that Italy’s
next government should choose its
partners not solely on the basis of
“ideological commonality”.
He said: “We should ask
ourselves: which are the partners
that help me to better protect the
interests of Italians? Who counts
the most among these partners?”
Draghi’s implicit message was
that the Italian national interest
lay in staying close to France and
Germany. Meloni now has to decide
how far to follow the advice of the
prime minister she will succeed.
PATRICK WINTOUR IS THE GUARDIAN’S
DIPLOMATIC EDITOR
I T A LY
Italians voice
fears after  year that would have criminalised
far-right’s
poll victory
By Angela Giuffrida ROME
M
atteo Salvini, the leader of
Italy’s far-right League,
has promised that his
alliance with Giorgia
Meloni’s Brothers of Italy will deliver
a long-lasting government as Italians
began to digest the outcome of an elec-
tion that produced the most rightwing
administration since the end of the
second world war.
Final results on Monday gave the
coalition control of both houses of
parliament with 44% of the vote and
confirmed the swing in the balance of
power in the Italian far-right towards
Meloni after her party made spectac-
ular gains in the League’s northern
strongholds of Veneto and Friuli
Venezia Giulia.
Meloni is expected to be given a
mandate from president Sergio Matta-
realla to form a government after
13 October, meaning she could take
office by the end of next month.
Brothers of Italy, a party with neo-
fascist origins, scored 26% of the total
vote, compared with the League’s 9%,
an abysmal result for a party that in
2019 was polling at almost 40%. The
third member of the coalition is Silvio
Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.
The outcome makes Salvini, who
Opinion p47
17
enacted tough anti-migrant measures
during his stint as interior minis-
ter in 2018-19, a key protagonist in a
government that will be hostile towards
immigrants, LGBT people and women
seeking to access safe abortions.
“There is a lot to be worried about,
as for Meloni to respond to her elector-
ate she will maintain her promises on
things that will hit the weakest com-
munities hard, such as immigrants,”
said Paolo Branchesi, an activist for
the Refugees Welcome association.
Early in the election campaign,
Meloni called for the navy to turn
▲ Matteo Salvini migrants back to Africa, while Salvini,
will be a key eager to return to the interior ministry,
coalition player said last week that he “can’t wait” to
FLAVIO LO SCALZO/ resume a policy of blocking migrant res-
REUTERS
cue ships from entering Italian ports.
Both the League and Brothers of
Italy blocked a law in parliament last
homophobia, arguing that it would
have eroded freedom of speech.
Meloni and Salvini have repeatedly
made it clear that they are against gay
adoption and surrogacy.
“We are facing an extreme right
that is really worrying, especially if
you look at their closeness with Viktor
Orbàn’s Hungary, Poland and Russia,”
said Mario Colamarino, president of
the Mario Mieli Circle of Homosexual
Culture association. “We need to be
better, more vigilant and unite against
this nationalism and to protect civil
rights. Meloni is not a phenomenon
built in a day, but a dark cloud that
has been hovering over us these last
10 years, and now she’s in power.”
Given that Meloni, 45, is calling
the shots in the coalition, one of the
biggest threats to the stability of her
government could come from Salvini,
a political chameleon who will not only
have to renounce his desire to become
prime minister but could be stopped
from returning to the interior ministry.
“He is arrogant, and you never
know if what he says today he will
repeat tomorrow,” said Sofia Ventura,
a politics professor at the University of
26
Bologna. “It will be a difficult relation-
ship, but they need to stay in power,
and so maybe their negotiations will
Percentage be contained.”
of vote for Enrico Letta, leader of the centre-
Brothers of Italy, left Democratic party (PD) that led a
contributing to leftwing alliance, said on Monday that
the 44% share he would step down at the party’s next
of the vote congress, which would be held soon.
gained by the ANGELA GIUFFRIDA IS THE GUARDIAN’S
rightwing parties ROME CORRESPONDENT
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
18 Spotlight
Europe
 Shoppers at
Ladywood’s Bull
Ring market
MICHAEL KEMP/GETTY

To the wall
Liz Truss is being
warned that she
risks abandoning a
winning coalition
of voters in the
“red wall” as she
pursues “cavalier”
tax cuts, amid
revelations that her
giveaway package
disproportionately
benefits traditional
Conservative

O
UNITED KINGDOM nly the most bullish Con-
servative party strategist
would have dared fore-
cast the centre of Britain’s
Her friend and fellow doctor heartlands.
With huge
Alex Lawson, also 24, added: “Boris
nervousness among
Johnson and David Cameron at least
MPs over the £45bn
wanted to give the impression they
($48bn) tax-

Mini-budget
second-biggest city turning Tory any-
time soon. Yet as the real-life implica-
tions of the government’s mini-budget
wanted to support the poor. Cutting
cutting package
taxes in the hope people at the bottom
announced last
will get more, instead of directly sup-

gets short
Friday, including
continued to crystallise last weekend, porting those in need, is crazy.”
abolition of the
even contemplating a Conservative Smith said Labour traditionalists top rate tax band
victory in central Birmingham should who voted for Boris Johnson in 2019
shrift in Tory now be judged beyond delusional.
On the vast pedestrianised fore-
would not repeat the same “mistake”.
She added: “I know people, some of
and the end of the
bankers’ bonus
cap, several Tories

conference court outside its International Conven-

tion Centre – where this weekend Tory
grandees will gather for their annual
my family, who voted Tory in the last
election, who were part art of the red wall,
omplet cheated now.”
and who feel completely
said they feared the
prime minister has

host city
shifted away from
party conference – the mood among Performermer K Kirsty Minchella-Storer the levelling up
Brummies towards the impending was more re fforthright, describing the tax agenda that helped
arrival of the UK’s ruling politicians cuts as ““disgusting”, an adjective used secure red wall
veered between fury and contempt. ev
by several of those interviewed by the seats from Labour
‘Trussonomics’ hasn’t gone Abi Smith, 24, shook her head when bs
Observer last weekend. The 34-year- in the Midlands and
asked what she thought of the govern- ld added: “It’s completely awful …
old north of England.
down well with many voters
ment’s tax cuts: “They are not even Th fact is that they’re making it even
The Households
in Birmingham, as the party’s pretending to help the poor any more, h
harder for people on the breadline, in London and
annual gathering looms they don’t get a mention,” she said g
giving extra to those that don’t need it.” south-east England
Smith, a doctor at the city’s Sandwell The breadline matters in this part will gain three
By Mark Townsend BIRMINGHAM general hospital, added: “This prime of Birmingham. During the last reces- times as much as
minister, who wasn’t elected by the io in 2008-09, the constituency of
sion, those in the north
population, has decided to not bother ad
Ladywood – which the convention from tax cuts next
with that pretence. In one sense, they nt is in – was the first place in the
centre year, according
are being honest about not wanting to wh
UK where the unemployment claimant to the Resolution
help those struggling.” count ex x
exceeded 10%. Foundation.

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022

 Opinion p48
19

The subsequent years of largely A N A LY S I S An emergency rate increase may

successive Tory governments have seen
little improvement in several key met-
rics. Cases of Ladywood’s children living
in poverty are among the highest in Eng-
land, with 47% of children growing up
in relative poverty and 39% in absolute
poverty, double the national average.
Regarding fuel poverty, an acute
topic given the context of spiralling
energy costs, Ladywood is among the
UK’s worst areas. Analysis shows that
of its 23,429 households, almost half
(46%) are already in fuel poverty.
Such stark data helps explain why,
during the 2019 election, Labour
amassed nearly 80% of the vote in the
constituency, with the Tories muster-
ing just 4,773 votes out of a turnout of
42,118, a cohort that many last weekend
already believed would have shrunk
significantly as the ramifications of the
mini-budget became clearer.
Shop assistant and mother of three
Yasmin Shah, 42, who lives in Small
Heath, part of which makes up one of
Ladywood’s most deprived areas, said:
“It’s tough for us. People don’t have
many pennies to rub together as it is
and it feels like the government has
turned its back on us for good.
“Birmingham is a working city, very
open-minded, and it feels to me like
the government are an alien species
from another planet. We have nothing
in common.”
Screenwriting student Henry King-
don, 21, who lives in Bartley Green,
added: “They’ve made it clear that
they care more about big business
than ordinary people. Their talk of
economic stimulation comes at the
expense of ordinary people. There’s
simply no evidence that trickle-down
economics works.”
Accountant Dave Beal, 30, visit-
ing from Cambridgeshire and enjoy-
ing a midday pint 20 metres from the
entrance to this weekend’s Tory con-
ference, said: “It’s absolutely horren-
dous, choosing to help banks over food
banks. There was a time when people
would have rejected this as satire. It’s
too shameful for words.”
Nearby, Safia Dar, 31, who works in
digital marketing, was worried about
the economy’s trajectory after recently
buying a new home and having to
juggle rising energy and living costs.
“It’s an important question to ask, and
I worry about the answer: where are
we heading?” Observer
MARK TOWNSEND IS THE OBSERVER’S
HOME AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT
UNITED KINGDOM
Schoolboy error
Chancellor’s
tax cuts pledge
adds to pound’s
plummet
By Larry Elliott and
Richard Partington
On Monday, after a day
of wild speculation in the
City of London that left
the pound in apparent
freefall, the Bank of England had
little choice but to break its usual
silence on day-to-day currency
market movements. Sterling had
plunged overnight in Asia to its
lowest level in history against the
US dollar, in a punishing verdict for
Kwasi Kwarteng’s £45bn ($48bn)
of unfunded tax cuts announced
last week. The resulting statement
was, however, a far cry from the
Hard times cavalry arriving to help Britain’s
Constituency increasingly battered currency.
challenges Some investors were betting on
an emergency interest rate increase
to shore up confidence. Instead
80% the governor, Andrew Bailey, said
events were being monitored
The Ladywood closely. The message: markets could
vote won by wait. The Bank’s next monetary
Labour in 2019 policy decision would not come
until November. The pound, which
39% had been recovering ground,
resumed a sharp sell-off.
Proportion
ion of
children growing
solute
up in absolute
poverty
46%
% resume that the Bank may have to
Ratio of
olds in
households
erty
fuel poverty
never have been likely, given the
proximity to the mini-budget. Such
a move would have been a political
hand grenade at a time when
politicians are questioning Bailey’s
leadership. The Bank will hope
the initial dislocation in markets
subsides. Yet with sharks circling
the currency, the danger is growing
that the Bank and the government
are losing control of events.
That uncertainty was reflected
by the resumed fall in the pound
on Monday, which touched $1.06,
and a further rise in the cost of
government borrowing to the
highest levels since 2008. Britain’s
credibility to make good on its
commitments as a counter-party to
investors is clearly at a historic low.
Part of the pound’s weakness is
a function of dollar strength, but
that does not explain why sterling
fell so rapidly. There are three UK-
related factors behind the fall. First,
once a currency hits the skids, it is
difficult to stop it. Second, Kwarteng
committed a schoolboy error last
weekend by pledging further tax
cuts in a full budget planned for later
this year. If the markets are worried
about the increase in borrowing
needed to fund government plans,
it is not the wisest course of action
to add to those concerns. Third,
the financial markets are still far
from clear about how the Bank will
respond, as reflected by the pound’s
gyrations on Monday as excitement
over a promised intervention was
followed by disappointment.
As set out by analysts at the Bank
of America, the situation is likely
to worsen. “[The] policy backdrop
is toxic and is pushing [the pound]
towards existential crisis,” they said,
warning that interest rates would
probabl need to rise above 5%.
probably
Kwarten budget would do little
Kwarteng’s
to boost growth, they warned, but
would adda to inflationary pressures.
Inves
Investor speculation is likely to
befo November. A week is a
act before
tim in economics as well as
long time
politics Five weeks may be too long
politics.
for Thre
Threadneedle Street to stay put.
LARRY E
ELLIOTT IS THE GUARDIAN’S
ECONOM
ECONOMICS EDITOR; RICHARD
PARTING
PARTINGTON IS ECONOMICS
CORRESP
CORRESPONDENT

30
30 September
Sep 2022 The Guardian Weekly
20 Eyewitness
Iran

 A defiant stand
A main road in Tehran is blocked
by protesters last week as Iranians
took to the streets, in defiance of
warnings from the judiciary, to
protest against the death of Mahsa
Amini. Officially at least 41 people
have died since the unrest began,
mostly protesters but including
members of the security forces.
Human rights groups said the real
figure may be higher.
Norway-based group Iran
Human Rights (IHR) said last
Sunday evening that the death
toll was at least 57, but noted that
internet blackouts were making
it difficult to confirm fatalities as
protests led by women spread to
scores of cities. At least 450 people
have been arrested in the northern
province of Mazandaran during
the protests, according to its chief
prosecutor.
It is thought that hundreds
more demonstrators, reformist
activists and journalists have been
arrested amid the mostly night-
time demonstrations since unrest
first broke out after 22-year-old
Amini’s death in police custody on
16 September. Amini was detained
by the morality police for not
wearing a hijab properly.
Echoing a warning by Iran’s
president, Ebrahim Raisi, the
judiciary chief, Gholamhossein
Mohseni Eje’i, “emphasised the
need for decisive action without
leniency” against the core
instigators of the “riots”.
Opinion Page 45 
AP

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022

 21

30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly

22 Spotlight
South Asia
INDIA
Falling stars
Bollywood
suffers as its
hit formula
grows stale
By Hannah Ellis-Petersen DELHI
T
he opening of a new big-
name Bollywood film was
once a national event across
India, greeted by weeks of
fanfare, long queues outside cinemas
and halls packed to the rafters with
audiences cheering and singing along.
But this year, with 77% of releases
flopping at the box office, cinema halls
have been left eerily quiet and Bolly-
wood’s once unshakeable domination
of the Indian film industry has begun
to look uncertain.
“This year has been extremely poor
for the Hindi film industry as far as the
box office is concerned,” said Sumit
Kadel, a film trade analyst in India. He
said there had been only three or four
hit films, while everything else had
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
bombed – a disaster for an industry
that relies on at least 10 big box office
smashes a year for survival.
The blame for Bollywood’s recent
failures has been attributed partly to
Covid, which prompted a crisis for
cinemas globally. As India’s usually
committed cinema-going crowds were
confined to their homes, there was a
rise in the popularity of platforms such
as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hotstar,
which are used by a quarter of India’s
1.4 billion people.
It resulted in a diversification of
tastes. Bollywood has long enjoyed
the privilege of being India’s “national
cinema”, due in part to the prevalence
of Hindi speakers and the political
weight commanded by Hindi-speaking
states. India’s other film industries were
relegated to being “regional”, with a
reputation for lacking the spectacle and
star presence of Bollywood films. But
as growing audiences began to avidly
consume Tamil (Kollywood), Telugu
(Tollywood), Malayalam, Kannada
(Sandalwood) and Marathi-language
films in their homes, “this made them
aware of the staleness pervading Hindi
films,” said Anna MM Vetticad, a film
journalist and author. Meanwhile, she
added, “blinkered by their privilege,
Hindi film-makers failed to notice that
their traditional audience had gradu-
ally begun evolving”.
As a result, this year dozens of
multimillion-dollar Bollywood films
found themselves facing criticism
for formulaic storylines and were
shunned by audiences.
77%
“Films are not working – it’s our
fault, it’s my fault,” Bollywood actor
Akshay Kumar said after yet another
The proportion of his films fell flat at the box office.
of Bollywood Instead, the biggest hits have been
releases that films made by so-called regional
have flopped at cinema, mainly from south India. RRR,
the box office
this year
a Telugu epic film about two revolu-
tionaries fighting the British Raj, broke
the record for the highest opening-day
earnings for any Indian film and is the
third highest grossing Indian film of all
time, taking about $160m worldwide.
Overall, for the first six months of
the year, films from south India took in
50% of the share of box office profits.
There have been some exceptions,
such as The Kashmir Files, a Hindi-
language film that centres on a fic-
tional retelling of the 1990 exodus
of Hindus from India’s Muslim-
majority region of Kashmir. The film
was accused of politicised historical
revision and Islamophobia and was
endorsed by politicians from India’s
ruling Hindu nationalist party, the
Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) including
the prime minister, Narendra Modi.
More recently, Brahmāstra , a
Bollywood fantasy action film drawn
 Bollywood
from stories from Hindu mythology,
stars, clockwise has been a hit. Against the backdrop
from below: of India’s political climate, many
Aamir Khan;
have concerns at what they see as the
Akshay Kumar; reflected “Hinduisation” of Bolly-
Alia Bhatt and
wood. Aakshi Magazine, a film critic
Ranbir Kapoor in
and academic, said it was concerning
Brahmāstra that overtly Hindu iconography and
PARAMOUNT/AP; SUJIT
imagery was being utilised by Bolly-
JAISWAL/AFP/GETTY wood to draw in audiences.
“The fact that Brahmāstra seems
to be naturalising and embedding
characters in this very hyper Hindu
religious universe is particularly trou-
bling,” said Magazine.
Bollywood has long been viewed
with suspicion by the Hindu rightwing,
who have recently attacked some of its
biggest Muslim stars, including leading
a boycott on Aamir Khan’s recent film
Laal Singh Chaddha, accusing him of
being “anti-Hindu”. With Bollywood
floundering and looking for ways to
win back audiences, Magazine said
there was the risk that a Hindu-ised
Bollywood could become the norm,
undermining its long history of being
seen as largely secular and religiously
inclusive. “If this film, with all its
excessive religiosity, is a success, I’m
sure many others will follow,” she said.
HANNAH ELLIS-PETERSEN IS
THE GUARDIAN’S SOUTH ASIA
CORRESPONDENT
 Spotlight
South America
BR A ZIL
Bolsonaro
invokes a
red scare as
polls point to
election loss
By Tom Phillips RIO DE JANEIRO
M
ore than 4,000km and an
ideological abyss separate
the capitals of Nicaragua
and Brazil, where an
acrimonious race for the presidency is
under way. But the Central American
country has found itself at the centre of
Brazil’s election debate as its far-right
incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, seeks to
weaponise Daniel Ortega’s authoritar-
ian crackdown on the Catholic church to
me
attack his leftist challenger, the former
president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Bolsonaro has repeatedly cited d future under Lula. “If Jair Bolsonaro
Ortega’s anti-clergy offensive in the
run-up to Brazil’s 2 October vote,
hoping to convince God-fearing voters
Lula’s return to power would result in
similar persecution.
Last week Bolsonaro hammered
home his message at the UN gen-
eral assembly, declaring: “I want to
announce that Brazil will open its doors
to receive the Catholic priests and nuns
who have suffered persecution under
Nicaragua’s dictatorial regime.”
Experts describe Bolsonaro’s
allegation that Lula – a moderate two-
term president from 2003 to 2010
who enjoyed good relations with
both Catholic and Protestant leaders
– would close churches and jail clergy
as ludicrous.
“There is just zero evidence in his
governing that he would ever behave
like dictators in Nicaragua and Vene-
zuela. I just find it a ridiculous argu-
ment,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard
University Latin America specialist and
the author of How Democracies Die.
“Do these guys really believe that,
having lived in Brazil for eight years
under Lula, that Lula would suddenly
turn Brazil into Nicaragua?” Levitsky
wondered. “I think they’re just saying
that because they want to legitimise or
justify authoritarian behaviour.”
However dubious the claim, it is
one Bolsonaro and his allies continue
to peddle, primarily in the hope of
winning over evangelical voters, who
represent almost a third of Brazil’s 156
million-strong electorate.
Bolsonaro’s politician sons, Eduardo
and Flávio, have been warning mil-
lions of social media followers over the
supposed threat of a Nicaragua-style
leaves power, Brazil won’t become
an Argentina or a Venezuela – it’ll go
str
straight to Nicaragua,” congressman
ua
Eduardo tweeted last month.
vio, a senator for Rio, wrote of
Flávio o 32%. Overall, the leftist held a lead of
Lula: “Don’tn’t forget, he’s a frie
friend of
Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. Have a look
on Google to see what he’s been doing
to priests and nuns.”
23
 Bolsonaro Last week, Silas Malafaia, the
supporters radical televangelist who Bolsonaro
pray during a took to London for the Elizabeth
campaign rally II’s funeral, shared his ally’s offer to
SUAMY BEYDOUN/ shelter Nicaragua’s embattled clerics
REUTERS
on Twitter, claiming Nicaragua “was
supported by Lula”.
The weaponisation of Nicaragua is a
rehash of Bolsonaro’s 2018 campaign,
when he used the collapse of Nicolás
Maduro’s Venezuela to make spurious
claims about what might happen were
Lula’s Workers’ party (PT) to win power.
Lula has sought to neutrali se
Bolsonaro’s attacks by distancing
himself from Ortega, a revolutionary
hero turned authoritarian who has
governed continuously since 2007 and
secured a fourth consecutive term last
year through elections that opponents
Religious rupture called a sham.
Roman Catholicism Ortega’s re-election followed a six-
is Nicaragua’s month crackdown on Nicaragua’s
main religion, but
opposition, which saw all of the former
President Daniel
rebel’s main challengers detained or
Ortega and his
forced into exile.
wife and vice-
“It’s been 10 years since I last had
president, Rosario
contact with Nicaragua. I don’t know
Murillo, have had
what’s happening in Nicaragua. But
a complicated
I’ve heard things aren’t going well
relationship with
the church for
decades. The former
there,” Lula said last year, urging
Ortega not to “abandon democracy”.
guerrilla allied with
the church as he
Lula has been facing groundless
allegations that he would attack
Christianity since the first of his six
sought to regain the
presidency in 2007 presidential campaigns in 1989. More
after a long period than three decades later such scare
out of power. But tactics have been turbo-charged by
relations frayed social media. Together, Bolsonaro and
after the church his three sons boast nearly 16 million
mediated in failed followers on Twitter and 20 million
talks during the on Facebook.
2018 uprising, So far the scaremongering appears
and ruptured to be failing, however, with Lula
when clerics launching a charm offensive to
denounced the reassure Brazilian Christians.
bloody crackdown “I don’t think anyone has ever taken
that claimed about such care and ensured the freedom to
350 lives. open churches and practise one’s faith
as I did,” Lula told a rally of evangelical
supporters earlier this month.
Polls last week suggested support
for Lula was actually increasing among
Catholic voters, rising from 52% to
53%, according to the pollster Ipec.
Evangelicals still preferred Bolson-
aro, with 48% of them supporting his
presidential bid. But Lula’s evangelical
vote share last week rose from 31% to
around 16 points over Bolsonaro, as
this weekend’s election neared.
TOM PHILLIPS IS THE GUARDIAN’S
LATIN AMERICA CORRESPONDENT
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
24 Spotlight
Environment
CHILE
At 5,484
years old,
could this
be the oldest
living tree?
By John Bartlett
I
n a secluded valley in southern
Chile, a lone alerce tree stands
above the canopy of an ancient
forest. Green shoots sprout from
the crevices in its thick, dark trunks,
huddled like the pipes of a great cathe-
dral organ, and water streams down its
lichen-streaked bark on to the forest
floor from bulbous knots in the wood.
“It was like a waterfall of green, a
great presence before me,” said the
climate scientist Jonathan Barichivich,
41, of the first time he encountered the
Gran Abuelo, or “great-grandfather”,
tree as a child. Barichivich grew up in
Alerce Costero national park, 800km
south of the capital, Santiago. It is
home to hundreds of alerces, Fitzroya
cupressoides, slow-growing conifers
native to the cold, wet valleys of the
southern Andes.
“I never thought about how old
the Gran Abuelo could be,” he said.
“Records don’t really interest me.”
However, Barichivich’s study has
shown the 30-metre giant could be
the world’s oldest living tree.
In January 2020, he visited the Gran
Abuelo with his mentor and friend,
the dendrochronologist Antonio Lara,
to take a core sample from the trunk.
They were able to reach only 40%
into the tree as its centre is likely
to be rotten, making a complete
core unattainable. Yet that sample
yielded a finding of about 2,400 years.
Undeterred, Barichivich set about
devising a model that could estimate
the Gran Abuelo’s age, producing an
astounding estimate of 5,484 years
old – but some colleagues assert that
complete, countable tree ring cores are
the only true way of determining age.
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
That would make it more than six
centuries senior to Methuselah, a
bristlecone pine in eastern California
recognised as the world’s oldest non-
clonal tree – a plant that does not share
a common root system. Some clonal
trees live longer, such as Norway’s Old
Tjikko, thought to be 9,558 years old.
Barichivich believes ancient trees
may help experts understand how
forests interact with the climate.
“The Gran Abuelo isn’t just old, it’s a
time capsule with a message about the
future,” he said. “We have a 5,000-year
record of life in this tree alone, and
we can see the response of an ancient
being to the changes we have made to
the planet.”
In January, Barichivich, who works
at the Climate and Environment Sci-
ences Laboratory in Paris, won a €1.5m
($1.46m) European Research Council
starting grant.
He has embarked on a five-year
project to assess the future capacity
of forests to capture carbon, hoping
to add tree-ring data from thousands
of sites around the world into climate
simulations for the first time.
By adding data for xylogenesis,
the formation of wood, Barichivich
believes he could provide 100-year
predictions for climate change – and
revolutionise our ability to understand
and mitigate its effects.
Barichivich’s mentor Antonio
Lara, 66, has spent his career work-
ing to reconstruct temperature,
precipitation and watershed levels
throughout history. Lara, a professor
at the Faculty of Forest Sciences and
Natural Resources at Chile’s Austral
University in the city of Valdivia, has
been able to prove that alerces can
absorb carbon from the atmosphere
and trap it for between 1,500 and
2,000 years in standing dead trees.
Buried alerce trunks can hold carbon
for more than 4,000 years. He has also
pinpointed exact climatic events by
translating tree rings into numbers,
which can then be read like a barcode.
“The great-grandfather tree is a mira-
cle for three reasons – that it grew, that
it survived, and then that it was found
by Jonathan’s grandfather,” Lara said.
In the mid-1940s, Barichivich’s
grandfather, Aníbal Henríquez,
arrived from the southern city of
Lautaro to work for the forestry com-
panies felling the lahuan, as the alerces
are known in the Indigenous language
Mapudungun, his native tongue.
Alerce shingle was used as currency
▲ The Gran by local populations throughout the
Abuelo tree in the 1700s and 1800s and the wood was
Alerce Costero commonly used in construction. The
national park famous Unesco-protected wooden
SALOMÓN HENRÍQUEZ churches on the island of Chiloé are
built from alerce trunks.
Henríquez happened upon Gran
Abuelo while on a patrol in the early
1970s. Word got out and people began
to arrive: now, more than 10,000
tourists trek down to the wooden
viewing platform next to the tree each
summer. Footfall around the base of the
tree has damaged the thin layer of bark
on its roots, affecting nutrient uptake.
While the scope of his research is
far broader, Barichivich insists the
10k
national park is where he belongs.
When he was eight years old, his
grandfather disappeared on a patrol
Estimated out in the snow. His body was found
number of two days later. Another uncle, also a
tourists who park ranger, later died in the park.
visit Gran “The same fate probably awaits
Abuelo each me, dying with my boots on out in the
year. Footfall forest,” Barichivich said. “But first I
around the tree want to unlock its secrets.”
has damaged the JOHN BARTLETT IS A JOURNALIST BASED
thin layer of bark IN CHILE

Help us make
a difference
The climate
crisis is at
the heart of
our coverage.
Here’s why
By George Monbiot
W
hat is salient is not
important. What
is important is not
salient. Most of the
time, most of the media obsesses
over issues of mind-numbing
triviality. Much political journalism
is little more than court gossip:
who’s in, who’s out, who said what
to whom. Issues of immense, even
existential importance are largely or
entirely ignored.
With the exception of all-out
nuclear war, all the most important
issues that confront us are
environmental. None of our hopes,
none of our dreams can survive the
loss of a habitable planet. And there
is scarcely an Earth system that is
not now threatened with collapse.
Let’s begin with the ground
beneath our feet. Soil is biological,
created by the organisms that
inhabit it. When conditions become
hostile, the structure collapses,
and fertile lands turn to dust bowls.
We rely on the soil for 99% of our
calories, yet we treat it like dirt.
Ocean ecosystems are in even
greater trouble, hammered by
industrial fishing, pollution and
acidification. Forests, rivers,
wetlands, savannahs, the
cryosphere: all are being pushed
towards the brink. And climate
breakdown is gathering at shocking
speed, with disasters occurring at
1.2C of heating that scientists did
not expect until we hit 2 or 3C.
All Earth systems are complex
systems, which means they do not
respond to change in linear and
steady ways. They absorb stress up
to a certain point, then suddenly
collapse. During previous mass
extinctions, collapse seems to have
cascaded from one ecosystem
and Earth system to the next. The
conditions in which the majority of
life on Earth evolved could, if we do
not take urgent and drastic action,
suddenly come to an end.
Yet you would scarcely know it.
Most of the media, most of the time,
either ignores our environmental
crisis, downplays it or denies it.
Most of the media is owned by
corporations or billionaires, who
have a major financial interest in
sustaining business as usual. If
governments acted to prevent the
collapse of Earth systems, business
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GEORGE MONBIOT IS A GUARDIAN
COLUMNIST
planet
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
26 Spotlight
Middle East
PA L E S T I N I A N
TER R ITOR IES
‘Laughter helps’
The blind
comic tearing
down barriers
By Bethan McKernan WEST BANK
O
n a small stage in Tulkarm,
a  city in the north of
the occupied West Bank,
Sherihan El Hadwa emerges
from the wings to a Palestinian pop
song. Dancing and waving the long
white cane she uses to navigate the
world, the visually impaired comedian
already has her audience laughing and
clapping along to the music.
Hadwa did not have an obvious
route into standup comedy, and the
many difficulties of life as a disabled
woman in the Palestinian territories
are not, on the face it, funny.
But in her mostly autobiographical
debut show, No Cherie, Hadwa chal-
lenges lazy narratives about victim-
hood – and has won fans and accolades
all over Palestine in the process.
Jokes and anecdotes mainly focus
on the absurdities of getting around
Palestinian society as a blind person:
everything from the awkwardness
of flirting with strangers helping her
cross pothole-filled roads, to having
to attend a medical evaluation with
doctors once a year to “prove that I still
can’t see them”.
Paired with a sardonic, almost
cynical delivery, Hadwa’s comedy
has bite: righteous anger simmers
beneath every bit, fuelling her act with
a compelling power.
“I’m not looking for sympathy.
I think sometimes audiences are sur-
prised to encounter a blind woman
who is as honest as me. That’s part of
the fun,” the 35-year-old said. “I like
surprising people and opening their
horizons. Laughter has helped me; it
helps everyone.”
Hadwa became blind suddenly, at
the age of 16, after contracting a virus
that damaged the retina and optic
nerve. The shock of losing her sight led
to a difficult period of re-adjustment,
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
and the comedian said she spent years  The Al Bayt
grieving for a different future. stadium in
Hadwa got involved with a theatre Al Khor can seat
group in Bethlehem in 2013, but did 60,000 people
not branch out into comedy until last
year. Writing the show with the help
of fellow comedian Manal Awad, she
realised that humour was a tool for
framing her life experiences in a new
way and exploring a different kind
of performance.
Supported by Bethlehem’s Al-Hara
theatre and the Drosos Foundation, a
Swiss funding body, Hadwa is tour-
ing the West Bank, doing a show most
weekends and kicking off a short Euro-
pean leg with a show in Amsterdam.
“My day job is basically the opposite
of this, answering phones at a hospi-
tal in Bethlehem,” Hadwa said, as she
prepared for the show in Tulkarm. “If QATA R
I’d realised before I was this funny and
talented, I definitely wouldn’t still be
doing that.”
Behind the
Standup is a new form of entertain-
ment in the Palestinian territories.
Performers have realised audiences
are receptive to comedy mined from
hardship: Israeli checkpoint searches,
restrictions on movement, violence,
World Cup
poverty and politics are all fair game.
When No Cherie’s run ends, Hadwa
is planning to get back to writing.
sheen: debt
“I love doing this. It’s nice to make
people laugh and bond over what
makes us the same and what makes
and squalor
us different,” she said. “I am happy to
be an example that disabled people Migrant workers who forked
aren’t helpless. We are just as capable
out substantial sums to secure
as anyone else and we can do things
on our own terms.” Observer jobs in run-up to tournament
BETHAN MCKERNAN IS JERUSALEM live in repugnant conditions
CORRESPONDENT FOR THE GUARDIAN
AND OBSERVER By Pete Pattisson DOHA
W
hen Qatar’s national
football team kicks off
the World Cup finals
against Ecuador at
‘It’s nice Al Bayt stadium on 20 November,
fans watching around the world will
to make get their first glimpse of a stunning
people 60,000-seat arena built to resemble
laugh a nomadic tent.
The stadium, arguably Qatar’s
and bond finest, will host matches through to
over what the semi-finals, including group stage
games involving the likes of England,
makes us Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.
the same’ Just as impressive is the pristine
park surrounding the stadium. Mani-
 Sherihan cured lawns are dotted with fountains,
El Hadwa streams and a lake. Ducks play in the
Comedian cool water. A running track winds

its way around the stadium passing
immaculate training pitches with grass
like a putting green.
Yet the men who labour day after
day in the relentless heat and humidity
to maintain this remarkable green
space – watering the grounds, cutting
the grass and painstakingly pulling up
weeds by hand – live in very different
conditions.
At the end of each shift, they are
driven for 40 minutes to the edge of
the desert, where they are dropped
off at a farm belonging to their
employer, Al Sulaiteen Agricultural
and Industrial Complex (SAIC). Among
rows of giant greenhouses are small
rundown cabins. Some house three or
four workers in single beds, others five
or six in bunks, but all those viewed
by the Guardian were windowless,
cramped and dirty. Towels draped
between the upper and lower bunks
provide what little privacy there is.
Water bottles, cooking utensils and
personal belongings are crammed
under the beds. Clothes hang on lines
strung across the walls.
Fifa and the local World Cup
organising body, the Supreme Com-
mittee for Delivery and Legacy (SC),
have repeatedly claimed that the
tournament has been the catalyst to
transform conditions for low-wage
labourers but the Guardian’s findings
expose serious shortcomings.
Workers employed on World Cup-
related projects are supposed to
enjoy superior treatment in line with
stringent “workers’ welfare stand-
ards”, but in interviews this summer
with workers employed by SAIC at
three World Cup stadiums – Al Bayt,
Al Janoub and Ahmad Bin Ali – the
▲ A worker (not Guardian heard allegations of multiple
interviewed for breaches of these standards.
this story) waters All the workers interviewed, who
the grounds at are from Bangladesh, Nepal and India,
Al Bayt stadium say they were forced to pay illegal
fees to agents in their own countries
$3k
to secure their jobs. “I paid 300,000
[Bangladeshi taka – the equivalent
of about $3,000],” said one worker.
Amount in “Some pay a little more, some a little
recruitment less, but everyone pays.”
fees paid by The local organising committee of
workers from the World Cup introduced a scheme
India, Nepal and in 2017 to encourage its contractors to
Bangladesh repay workers’ recruitment fees, but
SAIC workers who spoke to the Guard-
ian say they have received nothing.
Most of the interviewed workers
are earning a basic wage of 1,000 rials
($265) a month. Food and accom-
modation are provided by SAIC. The
wage is the legal minimum in Qatar,
but workers say they are struggling
to repay their recruitment fees and
associated debts, and send money to
 A room at the their families.
camp that houses In the face of relentless criticism
people working of its treatment of low-wage migrant
on World Cup workers, Qatar announced a law in
preparations 2020 to remove the abusive kafala
system – under which workers were
unable to change jobs – but the workers
say SAIC refuses to release them.
The World Cup organising
committee said: “We recognise that
the SAIC workers may still face chal-
lenges from their employers.” It
encouraged SAIC workers to use its
grievance hotline to raise concerns.
During the hottest summer months,
the workers get up before dawn and
head to the Al Bayt stadium – which
Photographs by cost nearly $850m to build. By 7am,
Pete Pattisson the heat is unbearable, but Kabir (not
27
his real name) works on, watering the
grass and trees. He did not know he
would be working at a World Cup site
when he came to Qatar, but it does not
seem to interest him. “I’m not excited
about the World Cup,” he said with a
shrug. “I don’t think we can even go
inside the stadium.”
The only thing that really concerns
him is his salary. “Qatar is a rich
country, but they are paying so little
for the work we do,” said Kabir. “You
can forget about good pay here.”
The SC said it had “stayed true to its
commitment of utilising the World Cup
to deliver lasting social changes for our
workers, to improve their working and
living conditions”. It cited improved
accommodation, measures to mini-
mise workers’ exposure to heat, legis-
lation to introduce a minimum wage
and allow workers to change jobs, and
a monitoring system to ensure compa-
nies comply with the law.
“ Thousands of companies have
adjusted their work practices to com-
ply with the new laws and regula-
tions,” it added.
Fifa said it was in contact with the
SC regarding the allegations raised by
SAIC employees. It added: “In addi-
tion to the extensive measures already
introduced, which aim to support
workers involved in the preparation
and delivery of the World Cup, Fifa has
actively pushed for the implementa-
tion of broader labour reforms that
apply to all companies and projects
across the country and benefit all
workers in Qatar.”
SAIC did not respond to requests
for comment.
PETE PATTISSON IS A VIDEO AND PHOTO
JOURNALIST BASED IN KATHMANDU
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
28 Spotlight
Africa
K E N YA
Charting
a river
of belief
back to its
source
By Caroline Kimeu NAIROBI
W
airimu Mukuru started
sharing TikTok videos
about Kikuyu culture
earlier this year. Within
months, the 26-year-old had gained
more than 60,000 followers and
received at least 1m views of her videos,
where she talks about her ethnic
group’s traditional practices and beliefs
on topics such as mental health and sex.
Mukuru, a Kikuyu language teacher,
is one of a small but growing number
of Kenyans from the country’s largest
ethnic group, the Agīkūyū, who are
trying to revive precolonial cultural
and spiritual practices. The belief sys-
tems were suppressed during British
colonial rule in the 19th century, and as
Christianity became more entrenched.
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
“Westernisation was entangled
with Christianity,” said King’ori wa
Kanyi, a member of the Agīkūyū
Council of Elders. “A good African
convert had to take a European name,
dress like a European and visit the
clinic instead of the herbalist.”
About 85% of Kenyans identify as
Christians.
“There’s a new kind of Pentecostal-
ism that has consumed much of how
we understand ourselves,” said Kamau
Wairuri, a socio-political researcher at
the University of Edinburgh. “Since
people are not familiar with other
alternatives, those looking to practise
a different kind of spirituality might
not know where to begin.”
Adherents of Kikuyu spirituality
say it is inseparable from their culture.
“Colonialism destroyed indigenous
African religions, labelling them prim-
itive and not good for the modern
age,” said Jacob Olupona, a profes-
sor of African religious traditions at
Harvard divinity school. “With time,
Africans stopped seeing something
good in their own traditions. Those
belief systems became so marginal-
ised that some have become like secret
societies.”
Today, less than 2% of Kenyans
practise traditional beliefs. But experts
say many people practise indigenous
belief systems alongside Christianity
or Islam. Some Kikuyu elders say there
has been a slow but gradual shift in
attitudes within the community.
“Many people are now reject-
ing European -imposed religious
▼ A Kikuyu and cultural identities,” said Kanyi,
woman from adding that among the Agīkūyū,
Laikipia County, there is a term for the efforts to revive
Kenya indigenous beliefs, which translates
ERIC LAFFORGUE/ART IN as “restoring the river to its original
ALL OF US/CORBIS /GETTY
course”.
Experts say interest has grown as
a rising number of the African dias-
pora returned over the past decade,
in search of their
ir anc
ancestral traditions.
“It has emboldened d those
th
practising it at home,” sa
who are
said Olupona.
Nevertheless, those looking to reclaim
their heritage face challenges. Most
African spiritual belief systems are
an oral tradition.
“There’s a lot that has been washed
away,” said Mukuru, who has been
exploring the Kikuyu cultural and
spiritual history for several years.
Some accounts of the Agīkūyū
Spiritual divide way of life were written down by the
The efforts to Kikuyu historian Godfrey Muriuki and
revive traditional Louis Leakey, a Kenyan-British archae-
beliefs have not ologist who lived among the commu-
been welcomed nity for most of his life. Mukuru says
in all quarters. a lot of the history can also be found
Some members of in the community’s language, sayings,
the community, songs and stories by Kikuyu writers
especially such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
those over 50, Those who try to re-engage with
strongly oppose the traditions, like Mukuru, also face
the revival, says pressure to adopt it wholesale. She
Mukuru’s teacher does not agree with some Kikuyu trad-
and spiritual itions, such as female genital mutila-
guide, Kariithi tion, for example. But she says the
wa Njenga. Many
traditions include a range of beliefs,
have embraced
including many that are progressive.
Christianity.
Under Kikuyu cultural practice,
women were in charge of agricultural
production, the community’s main
source of livelihood. Mukuru was
surprised to discover that the culture
was also matrilineal and sexually lib-
eral. “Sensual dances were used as a
way to gauge sexual synergy with the
opposite sex,” she said.
Environmental protection was also
important. “Treating animals and
plants with respect is a mark of spir-
itual maturity among the Agīkūyū,”
said Kanyi, adding that the commu-
nity attached spiritual significance to
mountains and trees, and ate a mainly
plant-based diet.
Experts say community practition-
ers have become custodians of an
important history and culture. “If we
lose these religions, it would be a big
loss for the world,” said Olupona. “We
would have lost an entire civilisation.”
CAROLINE KIMEU IS THE GUARDIAN’S
EAST AFRICA GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT
CORRESPONDENT
 Spotlight
North America
C A NA DA
A crisis of
confidence
Mounties
face calls for
a shake-up
By Leyland Cecco TORONTO
H
ours after the arrest earlier
this month of a fugitive
wanted in connection with
the stabbing deaths of 11
people, the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police hastily called a press conference
to announce that Myles Sanderson was
“no longer a threat” to the public.
But as RCMP assistant commis-
sioner Rhonda Blackmore described
the four-day manhunt, she omitted
a critical detail: Sanderson, who had
been taken into custody alive, was
already dead. It was nearly five min-
utes after announcing his arrest that
Blackmore added that Sanderson had
died after he went into “medical dis-
tress” and was transported to hospital.
Reporters covering the press con-
ference were in disbelief. “I have
never seen a more egregious case of
burying the lede,” tweeted Siobhan
Morris of CTV News.
After two mass killings in two years –
both among the worst in the country’s
history –the institutional opaqueness
of Canada’s national police force has
once again become the focus of criti-
cism. These public communication
fumbles – and a troubled legacy of
scandals, lawsuits and policing fail-
ures – have renewed longstanding
questions over the force’s structure.
Questions over police actions have
continued to mount. National media
have repeatedly pressed the force after
the police said autopsy results would
not be released.
And it emerged that – despite the
fact that earlier in the summer an arrest
warrant had been issued for Sanderson
on unrelated charges – police do not
appear to have been searching for him
until he launched his stabbing spree
on 4 September.
Police have not publicly specu-
lated on what triggered the erup-
tion of violence in which Sanderson
killed 10 people aged between 23 and
78 in the James Smith Cree Nation, an
Indigenous community in northern
Saskatchewan, and the neighbouring
village of Weldon. After the attacks,
Sanderson remained at large for four
days, with local communities on edge
amid a string of false sightings.
As officers searched for Sander-
son, the RCMP was itself the subject
of a sprawling public inquiry over its
response to another mass killing on the
other side of the country, when a lone
gunman shot and killed 22 people in
12 hours in rural Nova Scotia.
In that case, police failed to send an
emergency alert warning locals, and
waited 12 hours to alert the public that
the suspect was driving a fake police
29
car. The public inquiry heard that two
victims died in the time it took Cana-
dian police to get internal approval to
tweet a warning to the public.
As the commission wrapped up
last week, lawyer Sarah McCullough,
who represents most of the 22 victims’
families, said the RCMP demonstrated
it was fundamentally untrained,
unprepared and unequipped for a
major mass killing in a rural area.
During the Saskatchewan attack,
multiple alerts were sent out to warn
residents of the threat. The RCMP
also worked closely with local police
forces, something it was criticised for
not doing in Nova Scotia.
“We definitely saw some improve-
ments in their general communi-
cations in Saskatchewan, but it is
▲ The RCMP is disturbing there has not been more
under pressure information about how Mr Sanderson
after two mass died,” said Roach, author of the recent
killings in two book Canadian Policing: Why and How
years It Must Change.
CANADIAN PRESS/REX/ Saskatchewan’s chief coroner
SHUTTERSTOCK
announced last week that two inquests
– for the stabbing victims and Myles
Sanderson – would be launched in the
spring. “With the suspect deceased,
there will not be a public criminal trial.
Without a public hearing of the facts, it
will leave many questions unanswered
from the families involved and the
public pertaining to the circumstances
leading to the deaths,” chief coroner
Clive Weighill said in a statement.
A jury will only be able to estab-
lish fact, not guilt, but can also issue
recommendations. “It is my intention
to have the jury wholly [comprising]
‘I have Indigenous persons,” said Weighill.
Due to a quirk of Canadian policing,
never seen the RCMP oversees federal criminal
a more law enforcement as well as operat-
egregious ing contract police services to most
provinces and municipalities. But that
case of system is once again under scrutiny:
burying the force has only one officer dedi-
cated to policing the 2,400 residents
the lede’ of James Smith Cree Nation.
In the wake of the Saskatchewan
Siobhan Morris attack, the James Smith Cree Nation
CTV News has discussed creating its own police
force to better address the needs of
First Nation residents.
“The reality of policing of sparsely
populated rural areas is something
that Canada really needs to grapple
with,” said Roach. “How much are
Canadians willing to pay for policing
of these communities?”
LEYLAND CECCO REPORTS FROM
CANADA FOR THE GUARDIAN
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
30 Spotlight
North America
U N I T E D S TAT E S York. The signature tune is Village
People’s YMCA, alongside The Great-
est Love of All by Whitney Houston,
and a few Elton John numbers.

Cash meets
“Sometimes he dances to it,” the
club member said. “He will be at his
table and he’ll dance while sitting.”

influence at Towards the end of the evening,

Trump will play a hymn, How Great
Thou Art, which topped the charts

Mar-a-Lago when Elvis Presley sang it. It was a

favourite of Trump’s father, Fred,
a sentimental way of drawing a Mar-

after dark a-Lago soiree to a close.

Anyone with enough money
can become a member at
Trump’s Florida base, but who
is watching the interlopers?
By Julian Borger
What might have otherwise seemed
no more than a characteristically
bizarre twist for a post-presidential
career looks more significant now it
is known that while the lights were
low, the music was playing, guests
were tipsy and the host was other-
wise engaged, there were thousands of
government documents, many highly
sensitive, and at least one containing
nuclear secrets, sitting nearby. And
all of this was unfolding in a venue

A
t a certain point in an average
evening at Mar-a-Lago, the
lights go down and the
volume goes up, as the pro-
prietor and former president of the
United States turns DJ for the night.
A member of the Mar-a-Lago private
club said Donald Trump had assumed
the role of social ringmaster, deciding
to bring a disco vibe to the Palm Beach
resort after dark.
“About 9.30pm every night, he’ss
sitting at his table, whether on the e in really questionable people with
patio or inside, and they bring a lap-
top over and he starts picking songs,
and he starts being a DJ for the night,
but it’s sort of funny because he picks
like the same 10 songs every night,”
the club member said.
The Trump playlist is of a certain era,
when he was a regular clubber in New
described by former intelligence officials
as a priority target for foreign spies.
hou any question the former
“Without
president
de and those in his circle will
be very
ve important targets for any for-
eign intelligence service. They will be
eig
looking at: how do we get into that cir-
lo
cle?” said Douglas London, a 34-year
CIA veteran and the author of The
Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of
American Intelligence.
London added: “He’s brought
various skeletons in their closets,
financial or personal or political, who
have vulnerabilities a foreign intelli-
gence service could exploit.”
When Trump bought Mar-a-Lago
for $10m in 1985, it had 58 bedrooms,
an adjoining
ad golf course and three
bomb b shelters.
s He said at the time he
thought ht of the purchase as a “state-
ment” ratherther than somewhere he
could imagine living,
iving, but the high-end
Floridian lifestyle grew on hi him.
In the 1990s, after a string of
bankruptcies, he tried to squeeze cash
out of the property, attempting to split
it into plots, but he was blocked by the
planning board. The board also tried to
veto his plan B, to turn the estate into
a private club, but he outmanoeuvred
his opponents by cultivating individual
members and pointing out that most of
the other clubs in Palm Beach did not
admit Jews or black people.
There were few African Americans
in the area who could afford the
Security risk $100,000 fee, which was doubled in
Even during the 2017, but plenty of wealthy Jews. They
Trump presidency, became the bulk of the membership,
there were holes in the majority of them Democrats.
security at Mar-a- When Trump succeeded Obama as
Lago. A teenager, president, and Mar-a-Lago became the
Mark Lindblom, “winter White House”, the ambience
slipped past guards began to change. Trump had no time
and entered the for the official presidential retreat at
club through a Camp David, which he thought too
tunnel from the rustic. Also the Trump Organization
beach. Two Chinese made no money from him staying
women were there. Mar-a-Lago was another matter.
caught trespassing. His presidency became one of the
One of them club’s attractions. It was another label
had four mobile
under the Trump brand. Paying guests
phones, an external
were able to witness real-life scenes
hard drive, five sim
such as Trump huddling with Shinzo
cards and a “signal
Abe, then Japan’s prime minister, and
detector” gadget
Xi Jinping, China’s president.
for locating hidden
After Trump was defeated in 2020,
microphones
he decamped to his Florida retreat,
or cameras.
taking boxes full of secret documents
and a new clientele. The crowd that
hung around the Trump International
hotel in Washington followed him.
“The new members of the club are
a little bit Maga [Make America Great
Again, a Trump electoral slogan],” a
longtime member reflected. “It’s very
eclectic, a lot of foreigners, people that
 Xi Jinping have made money in cryptocurrency,
was among the Oklahoma, fracking money.”
foreign leaders Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI
entertained assistant director for counter-intel-
by Trump at ligence, said: “Typically once a
Mar-a-Lago president becomes former president,
JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY there’s a scale-back in resources at

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022


the Secret Service, but that really is
something that doesn’t lend itself to
the Mar-a-Lago environment because
of the obvious threats there.”
Each year the club hires 80 to 90
foreign workers, all of whom are
vetted. The problem of the club mem-
bers and their guests is far greater.
“Who are these members? Who’s
vetting them? If you have the requisite
money and you plunk it down, it
appears you’re a member,” Figliuzzi
said. “And now here come your family
members and guests and their cousins
and their in-laws. And is it really possi-
ble for the Secret Service to even begin
to think that they could vet the guest
side of the house?”
A Russian-speaking Ukrainian-
born woman, Inna Yashchyshyn, was
able to mingle with club members
and Trump himself last year, posing
as Anna de Rothschild, a Monaco-bred
scion of the banking family.
But perhaps the biggest question
mark is hanging over the resort’s
wounded and vengeful owner and DJ.
No one knows what plans he had for
his stolen trove of state secrets.
“Whatever he selected was because
he had some intent to do something
with it,” London said. “The question
is: what were his intentions? But none
of it is going to be a happy story. None
of it is going to end well, in terms of the
impact on national security.”
JULIAN BORGER IS THE GUARDIAN’S
WORLD AFFAIRS EDITOR
A N A LY S I S
U N I T E D S TAT E S
The final curtain?
New York state
investigation
could bring the
Trumps down
By Hugo Lowell NEW YORK
Penalties being sought
in the civil fraud suit
brought last week by
the New York state
attorney general’s office against
Donald Trump and three of his adult
children could result in the end of
▲ An aerial view the Trump Organization, his real
of Donald Trump’s estate empire, in its current form.
Mar-a-Lago home The former US president, as well
in Palm Beach, as Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump
Florida and Eric Trump, were named as
MARCO BELLO/REUTERS defendants in a sprawling 214-
page complaint filed by New York
attorney general Letitia James for
allegedly falsely inflating his net
worth by billions to enrich himself
and secure favourable loans.
The restrictions being sought
‘The new by James include permanent bans
members on Trump and his three children
from serving as executives in any
of the club company in New York, a move that
are a little would tear the Trump Organization
bit Maga. away from his personal control.
The other penalties would
It’s very prevent Trump from attempting to
eclectic’ circumvent that principal restriction
to establish his business under
a different guise: James is also
seeking to bar Trump from acquiring
commercial real estate and applying
for loans in New York for five years.
Trump could also lose two loyal
executives – Trump Organization’s
chief financial officer, Allen
Weisselberg, and its controller,
Jeffrey McConney – with James
asking the New York state supreme
court to bar them from serving in
top business roles in New York.
James confirmed that her office
had made a criminal referral to
31
justice department prosecutors with
the southern district of New York
and the Internal Revenue Service
to investigate what she believed
to be violations of federal statutes
– marking additional, unforeseen
legal peril for the former president
and his three adult children.
The former president and his
attorneys castigated James’s
investigation as a politically
motivated witch-hunt.
In the complaint, James outlined
an extensive record of alleged
wrongdoing, such as inflating
the value of 23 Trump-owned
properties, including his Mar-a-Lago
resort, Trump Tower in New York
and what was previously the Trump
International Hotel in DC.
Among more than 200 examples
of false or misleading valuations
knowingly used on financial
statements detailed in the suit, the
state alleged the former president
falsely inflated the square footage
of his triplex apartment in Trump
Tower from 10,996 to just under
30,000, which allowed him to claim
it was worth $327m. But, James
said, “that price was absurd given
the fact that at that point, only one
apartment in New York City had
ever sold for even $100m … In the
30-year-old Trump Tower, the record
sale at that time was a mere $16.5m.”
The suit also alleged that Trump’s
Mar-a-Lago resort was valued at
$739m on the false premise that it
was unrestricted property that could
be developed for residential use,
even though Trump had himself
signed deeds donating those rights,
meaning it should have been valued
closer to $75m.
HUGO LOWELL IS A REPORTER FOR
GUARDIAN US
200+
Examples of allegedly false or
misleading asset valuations knowingly
used on financial statements
$327m
Value placed on an apartment in
Trump Tower by allegedly falsely
inflating its square footage
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
32 Spotlight
North America

S
U N I T E D S TAT E S ince 1978 Ray Fair, professor
of Economics at Yale Univer-
sity, has been using economic
data to predict US election
“This prediction is based on business
as usual,” said Fair. “It’s based on esti-
mations back to 1918, a hundred-plus
years of data. In that period what seems

Wide blue yonder

outcomes. His bare-boned, strictly-by- to matter, election after election, is
the-numbers approach has a fairly inflation, output, growth and the pen-
impressive record, usually coming alty you get for being the incumbent

Data clouds Biden’s within 3% of the final tally.

Sadly for Democrats – if Fair’s
on track again this time – the Biden
party in the White House.”
Fair will update his model before
the election and, given its economic
midterm ray of hope administration
admin
control
will struggle to keep
contro of Congress in November’s
focus, Biden’s percentages are unlikely
to improve. Inflation remains close to
crucial
crucia midterm elections. a 40-year high – soaring prices are now
Elections
Ele are noisy events and costing the average American house-
By Dominic this year’s
y is no different. Recent hold an extra $717 a month.
Rushe pollin
polling suggests Joe Biden is on a The US economy has shrunk for
roll, re
reclaiming some of the ground two consecutive quarters, a sign
he lost
los earlier in his presidency. The taken by many as a harbinger of reces-
Democrats
Demo have passed major legisla- sion. Interest rates are rising at their
tion. There
T has been a surge in women sharpest pace since the 1990s as the
registering
registe to vote after the supreme Federal Reserve fights to tamp down
court overturned Roe v Wade. Abor- price rises.
tion rights
ri drove voters to the polls The strength of the economic
in deep-red
dee Kansas. Petrol prices, if headwinds Biden faces are apparent
not ovoverall inflation, are falling. In the even in his improving poll numbers.
meantime,
meant Donald Trump and the can- About 69% of Americans think the
didates
didate he has backed are dominating nation’s economy is getting worse
the headlines
he and helping Democrats’ – the highest percentage since 2008
poll nu
numbers. – according to an ABC News/Washing-
But if Fair is right, we can largely set ton Post poll.
aside tthe personalities and the issues: Fair doesn’t think elections are
the ececonomy is the signal behind the only about the economy. “This is not
a Biden is still in trouble.
noise and a perfect story, there’s room for other
Using
Usin data going back to 1916, Fair’s stories in each election,” he said. Given
latest analysis suggests that Demo- the equations narrow, economic focus
crats will
w get 46.7% of the national vote he said it was “reasonable” that people
in Nov
November – down from the 51.3% in were now looking at what other fac-
2020 when
w Biden defeated Trump and tors might impact the Democratic vote
took ccontrol of the House and a slim share in the midterms.
majority
majori in the Senate. One factor that may have skewed
Fair’s
Fair model looks at the national his results in the past, and could do
picture,
pictur he doesn’t dig down to state again, is Trump. In 2016 Fair’s model
battles
battle and won’t be drawn into predicted Hillary Clinton would beat
more g granular prognostications. But Trump. She did win 2.9m more votes
given the gloomy economic picture than Trump, securing 48.2% of the
in rec
recent months, his prediction is vote to Trump’s 46.1%. But she lost in
unlikely
unlike to improve before November the electoral college.
and susuggests a loss in the House and a This time too Trump could be a
very totough fight to keep control of the factor, although he is difficult to meas-
Senate.
Senate When Fair’s last prediction was ure. “There are many reasons why the
published
publish in July, the Democrats’ share Democrats may do better. Certainly
of the vote had fallen from 48.99% in Trump could be one of them,” said Fair.
October,
Octob “due to two fewer strong But history – or at least the history
growt quarters and slightly higher
growth that Fair measures – suggests for all the
inflati ”. The economic  malaise
inflation recent positive polling, the Democrats
has on
 only deepened since then. face an uphill struggle this November.
“How large is the error I make on
average? It’s about 3 percentage points.
‘Wh seems to
‘What If the prediction is 47, that would get
you up to 50. So it’s a long shot that
matter, election after
mat
EVAN VUCCI/AP

the Democrats would get more than

half,” he said.
election, is inflation,
elec
DOMINIC RUSHE IS BUSINESS EDITOR
output and growth’
outp FOR GUARDIAN US

The Guardian Weekly

y 30 September 2022

U N I T E D S TAT E S
The city that
never sleeps
struggles to
get the party
going again
By Edward Helmore
N
ew York is the city that
never sleeps. Or is it? Post-
pandemic, short-staffed
restaurants are closing ear-
lier and late-night bars, gyms and clubs
are less plentiful than they once were.
Amid the economic stress, back-
to-work drives, crime and other
quality-of -life issues facing the
metropolis, mayor Eric Adams and
the city’s Office of Nightlife are fight-
ing to reclaim the small hours and get
New Yorkers back to the dancefloors.
“As New York recovers from the
global pandemic, one may wonder
whether its reputation as a 24-hour
town is in jeopardy,” the New York
Times fretted last week.
“It’s sad that it’s difficult to buy a
slice of pizza after 10pm, but I think we
will become a 24-hour city again soon,”
said Paul Sevigny, brother of actor
Chloe, who has run a series of night-
clubs including Don Hill’s, Beatrice Inn
and currently Baby Grand and Paul’s
Casablanca.
“The powers-that-be understand
what a loss it would be to the city if it
was not known as the city that never
sleeps,” he said. “The last thing they
want is for it to end up like Boston
with all of the troubles and none of
the benefits.”
Sevigny said demand for nightlife
in the city is returning.
Han Jiang, a stylist at Saint Laurent
who DJs at Sevigny’s clubs, said cus-
tomers are in a nostalgic mood, and are
favouring Abba and Michael Jackson
as well as looking for something new.
A 2019 report from the city’s Office
of Nightlife estimated the night-time
economy supported 299,000 jobs
with $13.1bn in employee salaries and
$35.1bn in total output. It noted that
“throughout its long history, nightlife
has been central to New York City’s
identity. The ‘city that never sleeps’ is
a destination for dreamers and doers
and an epicentre of creativity.”
But there are also post-pandemic
issues: New York has bounced back
slowly. Employers are battling to get
workers to return to offices and the city
has lost 176,000 jobs. Vacancies that
do exist, often late-night or for low pay,
have proved tough to fill.
But the shortage of workers and a
surge in street crime and homelessness
has led to anxiety among residents.
The Office of Nightlife’s executive
director, Ariel Palitz, told the Observer
that the city is still in its recovery. “The
compassionate perspective is not that
Covid was a fatal blow to the persona
of the city. We’re in a process of healing
and improving.”
33
Palitz’s office has undertaken a
number of reforms, including intro-
ducing mechanisms for smoothing
disputes between clubs and commu-
nity boards, mental health care for
nightlife workers and a Narcan Behind
Every Bar campaign to ensure clubs
have overdose kits to help cope with
drugs adulterated with fentanyl.
Young people, said Palitz, still have
a strong urge to get out and stay out,
 Celebrities at to let go, drink and dance. “But now
Studio 54 in 1978 we have an opportunity to build back
include Bianca better. We had come to a full-stop, and
Jagger (centre), we can’t just go back to how it was.”
Liza Minnelli Leading that charge is the mayor
(back right) and himself, Eric Adams. He is often to
Andy Warhol be found at Osteria La Baia, an Ital-
(right) ian restaurant in midtown, or at Zero
ROBIN PLATZER/GETTY Bond, a private members’ club whose
owner was recently appointed to the
board of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art on Adams’ recommendation.
“It ain’t an album release party
until the mayor gets here,” the rapper
French Montana said in an Instagram
post over the summer.
“When you’re out at night, it helps
decrease crime. It attracts tourists,”
Adams said before he took office.
“He goes everywhere,” said
Sevigny. “We love him.” But some have
already begun questioning whether
his enthusiasm for the night could
create conflicts of interest.
“He unapologetically understands
that New York is a 24-hour city,” said
Palitz. “He’s prioritised that New York
is not just about 9-to-5, Wall Street,
getting people back into offices. It’s
about getting people back into the
Empire state clubs, workers back behind the bar,
The value of DJ-ing and back to entertaining our
businesses and our visitors.”
24-hour NYC
But Jiang said the nightlife scene
has changed for reasons that predate
299k
Number of
the pandemic. “People used to be able
to get loose in nightclubs and feel com-
pletely safe but social media changed
jobs the night- that. They worry people might pull out
time economy a camera.”
supported in Sevigny’s defunct Beatrice Inn, one
2019 of the last legendary wild dives, came
just before the advent of the smart-
$13bn phone. Customers may not mind being
photographed on the way in, but once
The value of inside Sevigny now has a no-pictures
salaries policy in his other clubs. “A lot of
places made their reputations off bold-
$35bn faced names but you won’t see those
names doing what they used to do in
Total output of New York,” he said. Observer
2019 night-time EDWARD HELMORE REPORTS ON THE US
economy FOR THE GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
 Jack and Josh
were once
a standup
double act.
What led
them both

Divine comedy away from a

world of telling
absurdist jokes,
and set them
on a path to the
priesthood?

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022

 35

 Hip priests Jack Chisnall at Pusey House in Oxford (left) and Josh Dolphin at All Saints Margaret Street church in Marylebone, central London

By
Lamorna
Ash
Portraits by
CHRISTIAN SINIBALDI

J
ack Chisnall knocked twice on the dark pew and the
congregation stood. There was a short silence, the even-
ing traffic beyond just audible. Then he started to sing.
Alone at first, his voice mounting and clear, before the
rest of us joined in. At this chapel, Pusey House in central
Oxford, the psalms are recited antiphonally, those on the
left singing the first verse, those on the right the next, the strange
poetry of the Old Testament passing back and forth like information
moving between the hemispheres of the brain.
Jack led us through the lineaments of the service – the Nunc dimittis
(The Song of Simeon), the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer. Under his
long black cassock, he wore a bright red short-sleeved shirt tucked into
belted drainpipe jeans, a look that marked him out from the regulars
in their blazers and ties of varying browns and greys. The way he sang,
the way he held himself, everything about him suggested this was
the place he was meant to be, as if had never lived another way. After
the service, I leaned over to say something to this effect. He shook
his head and sighed: “Thanks, but I fucked the Nunc.”
Six years earlier, Jack had not believed in God. Neither had his best
friend from university, Josh Dolphin. Neither is sure who became a
Christian first. How do you locate the moment of religious conversion?
It’s like trying to work out the instant you started loving someone.
It could have been the first time they entered a church of their own
volition, the first time they felt moved during a service, the first time
the empty tomb of Jesus Christ – the resurrection itself – became a
plausible truth to their minds.
After they graduated in 2016, their greatest ambition had 
been to become comedians. They formed a double act, called

30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly

36 Divine comedy

themselves Moon, spent their weekends performing absurdist sketch

shows in pub theatres, dressed in matching white boiler suits. It lasted
several years, this dream of names in lights. But now neither of them
wanted to be comedians. They wanted to be Church of England priests.
News about their religious reorientation passed in half-whispers
among Josh and Jack’s university friends, myself included. The fact
they were joining the priesthood was sometimes couched as an
enigma, sometimes as a tragedy.
We could not understand why they were giving up their futures for
a dying tradition. Why they were choosing a life marked by cloisters
and considerable darkness over being anything they wanted, over
everything. And so, in early 2021, in the midst of a third Covid-19
lockdown, I decided to ask them.
Josh and Jack are in their mid-20s, which is young for priesthood.
In 2020, the average age at ordination to deacon was almost 46 in
the Church of England. The numbers of young people becoming
priests is low partly because the number of young Christians is low,
and continuing to decline. The majority of young people in Britain
define themselves as having no religion at all. When the results of the
new UK Census are issued later this year, the number of respondents
who tick Christianity as their faith is predicted to drop below 50%
for the first time. In other words, it is far from usual for two young
British men from secular backgrounds to give their lives to the cloth
in the 21st century.
It takes at least six years to become a fully qualified Church of
England priest. This involves the kind of training that many jobs
demand: academic study, practical experience and so on. It also
involves a more profound kind of transformation. In the Book of
Revelation, it is prophesied that Christ will return once more to Earth
from the east. Most Christians are buried facing east for this reason,
to rise from the soil at the second coming and see their saviour face to
face. Priests and bishops, however, are buried facing west, to stand,
as they did in life, before their congregations, guiding them onwards
into eternity. Becoming a priest does not just alter a person’s mortal
life; it is a role that extends beyond time itself.
The 19th-century Anglican priest and theologian RC Moberly As he stood at the altar, all Jack
described the priesthood as a “living sacrifice”. Your life is no longer
your own; it is lived in service of a community of believers. One priest
could think was: ‘Look where I
ordained in his 20s told me he spent his first two weeks as a minister in
constant floods of tears. “Just walking up the street wearing a clerical
am now, on top of the mountain’
collar made me feel so exposed and vulnerable,” he explained. “Like
I had to represent the Church, God, all of it.”
the time he took his A-levels, he was an equally zealous atheist. Josh’s
ON MEETING, JACK AND JOSH EXPERIENCED an mind is less of a warring state than Jack’s. He was not religious as a
instant affinity. They had grown up 150km apart, on teenager, but he has happy memories of spending time in the parish
the peripheries of hefty industrial cities. Jack was church. Josh arrived at Oxford in 2012 to study history, Jack in 2013
from Wigan, Josh from Cleobury Mortimer, a market for English. Once there, Jack devoted himself to comedy. The first
town not far from Birmingham. Their dads had both time Josh saw him on stage, he couldn’t get over Jack’s brilliance.
started their careers on factory floors and graduated After the show, he told him: “You should do a sequel of that, but with
to soft management. They both had mums who were me in it, too.” Jack was quick and witty. But he was also more honest
“good on eBay”, as Jack put it. They each had one than other people Josh had met at university. No one else talked about
sibling, a younger brother. Their granddads provided them with a diet how punishing it was. Likewise, Jack admired how straightforwardly,
of classic British comedy – Only Fools and Horses and Blackadder. They unapologetically himself Josh seemed. In each other they both dis-
were good kids and high flyers, precocious to the verge of pretentious- covered qualities they could not see were also in themselves: someone
ness. Josh declared his favourite film to be The Godfather before he’d grounded and earnest, who reminded them of home.
seen it. In photographs from family holidays, Jack would be sitting Jack is taller, more angular than Josh. The first time Josh saw a
alone on the beach, reading some enormous novel. No one in their Rembrandt self-portrait, he thought: at last, people who look like me
families had been to institutions such as Oxford or Cambridge, but getting some representation in art. He has soft features, a stooped
since they could remember, Jack and Josh were determined to end posture and droopy eyes that suggest a melancholic disposition. This
up there, gracing the same stages where so many of their comedy impression falls away as soon as he speaks. When together, Josh is the
heroes had begun their careers. more animated of the pair. At any hint of a joke from Jack, he throws
Their parents didn’t go to church. Still, neither Josh nor Jack his head back and slaps his knees appreciatively. Jack is more sensi-
remembers a time when they felt apathetic about God. Jack is a man tive and self-critical. He sometimes disappears into himself without
of extremes. In his early adolescence, he was zealously religious. By warning. We spoke every few months between 2021 and 2022. The

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022


deepening of his commitment to Christianity during this period meant
that on each occasion we talked, the version of himself from our last
meeting had already become an object of some disdain.
There are two distinct routes to faith among those who don’t grow
up Christian. The first is person-led. One priest I spoke to followed a
girl he fancied into a church. He walked in an atheist and came out
a believer. The process isn’t always so quick. One devout Christian,
named Chris, told me that it had started on his gap year when he met
a Pentecostal Christian. Every day the two spoke about faith. At the
end of the year, Chris went to visit his new friend’s church. There the
friend spoke to him through the Holy Spirit. In that heightened state,
he told Chris truths about himself no one else knew. After that, Chris
could think of no further reason not to become a Christian.
Others arrive at church after trauma. One 19-year-old I spoke to
found himself in a cathedral, having recently lost both his grand-
parents. There, in the partial darkness, the vast interior illuminated
only by candlelight, the air thick with incense, as the choir sang the
Magnificat, he began to weep. He could feel his grandparents beside
him and was released. “Something had fallen into place,” he told me.
Neither Josh nor Jack found faith while at university, but the con-
ditions for their conversions were likely set there. A panic attack the
night before Josh handed in his thesis had led him to take a year out.
It shocked his mum. She hadn’t realised the pressures he put himself
under. “We’re still the same here. Nothing changes with us,” she
remembers saying when Josh came home to recover. “But things are
so different for you now.”
WHEN HE RETURNED TO OXFORD THE FOLLOWING
YEAR, Josh sought out ways to stave off another
breakdown. He ended up attending morning prayers
with a friend at his college chapel. It was not a con-
version, but it provided a stabilising ritual, which
seemed to open a new region in his mind – this could
be somewhere you go when you’re in trouble.
Jack had a similar crisis of confidence in his final
term. One evening he walked over to his tutor’s office and asked him:
“What’s the point in literary criticism?” From there, it was a small step
to: “What’s literature for?” The questions kept unfolding all the way
up to: “What’s the universe for?” He sees this moment as the origin
of his faith. His younger brother, Callum, considers it inevitable that
Jack ended up at God. He had that kind of mind. “It was too big a
question for him not to get his teeth into,” he said.
When I suggested to Rev Helen Fraser, the Church of England’s head
of vocations, that many of the conversions I’d heard of were borne
out of despair, I found myself immediately apologising. “It doesn’t
sound negative to say you find God when you’re low,” she corrected
me. “I would just say instead: ‘God finds you when you’re low.’” I had
begun to understand that this reframing is part of what it means to
be Christian: fate elided with faith, each experience reworked into
further evidence for the existence of a loving God.
The place where Jack hoped to come to faith was St Bartholomew
the Great, London’s oldest parish church, which was founded in the
12th century – as if a church with a weighty past might more readily
catalyse a conversion. It took him two attempts to get there. The first
time he dressed smartly, got to his front door, then changed his mind
and retreated back to his bedroom. He had graduated that summer, in
2016, and now he was in London, living with a set of close comedian
friends. But the atmosphere in the house was miserable. A week
before Christmas, they threw a house party. That night Jack struggled
to get a purchase on conversations. To make matters worse, his ex
was there with a new boyfriend. The next morning, waking to a scene
of splayed bodies and spilt beers, something snapped: he ordered a
Bible and a Book of Common Prayer on Amazon, promising himself
he would start attending church in the new year.
37
His first service was evening prayers in the bitter heart of winter,
January 2017. The whole thing – all that glass and refracted light, the
choir’s voice resounding around Norman stone – struck him in a way
nothing else had. He sat in the back row, trying to make sense of the
vast, oppositional thoughts in his mind. Christians were supposed
to be the ones who’d got it wrong. It was his friends, all those drunk,
unhappy people from the house party, who knew how to live now.
“Which team do I want to be on?” he remembered thinking.
Church services offered a system and order to Jack’s weeks. All
those steeples interrupting the skyline, previously unnoticed because
he had not needed them – they now took on a new meaning. He picked
his team. He skipped the next few house parties and started going to
St Bart’s most Sundays.
The style of churchmanship at St Bartholomew’s is high church,
or Anglo-Catholic – a misleading name for what is, in fact, a branch
of Protestant Christianity, though one with close ties to the Catholic
origins of the Church. There is a solemnity to proceedings, the ministry
dressed in smart, pleated cassocks, the congregation in suits, the
services closely imitative of their “smells and bells” Catholic heritage.
The type of church where a new Christian ends up is often down to
chance – the one closest to your flat, the one your friend attends. Some
find themselves drawn to a particular branch of Christianity – the
accessibility and exuberance of evangelical churches, for example,
or the prescribed rituals of Anglo-Catholicism – while daunted or
dispirited by another.
That first year out of university, while Jack was in London, Josh
was completing a history fellowship at Princeton. On one of their
many Skype calls across the Atlantic, Jack mentioned to Josh that he’d
started going to church – and Josh lit up. He had never felt lonelier than
he did in the US. Some afternoons, he would find himself loitering
outside the church at the centre of campus. But he found he couldn’t
go in. It was strange. He’d never felt wary of churches before. Now
it was as if just stepping over that sacred threshold might provoke
some irreversible change in identity.
But with Jack lighting the way ahead, faith suddenly seemed a
plausible option for Josh, too. For both of them, university was sup-
posed to have been the key to a shining future. Instead, they had left
feeling rudderless. Here, at last, was a way out. “Sorted!” Josh thought.
“I’m sorted now.” It is much easier to remain convinced of your own
choices when someone else is making the same ones alongside you.
RECENTLY JACK HAS STARTED PICTURING HIS LIFE
as a great house comprising many rooms. There
are rooms for your friendships, your love life, your
career, rooms that you put signs outside declaring: I
do not want this changed by my religion. Gradually,
though, God starts knocking on the doors of more
rooms, asking to join you in there, too. “And it’s
difficult and painful and annoying,” he told me.
But God’s presence also changes your experience of the rooms. You
realise this was how they were supposed to look all along. You realise
they have become brighter.
After Josh came back from the US in the autumn of 2017, he moved
into the house with Jack. While Jack continued going to St Bart’s,
Josh settled on All Saints Margaret Street, an ornate high gothic,
Anglo-Catholic church in Marylebone in central London. Josh found
it easier than Jack to throw himself into the embodied aspects of
faith, attending as many services as possible, memorising prayers
and when to bow his head, kneel, cross himself.
Outside of religion, most of their time together was spent dreaming
up sketches for their comedy double act. Their first Edinburgh Fringe
in 2018 was a success – a set of interrelated skits that darted
between the weird, the brutal and the unashamedly silly. Eve- 
ryone said it was impossible to get noticed your first year at
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
38 Divine comedy
the Fringe, but they sold out their shows, received a host of five-star
reviews and ended up performing a run at Soho Theatre in London.
A month after Edinburgh, in September 2018, Josh celebrated his
confirmation, the Anglican rite in which the believer makes their first
serious commitment to God since baptism. (Jack did not get confirmed
until 2021.) It was around this time that Christianity started inflect-
ing their comedy. Jack wasn’t sure whether there should be smut or
swearing any more.
For now, though, Jack was still operating within the outer rings of
his new faith. He could not imagine actually ending up ordained. At
the same time, Josh was rapidly moving towards the centre of his reli-
gion. On Shrove Tuesday 2019, Josh began discernment, the process
during which Anglicans ascertain if God is calling them to ministry.
LAST YEAR, I MET A PRIEST NAMED BRUTUS GREEN
at his church in Putney. We sat on a bench looking
out over the church lawn, where teenagers were
sunbathing. A few years ago, Green published a
paper on priestly formation, the process ordinands
go through at theological college. He argued that
“formation” implied a simultaneous deformation
of one’s past self, a rupture between who you were
before and after your ordination – when the bishop lays his hands on
your head and confers into your body the authority of the Holy Spirit.
It can take a while to get used to this change. I heard of one young
priest who, on his first day wearing a collar, was carrying a broken
microwave out of the vicarage when someone called out: “Morning
Vicar!” He was so shocked to be addressed that way, he let go of the
microwave and it crashed to the ground.
Training for priesthood usually takes six years, and follows distinct
stages: discernment (roughly a year); ministerial formation, usually
at a theological college (two or three years); then, after ordination,
three years of practical training as a curate (an assistant priest), first
as a deacon, then as a priest, at a parish church.
One day last year, I visited Trinity College Bristol, a residential
theological college with a mostly evangelical student body. I was
placed in a circle of seven ordinands in an airy room, and told I
could interview them simultaneously. One by one, working clock-
wise around the circle, they told me their names and why they were
becoming priests. Though only 23% of ordinands who began their
training in 2020 were under 32, those present were all in their 20s and
early 30s. Annabelle, the quietest of the group, described finding her
old school year book the other day. By her name was written: “Most
likely to be a priest.” At this the chorus of ordinands oohed.
Ordinands complete a core curriculum as well as carrying out
placements at local churches. Trinity Bristol has an “introduc-
tion to preaching” module, with assistance from a voice coach. At
Cranmer Hall in Durham, there is a module on death and dying, where
ordinands practise writing eulogies for people they have never met.
A student at Trinity Bristol described a lecture they had on “the pull
of the collar”. Wearing a clerical collar, they told me, can make you
more attractive. In the class they were taught how to avoid taking
advantage of this newfound appeal.
After graduating, you are ordained as a deacon, then, a year later, as
a priest. “A priest has completely broken cover,” Josh told me. “They
become a walking sacrament.” Only priests can absolve sin – though
absolution is better associated with Catholicism, Anglican priests may
provide general absolution to their congregation – bless people and
consecrate the eucharist. New priests describe their first eucharists
as a blur of nerves – each recalibration of self, each difficulty faced
over those half-dozen years, all preparing for this moment, when
Christ is encountered through the bread and wine.
Alongside the transcendent moments, the job is often mundane.
Priests have endless admin. You have to maintain the church buildings,
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
organise volunteers, run after-school clubs and food banks. You deal
with pastoral visits throughout the week from members of your par-
ish – 5% of your congregation take up 95% of your time, one priest
told me. The afternoon I spent in the back office of Rev Georgina
Elsey’s church near Hyde Park, she had three hour-long meetings
with members of her congregation, one of whom, an elderly woman,
wanted to discuss the details of her impending death and funeral.
“You are engaging with people from their birth to their death,” Green
said. “You’re not worshipping for yourself once you’re a priest – you
worship for others.”
LEAVING COMEDY WASN’T A STRUGGLE for Josh.
Alongside discernment, he was working as a learning
support assistant at a Church of England school in
London, and he felt happier and more rooted than
he’d been in a long time. For Jack, it was harder to let
go of his dream of becoming a “hot-shot comedian”,
as he put it.
Seeking a way out, he applied for a postgraduate
diploma (a qualification similar to a master’s degree in kind, but
shorter in duration) in applied theology at St Stephen’s House, a
theological college with Anglo-Catholic leanings. In September 2020,
he moved back to Oxford to begin his new studies there. It was the
midst of the pandemic; even if he’d wanted it, there was no comedy
stage for him to return to.
Near the end of his first year at St Stephen’s, Jack went through a
breakup. They had been going out for a year, and were in love. Her
lack of faith seemed no obstacle at first. God had not entered that
room yet. But the further he progressed into a Christian community,
the more difficult it became. He wanted to be with someone he could
pray with, someone to share in the new set of principles redefining
his life. Eventually, he came to believe that the most loving thing he
could do was not be with her any more.
To his secular friends, the breakup made no sense. One sent him a
long, concerned WhatsApp message. “You’re throwing away some-
thing that makes you really happy for the sake of your religion,” he
wrote. “I’m worried about you giving your life to this thing.”
There are other topics that Jack and Josh find hard to broach with
their friends. Both of them now define themselves as “pro-life”.
Their positions on this issue are still crystallising. When I asked Jack
about abortion while visiting him in Oxford in early 2022, he rubbed
his eyes hard with his fingers and did not speak for 10, 20 seconds.
As we discussed the subject, he seemed to be trying to figure out in
real time what his faith might require of him, and how far that might
separate him from me. Later, I raised the same subject with Josh, and
under the shade of a tree in Regent’s Park, he sighed and pressed his
face into his hands. Just as Jack had, Josh quoted Genesis: “All life
is sacred.” He was reluctant to give a definitive answer; he had not
received any training yet on the issue from the Church. All he would
say is that people ought to think carefully about their decision. But,
he pressed on. “Whatever decision they come to, God is with them.
God does not give up on us.” Both Josh and Jack said they would not
advocate for abortion to become illegal.
Jack has also begun refashioning his views on sex, choosing to be
celibate before marriage. Watching Josh and Jack’s views migrate over
lines I had not imagined they would ever cross made me nervous.
Sometimes I envied the certainty that faith gave them, but sometimes
I worried that that certainty had become a barricade between us.
How can a person travel from one ethical standpoint to another like
that? How can you have no belief, and after only a few years see the
Christian faith as the gamut by which you live your life? Sometimes
as we talked, I wanted to ask if this was their final conviction, if there
might not be another shift to a new worldview in five, 10 years’ time.
“Have you considered that one day you will look back at the 27-year-

Josh started attending prayers at
his college chapel. It seemed to
open a new region in his mind
old Jack and be amazed he could believe what he did back then?”
I prompted. Jack laughed. He compared it to being in love. When
you’re in love, you say all these things to a person. And you really
mean them. But after that relationship has ended, you ask yourself:
“How can I reconcile the fact that I really meant them, and yet, I can’t
say them, or don’t mean them now?” It is frightening to acknowledge
our current feelings might not last. “Of course,” Jack said, “it may be
the case that in 20 years I’m saying, actually it’s Allah I believe in,
and now I want to be an imam, or something.” But even as he said it,
I felt he didn’t mean it.
IN MAY 2021, JACK FINALLY ENTERED DISCERN-
MENT. Having spent eight months at St Stephen’s
living among ordinands, priesthood no longer felt
so remote. I visited him around that time, at his flat
in Oxford. An ordinand from St Stephen’s joined us
for dinner. She asked if Jack would say grace, and
the three of us bowed our heads while Jack extem-
porised a prayer. His friendships at St Stephen’s are
much like his old ones, characterised by silly jokes and idle chat about
music, sport, he said. But most lines of conversation that night led
determinedly back to faith. A few days previously, Jack told me,
39
St Stephen’s had held a movie night. Someone chose Hereditary, a
horror film complete with hauntings and satanic rituals. One of the
ordinands kept gasping and averting his eyes. At first Jack thought he
was doing it sarcastically; he was astonished when he later found out
that the ordinand actually had a pronounced belief in demonologies,
the doctrine of demons acting on the physical world. A year later,
when I brought this anecdote up with Jack, he admitted that he no
longer discounted the possibility of demons, either: he has learned
to take seriously Christ’s warning about spiritual warfare on earth.
The next time I visited him in Oxford, Jack had moved out of his
flat to Pusey House, the Anglo-Catholic establishment in the centre of
the city, comprising living quarters, an elegant gothic-revival chapel
and an extensive library of theological texts. He slept in an attic room
with a single bed. On his mantelpiece was a postcard of Grünewald’s
Crucifixion, displaying so vividly the agony of Christ, next to a pop
art photomontage of the Beatles. It was November 2021. For more
than a year, Jack had been living away from those places where faith
rubbed up abrasively against the rest of his life.
This was when I saw Jack leading evening prayers, and was struck
by how at home he seemed before a congregation. A few hours later,
we returned to the small chapel so he could prepare for compline,
the last service of the day. I understood now why Jack had found it
hard loving someone who didn’t pray with him. Prayer was no longer
a distraction in his day. This was where his life happened.
I had never witnessed the moments preceding a church service
before. The vaulted space feels less sacrosanct with a stepladder
before the altar, where, on this occasion, Jack was balanced precari-
ously trying to light the candelabra. His colleague arrived to burn
black tablets of incense in the thurible, the metal container suspended
from chains that is commonly used in Anglo-Catholic services. As
he swung the thurible, the chapel began to lose its edges. Look, he
gestured to me, and performed a whole orbit over his head, leaving
behind a hazy ring of smoke. Soon the electric lights were extinguished
and the congregation entered holding candles and we began to sing
once more. In those moments I saw the extent of an active faith: the
mundane and transcendent, the two drawn so close together.
Not long ago, I went to visit Josh, who is now a history teacher at
the Church of England school. His journey towards priesthood had
stuttered the last year. Midway through 2021, he put his discernment
on hold, deciding that teaching was a sufficient call on his life. But he
kept going to church, kept praying for consolation, and over time his
faith was restored. Amid the “mirth and turbulence of relationships”
that being a teacher provides, Josh finds he can feel God’s presence
most closely. As I watched him in front of his class of cool, anxious
sixth-formers, he seemed to gain in stature, to grow more assured.
After class, he told me he had started on discernment again. He wants
to become a chaplain in a school. He and Jack might even end up at
Oxford together again for theological college.
The day after visiting Josh, I went to see Jack one last time at Pusey
House. We sat on deep red armchairs in an opulent study, Jack reach-
ing up now and then to play with the tall lamp beside his chair. He
told me that the other day he was asked to assist the priest with the
Sunday high mass for the first time. Standing before the altar, as the
bread and wine were consecrated, all he could think was: “Look where
I am now, on top of the mountain.” He told me he’s dating someone
new. They pray together. They’re keeping to their vow of celibacy,
which is not easy. They go on dates in public places to avoid getting
too close – long walks, golf. They’ll probably end up at an owl sanctu-
ary soon, he joked. But it feels more intimate than any relationship
he has had before. God has knocked and come into another room,
Jack said. And as he did so, he twisted the lamp shade again so that
the emanation from the bulb shone out rather than down. And then
there was a little more light •
LAMORNA ASH IS A WRITER AND EDUCATION SPECIALIST
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
40

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022

 Illustration by ANA YAEL 41

Face value
The smiley has been co-opted by ravers, artists and fashion
designers for decades. So how does the 50-year-old company
that owns the symbol keep it relevant? By Will Coldwell

30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly

42 Face value

ICOLAS LOUFRANI, CE O
OF THE SMILEY COMPANY, has sharp features, and a
sharper grin. I find him in his London office, beaming ener-
getically, clutching a poster that says: “Take the time to
smile.” Around him, the room fizzes with iterations of the
icon – you know the one. Fluorescent lights in the shape
of that unmistakably simple, upbeat expression. Clothing,
homeware, bottles of prosecco … all stamped with it. A
basketball net boasts a smiling backboard to hurl a ball at. A
bowl of fruit? Also happy. I spot a framed print of Vermeer’s
Girl With a Pearl Earring, her face replaced with a yellow
smirk. Nothing is off limits. The Smiley Company puts smi-
leys on things. Last year it sold $486m worth of products.
Loufrani, 50, greets me with fast-talk and a French
accent, steering me to a meeting room. We brush past
employees in smiley-smattered harem pants, bearing Mac-
Books slapped with smiley stickers. They smile politely. We
smile back. A fashionable young workforce busies itself at
computers. Every season Loufrani and his team come up
with hundreds of new concepts for smiley-based products
and promotions and pitch them to brands. The Smiley
Company owns the rights to the image in more than 100
countries. Yes, the smiley – at least, this particular version
of it – is a trademarked image. Want to use it? You gotta pay.
The Smiley Company is ranked one of the world’s top 100
licensing businesses, with 458 licensees in 158 countries.
It boasts thousands of products, from health and beauty
to homeware. This year it celebrates its 50th anniversary,
which means smiles all round; 65 new partnerships and
collaborations. If you’ve noticed more smileys on the high
street lately, now you know why.
“We do a lot, but we also don’t do that much,” Loufrani
tells me. “We’re very, very protective of our brand. We try
to be creative. We try to avoid having products with just
a big yellow face.” To Loufrani, who has, in recent years,
expanded the company to create a good news platform to
promote charities and social enterprises, the smiley is not
simply a logo, it’s a “movement”. It stands for “defiant
optimism, positive thinking, empathy, doing good”. As
the world simmers in these distinctly un-smiley times, It doesn’t have any
Loufrani believes the Smiley Company has a lot to offer.
Smiles may be down – according to the Smiley Company’s
own smile index survey – but, thanks to a declaration by
negative connotations.
the company, 2022 is set to be the “year of smiles”.
Smileys have drifted across the pop-cultural ether since
I think it’s up there with
the 1950s. A yellow-and-black one first showed its face in
1961, when it was printed on a promotional sweatshirt by
religious iconography
the New York radio station WMC A to promote a news-talk

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022


show, Good Guys. Thousands were given away. But many
people credit Harvey Ball, an ad-man from Worcester, Mas-
sachusetts, for designing the smiley in its most iconic form.
In 1963 Ball was hired by the State Mutual Life Assurance
Company to create a smiley face icon to boost company
morale. He penned his design in 10 minutes. Two dots and
a flick, though not without artistic distinction – Bill Wallace,
executive director of the Worcester Historical Museum, has
compared the imperfect slant of its mouth to the smile of the
Mona Lisa. Ball was paid $45. The company produced pins
with a smiley face on it, and sold millions over the course
of the decade, though Ball did not trademark the design.
Later, in 1971, Bernard and Murray Spain, two brothers who
ran a couple of Hallmark card shops in Philadelphia, spotted
Ball’s design, and copyrighted a version that combined the
image with the slogan: “Have a Happy Day”, selling more
than 50m buttons in the first year alone.
The Smiley Company itself harks back to 1972, when
Loufrani’s father, Franklin, became the first person to
register the smiley as a trademark – taking ownership of it as
a commercial logo – which he did in France. His background
spanned journalism, advertising and licensing. If you
wanted to market a Batman product in France during the
1960s, Franklin was your guy. Babar the Elephant merch?
Speak to Franklin. Licensing – when intellectual property
rights are granted to third parties for a fee or royalties –
was a relatively novel concept back then and Franklin hit
the jackpot the following decade. Fed up with downbeat
reporting and miserable headlines, Franklin pitched a new
column to the newspaper France-Soir called “Prenez le
Temps de Sourire” or “Take the Time to Smile”, along with
a simple hand-drawn yellow smiley face to signpost good-
news stories. Through his company, then called Knowledge
Management International, he licensed the smiley to other
newspapers, then other companies and products. He made
a deal with Mars, which stamped smileys on Bonitos choco-
late pieces, then Levi’s, which whacked it on jeans. It turned
out you could put a smiley on almost anything and sell it.
It can be difficult to imagine how such a simple icon
 Happy days could even be owned, but whether through genius or luck,
Nicolas Loufrani, Franklin had struck gold. The Smiley Company has fielded
CEO of the Smiley criticism for staking a claim to something so pervasive, but
Company, says there don’t seem to be too hard feelings on Ball’s part. He
the symbol died in 2001, but was “not a money-driven guy”, according
stands for ‘defiant to his son, Charles Ball, who told the Worcester Telegram
optimism, & Gazette: “He used to say: ‘Hey, I can only eat one steak
positive thinking, at a time, drive one car at a time.’”
doing good’ To Loufrani it matters not who was first mover in the
ALBERTO BERNASCONI genesis of the smiley; the trademarking itself was tanta-
mount to a creative act. “He invented it in the sense that he
invented the business model of making smiley a brand,” he
says. “Apple, Adidas, Puma, Fred Perry … a lot of trademarks
are very simple designs. It’s not about who came up with
the design, it’s about who decided to build a business out
of it, to make it popular and to create values around it.”
Yet just as the use of the smiley in art, fashion and design
has ebbed and flowed with social and aesthetic trends, the
Smiley Company’s cycles of success have always depended
on external forces. Franklin rode these wave after wave. He
was unfazed by the shifting semiotics of a once-corporate
feelgood logo into something often quite subversive. It
was shrewd of him not to grapple for total control over
its meaning. If anything, as the smiley was woven into
the tapestry of 20th-century pop culture, it boosted sales.
 Prize draw Harvey Ball, who created 43
the symbol, and France-Soir’s column
PAUL CONNORS/AP
Designed to deliver a simple feelgood hit, it soon became
entwined with anti-war and anti-establishment sentiments
– a 1970s photograph shows peace protesters assembled
in smiley formation. Another depicts an American soldier
in Vietnam with a smiley sticker on his helmet. In 1986,
the artist Dave Gibbons depicted the smiley at its darkest,
when he designed the artwork for Alan Moore’s comic book
Watchmen. The cover depicts the smiley with a single drop
of blood trickling across its blank, yellow face.
But it was the birth of acid house that sent sales strato-
spheric. The smiley first permeated the club scene after the
designer Barnzley Armitage made a run of smiley T-shirts.
The DJ Danny Rampling bought one and started wearing it
in Ibiza. When Rampling launched his club night, Shoom,
in London, in 1987, a flyer design featured smileys raining
down like ecstasy pills. It was reborn as a symbol of utopian-
ism for a new generation of ravers. In 1989, when the UK
was in the midst of the second summer of love, Franklin’s
business hit peak smiley. Loufrani was a teenager at the
time. He’d hear about the deals his father was making. “The
numbers were quite shocking,” he says. “I was seeing smiley
products everywhere. He made one deal with a company
to produce something like 40m badges.”
HIS EXPLOSION OF SMILEY CULTURE WAS
SHORT-LIVED. By the time Loufrani took over, in 1996, the
business was, as he puts it, “burnt out … crap … meaning-
less. Smiley was dead.” Rave culture was tarnished by nega-
tive press and scaremongering about drug use. Licensing
deals disappeared as quickly as they came. “The prejudice
became the excuse,” says Loufrani, “but the truth is the
smiley was oversaturated. It just wasn’t something people
wanted any more.”
Loufrani was determined to rebuild the family business.
He took a different approach and began trademarking the
smiley around the world (a notable exception being the US,
where the Smiley Company settled out of court following
a 10-year legal battle with Walmart, which uses the logo in
its promotions). Loufrani also developed digital iterations
that could be licensed out, such as emoticons. He tinkered
with the design. Franklin wasn’t convinced. “He was
shouting at me, saying: ‘Why are you changing my 
smiley?’” says Loufrani. “I always say: imagine you
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
44 Face
Fa
Face value
were the son of Hugh Hefner and he asked you to relaurelaunch
Playboy, and you drew Bugs Bunny. It was like that.”
Just as a fleeting cultural nostalgia for the 1970s saw the
smiley mainlined into the rave scene, it would take another
wave of the sentiment to bring the smiley back into con-
temporary consciousness. By the late noughties, the 80s
were back in vogue. Loufrani – who previously worked
with the designer Ozwald Boateng and always had an eye
on the luxury fashion markets – negotiated collaborations
with the likes of Moschino, Armani and Supreme. His vision
was to reposition the Smiley Company as a heritage brand,
and the culture was buying into it.
The moment Loufrani really knew the Smiley Company
was back on top was when the image featured in the opening
ceremony for London’s 2012 Olympic Games. To the tune of
New Order’s Blue Monday, hundreds of dancers assembled
into a giant smiley, while giant inflatable smiley orbs rolled
around the arena. “Suddenly at the highest level, from the
British government who were organising the Games, the
smiley was accepted as part of your heyday as a nation. It
was embraced.”
HAT DOES THE SMILEY MEAN
TODAY? For Fraser Muggeridge, a graphic designer who has
used it in his work with artist Jeremy Deller (independently
of the Smiley Company), it remains a “universal symbol”
for fun. “No one goes: ‘Oh, I don’t like the smiley face,’”
he says. “It doesn’t have any negative connotations. It’s
up there with religious iconography.”
Still, he was surprised to discover that the image
maintains the power to provoke. When he and Deller were
asked by Somerset House to produce a flag to fly above
the building for its Utopia 2016 season (to mark 500 years
since the publication of Thomas More’s seminal text), they
landed on the image. At first, Somerset House was uneasy.
“They were initially concerned due to the smiley face’s
association with acid house, rave music and recreational
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
drugs,” he says. “But once the flag was up and people started  Selling smiles
taking pictures of it and seeing it as a positive symbol, it The Smiley
stayed up for two years.” Company has
Muggeridge remembers the smiley long before the birth 458 licensees in
of rave. “In the late 1970s and early 1980s I used to go to Sun- 158 countries; the
day school and we’d get smiley stickers to stick in our Bible design is used on
that said: ‘Jesus loves you.’ That’s a completely different products from
vibe to acid house. The reason I thought it was good is that health to
it always works.” He finds it strange that anyone can own its homeware
trademark. “Anyone can draw it themselves, make tweaks PAUL HARTNETT/PYMCA/
SHUTTERSTOCK
to it,” he says. “So in that sense it’s quite democratic.”
For Chelsea Berlin, an artist and author of the book
Rave Art, the smiley has become one of those icons that
has “smashed its way” through culture. “As soon as you
put the smiley face on something people think it must be
cool, hip, or related to rave culture,” she says. “But it’s seen
as a historic item rather than a powerful countercultural
force.” The commercialisation of the smiley by the Smiley
Company, she says, mirrors the trajectory dance music
has experienced since the late 1980s – subsumed into the
mainstream and sold back to us. So what happens when an
image like the smiley is dominated by a business like the
Smiley Company? “It becomes Disney,” she says.
The Smiley Company may be a multimillion-pound
operation, but at its heart is a fragility. Unlike Disney – one
of its major competitors in the licensing sector – it doesn’t
deal in a multitude of characters or worlds from its creative
catalogue. It doesn’t really make anything at all. It’s just that
simple symbol – and its value depends on a cultural consen-
sus that is always in flux. As Michael Cherman, founder of
streetwear brand Market, which has partnered the Smiley
Company to produce a range of products, tells me, the chal-
lenge for the Smiley Company will always be how to keep
it “as iconic as it is now”. Loufrani knows they have to be
creative. His big fear is always that the company will end
up back where it was in the mid-90s. “We need to adapt
the smiley to the zeitgeist, to make it relevant,” he says.
Yet in an era of infinite replication, when images and
logos can be shared and reimagined online in an instant,
there’s always the possibility that the smiley could take on a
life of its own, leaving the Smiley Company in possession of
an image at odds with its values. It is already visual fodder
for artists, many of whom have subverted its meaning,
often to raise questions about conformity and consumer-
ism. Banksy, for example, has placed smileys on the faces
of armed police and the grim reaper. For the most part,
creative use serves to reinforce the smiley as something
iconic, expansive. But what’s to stop it being co-opted by
darker forces? Pepe the Frog, an innocent character from a
web comic, was appropriated by far-right groups and is now
considered a hate symbol. Fleetingly, during the pandemic,
anti-mask movement #SmilesMatter encouraged followers
to wear a smiley badge to signal their views.
As I depart smiley HQ, I ask Loufrani if he is afraid that
one day, people will look at the smiley and see something
negative, unpleasant … sad … staring back at them? He’s
philosophical. Like his father, he knows that the smiley’s
power lies in it being used at all – even if the sentiment is
ambiguous, or subverted. “It’s the same between our smile
and a human smile,” he says. “It can mean different things
to people. If someone smiles at you, you don’t know what’s
on their mind. You might read it as happy … but they could
be imagining you falling off a cliff.” • Observer
WILL COLDWELL IS A WRITER BASED IN LONDON
 45
Comment is free, facts are sacred CP Scott 1918

ROBERTO SAVIANO
Giorgia Meloni
is a danger to
all of Europe
Page 47 

False optimism may cloud what

IRAN

we see on the streets of Tehran

▲ A protest in
Tehran following
Jason Burke
the death of
Mahsa Amini
GETTY 
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
46 Opinion
I
n December 1978, between 1 and 2 million
people marched peacefully through Tehran
calling for the Shah to leave. Around a fifth
to almost a half of the city’s population was
on the streets. The CIA, warily watching
opposition in a key regional ally and client for
US arms, noted that one man was “the focal
point”, providing “guidance and support
for the movement acting in his name in Iran”. This was
the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then in exile in Paris,
though his portrait was carried by many of the marchers.
Decades later and the regime established by Khomeini
is still in power in Iran. Crowds are on the streets again
in Tehran and other Iranian cities following the death on
16 September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, arrested by
the morality police, who accused her of breaking laws on
wearing the hijab introduced by Khomeini’s regime in
1981. Women have thrown headscarves on to fires, vast
posters celebrating the regime have been torn down,
police stations torched.
Could this finally be the spark that leads to massive
change in Iran? Some believe a fuse has been lit.
Oppression of women is an existential issue for the
regime, but perhaps, too, a fundamental weakness. The
powerful images coursing through our Facebook and
Twitter feeds, and reproduced by mainstream media,
might lead us to believe they are right.
Is history repeating itself? Certainly some protesters
have invoked parallels with the tumultuous events of
1979, chanting :“Death to the oppressor, be it the shah
or the supreme leader!” There are many reasons to be
impressed by what is happening in Iran. Protests on
this scale prompted by anger over the abuse of women’s
rights are rare anywhere. Men are on the streets, too,
and those involved in the unrest are reported to be
more demographically diverse than participants in
similar events in recent years. No one can doubt that the
protests are also tapping into wells of deep discontent
with the regime’s economic, political and moral failures.
But we may be letting our hopes run ahead of reality.
What we are seeing is very far from being a full picture of
events. Reporting from the ground is extremely limited.
After a decade or so of exposure to the extraordinary
impact of contemporary media technology, we have
seen again and again how a single clip uploaded from
an individual’s mobile phone can be broadcast to
hundreds of millions through social media, then further
amplified by mainstream media. We see something that
is happening in one street in one town in one province
– but that is not always representative of events across
We see something that is
happening in one street
in one town – not always
representative of events
across a vast country
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
a vast and populous country. Journalists, academic
experts and government intelligence analysts will seek
to supplement inadequate visual evidence, but their
conclusions very often have little impact compared
with emotive images. Populist politicians know this, so
do terrorists of every ideology and creed. We prefer to
believe what we want to be true.
The Shah was ousted 43 years ago not just by
Khomeini and his clique of radical clerics, but by a
broad coalition of opposition groups, which mobilised
diverse constituencies: secular urban liberals, old-
school communists, new left fedayeen, Islamo-Marxist
guerrillas and nationalists who venerated the memory of
Mohammed Mosaddegh, the prime minister deposed in
1953 in a coup backed by the US and Britain.
There were also the young men from sprawling new
shanty towns or from the provinces who provided the
shock troops of the radical clerics and who now, grown
old, cling to the power they won back then.
Witnesses of the unrest in Iran in 1978 and 1979
included Rzyard Kapuściński, the celebrated Polish
journalist, who described one massive march in Tehran
as “a human river, broad and boiling, flowing endlessly,
rolling through the main street from dawn till dusk. A
flood, a violent flood that in a moment will engulf and
drown everything.” The crowd took eight hours to pass
through the city centre. There is no Kapuściński in
Tehran now and we can be fairly sure there are no eight-
hour marches either.
The harsh truth is that though these are important
protests, they are likely to be crushed by the still
powerful regime. Our excitement at the stirring images
we see not only often leads us to exaggerate the
breadth and depth of a protest movement, but also to
underestimate the strength of their enemies, too.
The problem of interpreting far-off events is evidently
not a consequence merely of smartphones and the
internet. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was covered by
hundreds of reporters. In the few months that Khomeini
was in Paris before his return to Tehran, he granted 150
interviews, talking about democracy, women’s rights
and tolerance. The US ambassador in Tehran decided the
statesman whom Khomeini would most resemble after
taking power was Gandhi. Within two years of taking
power, Khomeini had ruthlessly
 Jason Burke is eliminated almost all opposition,
the Observer and filled prisons and introduced the laws
Guardian’s Africa that imposed the hijab on women.
correspondent But the ubiquity of news today and
the primacy granted to the image by
technology brings a particular risk. As we work to build
what we hear and see into something with sufficient
unity to make sense, we fill the gaps ourselves. Some
deploy prejudices and fear, creating elaborate conspiracy
theories. Others complete the incomplete picture with
dreams and hopes, a reaction that can still do harm.
This does not mean that those on the streets in Iran
are not to be admired. But when we think of how we can
support them, we should be careful to do so with eyes
that are clear, not clouded by false optimism. This will
make our support even more valuable • Observer

I T A LY
Giorgia Meloni is a
danger to Italy and
the rest of Europe
Roberto Saviano
G
iorgia Meloni presents a danger to
the democratic balance in Europe.
Her leadership looks to be the
antithesis of what Italy needs – and
not just at this difficult moment.
The danger arises for Europe
because Italy has always been a
laboratory: it has foreshadowed
the crises of other countries. Italy had Mussolini before
Hitler and the leftwing extremist Red Brigades before
Action Directe appeared in France and the Red Army
Faction followed suit in Germany. Italy had Berlusconi
before the US got Trump. And after years of Berlusconi
misrule, Italy produced the Five Star Movement, the
first populist party led by a comedian, before the rest of
Europe caught up; its agenda was political disruption,
often without any thought to the consequences.
Meloni’s party has expanded its electoral base in Italy
by poaching militants from other parties ready to jump
on what was supposed to be a winner’s bandwagon. This
strategy has worked although it has drawn the Brothers
of Italy into controversy and several ongoing judicial
investigations, over candidates’ alleged involvement in
corruption, extortion, sleaze and illegal waste disposal.
Yet Meloni has been able to reaffirm her credibility by
expelling troublemakers and publicly distancing them.
The only figures it seems she has difficulty disowning are
politicians whose identity is built on far-right ideology.
FLAVIO LO SCALZO/
She denies that she is a fascist. I don’t think it is the
REUTERS most important point of her party’s programme, but it
47
is worth addressing. It is a simple game: parties whose
lineage can be traced back to neo-fascist movements
have gone to lengths to detoxify and soften their image,
declaring their opposition to antisemitism, racism and
the historical fascist experience.
Meloni dog-whistles to her neo-fascist political
ancestors with the Mussolini-era slogan “God,
homeland, family”. She did it in 2019, telling a rally: “I
am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian,
I am a Christian.” She reaffirmed it that year, at the World
Congress of Families in Verona, promising: “We will
defend God, the homeland and the family.”
During an interview in the election campaign, she
said that Dio, patria, famiglia was not a fascist slogan,
but a declaration of love. To those who remember that it
was daubed everywhere during the fascist regime, she
countered that the original quote was from the Italian
revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini.
God, for her, does not seem to represent faith, but
rather a brand of Catholicism imposed as the only
religion worthy of rights. The homeland’s borders
must be defended, with violence if necessary, and the
family is not the cradle of affection, but of imposition,
obligation and prescription. The family is always
heterosexual, its children born and
 Roberto recognised in the imposed form.
Saviano is an Meloni’s real beliefs and goals may
Italian author, not appear exactly the same, but
journalist and her words can often carry echoes of
screenwriter Mussolini. Her speeches play on the
need for identity, on the very human
fear of being marginalised or going unrecognised. In
her hands, identity becomes a propaganda tool for
dividing the world into Us and Them, where “they” are
LGBTQ+ communities, migrants or those who don’t see
themselves represented in established structures or the
labels imposed by others.
Although she denies any connection to fascism,
Meloni appears to want to retain support from the wing
of the radical right who consider her party too moderate.
On the other hand, continued association with neo-
fascism would put Meloni in a very uncomfortable
position internationally. She has opted therefore for a
rebrand, but it is partial. During the election campaign
she tried to pass for a moderate, muting her message and
advancing what she claims are new ideas to solve the
so-called migrant emergency and restore Italian spirit.
The far right can succeed in Italy because the
left has failed, as in much of the world, to offer
credible visions or strategies. The left asks people
to vote against the right, but lacks a political vision
or an economic alternative. The left sounds elitist
when it communicates, while the right has found a
hypersimplified discourse: keywords, slogans, concepts
reduced to the most basic.
Meloni is, I believe, dangerous because she comes
closest to the Berlusconi school of political lies and the
populist playbook that says the more total a lie is, the
more people will believe it.
Be careful, because where Italy goes, the rest of
Europe will soon follow •
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
48 Opinion
UNITED
KINGDOM Truss and Kwarteng’s
reverse Robin Hood
amounts to class war
Jonathan Freedland
L
iz Truss has embarked on an
ideological project so extreme that
the de facto budget announced by
her chancellor last Friday amounts
to a declaration of class war. It was
a reverse Robin Hood: taking from
those who have least, lavishing gifts
on those who have most. It is morally
indefensible, economically reckless and so politically
risky as to suggest a death wish.
Trussonomics rests on a simple article of faith: that
by rewarding the already wealthy, life will improve for
everyone else. Trickle-down economics, they called it
in the 1980s, and it didn’t work then. Now it’s back in a
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
form more stark, more extravagant, than even its most
ardent apostles ever dared contemplate.
The generosity towards the amply blessed was
breathtaking. Kwasi Kwarteng’s totemic move was
the removal of the cap on bankers’ bonuses – as if the
number one problem confronting Britain today was that
bankers aren’t rich enough. It’ll be Cristal magnums all
round in the City, obviously, but Labour should celebrate
an attack line that cannot fail. Truss and Kwarteng’s
Conservative predecessors had no principled objection
to letting bankers receive telephone-number bonuses,
but held off because they knew the optics were so
screamingly awful. The new duo has no such restraint.
They have delivered the biggest tax cuts in half a
century, outstripping the landmark Nigel Lawson budget
of 1988 – and their largesse is aimed squarely at the top.
Kwarteng abolished the top tax rate altogether. That will
hand an average £10,000 ($10,700) to the highest-earning
600,000 people in the country: literally the one per cent.
The chancellor cancelled a planned increase in
corporation tax. Even the scrapped rise in national
insurance will benefit the highest earners most. (As for
social care, which desperately needs the money that rise
was going to pay for, who knows where that cash will
come from – if it comes at all?)
We shouldn’t forget what remains the largest fiscal
Illustration Bill Bragg
 Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust 49

move of the Truss administration: the £150bn to be spent

on freezing energy bills. To be sure, that will benefit
everyone, but guess who’s going to pay for it? It could
Hilary Mantel was a glorious
have been a windfall tax on the gargantuan profits of the
fossil fuel giants, which have seen billions fall into their
laps thanks to the surging price of oil and gas caused by
original – we have lost
the war on Ukraine. That pot of money could, and should,
have helped hold down energy bills. But Truss and
Kwarteng preferred to protect the energy companies and
one of our greatest writers

T
to borrow instead. That will rack up a debt that will have he death of Dame and spiritual bankruptcy of
to be repaid by the taxpayers of today and tomorrow. Hilary Mantel brings organised religion in a north
Class war is never just about looking after your own. an end to one of the of England backwater. She
It’s also about hurting the enemy. So the chancellor most remarkable brought the French Revolution
announced that the unemployed will see their benefits literary careers of the past half vividly to life in one of her
slashed if they can’t prove they’re searching for more century. Her great historical finest novels, A Place of
work. And even though the trade unions have a fraction trilogy, Wolf Hall, earned her Greater Safety.
of their former strength, Kwarteng promised legislation two Booker prizes, dominating She was also at times a
to shrink workers’ ability to act together yet further. No the cultural landscape of fey writer, who considered
matter how little cash or power the neediest have, the the early 21st century – on herself to be haunted by the
sheriff of Nottingham is after it. page, stage and television people she had known and
– for almost as long as her the lives she might have led,
The moral case against Trussonomics is compelling, protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, had she not been stricken as a
but some of the most trenchant opposition to last reigned over the political one young woman by undiagnosed
week’s announcements were on grounds of economics. of the 16th. endometriosis. It is this
Analysts were struggling not to be rude, as they She gave readers permission feyness that powered one of
examined measures whose premise has been discredited to look afresh at this most her most outstanding novels,
by historical experience. The notion that cutting taxes overworked period of history: Beyond Black.
for the wealthiest fuels growth to such an extent that not only at Cromwell himself, This tale of a medium
“tax cuts pay for themselves” is a theory for which who was previously mainly haunted by a malign circus
there is scant evidence. It’s likely the Office for Budget known as the portly subject dwarf was so powerfully
Responsibility would have made this of a sombre Holbein portrait, sinister that, much to her
 Jonathan point, had it not been silenced by but Henry VIII and all of the delight, it had the rare
Freedland is Truss, apparently anxious to avoid courtiers who surrounded distinction of being both
a Guardian independent scrutiny of her plans. him. Her scepticism about hailed as a work of genius and
columnist Even stout defenders of the saintliness of Sir Thomas condemned as “evil”.
Thatcherism and Reaganomics balk More ruffled more than a In her other life, as an
at the comparison with their heroes. Truss may have few feathers. essayist over many years,
forgotten that Thatcher’s early cuts to income tax were However, nobody could fault mainly for the London
balanced by a near doubling of VAT: the first female PM the painstaking research that Review of Books, she drew
wanted the country’s sums to add up. As for her 1988 underpinned her revisionism. provocative parallels between
tax cuts, they came only once inflation was low and As she said in her 2017 Reith establishments past and
the economy growing. Reagan cut taxes and massively lectures: “I would make up a present, memorably describing
increased the US deficit, but he too acted at a time when man’s inner torments but not … Diana, Princess of Wales, as
inflation was coming under control. the colour of his drawing- an icon “only loosely based on
By contrast, Kwarteng’s stimulus package, designed to room wallpaper.” the young woman born Diana
jolt the economy into growth, arrives alongside soaring To her fellow writers she Spencer” and comparing Kate
inflation: it’s throwing petrol on the fire. That will push gifted the licence to write Middleton to Anne Boleyn.
the Bank of England to raise interest rates, making life historical fiction differently: That history was a battlefield
perilously hard for those with a mortgage. Meanwhile, Maggie O’Farrell, author of strewn with the bodies of
government borrowing is getting more expensive. the award-winning Hamnet, women was one of her most
As for the politics, perhaps people will be so happy a brilliant reclamation of persistent themes in both
with the extra £330 they get from the cancelled national Shakespeare’s wife, is among fiction and nonfiction.
insurance rise, they’ll overlook the fact that the Tories the younger novelists who Most of her essays were
are handing at least 30 times that sum to the wealthiest acknowledge her influence. written at a time when her
one per cent. It’s possible they’ll just be grateful However, there has always novels were a well-kept secret:
their energy bill is capped. Alternatively, the Truss been far more to Mantel for years she suffered from
government has just written the script for Labour’s than the Tudors. From the a refusal to sit quietly in an
next election campaign. mid-1980s she was forging easily marketed pigeonhole.
This is a policy that violates the most basic notion of funny and politically mordant For all her enjoyment of her
fairness. What a sight to behold: a government that spent novels from such unlikely belated success, she remained
10 days of national mourning piously extolling British material as the inadequacies of a glorious original. We shall not
values now trampling all over them • social services and the moral see her like again •

30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly

50 Opinion
Letters
WRITE Stirring funeral shows the
TO US power of pageantry
No other country could
put on such a spectacle
(Big story, 23 September).
Letters for Not a single person
publication out of step. Trumpets,
weekly.letters@ drums, bagpipes, all
theguardian.com heralding the end of an
—
era. Cannons firing, bells
Please include a
ringing, Big Ben chiming,
full postal address
and a reference
choirboys singing. Row
to the article. upon row of servicemen
We may edit letters. and servicewomen,
Submission and faces etched in solemn
publication of all regard. Line after line
letters is subject passes soberly by – a river
to our terms and of scarlet and gold in an
conditions, see: ocean of black. The crowds
THEGUARDIAN.COM/
LET TERS-TERMS
bear witness to it all, a
nation joined as one in
solidarity for a queen the
Editorial
like of which we will never
Editor: Graham
Snowdon see again. Unforgettable.
Guardian Weekly, Jon Goldney
Kings Place, Gawler, SA, Australia
90 York Way,
London N1 9GU, • I am on vacation from
UK the US in the UK. While
not normally a royal
To contact the follower, I decided that I
editor directly: had to do the British thing
editorial.feedback
and watch the Queen’s
@theguardian.com
funeral. It was impressive.
Corrections I am glad I live in a world
Our policy is to that still has pageantry.
correct significant A world that can still
errors as soon as have things that serve no
possible. Please practical purpose, such
write to guardian. as kings and queens, and
readers@ soldiers who have swords
theguardian.com on their belts, fur on
or the readers’
their hats, and move like
editor, Kings Place,
trained dancers. I hope
90 York Way,
London N1 9GU,
there will always be room
UK in this world for soldiers
who aren’t carrying guns.
Emily Anne Lyons
Annandale, New Jersey, US
Unstinting service was a
lesson for the new King
I read Caroline Davies’s
excellent article (The
constant monarch,
16 September) with much
interest. Many of us are
aware of the Queen’s
influential and impressive
timeline but it was good
to read a nuanced and
informative appraisal.
World leaders and
politicians must wonder
how one woman could
instil such warmth and
affection from a country
that has been turned off
and turned away from
its political masters. The
answer is simple, her
unstinting service to duty,
whatever the physical
cost; this was manifest
when only two days before
she died, she appointed
her 15th prime minister
and performed this task
with graciousness. We
will not see her like again
but King Charles III has
learned from her reign and
will carry on where she
left off, no doubt adding
his own individual stamp.
Judith A Daniels
Gt Yarmouth, England, UK
It’s not just the Queen
that we have lost
I am no royalist, not
even British. Nor was I
born before, during or
immediately after the
second world war, but it
couldn’t have been said
better: the death of the
Queen feels huge for
exactly the reason Frank
Cottrell-Boyce points out
(Opinion, 16 September):
with her died the last
Zeitzeuge of a time when
humans were determined
to build better societies.
Anette Magnussen
London, England, UK
Environment deserves
such in-depth coverage
I counted 37 pages on
the death of Queen
Elizabeth and the future
of the monarchy in your
16 September issue.
Can we expect a similar
number of pages on the
climate crisis sometime in
the near future?
Kathryn Hazel
Nanaimo, BC, Canada
Counting the true costs of
Truss’s economic credo
George Monbiot calls for
inspiring alternatives to
the current disastrous
ideology (Opinion,
23 September). A good
place to start might
be to finally dispel the
convenient myth that
amassing a lot of money
is the same as creating
wealth. To “make” lots of
money basically involves
taking bits of money from
lots of other people, by fair
means or foul.
Wealth, on the other
hand, is “created”
by using the Earth’s
resources, combined with
leveraging the differences
in socioeconomic
expectations between
social groups/countries.
Both those things are
becoming increasingly
problematic, with the true
social and environmental
costs becoming impossible
to ignore. Responsibility
to society must go
hand in hand with the
accumulation of financial
riches. So-called wealth
creation should be called
out for what it is, not
lauded and encouraged.
Jeremy Brettingham
North Creake, England, UK
• Our dance with growth
economics is becoming
ever more deadly, because
it exacerbates the three
biggest dangers to our
ecosystems: population,
affluence and technology.
Our education system
is part of the powerful
propaganda machine that
persuades parents that the
way to survive is to fit in,
and to earn money; in fact,
what is really needed are
healthy ecosystems.
Barbara Williams
Long Hanborough,
England, UK
• So, Liz Truss is wheeling
out the discredited
Thatcherite trickle-down
theory of economics. This
should rather be known as
the truckle-down theory,
which assumes that the
rest of us will tamely
accept policies destined to
increase the wealth gap.
As such, this theory has
at least one virtue: it does
seem to work.
Damian Grant
Villeneuve d’Ascq, France

A WEEK
IN VENN
DI AGR A MS
Edith Pritchett

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022

 51
Film, music, art, books & more

MUSIC
Margo Price’s
long country
road to success
Page 55 

Rap battles Welcome to Jungle, an ambitious crime drama set in a

dystopian, futuristic London – and TV’s first drill musical

30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly

52 Culture
Screen
J
INTERVIEW UNGLE IS NOT THE MOST CONVENTIONAL
By Alexi Duggins TV SHOW YOU’LL EVER WATCH. In one sense, it’s is a
COVER spiritual successor to the likes of Top Boy, given its gun-
PHOTOGRAPH toting storylines and cast whose crime-based livelihoods
Delroy Matty/ circle London’s drug trade. But it’s also a musical – British
Prime Video TV’s first drill musical, in fact – and the bulk of the actors
are prominent UK drill and grime MCs. It’s also set in a sci-fi
alternate reality where England’s capital is full of fictional
technology like under-skin watches, cars with barcodes for
licence plates and cops armed with electrified billy clubs. If
you had to give it a genre, it would be crime-fi-rap-opera.
“We didn’t just want to make a typical gangster drama,”
says Jungle co-creator Junior Okoli. “Congratulations to all
the productions before us, I think they’ve done an amaz-
ing job, but we wanted to do something totally different.”
Jungle is the televisual debut of Okoli and co-creator
Chas Appeti. Appeti is a maker of music videos who’s “shot
for pretty much everyone in the UK scene – Giggs, Lethal B,
Chip, Ruff Sqwad, Tinchy Stryder”. Okoli worked in artist
management – with a sideline as a mixed martial artist – and
as he travelled the world with musicians, he noticed that
wherever he was, he saw the same thing happening as in
his hometown: inner-city poverty leading to a life of crime.
When the two met, they began working on videos
 Lore of together and decided to create Jungle to “shine a light on
the jungle that kill-or-be killed mindset that comes with an impover-
Scenes from the ished life, a lack of opportunity”. Eventually, they pitched
‘crime-fi-rap- it to Amazon, and were soon making the show – though
opera’ there was a decidedly strange feel to the initial meetings.
DELROY MATTY/
“About five or six sessions in, I realised they were all
PRIME VIDEO Googling my name and looking at my cage fights,” says
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
Okoli. “My fights were pretty brutal at the time, so they
must have thought I was an absolute savage!”
Given their music industry backgrounds, and a desire to
engage young viewers, telling the tale via song felt a natural
fit. At least it did for them, if not the talent involved. “They
hated it at first. They definitely hated it,” says Okoli of the
attempt to convince a cast of MCs including Tinie Tempah,
Dizzee Rascal and Big Narstie to collaborate on their rhymes
for the show, despite usually making music solo.
“At first it was this very standoffish thing like: ‘Who is
this guy telling me what to do – with some guy in the corner
writing notes?’ We had to gain their trust and respect, so
we ended up talking to them outside their houses, sitting
in their cars, just trying to understand their background
and their history and what inspires them.”
The result is a narrative that flits seamlessly from tradi-
tional dialogue to segments delivered entirely in rap. For
the first three episodes – all that were released for preview
purposes – the action centres on a robbery gone wrong,
committed by reluctant criminal and father-to-be Gogo
(Ezra Elliott) and his terrifyingly violent colleague Slim
(played by rapper RA).
While the stick-up is full of barked spoken-word instruc-
tions to hand over the payload, a low bassline kicks in for
the aftermath, and the robbers launch into rap for a frenzied
post match-analysis. At one point, Gogo has a three-way
rap-off with himself, trading bars with his inner good voice
and bad voice.
“If you were in the studio with us when we were writing
it, you’d have been like: ‘What world is this?’” says Okoli
of the incredibly complex writing process that has to tell
a story across both music and dialogue. They took lyrics
created by the cast (or rap ghostwriters for the actors who
weren’t also MCs), then rewrote the spoken-word segments
to either remove or add extra material depending how well
the rhymes tied in with the plot.
Just in case that wasn’t tricky enough, the lyrics had
been written in total ignorance of the show’s overall plot.
Appeti and Okoli kept the scripts secret from cast members
because “London’s a very small place. We didn’t want the
scripts getting out,” as Okoli puts it.
Shooting was no mean feat either. As soon as London’s
councils heard the words “drill musical”, they instantly
refused permission, because the genre has often generated
headlines blaming it for inciting violence. But given that the
series focuses on inner-city crime, the script is so packed
with street-based confrontations and estate-based gang
meetings that this wasn’t an option. “We’d jump on Zoom
calls, show them we’re straight-up people, and they’d go
‘OK, cool! We’re going to help you!’” says Okoli. Not that
any of this was an attempt to rehabilitate drill’s reputation.
“We didn’t set out to address the stigma attached to drill,”
says Appeti. “We’re storytellers. But drill is just another
artform. Hip-hop had the same sort of thing at first, UK
garage did, even jungle. Every genre that’s new and cutting
edge gets stigmatised at first.”
“You can’t suppress popular culture,” says Okoli. “You
can’t. It doesn’t work. The more you try to shut it down,
the more popular it becomes.”
Even without council opposition, Jungle’s scenes aren’t
the easiest to film in a packed metropolis. At one point, a
gigantic crew of gang members gather in Canary Wharf
on quad bikes, holding a strategy meeting to the soundtrack
of roaring engines. In another, an older woman bursts
 53

from a building and fires a shotgun after departing robbers

before unleashing a terrifying attack dog.
“It was Junior who had to hold that dog before it was
released! He was basically wrestling with it. I swear the dog
was trying to take him for a walk!” says Appeti.
“At one point, it turned to me and I could see in its eyes
it was thinking: ‘Shall I just bite this guy?’” says Okoli. “It
doubled back to get me a second after I’d let it go, but I’d
closed the door by then.”
One of the most striking things about Jungle is how visu-
ally stunning it is. Every interior looks like it belongs in an
Instagram shoot. Cars are the kind of vintage US vehicles
you’d expect in a Hitchcock movie. London itself has been
reimagined as something out of Blade Runner, lined with
Dubai-height skyscrapers, where women dance on gigantic
video screens on the buildings.
“Blade Runner is my favourite film of all time,” says
Appeti. “But from the start our mission was to make sure
that every shot looked so good it could be taken and put
on the wall [like a picture].”
The stylised footage includes liberal use of slow-motion.
In one scene we see a character being
graphically killed, with the bullet
moving millimetre by millimetre across
The more the screen, until it launches an arterial
spray of blood that slowly fans like
you try plumes. It’s like the second coming of
to shut The Matrix.
popular “I was so blown away by The Matrix
when I was a kid that I said: ‘I want to
culture do something like this.’ But as a young
down, boy running around in Streatham, I
had no idea how,” says Okoli. “I didn’t
the more know how to get into that field. The
popular it Brit school was for a certain kind of stage-
becomes school individual, and I wasn’t that. You
find yourself later in life, subconsciously
trying to replicate these inspiring moments.”
Okoli has put so much of himself into Jungle that he
serves as narrator, breaking the fourth wall every episode
to deliver a monologue. In one, we’re treated to the heart-
warming tale of him buying his first bike, as he enthuses
over black-and-white footage of a beaming kid holding a
mini Chopper while joyful soul plays. In another, he deliv-
ers a motivational speech that urges viewers to “read every
book you possibly can” and “dream so big you feel uncom-
fortable telling your dreams to small-minded people”.
These are the show’s most emotionally affecting
moments, and they make total sense when you consider
Appeti and Okoli’s desire for Jungle to serve as a warning
about inner-city poverty sucking young people into crime.
After all, the more personal you can make the story, the
more likely it is to have an impact.
“We don’t just want people sitting in front of the TV going:
‘That was a good story,’” says Okoli. “We want viewers to
know that our backgrounds didn’t lead to us having this
success – it’s what choices you make, how vehement you
are, how hard you attack it. If people take inspiration from
Jungle, it should be that the creatives are from this world.
We’re trying to implore more people to do this.”
Let’s hope that happens. Jungle can’t be the only crime-
fi-rap-opera out there …
ALEXI DUGGINS IS THE GUARDIAN’S DEPUTY TV EDITOR
Jungle is on Prime Video

30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly

54 Culture
Visual arts
OPINION I would assume Brad Pitt has
a pretty enviable life, even in
the throes of his messy divorce
from Angelina Jolie. And
A celebrity
dropping into a museum in Finland to exhibit
his sculptures alongside works by his pals
Nick Cave and Thomas Houseago sounds like
casting that another cool extension of it. So it would only
be fair to the rest of us if he fell flat on his face
like other celebrities who dabble in art. But
lives up to from what I can see of his exhibition online,
that is not the case at all.
its billing The involvement of Houseago is a clue
that Pitt is up to something substantial
rather than self-indulgent. This idiosyncratic
and excellent British artist hews savage,
Brad Pitt is not the first deliberately awkward sculptural forms
teeming with monsters and myths. He has
star to try his hand at art, recently taken to painting, with a visionary
but his finely wrought, intensity inspired partly by Edvard Munch –
intelligent reflections of hence the choice of northern Europe for this
Nordic noir exhibition. And as an art world
American violence make mag reported recently, he “counts celebrities
him one of the very best like Brad Pitt among his closest friends”. But
there’s more to it than that. Houseago, who
suffered abuse in a tough childhood in 1980s
By Jonathan Jones Leeds, has turned to painting in the past
couple of years as therapy, while recovering
from a breakdown. And while Pitt may not, as
far as I know, have similar levels of trauma to
deal with, it seems he too escapes into his art
▼ New direction to enhance his health and happiness.
Nick Cave, When he and Leonardo DiCaprio were
Thomas Houseago filming Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he
and Brad Pitt in invited his co-star to relax making ceramics
Tampere, Finland together in his home studio.
JUSSI KOIVUNEN /AP Therapy is all very well. But what about the
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
results? Are Pitt’s sculptures as pointlessly
derivative as the abstract paintings of Ed
Sheeran, or as soporific as the watercolours of
King Charles III? On the contrary they appear
– from photos – to be pungent and memorable
images of pain and violence.
Aiming At You I Saw Me But It Was Too Late
This Time is a frieze of broken bodies as men
shoot each other in a Mexican standoff. The
gunslingers are crafted well: their faces and
bodies are skilfully done. Yet the artist isn’t the
prisoner of pedantic realism. He fragments and
fades out these raging fighters, expressively
conveying the way violence literally destroys
the self. This could easily be a monument
to the gun-toting US, where no one wins. Or
perhaps he was dealing with the on-screen
violence of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
But the title suggests a more inward pain.
The theme of brutal fragmentation
continues in a bronze coffin-like box covered
with body parts. The violence of his frieze has
gone a stage further. No complete standing
people remain, just pieces of them. It is a fairly
stark image. But far from just being deathly,
there is something redemptive about its
golden glow and funereal dignity. It reminds
me of Gauguin’s symbolist sculptures. This is a
healing box, a coffin from which you could rise
again, like someone in recovery.
Pinch me – I must be dreaming. Brad
Pitt is an extremely impressive artist. He
has sidestepped the embarrassment of
celebrity art to reveal powerful,
worthwhile works.
JONATHAN JONES IS THE
GUARDIAN’S ART CRITIC
 Culture 55
Music

M
argo Price was 19 when she decided
to drop out of college and make
music instead. She had taken some
mushrooms and had a psychedelic
epiphany about her future that she likens to “a
conversation with God”. Full of optimism, she
moved from small-town Illinois to Nashville.
It would take 14 years for Price to land a record
deal. In that time, she busked, worked as a wait-
ress and taught dance to children. She endured
grinding poverty, often subsisting on one meal
a day and, at one point, slept in a tent. So what
kept her going? “I was pretty stubborn,” the alt-
country star recalls.
Price, 39, has documented her struggle in a
vivid and poignant memoir, Maybe We’ll Make
It. She was inspired, in part, by Patti Smith’s book
Just Kids, a chronicle of her time as a young artist
in New York. “I just loved how her book took
place in those years that she was struggling,” says
Price. “And I thought: ‘If I don’t write about this
now, I’m going to forget all the details.’”
Price is talking from her home in Tennessee
where she lives with her husband and musical
partner, Jeremy Ivey, and their two children,
Judah and Ramona. “We’ve got about six acres
out here so I can be totally naked in my back-
yard,” Price grins, pointing to the leafy scene
out of the window behind her. “I just got back
from a hike with my dogs. I go about three miles
every morning. I try to get lost out there every
day, although my children go to school in east
Nashville so I still get my fill of bougie coffee.”
Price found the process of writing cathartic
and painful. The forthcoming book dwells on
some of her lowest points, most notably the
death of Ezra, her son Judah’s twin brother,
10 days after he was born, because of a heart
defect. It also traces her long and problematic
relationship with alcohol, which began when
she was 12 and reached its nadir in the months
following Ezra’s death. One
 Past struggle night, after a long evening of
It took 14 years to drinking, she got into her car
land a record deal and crashed into a telegraph
ALYSSE GAFKJEN
pole, resulting in a weekend
in prison.

Running up
Price notes she was still drinking when she
wrote the first draft of the book. It wasn’t until
her editor said to her: “You do know that whiskey
is basically a character in this book, don’t you?”
that she found the impetus to quit.

that hill In preparation for the release of Maybe We’ll

Margo Price won industry recognition after years of playing gigs
with little to show for it. Yet the singer remembers those tough
early days with fondness in a memoir with no holds barred
By Fiona Sturges
Make It, Price has been having therapy. “I was
having panic attacks, thinking about all of this
being out there,” she explains. “I was imagin-
ing the names they were gonna call me. They’re
gonna say I’m a horrible mother, that I’m a
drunk. But I also [hope] that people are going to
appreciate my vulnerability.”
She recalls sitting at home one night with Ivey
and bursting into tears about what her parents
and siblings would think. “I said: ‘What if I 
burn all my bridges? What if they won’t let me

30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly

56 Culture
Music
come back home?’ He just looked at me and said:
‘You belong to no one.’” Price smiles and holds
up an arm to the camera. “What he said meant
so much, I went and got it tattooed on my arm.”
She is putting the final touches to an album,
Strays, that is due for release in the new year. Its
first single, Been to the Mountain, sardonically
references her change in fortunes – “Used to be
a waitress but now I’m a consumer” – and blends
old-time country with 70s rock’n’roll.
In the book, Price bemoans the Nashville
scene that labelled her and her first band, Buffalo
Clover, as “too country for the rock scene and
too rock for the country scene”. As a solo artist,
she has found acceptance. “I don’t put any limits
on what genres I draw on and what I put on my
paintbrush,” she says.
Her early brushes with music industry figures
were frequently grim. One would-be manager
lured her to his house and then spiked her drink;
she escaped by locking herself in the bathroom
What if I burn all
my bridges? What if
they won’t let me
come back home?
and calling Ivey to come to get her. She also recalls
a label rep who told her they already had two
women on their roster, so couldn’t take on a third.
Success finally came when she was signed by Jack
White’s Third Man Records on the strength of her
first solo LP, 2016’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter.
That album was widely portrayed as her last roll
of the dice, having pawned her engagement ring
to pay for recording sessions. (Ivey subsequently
sold his car and bought the ring back.)
When I ask if she has seen a better side to the
industry since she began making a living from it,
she lets out a hollow laugh. “I feel it’s just like a
web that is set up to eat artists. I know so many
other talented friends that are still working at
grocery stores, as their careers are not in a place
where they can support themselves. And then
when you do get there, you have so many people
siphoning things off you.”
Still, Price revels in the high moments, such
as her 2018 Grammy nomination for best new
artist. “All those things are not lost on me because
I spent so much time being the loser,” she says.
Despite the years of hardship, there are
elements of her old life she misses. In her book,
she recalls how she and Ivey would sell their
belongings and hit the road; once, embarking
on a lengthy cross-country tour in a battered RV,
playing impromptu gigs and selling home-made
CDs to cover costs.
“Those days were tough but, still, I think: ‘I’m
so glad we did that.’”
FIONA STURGES IS A CULTURE WRITER
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
Reviews
SCREEN
Thai Cave Rescue
Netflix
★★★☆☆
This six-part series doesn’t have it
easy. How do you make the 18-
day Tham Luang Nang Non ordeal
captivating when the story of a
dozen adolescent to teen soccer
players and their coach trapped
deep inside the flooded cave system
in 2018 has been told over and over?
The drama series, created by
Michael Russell Gunn and Dana
Ledoux Miller, is not quite as elegant
and gripping as Ron Howard’s
movie, Thirteen Lives, but is the
more exhaustive, melodramatic
and occasionally heavy-handed
telling. It has one crucial ingredient
the movies don’t: it’s told from the
soccer team’s perspective.
We get to know the players, their
families and the emotional baggage
they carried with them deep into
that cave. And the story is told with
a sensitivity to local nuances thanks
to Thai director Baz Poonpiriya
and American-Thai film-maker
Kevin Tancharoen, both executive
producing alongside Jon M Chu
(the Taiwanese American director
behind Crazy Rich Asians).
The earlier episodes are pretty
rough, especially when the writers
desperately seek levity in a story
that doesn’t often leave breathing
room. There’s more confidence in
later episodes. Veteran singer turned
actor Thaneth Warakulnukroh is the
standout among the cast. He finds
reserves of empathy and grace notes
in his performance as Governor
Narongsak, the man tasked with
overseeing the rescue.
Just make sure you watch it in
the native Thai audio track with
subtitles instead of the awkward
English dub that the Netflix
platform automatically reverts to.
Radheyan Simonpillai
Podcast of the week Can I Tell You a Secret?
“We’ve had people round with guns, knives looking for him. It was
like a living nightmare.” So begins Sirin Kale’s six-part Guardian
true crime tale about Matthew Hardy, who spent more than a
decade stalking women online. This gripping series is a fascinating
tale of what might cause such behaviour. Alexi Duggins
ART
William Kentridge
Royal Academy, London
★★★★☆
Astonishments and violences fill
the Royal Academy’s survey show
of Johannesburg-born artist William
Kentridge. Glimpses of hangings and
torture, sex in the pool, old footage
of a white hunter skipping towards
the rhino he has just downed.
Snatches of crackly operatic aria,
lilting African song and paranoid
voices on the telephone fill the air,
along with the regular chink of a
miner’s hammer against a rock.
Kentridge’s show is filled with
sounds and furies.
Now in his late 60s, Kentridge
spent more than half his life living
under apartheid. The system
itself, and the complications
of its aftermath, have been his
key subjects.
The show includes animations,
filmed performance and sculpture.
Some motifs recur throughout – the
megaphone, the stove-top coffee
pot, the old-fashioned typewriter,
the camera, trees and leaves and
the pages of books, as well as a
cast of characters, including the
artist himself, lumbering through,
balding, ageing, playing himself as a
character as much as he is the work’s
originator. Adrian Searle
Until 11 December
 Culture
Books
S C I E NC E A N D NAT U R E
Chequered progress
A sprawling history
of the Huxley family
charts the evolution of
science and society as
the Victorian era gave
way to modernity
By Stephen Buranyi
▲ Brains trust
Thomas Henry
Huxley dissected
primates. His
grandson, Julian,
went on to pro-
tect their habitats
HUGH KINSELLA
CUNNINGHAM/EPA
57
for. Thomas Henry is a lower-class striver who
climbs the meritocratic ladder of professional-
ised science, and has immense faith in its project
of demystifying the world. Yet the basic assump-
tions of his time – from gender relations to the
benefits of empire – suit him well once cleared
of religious and reactionary cobwebs.
Eton-education Julian is more flexible and fal-
lible. He flits among the newly created jobs of the
era, from film-making to world government. He
is a committed scientist, but puzzles over where
Darwinian thinking might fit into the emerging
landscapes of psychology, art and culture.
The whole of British intellectual life seems
accessible through this sprawling family tree.
Thomas Henry’s son Leonard married into a
literary dynasty through Julia Arnold – daughter
of Thomas and niece of Matthew. Julia’s sister,
Mary Augusta Ward, the novelist and anti-suf-
frage campaigner, influences Thomas Henry’s
late-life engagement with religious philosophy.
Julian’s brother Aldous haunts the margins, bring-
ing the bleeding edge of psychedelic and psychiat-
C
harles Darwin was, by all accounts, a ric culture to Huxley family life. There is the sense
meek and conflict-averse man. In his of an author having fun rifling through a rambling
written work he tended not to person- family home, reading all the books and letters.
ally attack his adversaries. He rarely But Bashford pulls the threads tight late in the
gave public lectures, and never participated in book. Questions of human difference – physical,
the fractious debates that were the public proving mental and cultural – occupy the Huxleys.
ground for scientific ideas in Victorian England. Thomas Henry sailed on scientific expeditions
Fortunately, he had outriders to do all that for under an imperial flag, and the concept of the
him – most famously Thomas Henry Huxley, a “savage” stayed with him. He correctly and
scientific pugilist who styled himself Darwinism’s repeatedly shot down the idea that there were
“bulldog”. Huxley delighted in dragging down different species of human as defined by science,
old orthodoxies, whether scientific or religious, yet subscribed to – and often promoted – an idea
in the name of evolution. of civilisational development that envisaged a
Huxley’s grandson, Julian Huxley, is less non-scientific hierarchy of races.
known outside scientific circles, but he was also The aim here isn’t to cancel Thomas Henry,
a biologist, and a tireless populariser of Darwin’s but to show the progression of ideas through the
theories in the 20th century. In programmes for people who develop and expound them.
the BBC, in more than 30 books, and as head of Julian was intimately aware of the failings
institutions such as London Zoo and Unesco, he of previous generations of scientists, includ-
is partly responsible for the idea that the logic of ing his grandfather. As head of Unesco he con-
evolution suffuses modern life, from our bodies sciously helped shape a new utopian, anti-racist
and minds to politics and society itself. internationalism. But he also believed that
Alison Bashford’s book is an intriguing hybrid. understanding evolution would give humankind
A deeply researched biography of Thomas Henry, power to alter its genetic destiny. He worried
Julian, and the wider Huxley family, it also serves about overpopulation, and for decades sought
as an intellectual history of Britain through the to redeem eugenics from its fascist associations.
radical shifts in science and society that gave birth Bashford is too artful to present her subjects
to modernity. Thomas Henry was born simply as avatars for their times. But
in 1825, and died in 1895 when Julian by the end of Julian’s life, there is a
was eight years old. Julian died in 1975. sense of how things have changed.
Bashford sees them as bookending Thomas Henry’s project succeeded:
this era, “Janus-like”: Thomas Henry science triumphed over religion, but
turning to natural science to make Julian is drawn to new and unknow-
sense of the past; Julian looking to a able frontiers. Late in life he developed
more uncertain future. BOOK OF a sceptical interest in phenomena such
By roping in both men – and their THE WEEK as telepathy. Progress is a funny thing.
extended family – Bashford can cover An Intimate The world, Bashford suggests, can
more than a century while maintaining History of always be re-mystified.
continuity and an intimate scale. Each Evolution STEPHEN BURANYI IS A WRITER
is as near an exemplar of liberal English By Alison Bashford SPECIALISING IN SCIENCE AND THE
society at their time as one could ask ENVIRONMENT
30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly
58 Culture
Books

A RT A ND DESIGN
Tunnel vision
At the heart of this
study of the tube map’s
evolution is the man
whose clear map for an
untidy city has never
been surpassed
By Andrew Martin
T
his book’s title might suggest a history
of the London Underground map of
1933 (which is technically a diagram),
the one created by Harry Beck and
resembling electric circuitry. But it’s really a
history of London Underground maps plural,
albeit with Beck as the star of the show. After
all, there were underground maps before him,
and there have been others since, because his
original game-changer has been much messed
with. Caroline Roope’s lucid and thoroughly
researched study can also be read as a history
of London Underground per se. In other words,
she sets Harry Beck in the fullest possible context
– a well-merited honour.
Beck supplied a brilliantly comprehensible
map for an untidy city. It shows a metropolis of
railway lines that are only ever horizontal, vertical
or diagonal. For further clarity, he magnified the
cluttered centre and minimised the sprawling
suburbs, so, as Roope writes: “Uxbridge was as
close to Hillingdon as Leicester Square was to
Covent Garden.”
In their earliest diagrams the companies that
became London Underground imposed their
lines on a “base map” showing the local streets.
But realistic geography faded away as the lines
promoted their own concept of themselves.
For example, on maps of Metroland, the suburb
created by the Metropolitan Railway, golf clubs
loomed disproportionately.
Conceptualiser-in-chief was Frank Pick,
effectively head of design at the Underground
Electric Railways Company of London (UERL)
and its successor, London
 Line of work Underground. As Roope
Harry Beck’s 1933 identifies, Pick was a contra-
London Under- diction. On the positive side,
ground map a “genuine utopian impulse
ALAMY and a desire to improve the
civic space” coexisted with
a streak of amiable antiquarian whimsy, hence
his commissioning of a decorative map pro-
claiming Edgware “a fayre and pleasant retreat
from ye bustle of ye city”. But he also had
some potentially bleak watchwords, such as
“efficiency”, “functionality” and “modernity”,
resulting in the Johnston typeface, which
could be read from the ever-faster trains, dis-
gorging ever more people into modern stations
configured for optimum “passenger flow”. Roope
invokes George Orwell, who saw the tube as “the
ultimate symbol of bureaucratic control”, since
it promoted commuting, “an essential cog in the
machinery of capitalist society”.
Pick commissioned Beck’s map, which served
this machine and perhaps trapped people into
the commuting lifestyle by making the suburbs

FICTION
Sickness and health
Orhan Pamuk’s flawed
but entertaining novel
explores nationalism
on a fictional island
near Crete hit by plague
By Lucy Hughes-Hallett
O
rhan Pamuk likes to play new games. to the crowd assembled beneath him: “From
Every one of his books differs markedly this moment on, our land is free. Long live the
from the others, yet each shares a Mingherian nation, long live liberty!”
capacity for disconcerting the reader. Fifty-eight years later, a little girl repeats those
This one is long and intellectually capacious. It words to her great-grandmother. The child has
tackles big subjects: nationalism and the way learned in school about her nation’s birth. What
nations are imagined into being; ethnic and young Mina has been taught, though, deviates
religious conflict; the decline of an empire; the from what we readers know. She thinks there
political repercussions of a pandemic. It includes were thousands of people assembled beneath
many deaths. Yet, for all the weight of its subject the balcony. We know there were a measly few
matter, its tone is lightly ironic, arch, – most of the major’s intended audi-
even flippant. It has many flaws. It is ence having been deterred by terror
repetitive; it contains far too much of catching bubonic plague.
exposition. All the same – in terms of Mingheria is a fictional island, lying
content – it is one of the most interest- somewhere between Crete and Cyprus
ing books I’ve read this year. and sharing aspects of both islands’
In 1901, a man in a major’s uniform history. It is part of the ailing Ottoman
steps on to the balcony of a govern- Nights of Plague empire. The population is divided
ment building and brandishes a flag. By Orhan Pamuk roughly equally between Turkish
Blood is spurting from a bullet wound Trans by Ekin Oklap Muslims and Greek Christians. The
in his arm but, undaunted, he cries out governor is the easy-going Sami Pasha,

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022

 59

appear closer … and who BOOKS OF THE MONTH

knows how many com- The best new picture books and novels for children and teenagers
muters it brought to London
from the provinces? But
Beck seems an innocent By Imogen Russell Williams And Everything Will Be
abroad. This “honest and Glad to See You
pleasant-looking man” Curated by Ella Risbridger,
The History had been retained inter- illustrated by Anna Shepeta
of the London mittently by UERL as a From Maya Angelou to
Underground Map technical draughtsman , Amanda Gorman, this
By Caroline Roope and his employment status wide-ranging selection
was ambiguous when he of poetry by women
delivered the map, for which he was paid and girls is uplifting,
10 guineas (about £800 in modern money). moving and invigorating. The Ministry of
Beck believed himself the “rightful custodian” Atmospherically Unladylike Activity
of the map, but others had different ideas, among When You Joined illustrated and luxuriously By Robin Stevens
them the cigar-chomping Harold F Hutchison, Our Family bound, it’s a wonderful A new crew of resourceful
publicity officer of London Transport, who By Harriet Evans, gift for children of 6+. children takes the helm in
redrew it in 1960 and signed it with his own name. illustrated by Nia Tudor Stevens’s follow-up to the
Beck’s lovingly wrought “bevelled corners” A tender picture-book bestselling Murder Most
became “sharp angles” and, “the biggest trav- exploration of the Unladylike series. In war-
esty of all”, Aldgate was sliced in half, “so that developing bonds torn 1940s Britain, young
‘Ald’ appears on one side of the route line and between small children would-be spy May Wong
‘gate’ on the other”. and adoptive parents, gets herself evacuated to a
Hutchison’s innovations were soon reversed, moving sweetly from manor house with her new
and in the 1970s, when LU was “managed for first meetings to new pal, Eric. Their mission is
decline” amid rising car use, Beck’s map seemed traditions. to investigate its owner –
a guarantor of the system’s essential virtue. He but they don’t expect to
died in 1974, three years before the first T-shirt Sometimes, I Just WON’T Which Way to Anywhere stumble across a murder.
featuring the design appeared. By Timothy Knapman, By Cressida Cowell Meticulous, lightly
London public transport has rallied in recent illustrated by Joe Berger The unusual O’Hero worn research and sharp
decades, but the Jubilee line extension, the Some days, everything children and the down- character observation will
overground and the Elizabeth line have over- goes to plan – but to-earth Smiths are an please 9+ newcomers and
whelmed the map. Roope interviews some sometimes baths are uneasy not-yet-blended longstanding fans alike.
cartographers proposing replacements for awful, it’s too scary to pet family (although they all
Beck’s illustration, but, as she writes, they will the dogs in the park and adore baby Annipeck).
have to do more than provide a “navigational we hate the taste of peas! But K2 O’Hero has a
tool”. To match Beck’s map – the original sketch A hilarious look at strong gift – his drawings can
of which is in the Victoria and Albert museum toddler emotions and transport people between
– theirs will also have to be beautiful. Observer navigating “just won’t”. worlds. Wild magic,
ANDREW MARTIN IS AN AUTHOR AND CRITIC Cowell’s trademark
bonkers humour, rich
environmentalism and
whose career as a colonial official has been disap- the complexities of family
pointing and of whom readers are likely, despite love are woven deftly The Eternal Return of
his occasional cruelty, to become rather fond. through the first book in a Clara Hart
The novel we are reading, so we are informed fabulous new series for 8+. By Louise Finch
in a preface, is written by Mina in 2017, with a A Groundhog Day story
chronology that is as far from straightforward as The Elemental Detectives with a difference, this
its narrative strategy. There are premonitions and By Patrice Lawrence exceptional YA debut
spoilers. Characters’ back stories are introduced The Zebra’s Great Escape In an ancient London filled features a grieving
late, sometimes at disproportionate length. It is By Katherine Rundell, with elemental spirits, teenage boy and a girl
confusing, I think deliberately so. illustrated by Sara Ogilvie Marisee and Robert are who dies, over and over
Pamuk has often written indirectly about When Mink, an drawn into a battle against again, until Spence can
Turkey’s nationalist revolution, and got into indomitable girl, meets the deadly Shepherdess, figure out what he needs
trouble for doing so. This book can be read as a a baby zebra on the run, whose sleeping sickness to change in order to
playful variation on the theme. More obviously she knows it’s up to her to threatens to kill all save her life. A careful,
it is a novel about a community ravaged by an liberate his parents – and humans. An award- thoughtful, compulsively
incurable disease. Yet, for all its rows of corpses, the rest of evil Mr Spit’s winning YA writer turns readable examination
it seldom sounds a tragic note. Rather, it is a captive menagerie. This her hand to writing for 9+ of toxic masculinity and
compendium of literary experiments, ludic, 5+ picture book is joyously readers, with spectacular normalised sexual abuse.
audacious, exasperating and entertaining. anarchic in both word and results – the world- IMOGEN RUSSELL WILLIAMS
LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT IS AN AUTHOR AND illustration, sizzling with building is particularly IS A CHILDREN’S BOOK
BIOGRAPHER imagination and colour. striking. CRITIC AND EDITOR

30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly

60 Lifestyle
ASK
Annalisa Barbieri
It’s agony being
the other woman,
so should I end
the relationship?
Since retiring, I’ve been a volunteer
in a museum. Nearly seven years
ago, I started a relationship with one
of the other volunteers, X, who is a
bit younger, not married but living
with someone for a long time, and
has no children.
I have two wonderful adult
children, and have not been in an
intimate relationship since my
painful divorce 20 years ago, after a
difficult marriage.
X and I share many passions
and intellectual interests and our
relationship has become intense
and sexually adventurous. His
partner must be aware of the affair,
but they continue to stay together.
He says they don’t have sex.
Over the years X has been
thoughtful, loving and generous,
but guarded. He only expresses
his emotions during sex or when
prompted. We have one regular
day together a week, occasionally
more, but always determined by
him. I have broken up with him a
few times when I’ve found being the
“invisible” woman in a ménage a
STEPHEN COLLINS
The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022
trois unbearable. My usual reaction
to feelings of insecurity is to run
away, but the separations have
lasted just a few weeks. Since our
most recent break and reunion, X
has begun a “special friendship”
with another volunteer. He says he
loves me and doesn’t want a sexual
relationship with her but accused
me of trying to manipulate him.
I haven’t slept for months since
I found out about her. My children
and friends can’t understand why
I’ve accepted the situation for so
long. I don’t feel I can continue at
the museum, which is very special
to me. I feel ridiculous that at 76 I
am experiencing such grief at the
end of a relationship. The future
seems bleak: loveless, sexless,
directionless. How can I find a way
through this agony?
I
t would be easy to deride
you for being “the other
woman”, but real life is rarely
straightforward, and we often
find ourselves in situations we never
thought we would.
I discussed your problem with
psychoanalyst Stephen Blumenthal,
who applauds you for “raising the
issue of sex as an older person”.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting
a life full of passion for yourself.
“It’s really important to work
out what you want,” Blumenthal
says. “You may have wanted X to
be something that he actually isn’t.
It seems you [now] want a real
relationship.”
It sounds as though your personal
life has not been easy, so no wonder
this man must have seemed heady.
But I’m more concerned with what
he can’t offer. The line that jumped
out was: “My usual reaction to
feelings … is to run away.” I believe
that is why you chose to hook up
with a man who was unavailable. It’s
what people do when they shun real
intimacy, for fear of being hurt.
Maybe, earlier on in the
relationship, the unavailability
suited you, but I wonder if now
you want more. What do you think
would happen if you said that to
him and gave him the choice: you
or these other women? But maybe
you don’t want to know the answer.
Sometimes it’s hard, as Blumenthal
said, to “ask ourselves why we stick
with someone who is less than we
deserve”. You don’t have to leave
your job because of this man: it
sounds quite self-sabotaging. Don’t
give X this much power.
“Facing uncertainty and the
unknown is almost never what you
think it is,” says Blumenthal. “From
loss, new opportunities arise.”
Invest in some therapy to help
It’s hard you work through this. In time,
I’m confident that if this man can’t
to ask why commit fully to you, you’ll realise
we stick that having pieces of someone – who
may be deceiving the woman he’s
with decided to live with – is no longer
someone good enough for you.
who is less If you would like advice on a family
than we matter, please email ask.annalisa@
theguardian.com. See theguardian.
deserve com/letters-terms
 KITCHEN AIDE 611
6
By Anna Berrill

T H E W E E K LY R E C I P E
By Yotam Ottolenghi
and Noor Murad

№ 188
One-pot
th
chickpeas with
eta
carrots and feta
Prep 30 min You need
eed to soak the chickpeas,
Soak 12 hr+ so plan ahead. If you like, make k
the feta without the parsley, cover
Cook 2hr 25 min it with more oil, and keep in a

Bean feast: how to ensure a meat- Serves 4-6

• GLUTEN FREE
sterilised jar in the fridge for up to
a week, for spooning over salads

free chilli has a flavour to savour or soups. To make the dish vegan,
swap the feta for a non-dairy
alternative.

What’s the secret to a good
vegetarian chilli? I can never
replicate that savoury, meaty
flavour.
Beth, Margate, England, UK
The first question to ask yourself
is what’s going to replace the
“carne” part of your chilli, Beth?
“Mushrooms or courgettes, if
they’re grilled, can have that
meaty feel,” says Robin Perris,
chef-owner of Pappy’s Texas BBQ
in Kendal, Cumbria. “I think that
smoky flavour will give the kind of
sensation Beth is looking for.” Perris
doubles down on the smokiness
with a rehydrated dried guajillo
chilli. And dried really is the way
to go here: “You want the soft,
background warmth of dried chillies
to make a chilli stand out,” says
Thomasina Miers, who uses a mix
of chipotle and ancho in hers, for
“a lovely blend of smoky heat and
sweet, rounded flavour”.
You’ll also want some beans.
“They’re a fantastic staple,” Perris
says, “and so long as the flavour
of the chilli is good, you can use
just about any bean you want.” She
favours dried pinto, which she slow
cooks with spices before adding to
the chilli mix, but you could go for
tinned kidney beans or chickpeas
instead. Miers also suggests stocking
up on whole spices (cinnamon,
allspice, cumin, cloves) from Asian
supermarkets, to “toast, grind
and stir into sweating onions to
TONELSON/GETTY
really lock in their power”. Perris
goes for smoked paprika, a little
cayenne, garlic, Texas barbecue
sauce and chocolate. J Kenji López-
Alt achieves that elusive savoury
(or umami) flavour in his “best
vegetarian bean chilli” on Serious
Eats with soy sauce and Marmite,
which, he says, adds “a ton of
richness”. You could also try stout,
which Perris adds to the brisket
chilli she makes in her restaurant.
A longer cooking time will help
concentrate the chilli’s flavour. As
López-Alt writes: “Fast chilli recipes
are inevitably not quite as rich and
complex as you’d like them to be.”
Perris says: “You could cook your
chilli on the stovetop,” but be careful
the veg and beans don’t catch on the
bottom of the pan. “Be patient and
let it thicken and reduce.” And if you
can wait until the next day to eat it,
so much the better, to “give the chilli
time to incorporate all the flavours”.
Finally, it’s imperative you don’t
scrimp on the accoutrements, says
Miers, who serves her chilli with
“masses” of soured cream, fresh
lime, coriander, salsa “with fresh
chilli for bite” and toasted tortillas.
Alternatively, Perris says, eat it with
rice or crusty bread, grated cheddar,
chilli flakes, soured cream and
coriander. Either way, in the words
of Miers: “Let me at it.”
ANNA BERRILL IS ACTING DEPUTY
EDITOR OF FEAST AT THE GUARDIAN
Got a culinary dilemma? Email
feast@theguardian.com
Ingredients Method
300g dried chickpeas, Heat the oven to 180C (160C fan)/
soaked overnight in 350F/gas 4, and drain the soaked
cold water with 1 tsp chickpeas.
bicarbonate of soda
Roughly chop the onion, garlic,
1 onion, peeled (150g)
6 garlic cloves, peeled
ginger and green chilli, put into a
25g fresh ginger, food processor and pulse until very
peeled finely chopped but not pureed,
1 large green chilli scraping down the sides of the bowl
4½ tbsp (15g) fresh as you go. Add the coriander and
coriander, chopped pulse a couple of times to mix.
2 tbsp olive oil Put the oil in a large, ovenproof,
1½ tsp ground cumin cast-iron pan for which you have
1½ tsp ground
a lid on a medium-high heat and,
cinnamon
2 medjool dates
when hot, add the onion mixture
skinned, pitted and and cook, stirring occasionally, for
chopped (40g) about four minutes.
1 tbsp tomato paste Add the cumin, cinnamon,
4 carrots (500g) peeled dates and tomato paste and cook
and cut at an angle into for a minute more, until fragrant,
large chunks then stir in the drained chickpeas,
2 fresh bay leaves carrots, bay leaves, a quarter-
¼ tsp bicarbonate of
teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, a
soda
Salt and black pepper
teaspoon and three-quarters of salt,
2 tbsp lemon juice a good grind of black pepper and
1½ tbsp (5g) parsley, 1.2 litres of water.
chopped Bring to a boil, skimming any
scum from the surface as needed,
For the feta then cover and bake in the oven for
150g Greek feta, two hours, until the chickpeas are
crumbled completely softened and the sauce
1 tsp caraway seeds,
is thick and rich. Remove, stir in
toasted and roughly
crushed
parsley, and leave to cool for about
1½ tsp finely grated 10 minutes.
lemon zest While the chickpeas are cooking,
1½ tbsp (5g) parsley, mix all the ingredients for the
chopped marinated feta in a small bowl and
75ml olive oil set aside.
To serv
serve, divide the chickpea
mixture b between four or six bowls
and, top e each with some of the feta
mix and serve
s the rest alongside.

30 September
Septe 2022 The Guardian Weekly
62 Diversions

QUIZ 8 What was officially E MOJ I SPE A K COU N T RY DI A RY

Thomas Eaton opened by pilot Amy Killian Fox BAC K DA L E
Johnson in Skegness Derbyshire, England
in 1936?

1 Who inspired the Daily
Worker headline “A
Communist in Space”?
2 Which society was
divided into jarls, karls
and thralls?
3 Whose earnings would
be paid into a Coogan
account?
4 What is Europe’s largest
wild cat?
5 Tropicália was a 1960s
artistic movement in
which country?
6 Who has co-written
thrillers with Bill Clinton
and Dolly Parton?
7 What Basque game is the
fastest moving ball sport?
PUZZLES
Chris Maslanka
1 Pedanticus was sad
to hear of the death of
Jean-Luc Godard, but he
burst out laughing after
his most famous film was
mentioned on the news.
Why might that have been?
2 Wordcentre
What links:
9 Rex Ingram; Robin
Williams; Will Smith;
Idris Elba?
10 Bulbasaur (1); Pikachu
(25); Vulpix (37); Golem
(76)?
11 Cy Young; Hank Aaron;
Gold Glove; Silver Slugger?
12 Ascending; transverse;
descending; sigmoid?
13 Simien; Rwenzori;
Atlas; Drakensberg?
14 Pink; Anderson Paak;
HearSay; Godspeed You
Black Emperor?
15 Sprites; blue jets;
elves; anvil crawlers;
bead; ribbon?
3 E Pluribus Unum
Rearrange the letters of
TORY GOALS to make a
single word.
4 3-4-5
What Arnold
Schwarzenegger initially
used to be (3)
Vehicle reversing at
eleven (4)
Birds of the green sea,
lacking in RNA (5)
T
Identify Jean-Luc Godard movies from he sky was intermittently
the emojis.
blue and weak sunshine
1 sparked a faint chorus of
grasshoppers. Otherwise,
this was a landscape wrung dry of all
2 summer and the grasses were grey,
the thistles dead. The only sounds
were the notes of young buzzards,
3 suffused with a sense of melancholy.
There were seven birds – adults
and immatures – careering at one
4 another in mock squabbles, or they
would flap with deep rhythmic
wingbeats, before paddling up on
5 the bluffs of warm air. Perhaps it was
the way their movements perturbed
the currents, but 50 house martins
and swallows circulated among
5 Film Socialisme. them. It was a glorious gyre of
3 Alphaville. 4 Le Mépris (Contempt). different flight modes.
Then I spotted the swift. It must
Emoji 1 Breathless. 2 Week-end.
ASTROLOGY. 4 3-4-5 WAS, TAXI, GEESE
2 Wordcentre ANTEATER. 3 EPU have been a lone Scottish breeder or
a Scandinavian migrant drifted to
was given as “À bout de soufflé”.
Maslanka 1 The title of the film
15 Types of lightning. these islands, alone and detached
acts missing a punctuation mark.
13 African mountain ranges. 14 Musical
from the movement of its kind,
league baseball. 12 Parts of the colon. much of which occurred in late July.
number). 11 Individual awards in major House martin flight is beautiful
and quick, and the strokes not
10 Pokémon (by “National Pokédex”
Three Thousand Years of Longing.
Bagdad; Aladdin, 1992; Aladdin, 2019; easily countable, but in swifts you
barely register wingbeats at all,
camp. 9 Played genie: The Thief of
(jai-alai). 8 First Butlin’s holiday
5 Brazil. 6 James Patterson. 7 Pelota each swerving into the blur of the
Child Actor’s bill). 4 Lynx (Eurasian).
performer (in the US, under California
last. If an absence of straight lines
defines nature, then swift flight is its
 On the website Notes and Queries theguardian.com/notes-and-queries

nobles; tradesmen; slaves. 3 Child

Identify this word from its
centre: **TEAT**
CHESS
Leonard Barden
It took less than a minute
to reignite the feud.
Hans Niemann v Magnus
Carlsen at the Julius Baer
Generation Cup opened
conventionally, but then
Carlsen disappeared
from the screen; the
commentators were
aghast, while Niemann
shrugged and then also
disconnected. The world
champion’s father, Henrik
Carlsen, had already
announced that his son
would give no interviews
during the tournament.
The cameo was the
sequel to an incident at
the Sinquefield Cup in
1 Yuri Gagarin. 2 Viking/Scandinavian: apotheosis. My bird jinked left and
right, repeating the twists seven to
wAnswers Quiz
© CMM2022
eight times, as if there were invisible
St Louis. Carlsen was cheating over the board. obstacles and the bird must plot a
outplayed by Niemann, The St Louis organisers tight route through all that free air.
suffering a rare defeat as explained their anti- With each bend of its path, some
White, and withdrew from cheating procedures insect was also being snaffled by
the tournament. and emphasised there the bird’s immense maw. A parent
Niemann admitted to had been no wrongdoing can take prey like this, one after the
being banned twice by at their event. It is other, until an invertebrate ball,
chess.com for cheating believed Carlsen made a adhering as a bolus in its sublingual
online, but denied single move rather than pouch, can number 1,000 items.
none to technically fulfil Swift flight is precise and practical,
3834 White mates in two moves,
against any defence (composer
his contract. but also purer than in any other bird;
unknown). This weird position has In a new Chessbase watching it feed among martins was
proved tricky to solve. article, Prof Ken Regan, like seeing a wolf hunt among dogs.
widely regarded as the It was a joy to savour it one last time
8
leading authority on until next spring. Mark Cocker
7 anti-cheating, reveals
6 he has examined all
5 Niemann’s over the board
4 and online games for
the past two years and
3
found no evidence against
2 the American.
1
a b c d e f g h
3834 1 Qxe5! and mate next move.
ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER

The Guardian Weekly 30 September 2022

Like Puzzles? Try the new Guardian Puzzles app. Download from the App Store or Google Play
Read more: theguardian.com/puzzles-app 63

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Quick crossword
No 16,340
9 10 1 2 3 4 5

11 7 8 9

12

13 14 15 10 11

 All solutions published next week

16 12

17 18 13 14 15

19 16

20 21 17 18 19

22 20

23 24 21 22

25 26 23

The Weekly cryptic By Imogen Across defensive position (8)

1 For example, ‘a Toyota’s a 5 Nuclear explosive power unit (7)
No 28,867 Toyota’ (10) 6 Tashkent’s country (10)
7 Any phenomenally large 9 Wed (3,3,4)
number (7) 12 Abstruse (8)
Across 19 Bat showing determination on old wicket (6)
8 For example, a thumb (5) 14 Logical statement that
1 After mistake on circuit, pressure for F1 21 Be out of sleeping bag? That’s odd (5)
10 Cheese from the north of contradicts itself (7)
starter (6) 22 Small incision in tail (4)
Holland (4) 16 Above ground level (3-3)
5 Meat from sheep I finished first (8)
11 Small preliminary model of a 19 Habitual practice (5)
9 Indigo for a chess computer (4,4)
larger intended work (8) 20 Couch (4)
10 Rural cottage is this writer’s bolthole? (6)
13 Annoyingly playful (6)
11 Care to relax, after putting energy into a Solution No 16,334
15 Horrific smell (6)
comic song (7,5) B O L L Y W O O D I C
17 Cut and run (4,4)
13 For her, partner (not male) not available (4) G O A F I N C H
18 Kind of rock (4)
14 Upset voter stumbles against ballot box (8) O R G A N L O F T E E
21 Dinar (anag) (5) E F N S B L U R
17 Reduce studies in first chapter? (8)
22 Alligator pear (7) C S MU T E D A R
18 One goes round castle, treading nothing into
23 Make worse (10) H O W Z A T T O A S T Y
carpet (4)
A I C P T R
20 What did you say, you tosser? (5,2,5) C A T N A P C E R I S E
23 Tore off from opera, back at top speed to Down H C W E L L Y C D
dance (6) 1 Bohemian dance in fast time (5) A C H E N I S I
24 Partnership lacking say in loyalty (8) 2 What eggs get? (4) C O E T I Q U E T T E
25 Without imagination, supermarket replaces 3 Grannies (informal) (6) H U F F U U R E
legend’s recipe (8) 4 Fortifications added to a A F S P E E D B U M P
26 Deer turns over something with one foot (6)
Solution No 28,861
Sudoku
Down C A R D I F F T A N L I N E Easy
2 In the country I am an unknown animal (4) A E N O H A T A Fill in the grid so
3 Random bloke caught out over pitfall (9) G A L E F O R C E N E E D S that every row,
4 Send fruitlessly from here to post in this
E I O T S O M T every column
box (6)
D I E T S H R O P S H I R E and every 3x3
5 Appoint entirely unsatisfactory
V U E U E S R box contains the
diplomat (15)
P E A N U T N U C L E O N numbers 1 to 9.
6 Glittering, like part of American flag (8)
I I D O
7 Trainspotter losing head – it’s like a Last week’s solution
A N T O N Y M O W N E R S
sieve (5)
L O T E F D E
8 Went to see a fellow motoring enthusiast to
give a bit of a hand (10) P A R C E L B O M B I V E S
12 Bigoted, enjoying the bilingual harangue (10) A N N E U D E A
15 I mark the moment the paper is on the carpet C H A R D I N S T A G R A M
– picked up quietly (4-5) A D E N I M S E
16 Rare single: not running in between (8) S H O W D O G C A N N E R Y

30 September 2022 The Guardian Weekly*