A week in the life of the world | Global edition

24 MARCH 2023 | VOL .208 No.12 | £4.95 | €7.99

Tipping point

Is the world heading for a new

financial crisis?
12

Autocrats Disabled Glitter

reunited villains guru
China and The cultural Ashish
Russia’s trope that Gupta’s
show of just won’t sparkling
friendship go away fashions
17 40 51
 Open up you

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Eyewitness  Uneasy streets
Kenya Protesters in Nairobi throw stones at police during rallies called by
the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, over spiralling costs of living and
PHOTOGRAPH:
ongoing allegations of irregularities in the 2022 presidential elections,
YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP/GETTY which were won by William Ruto.

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 A week in the life of the world Inside
24 March 2023

Spectre of 2008, Xi’s

Moscow mission and
Iraq war, 20 years on
You’d be forgiven for having allowed the collapse of the 6-16 GLOBAL REPORT
tech industry lender Silicon Valley Bank, earlier this Headlines from the last
month, to pass you by. Even the news that SVB’s UK seven days
operation had been salvaged in a deal brokered by the 12 Finance Are we heading
British government might not have registered much. for another banking crash?
But the rescue this week of Switzerland’s second-largest
lender Credit Suisse had a more ominous feel to it, a sense 17-33 SPOTLIGHT
of fiscal dominoes cascading slowly into one another. In-depth reporting
For our big story this week, Anna Isaac and Kalyeena and analysis
Makortoff report on a week that brought back anxious 17 Russia/China Putin and
memories of the 2008 financial crash, while economics Xi’s autocratic bromance
editor Larry Elliott argues that only the era of ultra- 20  France Macron sparks
low interest rates that followed the previous crash has chaos over pension reform
prevented a further correction happening sooner. 24 Colombia A plan to export
The big story Page 12  Escobar’s hippos
26 New Zealand The legacy of
Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia this week Christchurch, four years on
had the feel of a pivotal moment for global diplomacy. 28 Science Sleep and the brain
Russian affairs reporter Pjotr Sauer and senior 30 Iraq The invasion that still
China correspondent Amy Hawkins look at what the haunts global politics
strengthening of the Sino-Russian alliance signifies for 33 US Trump in trouble,
Moscow, Beijing and the rest of the world. episode 433
Spotlight Page 17 
34-44 F E AT U R E S
The 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq passed Long reads, interviews
this week. Diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour reflects on and essays
a botched intervention that still haunts global politics to 34 My mother, the social
this day, while on the Opinion pages Randeep Ramesh media troll
argues that the US foreign policy debacle still serves to By Simon Hattenstone
underline what he describes as “the capricious and self- 40 The cultural obsession
centred nature of American global power”. with disabled villains
Spotlight Page 30  By Ian Grue

45-50 OPINION
45 Randeep Ramesh
US always looks after No 1
47 Stefan Stern
The new office perk-cession
48 Rebecca Solnit
Biden’s drilling mistake

51-59 C U LT U R E
TV, film, music, theatre,
art, architecture & more
51 Design
The sparkling fashions
Join the community On the cover of Ashish Gupta
Twitter: @guardianweekly As Larry Elliott points out on page 16, it has 55 Screen
facebook.com/guardianweekly
Instagram: @guardian been a year since the Federal Reserve started Oscars statuette for sale,
to raise interest rates and banks are now one careful owner
starting to fall over in the US. “Financial crises 57 Books
have occurred on average once a decade over George Eliot’s complicated
the past half century so the one unfolding is, relationship with marriage
if anything, overdue,” he says.
SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS:
Illustration: Guardian Design/AFP/Getty 60-61 LIFESTYLE
MATT BLEASE 60 Tim Dowling
Fiddling on the roof
6

Global
2 UKRAINE /RUSSIA 4 C O R O N AV I R U S

Pandemic fails to dint

report humankind’s happiness

It claimed 6.7 million lives,
locked down entire countries
and triggered a global economic
slump, but Covid-19 has not
Headlines from the affected humankind’s happiness,
last seven days an international study has found.
Interviews with more than
100,000 people in 137 countries
1 U N I T E D S TAT E S Putin visits Mariupol
found significantly higher levels
despite war crimes charges of benevolence in all global
Deportations of Russian
Vladimir Putin made a surprise regions than before the pandemic.
asylum seekers resume visit to Mariupol last Saturday When asked to evaluate their lives
Copyright © 2023 The Biden administration quietly night in a show of defiance after on a scale of one to 10, people on
GNM Ltd. All rights resumed deportations to Russia. the international criminal court average gave scores just as high in
reserved Immigration advocates were issued an arrest warrant for him 2020-22 as in 2017-19.
taken by surprise when a young on war crimes charges. Things were slightly worse in
Published weekly by Russian man, who came to the US Russian state media released western countries and slightly
Guardian News & fleeing Vladimir Putin’s efforts footage showing the president on better elsewhere, but overall
Media Ltd, to mobilise citizens to fight in his first trip to Russian-occupied “the undoubted pains were
Kings Place,
Ukraine, was abruptly deported territories in Ukraine’s Donbas offset by increases in the extent
90 York Way,
last weekend from the US back region since he launched a full- to which respondents had been
London N1 9GU, UK
to Russia. He was among several scale invasion last year. Putin able to discover and share the
Printed in the UK, Russian asylum seekers, many visited several sites, spoke to capacity to care for each other in
Poland, the US, of whom have made their way to residents and was presented difficult times,” the 10th World
Australia and the US in the last year, who are with a report on reconstruction Happiness Report found.
New Zealand now terrified the US government work in the city. Mariupol fell The study found the happiness
will return them to Russia where in May last year after one of the effect of “having someone to
ISSN 0958-9996 they could face prison or be war’s bloodiest battles. It marked count on in times of trouble”
sent rapidly to the frontline, Russia’s first major victory in its increased during the pandemic.
To advertise contact where Russia has seen tens of war in Ukraine, after it failed to In the overall happiness league
advertising.
thousands of casualties. seize the capital, Kyiv, and focused table, Finland remained top for
enquiries@
“US Immigration and instead on south-eastern targets. the sixth successive year and
theguardian.com
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Australia and was ordered to pay the damages somewhat approved of the riot
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The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023

UK headlines p11
6 SOUTH AMERICA
Cocaine smuggling and
production hit record high
South American drug cartels have
capitalised on the retreat of the
Covid-19 pandemic to produce
and smuggle record amounts of
cocaine around the world.
Production of coca, the drug’s
base ingredient, spiked 35% in
2020-21, surpassing pre-pandemic
levels, according to a new report
from the United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime.
The increase in coca production
is the highest since 2016 and
has been accompanied by
the continued trend of South
American cartels improving the
efficiency of their jungle labs
where they can extract more of
the illicit white powder from the
green coca leaves.
7 ARGENTINA
Citizens count cost as
inflation rate passes 100%
The inflation rate tore past 100%
in February, the national statistics
agency announced, the first time it
has hit triple figures since a period
of hyperinflation in 1991.
Inflation over 12 months
clocked in at 102.5% in the second
month of the year, according to
government data released last
Tuesday, with a higher-than-
expected 6.6% monthly rise in the
Consumer Price Index, and a 13.1%
year-to-date increase.
The government has tried in
vain to tame rising prices, which
dent people’s earning power,
savings and the country’s growth.
The big story Page 12 
8 THE NETHERLANDS
Populist party threatens
legislation on emissions
A new populist party surfing
a wave of rural anger at
environmental policies has
emerged as the big winner in 2
provincial elections, dealing
a blow to the four-party coalition
1
of the prime minister, Mark Rutte.
The electoral success of the
3 Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB)
casts doubt over the government’s
5 ability to pass legislation,
including its plans to slash
nitrogen emissions.
“We’re fed up with these 10 S PA I N
policies,” BBB’s founder,
Caroline van der Plas, told the
broadcaster NOS. “It’s not just
about nitrogen, it’s about citizens
who are not seen, not heard, not
taken seriously.”
Monastery allows female
choristers for first time
Women and girls are to be
admitted to a choir at the
Montserrat monastery near
Barcelona, home to the Escolania
all-boys choir, for the first time in
its 700-year history.
The new chamber choir,
made up of about 25 boys and
women and girls of 17 to 24, will
9 ECUADOR/PERU
be separate from the boys-only
At least 15 dead after strong Escolania. The mixed choir will
take over the Escolania’s liturgical
earthquake hits coast
duties one weekend a month.
A strong earthquake shook After a lengthy debate, the
southern Ecuador and northern move to include girls was decided
Peru, killing at least 15 people, in a vote by the Benedictine
trapping others under rubble, and order that runs the monastery
sending rescue teams into streets under the newly appointed abbot,
littered with debris. Manel Gasch.
The US Geological Survey
reported an earthquake with
a magnitude of about 6.8 in
Ecuador’s coastal Guayas region.
Its centre was about 80km
south of Guayaquil, which has a
metropolitan area of more than
3 million people.
The Ecuadorian president,
Guillermo Lasso, said the
earthquake had “generated alarm
in the population”.
Ecuador is particularly prone
to earthquakes.
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly

11 ISRAEL
President Herzog warns
nation over ‘civil war’
Isaac Herzog’s proposal aimed at
finding a compromise solution
to controversial legislative
changes has been rejected by the
governing coalition.
What the president called “the
people’s directive” was aimed
at ending the 10-week standoff
between Israel’s new hardline
government and the large protest
movement opposed to plans that
would give politicians far greater
control of the judiciary.
“The last few weeks have been
tearing us apart,” Herzog said in
an address to the nation. “Anyone
who thinks that a real civil war, of
human life, is a line that we will
not reach has no idea. The abyss is
within touching distance.”
14 DR CONGO
Humanitarian crisis ensues
as thousands flee violence
More than 300,000 people in
the Democratic Republic of the
Congo abandoned their homes
last month because of fighting
between the M23 rebel group and
the government.
The UN’s refugee agency,
UNHCR, says more than 800,000
people have been displaced by the
conflict since last March. Failed
attempts to secure a ceasefire have
meant fighting continues.
Emmanuel Lampaert, an
operations coordinator for
Médecins Sans Frontières, said
the conflict had created a need
for humanitarian relief, with
outbreaks of measles and cholera.
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
12 SYRIA
War and earthquake lead
to repeated homelessness
Nine out of 10 people living in the
squalid camps for the internally
displaced in north-west Syria have
been made homeless multiple
times, according to a survey of
displaced families within Syria.
February’s devastating
earthquake in Turkey and Syria,
which killed tens of thousands
of people, compounded an
already desperate situation with
an estimated 98% of the Syrians
living in camps having been left
without safe shelter, according to 18 19
15 a report by Action for Humanity.
The Syrian civil war, which
reached its 12-year anniversary
on 15 March, has forced an
estimated 1.8 million people into
1,420 camps within Syria.
17
13 M A L AW I
20
Climate change is real, says
leader as cyclone kills 500
President Lazarus Chakwera has
said that nearly half of his country
has been damaged by Cyclone
Freddy, which has killed hundreds
of people and become the longest-
lasting tropical storm on record.
The president asked for help
from the international community
and said the destruction was vast.
“Climate change issues are real
and we are standing right in the
path of it,” said Chakwera, who
added that the climate crisis had
the potential to keep “a nation like
Malawi in perpetual poverty”.
The death toll was last weekend
reported to have reached 500.

Global report
15 PA K I S TA N
Court cancels Imran Khan’s
arrest warrant after clashes
A court in Islamabad cancelled
Imran Khan’s arrest warrant after
intense clashes between police
and the former prime minister’s
supporters outside the judicial
complex. Khan officially appeared
before the court in Pakistan’s
capital last Saturday, complying
with a judicial order that led to
a failed attempt to arrest him on
14 March. He is facing various legal
challenges including unlawfully
selling state gifts given to him
while in office from 2018 to 2022.
Khan says he followed legal
procedures in acquiring the gifts.
There were clashes outside the
court between police and Khan’s
supporters. Local media reported
that, inside the courtroom, judges
and others faced difficulties
because of the effects of teargas
used by the police.
16 C O R O N AV I R U S
DNA tags Wuhan market as
starting point of pandemic
Genetic data gathered from
a live food market in Wuhan has
linked Covid-19 with raccoon
dogs, adding weight to the theory
that infected animals sold at
the site started the coronavirus
pandemic, researchers say.
Swabs collected from the
Huanan seafood market in the two
months after it was shut down on
1 January 2020 were previously
found to contain Covid and
human DNA. When the findings
were published last year, Chinese
researchers said the samples held
no animal DNA. That conclusion
has been overturned by an
international team of scientists.
The big story p12 
9
17 INDONESIA 19 JA PA N D E AT H S
Police officers freed over Virtuous citizens hand in
deadly stadium crush record $30m of lost cash
A court acquitted two senior The honest citizens of Tokyo
police officers who were charged handed in a record ¥3.99bn ($30m)
with negligence over a stadium in lost cash to police last year – an Phyllida Barlow
crowd crush last year that killed average of more than $82,000 a Sculptor
135 people, angering relatives of day. The country’s national police determined to
those who died in one of football’s agency said the amount was up turn convention
worst tragedies. Another officer ¥600m from the previous year, on its head to
was jailed for 18 months but and beat the previous high of create vast works
families of the victims said he had ¥3.84bn declared at police stations of art. She died
been treated too leniently. across the capital in 2019. on 12 March,
Police had been blamed for There was relief, too, for at aged 78.
triggering the crush on 1 October least some of those who had
at Kanjuruhan stadium in Malang mislaid their money. The police Dick Fosbury
by firing teargas after supporters department’s lost and found office American high
invaded the pitch following said it had returned almost ¥3bn, jumper whose
a 3-2 defeat for Arema FC by their while ¥480m was given to those innovative
fierce rivals Persebaya Surabaya. who had discovered cash and ‘flop’ technique
Several relatives of the victims done the honourable thing. transformed his
wept as the judge read out the Under Japanese law, anyone sport. He died
verdicts last Thursday, with one who finds money must hand it in on 12 March,
lawyer saying there had been “no to the police, but they can claim a aged 76.
justice” for the families. reward of between 5% and 20% if
Malang police officer Bambang it is retrieved by the owner. Jacqueline Gold
Sidik Achmadi, who was accused Businesswoman
of ordering his subordinates to who turned
fire the teargas, was found not sex toys and
guilty by the court in Surabaya, lingerie store
the capital of East Java. Presiding Ann Summers
judge Abu Achmad Sidqi Amsya into a high street
said the charges had “not been retail chain. She
proven”. Fellow Malang police died on 16 March,
officer Wahyu Setyo Pranoto was aged 62.
also found not guilty.
Masatoshi Ito
Japanese
billionaire owner
18 S O U T H KO R E A 20 AUSTRALIA of the world’s
second-largest
U-turn on 69-hour working Nuclear watchdog invited
retail empire, to
week after youth protests to talks over Aukus deal which 7-Eleven
The government was forced to The Albanese government has belongs. He died
rethink a planned rise in working requested formal talks with the on 10 March,
hours after a backlash from International Atomic Energy aged 98.
younger people who said the move Agency, the global nuclear
would destroy their work-life watchdog, to allay concerns that Lance Reddick
balance and threaten their health. the Aukus security pact between Actor who
The government intended to raise Australia, the UK and the US, appeared in TV
the maximum weekly working could lead to undeclared nuclear series The Wire
time to 69 hours after business activities or the diversion of and the John Wick
groups said the current cap of 52 enriched uranium. movies. He died
hours made it difficult to meet The Aukus submarine on 17 March,
deadlines. But protests prompted arrangement will be the first aged 60.
the president, Yoon Suk-yeol, to time a provision of the Nuclear
order a reworking of the measure. Non-Proliferation Treaty regime
South Koreans worked an has been used to transfer naval
average of 1,915 hours in 2021 – nuclear propulsion technology
that’s 199 hours more than the from a nuclear weapons state to
OECD average. a non-weapons state.
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
10
SCIENCE A N D EN V IRON M EN T
A ST RONOM Y
Space telescope captures
rare image of dying star
The James Webb space telescope
has captured the rare and fleeting
phase of a star on the cusp of death.
The observation was among the first
made by the telescope following its
launch in late 2021, but the picture
was only released last week. It shows
the gas and dust flung into space by
the star 15,000 light years away.
Shimmering in purple, the cast-
off material once comprised the
star’s outer layer. The Hubble space
telescope snapped a shot of the same
star a few decades ago, but without
the delicate details. “We’ve never
seen it like that before. It’s really
exciting,” said Macarena Garcia
Marin, a European Space Agency
scientist from the project.
P FA S
Toxic ‘forever chemicals’
found in toilet paper
All toilet paper from across the globe
checked for toxic PFAS contained the
compounds, and the waste flushed
down toilets probably creates a
significant source of water pollution,
new research has found.
Once in sewage treatment plants,
the chemicals can be packed in
sewage sludge that is eventually
spread on cropland as fertiliser,
or spilt into waterways. “Toilet
paper should be considered as a
potentially major source of PFAS
entering wastewater treatment
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
systems,” the study’s authors wrote.
PFAS are a class of about 14,000
chemicals used to make consumer
products resist water, stains and
heat. They are called “forever
chemicals” because they do not
naturally break down, and they are
linked to many serious health issues.
The study checked 21 unnamed
major toilet paper brands in North
America, western Europe, Africa,
Central America and South America.
The University of Florida report did
not consider the health implications
of people using contaminated paper.
ZOOLOGY
Parasitic fungus discovered
that infects and kills spiders
Scientists believe they have
discovered a new parasitic fungus
that preys on trapdoor spiders in
Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest.
The organism belongs to a group
of fungi that infect invertebrates
and take over the host. The fungus
was found in November during
a field trip to forests north of Rio
de Janeiro. “It’s a really beautiful
thing,” said Dr João Araújo, a
Brazilian mycologist with the New
York Botanical Garden, who made
the discovery. “It’s one of the very
few cordyceps that are purple, which
is a cool feature.”
A RTIFICIA L INTELLIGENCE
Contest launched to decipher
Herculaneum scrolls
Researchers are launching a global
contest to read ancient scrolls
charred by the eruption of Mount
Vesuvius in AD79 after showing an
artificial intelligence program can
extract letters and symbols from
X-ray images of the documents.
Scientists led by Prof Brent Seales
of the University of Kentucky read
the scrolls by training an algorithm
to spot differences in the papyrus
structure captured by the X-rays.
His team hope that $250,000 in
prizes attracts research groups who
can improve the AI and accelerate
the decoding of the only intact
library to survive from antiquity.
Global report
United Kingdom
H E A LT H
Senior doctor warns of rapid
rise of vaping among teens
One of the UK’s leading respiratory
doctors has raised the alarm
about the exploding popularity of
 The star in the vaping among teenagers, saying
constellation that, without urgent regulation,
Sagitta, officially a generation could end up
known as WR 124, with long-term addictions and
is 30 times as big lung damage.
as our sun and Dr Mike McKean, the
has already shed vice-president of policy for the
enough material Royal College of Paediatricians
to account for 10 and Child Health, said vaping was
suns, according becoming an “epidemic” among
to Nasa teenagers even though it is illegal
NASA/ESA/AFP/GETTY before the age of 18. If its rapid
growth maintained the same
trajectory, almost all children
would vape within five years, he
said. “This is a problem the UK
should take seriously. Walk past
a school at closing time and you’ll
see what happens – large numbers
of children vaping.
“That’s huge amounts of
children spending money on
products that are not cheap, and
they’re inhaling chemicals we
don’t know the long-term effects
of. There can be large amounts
of nicotine, especially in vapes
from overseas, and children are
becoming addicted to a drug.”
McKean said there was “lots of
evidence” to suggest that many
children start vaping despite never
having smoked before, meaning
they are not using it as a tool to
quit smoking.
Vaping involves inhaling
nicotine in a vapour without
the two most harmful elements
of burning tobacco – tar and
carbon monoxide – which makes
15
it a useful tool for weaning
smokers off cigarettes. However,
the long-term health effects
Length in remain uncertain since vaping is
metres of the a recent phenomenon.
neck of Mamen-
chisaurus
sinocanadorum,
a dinosaur that
roamed east
Asia more than
160m years ago,
making it the
longest-necked
creature ever
found

Eyewitness
 Purly queen
The front gates of
a 2.4-metre by 1.5-metre
replica of Buckingham
Palace, knitted by Margaret
Seaman of Caister-on-Sea
in Norfolk. It was the latest
ambitious architectural
replica undertaken by the
93-year-old knitter and
took her eight months to
complete. She first started
making knitted models as
part of a local fundraising
group after her husband’s
death and has since raised
about £100,000 ($120,000)
for charitable causes.
NILS JORGENSEN/
REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
TA X AT I O N
Chancellor under fire for
change to pensions savings
The chancellor has been accused
of unveiling a £4bn ($4.9bn) tax
giveaway that will benefit the
wealthiest people in the UK.
Jeremy Hunt announced
a shake-up of the rules governing
how much people can pay into
their pension pots, which will
not affect the vast majority of the
population but could lead to huge
gains for the top few per cent of
wealthy, older pension savers.
Labour claimed it was a handout
for “the richest 1%” and that
someone with a £2m pension pot
would pay up to £275,000 less tax.
The government said it had to
act because of a “tax trap” that
could mean a growing exodus
of doctors, dentists, teachers
and other senior public sector
employees retiring early, turning
down work or not applying for
higher-paid positions. Others
said that, while the changes
would tackle the issue of 55% tax
penalties faced by some doctors,
they would give a huge boost to
wealthy people.
SECURITY
TikTok app is banned from
government mobile phones
Britain is to prohibit the use of the
Chinese-owned video-sharing
app TikTok on ministers’ and civil
servants’ mobile phones.
The decision marks a sharp
U-turn from the UK’s previous
position and follows a review
of the app by government
cybersecurity experts. It will cover
ministers’ and civil servants’ work
phones, but not personal phones.
It brings the UK in line with
the US government and the
European Commission, both of
which announced similar bans
on TikTok in the past month, and
demonstrates how fast western
trust in China and TikTok has
deteriorated in recent months.
11
POLICE
Survival of London force
depends on ‘regaining trust’
London’s Metropolitan police has
no “God-given right” to exist in its
current size and form if it cannot
regain the trust and confidence it
has haemorrhaged after a series
of scandals, the leader of Britain’s
police chiefs has said.
Martin Hewitt, the chair
of the National Police Chiefs’
Council (NPCC), said the new
Met commissioner, Mark Rowley,
had been resolute in taking on
the challenges facing Britain’s
£18
biggest force and deserved time to
turn it around.
A report due out this week was
expected to severely criticise the The total
Met police for multiple failings amount ($22) in
including misogyny, racism savings collected
and homophobia. by a man from
In a Guardian interview to mark north Devon in
his retirement after three decades the eight months
in policing, Hewitt said it would since having his
take years to regain lost trust. He supermarket
also warned that policing needed loyalty scheme
to make hundreds of millions of QR code tattooed
pounds in savings and said the on to his
criminal justice system was no forearm, to help
longer “effective” . him remember
to use it
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
12 The big story Finance

Subject goes here

Is it
time
to
panic
like
it’s
2008?

The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023

 13

BANKING buy the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank

 The graph of
the DAX share (SVB UK) for a nominal fee – following
price on the the collapse of SVB’s California parent.
index board at However, a frantic weekend spent
the Frankfurt
stock exchange
The travails of trying to salvage the bank, on which
much of Britain’s tech sector depended
for cashflow, turned out to just be the
after shares in
Credit Suisse Credit Suisse “warmup act in some ways”, accord-
ing to a senior Whitehall official.
plummeted on
16 March and SVB have The SVB deal in the UK only pro-
vided a respite before a week from
stirred up bad
KAI PFAFFENBACH/
REUTERS hell unfolded, culminating in a rescue
operation for Switzerland’s second-

memories for largest lender, Credit Suisse, in an

attempt to avoid a re-run of the 2008

a public still banking crisis.

On Monday this week, banking
shares fell in London and across
scarred by Europe after the purchase of Credit
Suisse by rival Swiss bank UBS failed
the last global initially to calm markets. The jitters
were partly prompted by the terms,
financial crisis which saw holders of $17bn of Credit
Suisse’s bonds wiped out, while equity

15 years ago investors were not as badly affected.

Central banks took coordinated
action last Sunday to try to shore up
confidence by agreeing measures
to ensure banks in Canada, Britain,
Japan, Switzerland and the eurozone
had the dollars needed to operate.

N
By Anna Isaac and
Kalyeena Makortoff
o one in
the British government’s Treasury
department had expected March to be
easy. Last Monday’s economics-heavy
review of defence and foreign policy,
and the budget that followed two days
later, meant that a tough week for its
mandarins had already been priced in.
But none of them expected to have to
sell a bank for £1 ($1.20).
That happened last Monday, when
Treasury and central bank officials
eventually brokered a deal for HSBC to
The US Federal Reserve, the Bank
of Canada, the Bank of England, the
Bank of Japan, the European Central
Bank and the Swiss National Bank
announced they would boost liquidity
through daily US dollar swaps. The
change was a modest expansion of an
existing programme in which the Fed
each week pays dollars to other central
banks in exchange for local currency.
The turmoil escalated after last
Tuesday’s admission by Credit
Suisse that it had found “material
weaknesses” in its financial report-
ing. That mattered hugely to global
markets. While far smaller in terms of
assets under management than it used
to be before the global financial crisis,
it was still one of Switzerland’s largest
lenders, and a major European bank
with a significant role in investments.
Some high-profile voices have
stoked fears that problems at banks
such as SVB and Credit Suisse could
spill over to the entire financial sector.
Larry Fink – chief executive of 
BlackRock, the world’s largest

Are we in a banking crisis? SVB’s collapse will not be a one-off

Explainer, page 14  Larry Elliott, page 16 

24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly

14 The big story
Finance
asset manager – said last Wednesday
that the collapse of SVB could just be
the start of a “slow rolling crisis” in
the US financial system, with “more
seizures and shutdowns coming”.
Meanwhile, economist Nouriel
Roubini, known as Dr Doom for having
predicted the 2008 financial crisis,
warned that while SVB’s collapse had
had a “ripple effect” on the financial
sector, failure by Credit Suisse could
prove to be a “Lehman moment”.
While it is too early to say what the
long-term effects of these emergencies
might be, the pressure is on for global
leaders to try to restore calm.
Finance ministers and central
bankers have been at pains to reas-
sure markets and the wider public
that while billions might have to be
pumped into banks, this time things
are different: we will not be plunged
into another global financial crisis.
Joe Biden stressed that “the bank-
ing system is safe” and “your deposits
will be there when you need them”.
Janet Yellen, the US Treasury secretary
and a former central banker, repeated
that to Congress last Thursday. “Our
banking system remains sound, and
Americans can feel confident that their
deposits will be there when they need
them,” she said.
While nothing has come close to
An economist warned
a potential failure by
Credit Suisse could be
a ‘Lehman moment’
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
the queues seen outside the British
bank Northern Rock in 2007, augur-
ing the global financial crisis that saw
the collapse of Wall Street firms Bear
Stearns and Lehman Brothers a year
later, the mental scars those events left
behind mean investors and the public
are easily spooked by the prospect of
banks in trouble.
The financial crisis started a course
of events that led central banks to slash
interest rates to zero – or even lower.
Inflation came roaring back last
year, fanned by a surge in economic
activity after the Covid-19 pandemic
and the invasion of Ukraine. The age
of cheap money came to an abrupt
end, as central banks started to raise
interest rates to cool inflation.
“The era of very low interest rates
is, for the foreseeable future, clearly
over,” said Frédérique Carrier, British
head of investment strategy for RBC
Wealth Management.
And now banks are having to turn to
central banks again for support. About
$300bn was borrowed from the Fed-
eral Reserve last week. Nearly half the
money, $143bn, went to holding com-
panies for two major banks that failed
this month, SVB and Signature Bank.
The Fed did not identify the banks that
received the other half of the funding
or say how many of them there were.
In another sign of fears over finan-
cial contagion, a clutch of large US
banks, including Bank of America,
Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan,
joined forces to inject $30bn into the
US lender First Republic, after fears
that it could follow in SVB’s footsteps.
A N A LY S I S
EXPLAINER
Cheques and
balances
Is this another
financial crash?
By Jonathan Barrett
Are we in a banking crisis?
Opinions diverge on this. The
California-based Silicon Valley Bank
is the biggest US bank collapse since
2008, and Credit Suisse has joined
peers that were sold at fire-sale
prices during the financial crisis.
Shane Oliver, the chief economist
of financial services company AMP,
says while the bank failures do not
look like a rerun of the 2008 crisis,
▲ Customers line they do represent contagion risks.
up at Silicon Investors have been selling down
Valley Bank’s HQ regional US banks, in particular, over
in California concerns they might have balance
NOAH BERGER/AFP/ sheets that resemble SVB’s finances.
GETTY
But other parts of the market,
including US tech stocks, have held
up well during a volatile few weeks,
indicating some investors expect the
threat of a banking crisis to subside.
It is clear, however, that the speed
of the demise of SVB, and then
Credit Suisse, has spooked bank
investors and customers.
How are central banks trying to
avert a meltdown?
Several central banks announced
a strategy to keep money flowing
through the global economy to help
ward off the sort of credit crunch
that gripped markets in 2008.
The initiative, led by the US
Federal Reserve, will enable other
central banks to more easily obtain
US dollars that can be distributed to
commercial banks in their countries.
This is designed to ultimately
flow through to borrowers, who
need access to credit for mortgages,
businesses and investments.
The mechanism to do this is
called a swap line, which is an
agreement between two central
banks to exchange currencies. Until
On the website at least the end of April, the Federal
Scan the code for Reserve will offer daily currency
more in-depth swaps – rather than weekly – to
news, analysis ensure central banks in Canada,
and opinion on
this story

Britain, Japan, Switzerland and the
eurozone have enough US dollars
to operate.
The changes are designed to avert
a credit crunch, a situation whereby
the global banking system tightens
up and it is harder for consumers
and companies to get loans.
Why are deposits important?
The current unease in the financial
system was sparked by the collapse
of SVB, which suffered a bank
run after it disclosed a hole in its
finances caused by the sale of its
inflation-hit bond portfolio.
Customers quickly pulled their
deposits and, without adequate cash
on hand, the 16th largest bank in the
US collapsed on 10 March.
Banks typically use deposits to
underpin loans to other customers
and to invest, making them critical
to operations.
While the US government stepped
in to guarantee all deposits of
SVB customers, global banks are
preparing for customers to pull back.
Analysts from Saxo Capital
Markets said some global banks
were rushing to shore up liquidity by
borrowing US dollars amid concerns
deposits will dwindle.
What happened to Credit Suisse?
Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS,
has purchased the country’s second
largest, Credit Suisse, in a deal that
also avoids a bank collapse that
could have triggered wider fallout.
The below-market purchase
includes an insurance scheme from
Swiss agencies against potential
losses that UBS faces from taking
on some of Credit Suisse’s riskier
assets. The sale comes after years
of scandals eroded Credit Suisse’s
reputation and profitability, before
a sharp loss of investor confidence.
JONATHAN BARRETT IS
ARDIAN AUSTRALIA’S
GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA S SENI
SENIOR
SINESS REPORTER
BUSINESS REPORTER
 People queue at
a Northern Rock
branch in 2007
REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
“The actions of America’s largest
banks reflect their confidence in the
country’s banking system. Together,
we are deploying our financial strength
and liquidity into the larger system,
where it is needed the most,” the banks
said in a joint statement on 16 March.
By last Sunday, the Swiss govern-
ment had forced through the takeover
of Credit Suisse by rival UBS for almost
$3.25bn – well below its market value.
The deal was brokered once it became
clear a $54bn loan had failed to halt
the precipitous slide in its share price.
“The takeover of Credit Suisse by
UBS is the best solution” in the cur-
rent situation, said the Swiss presi-
dent, Alain Berset. A $9.8bn insurance
scheme to protect UBS from losses was
described by Karin Keller-Sutter, the
Swiss finance minister, as “like a back-
stop and insurance that only comes
into effect if certain losses occur”.
The Swiss bank’s recent woes
come after a run of scandals. In a little
more than two years it has admitted
to defrauding investors as part of
the Mozambique “tuna bonds” loan
scandal, resulting in a fine of more
than $429m, and been embroiled
in the collapse of the lender Green-
sill Capital and the US hedge fund
Archegos Capital.
Last week, Germany’s finance min-
ister, Christian Lindner, insisted his
country’s financial system was stable
and that this was not a repeat of 2008.
Despite weeks of late-night confer-
ence calls between US, European and
British central bankers and officials,
experts say we are not necessarily
15
facing an  immediate widespread
financial crisis.
“The global financial system is
much more robust than it was in
2008,” said Jón Danielsson, a direc-
tor of the Systemic Risk Centre at the
London School of Economics. “The
government authorities understand
the uncertainty and vulnerabilities
much more, and the financial system
is much better at absorbing shocks …
You can throw a lot at it without throw-
ing it out of kilter.”
Still, the political questions that
haunt such state and central bank
interventions have returned.
Support delivered by UK and US
authorities to the banking sector has
already raised questions over the
“moral hazard” of effectively bail-
ing out technologists and venture
capitalists who tend to criticise big
government and state supervision
until their own money is at risk.
And while the US money used to
save depositors was taken from a
pool of cash that American banks
fund themselves, that money is still
– according to some experts – effec-
tively taxpayers’ money by another
name. “That is semantics, because it’s
a tax: the government tells the banks to
put money into the deposit insurance
fund … it’s not free money,” Danielsson
said, adding: “That money could have
been lent to somebody, or it could help
somebody in some way.” Observer
ANNA ISAAC IS THE GUARDIAN AND
OBSERVER’S CITY EDITOR; KALYEENA
MAKORTOFF IS THE BANKING
CORRESPONDENT
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
16 The big story
Finance
ECONOMICS
A crisis is long
overdue. Silicon
Valley Bank’s
collapse won’t
be a one-off
Larry Elliott
I
t has been a year since the
Federal Reserve started to raise
interest rates and banks are
starting to fall over in the US.
Anybody who thinks Silicon Valley
Bank was a one-off is deluding
themselves. Financial crises have
occurred on average once a decade
over the past half century so the one
unfolding is, if anything, overdue.
The reckoning has been delayed
because, since 2008, banks
have been operating in a world
of ultra-low interest rates and
periodic injections of electronic
cash from central banks. Originally
a temporary expedient after the
collapse of Lehman Brothers,
cheap and plentiful money became
a constant prop for the markets.
Over the years, there was debate
about what would happen were
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
central banks to raise interest rates
and to suck the money they had
created out of the financial system.
Now we know.
The action deemed necessary to
rein in inflation has deflated housing
bubbles, sent share prices plunging
and left banks nursing big losses on
their holdings of government bonds.
The Bank of England was quicker
out of the blocks than the Fed.
Threadneedle Street began raising
rates in December 2021 and has
raised them 10 times in a row. The
European Central Bank waited until
July last year before increasing
borrowing costs for the first time
in a decade, and went ahead with
an increase last week despite news
that the banking malaise had spread
across the Atlantic to Credit Suisse.
As Dhaval Joshi of BCA Research
pointed out last week, there are
three classic signs that a recession
is coming in the US: a downturn
in the housing market, bank
failures and rising unemployment.
Housebuilding is down by 20% in
the past year, which means the first
has happened. The problems at SVB
and other regional banks suggest the
second condition is being met. The
third harbinger is unemployment
rising by 0.5 percentage points; it is
up by 0.2 points.
“Banks tend to fail just before
recessions begin,” Joshi says. “If
history is any guide, the start of
bank failures presages an economic
recession that is more imminent
than many people anticipate.”
The Fed and the Bank of England
were both due to meet to decide on
interest rates this week; the financial
markets expected, in both cases,
anything up to a 0.25 point increase.
Frankly, it should be a no-brainer.
Given the lags involved, even a cut
in rates would be too late to prevent
output from falling, but against
a backdrop of falling inflation,
plunging global commodity prices
and evidence of mounting financial
distress any further tightening of
policy would be foolish.
Central banks seem to think there
is no problem in achieving price
stability while maintaining financial
stability. Good luck with that.
The Fed, the ECB and the Bank of
England have tightened policy and
things are starting to break.
It wasn’t always thus. There was
a marked absence of banking crises
in the 25 years after the second There was
world war; banks were more tightly
regulated than today. Reforms put
debate
in place after the Great Depression, about what
including capital controls and the US would
separation of retail and investment
banking, were designed to ensure happen
governments could pursue their if central
economic objectives without fear
that they would be blown off course
banks were
by currency runs or market turmoil. to raise
Over the past 50 years, rates. Now
the financial sector has been
liberalised and grown much
we know
bigger. Regulation and supervision
have been tightened since the
global financial crisis but with
only limited effect. SVB was
supposed to be a small bank that
could operate with less stringent
regulation than a bank deemed to be
“systemically important”.
There is not the remotest
possibility of a return to the curbs  Approaching
on banks that were in place during turmoil can be
the 1950s and 1960s but that, as has mapped using
become evident in the past 15 years, economic data
has its costs. One is that economies SINOPIX/REX
dominated by the financial sector
only really deliver for the better
off: the owners of property and
shares. A second is that the financial
markets have become hooked
on the stimulus that has been
provided by central banks. A third
is that crises endemic to the system
become more likely when that
stimulus is removed. This means
more stimulus will eventually be
provided, markets will boom and
the seeds of the next crash sown.
LARRY ELLIOTT IS THE GUARDIAN’S
ECONOMICS EDITOR
 17
In-depth reporting and analysis

ENVIRONMENT
‘Final warning’
issued on
climate crisis
Page 22 

RUS SI A /C H I NA

X
Xi’s visit
i Jinping said China is ready
with Russia “to stand guard
over the world order based
▲ Matryoshka
will be fruitful and give new momen-
tum to the healthy and stable develop- dolls depicting
ment of Chinese-Russian relations.” Xi Jinping

consolidates on international law” as he

arrived in Moscow for a state visit on
Monday, days after Vladimir Putin was
Xi added that together with Russia,
China was “ready to resolutely defend
the UN-centric international system,
and Vladimir
Putin in a
Moscow store
Beijing’s made the subject of an arrest warrant
by the international criminal court.
stand guard over the world order based
on international law”.
NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/
AFP/GETTY

upper hand A military brass band greeted Xi

at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport. “I am
very glad, at the invitation of President
The two leaders, who are believed
to share a strong personal relation-
ship, held “informal” talks on Monday,

over Putin Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, to come

By Pjotr Sauer and Amy Hawkins
back to the land of our close neighbour
on a state visit,” Xi said upon arrival,
according to Russia’s state-run Tass
news agency. “I am confident the visit
followed by dinner. In remarks at the
Kremlin, Putin told Xi he welcomed
Beijing’s proposal to end the “acute
crisis” in Ukraine and that he viewed
Continued 
the plan with respect.
18 Spotlight
Global
▲ Xi Jinping,
accompanied
The Russian leader told his Chinese
counterpart: “You know that we are
by Russian always ready for negotiating, and we
deputy prime will discuss all those questions includ-
minister Dmitry ing your suggestions.”
Chernyshenko, He also said that Russia was
is welcomed to “slightly envious” of China’s rapid
Moscow development in recent decades.
ANATOLIY ZHDANOV/ On the eve of the state visit, Vladimir
KOMMERSANT/AFP/
GETTY Putin had praised his “good old friend”
Xi Jinping in an article written for a
Chinese newspaper. The Russian
president said Russia had high hopes
for Xi’s visit, the Chinese leader’s first
to Russia since Putin launched his
invasion of Ukraine last year. In the
article, Putin said: “We are grateful for
the balanced line of [China] in connec-
tion with the events taking place in
Ukraine, for understanding their back-
ground and true causes. We welcome
China’s willingness to play a construc-
tive role in resolving the crisis.”
Xi in turn published an article in
Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a daily published
by the Russian government, in which
he called for “pragmatism” on Ukraine.
He said China’s proposal, a 12-point
paper released last month and largely
 Xi Jinping dismissed by the west, represents “as
speaks to much as possible the unity of the world
Vladimir Putin
community’s views”.
during their Xi said his trip to Russia aimed to
meeting at the
strengthen the friendship between the
Kremlin on
two countries, “an all-encompassing
Monday partnership and strategic interaction”
SERGEI KARPUKHIN/
in a world threatened by “acts of
SPUTNIK/AP hegemony, despotism and bullying”.
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
‘For Xi, it is important
to stop a Russian defeat
which could jeopardise
Putin’s position’
“There is no universal model of
government and there is no world
order where the decisive word belongs
to a single country,” Xi wrote.
Analysts said the visit by Xi was
important to Moscow. “China is by far
the most important ally for Russia,”
said Alexander Gabuev, an expert on
Russia’s relations with China at the
Carnegie Endowment for Interna-
tional Peace.
“That Xi, the leader of the second
most powerful country in the world, is
ready to visit Moscow during the war
in Ukraine is hugely symbolic.”
The visit came shortly after Putin
was made the subject of an arrest
warrant by the international criminal
court for overseeing the abduction of
Ukrainian children, sending Russia
another significant step on the path
to becoming a pariah state, and two
days after he made a surprise visit to
the occupied city of Mariupol in an
apparent show of defiance towards
the court and the west in general.
It also came at a time of growing
Russian dependence on Beijing, with
Xi holding the upper hand over Putin
one year into the war in Ukraine,
experts said.
Gabuev pointed to the growing
economic dependence of Russia
on Beijing, with China accounting
for more than 40% of Russia’s total
imports, according to state trade data.
Data shows that China has stepped
in to supply Russia with large volumes
of products for both civilian and mili-
tary use, including raw materials and
computer chips – vital resources for
Moscow to keep its war machine afloat.
This shift partly explains why the
Russian economy has fared better than
many economists have predicted after
the introduction of unprecedented
western sanctions on the country.
But while Moscow has managed
to redirect some of its trade flows
towards China, the country’s budget
recorded a deficit of almost $25bn in
January after the west introduced a
series of price caps and embargos on
Russian energy exports, the lifeblood
of Russia’s economy.
Xi was also reported to be planning
a call with Volodymyr Zelenskiy. That
would partly be an effort to “balance
the negative impact that his visit to
Moscow will have” on Xi’s relations
with the west, said Bonnie Glaser,
the director of the Indo-Pacific Pro-
gram at the German Marshall Fund,
a thinktank.
“The talks might produce a more
concrete roadmap for peace out of
the conflict,” said Andrey Kortunov,
director general of the Russian Inter-
national Affairs Council, a research
organisation close to the Russian
government.
“People will be watching for the
result,” said Yun Sun, director of the
China Program at the Stimson Center,
a Washington thinktank.
“For Xi, it is important to prevent a
major Russian defeat which … could
jeopardise Putin’s position,” Gabuev
said.
PJOTR SAUER IS A RUSSIAN AFFAIRS
REPORTER FOR THE GUARDIAN; AMY
HAWKINS IS THE GUARDIAN’S SENIOR
CHINA CORRESPONDENT

EXPLAINER
RUSSI A
Court drama
What does
the ICC arrest
warrant mean
for Putin?
By Peter Beaumont
What is the international criminal
court arrest warrant for Vladimir
Putin for?
The court has issued arrest
warrants for the Russian president,
Vladimir Putin, and Russia’s
commissioner for children’s rights,
Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova,
in relation to the forced deportation
of children from Ukraine to Russia,
where many have been adopted by
Russian families.
Forced deportation of populations
is recognised as a crime under the
Rome statute that established the
court. Russia was a signatory to
the Rome statute, but withdrew in
2016, saying it did not recognise the
jurisdiction of the court.
Although Ukraine is itself not a
signatory to the court in The Hague,
it granted the ICC jurisdiction to
investigate war crimes committed
on its territory.
Four visits by the ICC’s chief
prosecutor, Karim Khan, over the
past year have led to a ruling that
“there are reasonable grounds
to believe that Mr Putin bears
individual criminal responsibility”
for the child abductions.
What does that mean in reality?
Because Russia does not recognise
the court and does not extradite
its citizens, it is highly unlikely
that Putin or Lvova-Belova will
be surrendered to the court’s
jurisdiction any time soon.
But the issuing of the warrant
remains a highly significant moment
for a number of reasons. It sends a
signal to senior Russian officials –
military and civilian – who may be
vulnerable to prosecution either
now or in the future and would
further limit their ability to travel
internationally, including to attend
international forums.
Don’t serving heads of government
enjoy immunity?
While the ICC does not recognise
immunity for heads of state in
cases involving war crimes, crimes
against humanity or genocide, in an
important precedent, South Africa
declined to enforce an ICC warrant
for the arrest of the Sudanese
dictator Omar al-Bashir during a
visit in 2015.
Pretoria argued that it saw “no
duty under international law and
the Rome statute to arrest a serving
head of state of a [ICC] non-state-
party such as Omar al-Bashir”, and
several other countries that he
visited also declined to arrest him.
19
The arrest of the former Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet in
London in 1998 on an international
warrant issued by the Spanish
judge Baltasar Garzón illustrates
the difficulties involved in such
immunity issues.
Pinochet claimed immunity as
a former head of state – a claim
rejected by the British courts – but
the British home secretary, Jack
Straw, allowed Pinochet to return
home on grounds of ill health.
 Putin has
been accused So what is the point of this?
of deporting While Putin seems secure in his
children from power and safe from extradition, a
Ukraine to Russia future Kremlin leader may decide
JONATHAN RAA/
it is more politic to send him to The
NURPHOTO/REX Hague than to protect him.
A good example is Slobodan
Milošević, the former president of
Yugoslavia, who was indicted on a
series of war crimes charges by the
international criminal tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia in the midst
of the war in Kosovo in 1999.
In 2001, amid a struggle between
key opposing figures in Serbia after
Milošević’s fall from power, the
prime minister, Zoran Djindjić,
ignored a court ruling banning
the extradition and ordered the
transfer of Milošević to The Hague,
saying: “Any other solution except
cooperation [with The Hague]
would lead the country to disaster.”
Milošević’s arrest – preceding
his transfer – followed pressure
on the Belgrade government to
detain the former president or risk
losing substantial US economic aid
and loans from the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Are other warrants likely to follow?
The ICC president added that the
prosecutor could form cases of
new allegations against Putin, thus
expanding the warrants. Human
Rights Watch described the decision
to issue an arrest warrant for Putin as
a “wake-up call to others committing
The issue abuses or covering them up”.
Balkees Jarrah, associate
of the international justice director at
warrant is the NGO, said: “With these arrest
warrants, the ICC has made Putin
significant a wanted man and taken its first
– it sends step to end the impunity that has
a signal to emboldened perpetrators in Russia’s
war against Ukraine for far too long.”
Russian PETER BEAUMONT IS A SENIOR
officials REPORTER FOR THE GUARDIAN
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
20 Spotlight
Europe
A N A LY S I S
FR ANCE
Pension reform
Macron faces
the moment
that may define
his presidency
By Angelique Chrisafis PARIS
When furious
demonstrators in Dijon
set fire to an effigy of
Emmanuel Macron, and
thousands of people took to the
streets in cities such as Paris, Rennes
and Marseille last week to protest
against the government raising the
pension age without a parliamentary
vote, the interior minister said the
chaos “brought back bad memories”.
Four years after the gilets jaunes
anti-government movement in
which people in small towns and
the countryside rose up, Macron
was again accused of disdain for the
public mood. Politicians from his
party were again asking for police
protection for fear of reprisals.
Macron chose last week to use
executive powers contained in article
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
49.3 of the French constitution to
bypass parliament and push through
his plan to raise the pension age
from 62 to 64 without a vote.
He argued there was no choice,
saying that losing a vote would have
spooked the markets and damaged
the economy. France’s 65-year-old
constitution concentrates power
in the hands of the president at the
expense of MPs, allowing him to
override a divided parliament in
certain circumstances.
But the move could define his
domestic programme and his
remaining four years in office. The
mer ban
former banker who once promised
to re
reconcile the French people
with their increasingly distrusted
political class, overhaul the welfare
state and stop voters heading to the
far right was accused by critics of
worsening the disillusionment with
politics, and potentially giving the
far right a future election boost.
The question is what happens
now. The government narrowly
survived a vote of no confidence
in parliament on Monday, by just
nine votes, though it would have
been highly unlikely for opposition
parties to have gained the absolute
Pensions are seen as the
cornerstone of France’s
cherished model of
social protection
majority required without the right’s ▼ A protester
Les Républicains, whose leadership registers her
refuses to support it. objection to the
Even so, Macron’s ability to put pensions change
in place his domestic programme
is now weakened. He has been
severely undermined in the national
DANIEL COLE/AP
assembly since his centrist grouping
failed to win an absolute majority
in parliamentary elections last
June amid gains for the far right
and radical left. The pensions row
showed how the right cannot be
depended upon to help Macron get
legislation through.
It was “the day Macronism died”,
said the journalist Thomas Legrand
in the leftwing daily Libération,
suggesting the president would
struggle to pass other domestic
policy. When Macron beat the
far-right candidate Marine Le Pen
to win a second term last spring, he
promised more consensus-building,
saying people were “tired of reforms
that come from the top down”.
Trade unions see that as hollow.
Changes to the pension system
have been a political flashpoint for
every French president, because
they are seen as the cornerstone of
France’s cherished model of social
protection. But Macron’s changes Noisy rebuke
were seen as unfair in part because The government’s
of a muddled communications drive use of special
constitutional
to explain them to the public.
powers led to
Trade unions said lower-income,
manual workers would suffer the chaotic scenes in
most from the pension age rising parliament in which
from 62 to 64, because they begin
radical left MPs
their working life earlier. Higher
sang La Marseillaise
to silence the
earners, who start paying into the
prime minister,
system later because of university
Élisabeth Borne.
studies, will feel less of an impact as
MPs on the left
many retire at 67 on a full pension.
shouted “Resign!
Trade unions have organised up
Resign!” at Borne,
to 1.28 million people in marches and members of the
across France during two months of France Unbowed
on-off strikes. More are planned. party sang the
Philippe Martinez, the head of the national anthem
CGT union, had said that if Macron so loudly that
forced through pension change, he the session had
would be giving “the keys of the to be suspended
presidency” to Le Pen in 2027. before Borne tried
While the radical left has been again to be heard.
vocal, Le Pen’s National Rally party She said the bill
has been quiet, hoping to gain would be pushed
capital, while accusing Macron of through because
taking an “unhealthy pleasure” in the government
sparking chaos. could not “gamble
ANGELIQUE CHRISAFIS IS THE the future of
GUARDIAN’S PARIS CORRESPONDENT our pensions”.
 Spotlight
South Asia
INDIA
Kashmir
Muslims
crushed by
‘bulldozer
politics’
By Aakash Hassan SRINAGAR
and Hannah Ellis-Petersen DELHI
S
uhail Ahmad Shah stood
despairingly before the wreck-
age that for two decades had
provided his livelihood. Just
hours before, he had been busy at the
workshop when he heard an ominous
crunch, and the tin roof began to cave
in. He barely made his escape before
a bulldozer flattened the entire place.
“No notice was served to us,” said
Shah, 38. “The officials came suddenly
and demolished our workshop. No one
is listening to us. We’ve been paying
rent. Isn’t this an atrocity?”
His workshop selling second-
hand car parts in Srinagar, the
summer capital of the Indian state
of Kashmir, was just one of dozens of
structures across the region caught
up in a widespread demolition drive
in February. The purpose, according
to the government, was to “retrieve”
state land that had been illegally
encroached on. More than 20,000
hectares of land were seized before
the drive was paused.
In Kashmir, the drive has been con-
demned as having a more sinister pur-
pose. Many have decried it as part of a
wider agenda by the Hindu nationalist
government of the Bharatiya Janata
party (BJP), led by prime minister
Narendra Modi, to displace and dis-
possess Kashmiris from their own land.
Since the Modi government came to
power in 2014, bulldozers have been a
popular tool for BJP leaders to target
the Muslim minority in their pursuit
of a religious nationalist agenda to
establish India as a Hindu, rather than
secular, country. In states such as Uttar
Pradesh, Delhi and Gujarat, bulldozers
have been used to destroy the homes
of Muslim activists accused of involve-
ment in protests and of communities
alleged to be illegal immigrants.
Panic spread in Kashmir that
so-called “bulldozer politics”were
being deployed against its Muslims.
Mehbooba Mufti, former chief minis-
ter of Kashmir, termed the demolition
drive “a ruse to further push people
to economic margins by demolishing
their homes and livelihood”.
Since independence in 1947, Kash-
mir has been the touchstone issue
between India and Pakistan. They
have gone to war multiple times for
control over the disputed territory,
which is split between the two coun-
tries. On the Indian side was the state
of Jammu and Kashmir where, from
21
the 1990s onwards, a violent separatist
insurgency with an allegiance to, and
funded by, Pakistan, emerged.
Successive governments struggled
to bring the violence under control.
But in August 2019 the Modi govern-
ment stripped the state of its auton-
omy, severing it into two territories
under central government control.
Thousands of troops were moved in,
the state government was dissolved
and local politicians were imprisoned.
Since then, the BJP has allowed
outsiders to buy property and register
to vote in Kashmir for the first time.
More than 2 million new voters have
been registered, concerning the many
who believe the government is trying
to change the state’s demographics.
A redrawing of the electoral map
has led to accusations of gerrymander-
ing after it became clear the reshaped
constituencies would split the Muslim
vote in Kashmir, to the likely electoral
▲ Protesters rally
advantage of the BJP.
against a recent The BJP says that its actions have
land eviction brought an era of peace. Those in
drive in Kashmir
MUBASHIR HASSAN/ REX/
SHUTTERSTOCK
the state tell a different story – one
of systematic oppression under
increasingly authoritarian laws and
where democratic freedoms have
been crushed. They say censorship,
of citizens and the media, is standard
practice by the government, police
and military, and that critics are taken
in by police.
Democracy remains elusive.
The state government has not been
restored and regional elections have
not been held for more than five years.
Militants have carried out targeted
killings of non-locals and minority
Kashmiri Hindus.
“We do not feel safe in Kashmir,”
said Rinku Bhat, who fled his home
after the killings. “Our people are being
killed in broad daylight by gunmen.
We are demanding that we should
be posted to safer locations but the
government has not helped.”
Kavinder Gupta, senior BJP leader
and former deputy chief minister of
the region, dismissed the allegations.
‘No one is “There is peace in Kashmir,” he
said. “The people promoting Pakistan’s
listening agenda and raising its flag were given
to us. a free hand by past governments.
The actions taken in Kashmir were
We’ve been necessary, and the results are in front
paying of us.” Observer
rent. Isn’t AAKASH HASSAN IS A JOURNALIST BASED
this an IN KASHMIR; HANNAH ELLIS-PETERSEN
IS THE GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER’S
atrocity?’ SOUTH ASIA CORRESPONDENT
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
22 Spotlight
Environment
GL OB A L H E AT I NG
Scientists
issue ‘final
warning’ on
climate crisis
By Fiona Harvey
S
cientists have delivered a
“final warning” on the climate
crisis, as rising greenhouse gas
emissions push the world to
the brink of irrevocable damage that
only swift and drastic action can avert.
The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), made up of the
world’s leading climate scientists, set
out the final part of its mammoth sixth
assessment report on Monday.
The comprehensive review of
human knowledge of the climate crisis
took hundreds of scientists eight years
to compile and runs to thousands of
pages, but boiled down to one message:
act now, or it will be too late.
The UN secretary general, António
Guterres, said: “This report is a clarion
call to massively fast-track climate
efforts by every country and every sec-
tor and on every timeframe. Our world
needs climate action on all fronts:
everything, everywhere, all at once.”
In sober language, the IPCC set
out the devastation that has already
been inflicted on swathes of the world.
Extreme weather caused by climate
breakdown has led to increased deaths
from intensifying heatwaves in all
regions, millions of lives and homes
destroyed in droughts and floods,
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
millions of people facing hunger, and
“increasingly irreversible losses” in
vital ecosystems.
Monday’s final instalment, called
the synthesis report, is almost certain
to be the last such assessment while
the world still has a chance of limiting
global temperature rises to 1.5C above
pre-industrial levels, the threshold
beyond which our damage to the cli-
mate will rapidly become irreversible.
Kaisa Kosonen, a climate expert at
Greenpeace International, said: “This
report is definitely a final warning on
1.5C. If governments just stay on their
current policies, the remaining carbon
budget will be used up before the next
IPCC report [due in 2030].”
More than 3 billion people already
live in areas that are “highly vulner-
able” to climate breakdown, the IPCC
found, and half of the global popula-
tion now experiences severe water
scarcity for at least part of the year. In
many areas, the report warned, we are
already reaching the limit to which we
can adapt to such severe changes, and
weather extremes are “increasingly
driving displacement” of people in
Africa, Asia, North, Central and South
America, and the south Pacific.
All of those impacts are set to
increase rapidly, as we have failed to
reverse the 200-year trend of rising
greenhouse gas emissions, despite
more than 30 years of warnings from
the IPCC, which published its first
report in 1990.
The world heats up in response to
the accumulation of carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere, so every year in which
emissions continue to rise eats up the
available “carbon budget” and means
far more drastic cuts will be needed in
future years.
Yet there is still hope of staying
within 1.5C, according to the report.
Hoesung Lee, the chair of the IPCC,
said: “This synthesis report under-
scores the urgency of taking more
ambitious action and shows that, if
we act now, we can still secure a livable
sustainable future for all.”
Temperatures are now about
1.1C above pre-industrial levels, the
IPCC found. If greenhouse gas emis-
sions can be made to peak as soon as
possible, and are reduced rapidly in
the following years, it may still be pos-
sible to avoid the worst ravages that
would follow a 1.5C rise.
FIONA HARVEY IS A GUARDIAN
ENVIRONMENT EDITOR
 The world is A N A LY S I S
on the brink of GL OB A L H E AT I NG
irrevocable dam-
age, says the IPCC
JANEZ VOLMAJER/ALAMY
Out of time?
On the road to
hell, signposts
still point to a
liveable future
By Damian Carrington
After a 10,000-year
journey, our human
civilisation has reached
a climate crossroads:
what we choose to do in the next
few years will determine our fate
for millennia.
That choice was laid bare in
the landmark report published on
Monday by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
assembled by the foremost climate
experts and approved by all the
governments. The next update will
be published about 2030 – by that
Stark facts time the most critical choices will
Current effects have been made.
The report is clear about what
of warming
is at stake – everything: “There
is a rapidly closing window of
3bn
Number of
opportunity to secure a liveable and
sustainable future for all.”
“The choices and actions
people living in implemented in this decade [ie
areas “highly by 2030] will have impacts now
vulnerable” and for thousands of years,” it
to climate said. The climate crisis is already
breakdown taking away lives and livelihoods
across the world, and the report
50% said the future effects will be even
worse than was thought: “For any
Proportion of given future warming level, many
world population climate-related risks are higher than
that is already [previously] assessed.”
experiencing “Continued emissions will further
periods of severe affect all major climate system
water scarcity components, and many changes
will be irreversible on centennial to
millennial time scales,” it said. To
follow the path of least suffering
– limiting global temperature rise
to 1.5C – greenhouse gas emissions
must peak “at the latest before

2025”, the report said, followed by
“deep global reductions”. Yet in
2022, global emissions rose again to
set a new record.
The 1.5C goal appears virtually
out of reach, the IPCC said: “In the
near-term, global warming is more
likely than not to reach 1.5C even
under a very low emission scenario.”
A huge ramping up of work to
protect people will therefore be
needed. For example, “extreme
sea level events” expected once
a century today will strike at least
once a year by 2100 in half of all
monitored locations.
However, the faster emissions are
cut, the better it will be for billions
of people: “Adverse impacts and
related losses and damages from
climate change will escalate with
every increment of global warming.”
Every tonne of CO2 emissions
prevented also reduces the risk of
true catastrophe: “Abrupt and/or
irreversible changes in the climate
system, including changes triggered
when tipping points are reached.”
The report presents the choice
humanity faces in stark terms, made
all the more chilling by the fact that
this is the compromise language
agreed by all nations – many would
go further if speaking alone. But it
also presents the signposts to the
path the world should and could
take to secure that liveable future.
Amid the maze of detail in the
thousands of pages of supporting
documents, three of these signposts
stand tallest. First is that the
climate crisis is fundamentally
a crisis of injustice: “The 10% of
households with the highest per
capita emissions contribute 34-45%
of global consumption-based
emissions, while the bottom 50%
contribute 13-15%.” The climate
emergency cannot end without
addressing the inequalities of
income and gender for the simple
reason that “social trust” is required
for “transformative change”.
The second signpost is that any
new fossil fuel developments are
utterly incompatible with the net
zero emissions required. Oil, gas and
coal projects already in operation
will blow our chance of limiting
heating to 1.5C, unless some are
shut down early.
The third signpost points to
Opinion p48
23
technology and finance: “Feasible, ▼ A road is
effective, and low-cost options for waterlogged by
[emissions cutting] and adaptation incessant rain in
are already available” meaning solar Chennai, India
and wind power, energy efficiency, IDREES MOHAMMED/EPA
cuts in methane emissions and
halting the destruction of forests.
The report does not shy away
from the daunting scale of the
choices we need to make. Money
is key but, the report said, “there
is sufficient global capital”.
Furthermore, it said, the costs of
climate action are clearly lower than
the damage from climate chaos.
But there is also a gaping climate
policy gap, between what is in
place and what is needed: “Without
a strengthening of policies, global
warming of 3.2C is projected by
2100.” That is the “highway to hell”.
Three decades of IPCC warnings,
mostly ignored, have brought us to
the crossroads. As we stand there,
perhaps this is the simplest way to
state the choice set out by the IPCC
for political and corporate leaders:
what price a “sustainable and
liveable future for all”?
DAMIAN CARRINGTON IS THE
GUARDIAN’S ENVIRONMENT EDITOR
The climate
emergency
cannot end
without
addressing
inequality
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
24 Spotlight
Environment
T
COLOMBIA he first time a hippo emerged
from the trees, waddled
across the grass and slid
down the river bank into the
murky waters of the Cocorná River, the
fishers in Las Angelitas froze in awe.
“We’d heard rumours of these
By Luke Taylor hippos and seen footprints down-river
PUERTO NARE but as we’ve never been to a zoo we’d
never seen an animal like that in real
life,” said Franki de Jesús Zapata Ciron.
“An animal all the way from Africa,
here? It seemed curious and beautiful.”
People stopped working and
gathered to gaze at the 3-tonne beast,
Zapata recalled. But as with previous
chapters of Colombia’s 30-year saga
with Pablo Escobar’s hippos, what
started as a curious experiment
eventually became a plague and
▲ A hippo in the source of division.
lagoon at Pablo The hippo that sauntered into the
Escobar’s former river that day is one of scores that can
hacienda be traced back to the drug lord who
FERNANDO VERGARA/AP imported four of the giant mammals
Escobar’s
hippos
may
be
sunk
The notorious drug lord’s giant
pets have bred spectacularly
– presenting the government
with a new problem to solve
from Africa to join the giraffes, camels,
ostriches and other exotic animals in
the menagerie at his lavish Hacienda
Nápoles estate in the 1980s.
Since the hippos escaped after the
capo’s death in 1993, the government
has repeatedly failed to tame the
booming population that has made
the Magdalena River basin its home.
It tried culling the animals in 2009
but had to stop after a graphic photo
caused national outrage. It contin-
ues to sterilise the hippos, but they
are breeding faster than they can be
found, caught and castrated.
Now, the regional government
wants to try a new strategy by attempt-
ing to ship Esocobar’s pets abroad.
The government of Antioquia state in
north-west Colombia said it is nego-
tiating with a park in India where it
plans to send 60 of the beasts and with
a sanctuary in Mexico where it wants
to ship 10 of them.
“It would be a great relief,” Zapata
said from the porch of his riverside
wooden house. “Please, if other coun-
tries can help, take them all.”
The first two hippos that made their
homes in Las Angelitas in 2016 were
largely peaceful but a year later the
pair had a calf and quickly became
territorial and aggressive. Now, eight
hippos live nearby and as the popu-
lation grows its effect is increasingly
difficult to manage. “Often we simply
can’t go out at night to fish any more as
it’s too dangerous and there is less to
catch as the hippos scare them away,”
Zapata said.
Just 15km west of Las Angelitas,
where the Cocorná River meets the
Magdalena, residents have more
affection for the giant mammals.

“Everyone here is a bit afraid of them
and we know they are a social prob-
lem,” said Noraldo Garzón, who runs
the local shop in Estación Cocorná.
“But if you were to ask people here if
they want to get rid of them tomor-
row, no way. They are a very endear-
ing species and the people here have
grown to like them.”
W
ith its nondescript
houses, blaring reggae-
ton and humid climate,
little distinguishes
Estación Cocorná from other Colom-
bian riverside settlements – besides its
colourful statue of a fisherman and his
dog, a monument to the village’s tradi-
tion of fishing. But now the commu-
nity has a new industry that is easier
and more lucrative: hippo tourism.
“We don’t want them to be sterilised
or killed,” said 38-year-old Álvaro Díaz,
a fisher who charges tourists to see the
animals. “We’ve learned how to cohabit
with the hippopotamus and can read
their body language so we know when
they’re angry and want to be left alone.
And besides, they were born here.
They’re Colombians too now.”
Cocorná’s location helps explain
attitudes there. It is far enough away
from the hippos that residents do not
come into direct contact with them but
close enough that villagers can make
a buck from ferrying tourists up-river
to see them.
But that state of affairs could soon
change. From the original four hippos
that escaped from Escobar’s estate,
about 130 exist today – the largest
population outside Africa. And with
no crocodiles, lions or any other preda-
tors to keep them in check, one study
estimated that by 2034 the hippo pop-
ulation will number 1,400. “Several
censuses have been conducted in
recent years and every time their
populations exceed our predictions,”
130
The number of hippos now, descended
from the four that escaped from
Escobar’s estate. They make up the
largest population outside Africa
1.4k
The estimated number of hippos in
Colombia by 2034 if left unchecked
GUJA R AT BIG C AT S
Indian state to open new Asiatic lion sanctuary
Lion conservation efforts
in the Indian state of
Gujarat have been so
successful that a new
sanctuary will be opened
to house the abundant
numbers of big cats.
Gir national park is
home to the world’s only
Asiatic lion population
and the only place outside
Africa where a lion can be
seen in its natural habitat.
The number of the
endangered animals has
risen so high – with about
400 in Gir and 300 in other
parts of the state – that Gir
has been overcrowded for
years. Lack of space has
forced lions to stray into
villages and coastal areas.
Conservationists have
been pleading with the
Gujarat government to
move some lions to other
parts of India to give those
in Gir enough breathing
space. Keeping so many
of one species in the
same place also makes
the animal vulnerable to
infectious diseases.
But the state
government has resisted
the demand, prompting
criticism that it is being
possessive about the lions
to the point of disregarding
their best interests.
Authorities resisted a
2013 supreme court ruling
ordering them to move
some lions to a sanctuary
in the neighbouring state
of Madhya Pradesh. The
ruling said a move was
essential to prevent a
disease from potentially
wiping out the entire
population. Now Gujarat
has said some lions will
be moved out of Gir,
although only to another
place within the state,
Barda Wildlife Sanctuary.
The new home will take
about 40 lions.
For Anish Andheria, the
president of the Wildlife
Conservation Trust, this
is yet another “misleading
gimmick” by Gujarat to
avoid sharing the lions
with other Indian states.
“Formally announcing
Barda as a new lion
sanctuary may lead to
more funds and better
management of the area,
but it will not relieve the
pressure on Gir. If Barda is
made more lion-friendly,
the lions will breed even
faster there and the
population will grow even
further,” said Andheria.
For India to have even
more lions, he added, was
good news, but the only
solution was for lions to
be moved to other parts
of the country. Only this
would make it possible to
move lions out of Gir and
also out of the other areas
of Gujarat to give them the
space they needed.
“But Gujarat doesn’t
want to do that,” said
Andheria. “It does not
want to share the lion
with other states. It wants
to keep the lion for itself
to enjoy the status of the
only state in India that has
lions. That’s why it keeps
coming up with these frills
and cosmetic changes that
are no solution at all.”
Amrit Dhillon Delhi
Lack of
space has
forced lions
to stray into
villages
and coastal
areas
25
said Jorge Moreno-Bernal, a biologist
at Universidad del Norte and co-author
of the study.
The species is damaging the eco-
system in the Magdalena – the largest
river in one of the most biodiverse
regions in the world. Each hippo eats
about 40kg of grass a night, meaning
that their excrement alone is poison-
ing the water, killing fish and jeopard-
ising the river’s rich biodiversity. At
risk are myriad species, such as the
West Indian manatee, Neotropical
otter and spectacled caiman, some
endangered. The 4-metre long ani-
mals are also increasingly coming into
conflict with people, and attacks on
humans are becoming more common.
Experts studying the hippo inva-
sion are sceptical that shipping the
hippos abroad will solve the prob-
lem. The sterilisation campaign is
slow, dangerous and costly at about
$8,500 per animal. Exporting them
would mean having to capture the
hippos, test for diseases, sterilise
them and then arrange transport in
custom-made crates via a caravan of
helicopters after a quarantine period.
“It’s not realistic. It’s just another
way to avoid taking the unpopular
but necessary decision to cull them,”
Moreno-Bernal said. A few hippos were
moved to a local zoo in the past but
the operation was almost abandoned
because the animals were too heavy to
transport, he added.
Although exporting the hippos is
not a complete solution it could be use-
ful alongside sterilisation, David Ech-
everri López, a spokesman for Cornare,
the local environmental agency, said.
In Las Angelitas, people prefer steri-
lisation but say they would support a
cull if necessary. At a recent meeting
of the local fishing association, several
members said they fear if the state can-
not deal with the problem the local
community may have to take matters
into their own hands. Rumours sug-
gest they already have – and that hippo
tastes just like grilled pork.
For Zapata, there are no real options
but to continue living Escobar’s legacy.
“I’ve asked the local government if
they will support me if I lose a limb or
my boat is damaged by the hippos, but
they have no answer. Yet if we shoot
one, they will be here immediately and
we’ll be thrown in prison. What are we
supposed to do?”
LUKE TAYLOR IS A JOURNALIST
COVERING LATIN AMERICA, FROM
BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
26 Spotlight
Asia Pacific

S
N
NEEW
WZZE
EAAL
LAAN
NDD o many of their sons loved
football. The game meant
inclusion and friendship
regardless of language or
culture; it cemented bonds in their

Mothers with own community and promised a way

to forge new ones outside of it. As
Noraini Abbas readies team shirts and

a goal of peace prepares lunches for a football festival,

Bereaved victims of the Christchurch attacks
four years ago are working to prevent more of
the hateful violence visited on their children
By Charlotte Graham-McLay WELLINGTON
▲ Noraini Abbas, whose
son Sayyad was killed in the
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023 Christchurch attacks
she recalls years of ferrying her soccer-
mad sons to games in Christchurch on
weekend mornings that always seemed
freezing, no matter the time of year.
Abbas is hosting the second annual
event in memory of her youngest son,
Sayyad Abbas Milne, and 50 other
Muslim worshipers who were killed
when a white supremacist opened
fire at their mosques during Friday
prayers, four years ago.
Sayyad – 14 when he died – was the
youngest of five shining soccer stars
murdered on 15 March 2019. Now their
mothers are each working towards the
same goal: curbing the hateful vio-
lence that was visited on their children
before it can take children from other
families. The work, they say, has frus-
trated and healed them.
“When we talk about getting help,
people might get therapy or counsel-
ling,” says Abbas, who has started
work since the attack as an outreach
coordinator for Muslims at Purapura
Whetu, a Christchurch-based social
services provider. “The best help that
I’ve had is getting to work with and for
the community.”
The horror of the 2019 terrorist
attack has been at times intensified,
and at others muted, by the fact that
it happened in New Zealand – a rela-
tively quiet and peaceful country that
responded with compassion for the
victims and rejection of the Australian
gunman’s racist motivations.
Jacinda Ardern, then prime
minister, was swift to ban all weapons
used in the attack – but four years later,
a coronial process investigating the
deaths is in its early stages and many
of the bereaved and survivors are still
seeking catharsis and facts.
The fourth anniversary is tinged
with uncertainty. Some families asked
the government to forgo any memorial
service this year, while Abbas is part of
another group of women who are host-
ing a week of unity-themed events.
“The day isn’t about remembering
that we lost our children because we
remember our children all the time,”
says Abbas, who survived the attack
at Masjid an-Nur, the first mosque the

terrorist struck, in a different room to
her son. “We want the wider commu-
nity to get together on the day, and for
people to really remember what they
did for their Muslim neighbours on
15 March 2019.”
Over time, a feeling has grown
among some New Zealanders that nei-
ther the victims of the shooting nor the
terrorist bear any relationship to them.
“I almost feel like New Zealand
has shut the door and they’re get-
ting on with their lives, which I can
understand,” says Rosemary Omar,
the mother of Tariq Omar, who was
24 when he died. “But I want people
to understand that this could happen
to another community.”
Tariq – the second of four children
– came home from school each day
with pockets full of stones, and went
on to complete a geology degree. The
environmentalist and strict vegetarian
was fastidious about his nutrition and
training for football.
Tariq played in his club’s first XI and
the nine-year-olds he coached won a
tournament days before he died. An
annual cup is held in his honour.
O
n the day her son was killed,
Omar drove him to Masjid
an-Nur and waited in the car
while Tariq went inside to
pray. Moments later, gunfire began.
Omar now works to help coordinate
feedback and questions for the govern-
ment from Muslims in Christchurch.
Tariq’s mother has left his bedroom
untouched, drawers full of stones. His
portrait sat on an empty chair at his
older sister’s wedding, and Rosemary
imagines him playing with her first
grandchild, now aged two.
“ Tariq would have been a great
uncle,” she says, “and he would have
bought Amira a football and been
teaching her the moves.”
As a little boy, Tariq attended a
Muslim kindergarten in Christchurch
where the ripples of devastation from
the attack are evident. Past students,
as well as parents of pupils, were
among those killed. One student, aged
four, who attended prayers with her
father, survived gunshot wounds.
Maysoon Salama, who runs the
kindergarten, was also nursing hurt;
her husband was badly injured in the
attack and her son, Atta Elayyan, 33 – a
futsal goalkeeper for New Zealand’s
national team – was killed. Her Mus-
lim faith remains as strong as ever, she
says. But much else is different.
“I wasn’t really into politics before,”
says Salama, who has a doctorate in
biology. “I was living my life, enjoying
my family and my kids and doing my
job as an educator.”
Atta was the apple of her eye; he was
beloved by the kindergarten pupils,
built his own software company and
played the shooting game Counter-
Strike under the name “crazyarab”.
“Even after he got married, he
would come in every day and say,
‘What’s the plan, Mum?” Salama says.
Now, Salama sits on committees
advising the government about their
social cohesion efforts, and about the
needs of the bereaved and survivors.
She has published a book – written for
Atta’s daughter, who was two when
he died – explaining grief and loss to
children, which was distributed in
New Zealand’s schools.
Last September, she spoke on a
United Nations panel about the rights
and needs of terrorism victims, along-
side a mother bereaved in the 2011
massacre by a white supremacist in
Norway. Both women listed similar
concerns, years apart: insufficient
mental health support, a lack of
accountability, and the insidious global
spread of racist online extremism that
fuelled both crimes.
“It was a chance to reassure myself
that my feelings and what I’m going
through is legitimate, that I’m not
exaggerating it and I’m not alone,”
Salama says.
In Christchurch, she worries about
intergenerational trauma in a small
community where she knows every-
one’s children.
“Loss of confidence, loss of
businesses, loss of work, physical
issues that people are facing are really
hard for families to handle on their
own,” Salama says.
27
 (Clockwise
from right)
Rosemary Omar
lost her son
Tariq; Maysoon
Salama’s son
Atta was killed;
Masjid an-Nur
51
In February, New Zealand’s
incoming prime minister, Chris Hip-
kins, announced a hate speech law
Number of proposed by Ardern after the attack – a
people killed lightning rod for political controversy
in the mass – would be shelved and referred to an
shootings independent commission for advice.
at Masjid It was disappointing for Salama,
an-Nur and because, she adds: “Islamophobia is
Linwood on the rise in New Zealand, definitely.”
Islamic For all their efforts to influence laws
centre, and policies, she, Omar and Abbas are
Christchurch, all driven by something more simple.
on 15 March At the August 2020 sentencing for
2019 the terrorist, who was sentenced to life
in prison without the chance of parole
after pleading guilty to all charges
(he has since sought leave to appeal),
Noraini Abbas told the court she would
“live my life doing great things for our
people, our community”.
She kept her word. In the absence
of an official public memorial, Abbas
gathered support from residents near
Lyttelton’s Pony Point, a quiet spot
overlooking the ocean, for something
Photographs informal. There, locals planted 51 trees
Carly Earl/ – one for each person killed.
Alex Lovell- CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-MCLAY IS A
Smith JOURNALIST BASED IN WELLINGTON
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
28 Spotlight
Science

T
onight, and almost every
night, something amazing
will happen inside your
brain. As you turn off the
light switch and fall asleep, you will
be switching on the neurological
equivalent of a dishwasher deep-clean
cycle. First, the activity of billions of
brain cells will begin to synchronise,
and oscillate between bursts of exci-
tation and rest. Coupled with these
“slow waves”, blood will begin to
flow in and out of your brain, allow-
ing pulses of the straw-coloured
cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that usually
surrounds your brain to wash in and
be pushed through the brain tissue,
carrying the day’s molecular detritus
away as it leaves.
Most people recognise that if they
don’t get enough sleep, their mood and
memory will suffer the next day. But
mounting evidence is implicating this
“brainwashing” function of sleep in
longer-term brain health.
“Sleep is not just a state where
things turn off. Sleep is a very active
state for the brain – and it seems to be
a special state for fluid flow within
the brain,” said Laura Lewis, assistant
professor of biomedical engineering
at Boston University in the US, who
has captured images of this pumping
process in sleeping humans.
If we don’t get enough regular sleep, ‘Sleep is a
these toxic byproducts can accumu-
late, gradually increasing our risk very active
of dementia and brain diseases. We state for the
tend to get less deep sleep as we get brain – and
older, making it harder to clear out
the debris. Fortunately, scientists are a special
homing in on ways to boost this kind state for
of sleep, which could ultimately help
to keep our brains healthier for longer.
fluid flow
It wasn’t until 2012 that Prof Maiken within the
Nedergaard at the University of brain’
Rochester Medical Center in the US and
her colleagues identified a plumbing
system in the brain that springs to life
during sleep, and enables the organ to
clean itself.

N EU ROSCIENCE

The brainwashing cycle

While we sleep, a neurological
deep clean takes place that is
crucial for filtering out toxins
and warding off dementia.
Here’s how to optimise it

By Linda Geddes

CHRISTOPHE GOWANS/GUARDIAN DESIGN

The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023


They found a series of tiny channels
surrounding the brain’s blood vessels
that allow CSF to filter in, and get
pushed through the brain tissue by the
pulse of blood alongside – and dubbed
it “the glymphatic system”, because it
is similar to the body’s lymphatic net-
work except managed by the brain’s
glial (support) cells. Having such a
system is important because your
neurons are extremely active during
the day, and produce waste.
“Just as if you don’t have a filter in
an aquarium, the fish will die in their
own dirt, all this stuff accumulates in
the brain that needs to be removed,”
Nedergaard said.
One such molecule is beta-amyloid,
a toxic protein that accumulates inside
the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, and
disrupts brain cell function. Neder-
gaard showed that significantly more
beta-amyloid was removed from the
brain during sleep. Other studies have
found an association between lifelong
sleep disruption, elevated levels of
amyloid and Alzheimer’s risk.
However, Nedergaard believes the
system could be important for the
clearance of many other molecules;
from the tau protein that accumulates
in Parkinson’s disease to lactic acid,
which builds up in the brain when
we are awake and has been linked to
seizures. Other researchers have sug-
gested that the glymphatic system
could provide a missing link between
disrupted sleep and mood disorders
such as bipolar, or psychiatric diseases
including schizophrenia.
L
ewis has expanded on
Neder gaard’s studies by
persuading human volunteers
to have their brains imaged
while they sleep. “We saw these large
waves of fluid flow that started to wash
over the brain about every 20 seconds
or so, and could travel quite long dis-
tances inside the brain,” she said. “As
soon as people woke up, this flow pat-
tern would disappear.”
This system seems to be most active
during slow-wave sleep – the deepest
phase of non-rapid eye movement
sleep, predominating during the early
hours of the morning.
For reasons not yet fully under-
stood, people experience less of
this kind of sleep as they get older.
The glymphatic system also shows
a dramatic decrease in efficacy as we
age. “Your dishwasher only works
at 20% capacity,” Nedergaard said.
Deep sleep isn’t only important for
keeping the brain clean. We release
growth hormone during it, helping to
repair muscles, bones and immune
cells. Deep sleep is also considered
important for memory consolidation
and the regulation of blood glucose.
So, what if scientists could find a
way to reboot deep sleep as we get
older? Prof Penelope Lewis, a sleep
researcher at the University of Cardiff,
believes this could be possible. Deep
sleep is characterised by the brain’s
neurons firing together in bursts of
electrical activity, followed by periods
of relative inactivity – which can be
visualised as “waves” on a recording
of brain activity called an electro-
encephalogram (EEG). The Cardiff
team has demonstrated that playing
a “click” sound to sleeping volunteers
as they approach the peak of each
oscillation can enhance this neural
synchrony, resulting in higher peaks
and deeper troughs.
“If you keep doing that again and
again, it can boost the amount of slow-
wave sleep that you get, and it may
boost the extent to which memories
are consolidated across that sleep as
well,” Prof Lewis said.
Extending this to older adults
appears to be more challenging.
Although the Cardiff team has man-
aged to boost their slow waves, “when
we compare it to what happens in a
younger group, the effect is puny”,
she said. Researchers are investigat-
ing whether targeting the sound to a
particular time point during the oscilla-
tion could have a more powerful effect.
The key thing to focus on is sleep
quality, which means avoiding coffee,
alcohol, exercise and electronic
devices in the run-up to bed, and
maintaining a dark bedroom over-
night. “If light is coming in through
the window, or from pilot lights on
electronic devices, even if it doesn’t
wake you up, it may kick you into a
lighter sleep stage and you won’t feel
as well rested,” said Prof Lewis.
Sleep may look like a passive
process, but as your consciousness
checks out, the glymphatic system
kicks in, helping to keep your brain
fresh and clean. Just as with house-
work, if you miss the occasional
session, no one may notice, but if
you scrimp too much, the clutter will
gradually accumulate and eventually
come crashing down.
LINDA GEDDES IS A GUARDIAN SCIENCE
CORRESPONDENT
29
DI E TA RY R E SE A RC H
Mediterranean
dit di
diett ‘‘may
lower risk of dementia’
A Mediterranean diet of nuts,
seafood, grains and vegetables
could lower the risk of dementia
Gut feeling by almost a quarter, according to
Study is food new research. The data suggests
for thought eating plant-based foods may
have a “protective effect” against
dementia, regardless of genetic risk,
23% which researchers said could form
the basis for future public health
The drop in risk strategies if confirmed.
of developing Joint lead author of the study
dementia for Dr Janice Ranson, a senior research
those following a fellow at the University of Exeter,
Mediterranean said: “This is likely to be a beneficial
diet lifestyle choice for people looking
to make healthy dietary choices and
60k reduce their risk of dementia.”
The findings, in the journal BMC
Number of Medicine, are based on data from
people whose more than 60,000 individuals from
health records the UK Biobank, an online database
were taken into
of medical and lifestyle records.
account Over nearly a decade, there were
882 cases of dementia, but those
who followed a strict Mediterranean
diet had a 23% lower risk of
developing the condition, compared
‘This is with those who ate differently.
Susan Mitchell, head of policy
likely to be at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said
a beneficial there were no sure ways to prevent
choice for dementia. “There is a wealth of
evidence that eating a healthy,
people balanced diet can help reduce the
looking risk of cognitive decline. But the
evidence for specific diets is much
to reduce less clearcut.”
their risk of Prof David Curtis from UCL’s
dementia’ Genetics Institute said the study did
not reflect the fact that people who
Dr Janice ate a Mediterranean diet were more
SALLY CAULWELL
Ranson likely to have a generally healthy
University of lifestyle, making it unclear whether
Exeter the diet itself reduces dementia risk.
Rachel Hall
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
30 Spotlight
Middle East

▼ George W Bush
prematurely
declares the end
of major combat in
Iraq on 1 May 2003
J SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP

T
I R A Q WA R he French statesman Georges
20 YEARS ON Clemenceau once said: “War
is a series of catastrophes
that results in a victory.”
In the case of the invasion of Iraq,
Special report however, the war that began 20 years
ago started in victory and has ended
including the CIA chief, Bill Burns,
but those who mattered, including
the notably incurious George W
Bush, chose to ignore the warnings.
Dodge was even invited to Downing
Street to warn Blair that the invasion
would be a disaster. He recalls Blair

The invasion that in a series of catastrophes.

The US military withdrawal from
Iraq was ultimately completed by 2011,
saying: “I know you think I should not
do it, but I have to. I know it’s going
to be bad. Tell me how bad it’s going

haunts global finally answering the question posed

by Gen David Petraeus during that
first push to Baghdad in 2003: “Tell
to be.” Dodge explained: “In London
and Washington, there was no one
who had the first idea about Iraq, but

politics to this day
Proxy wars, unchecked despotism, sectarian
violence, diplomatic deadlocks – many of the
intractable problems facing international
relations can be traced to the debacle in Iraq
By Patrick Wintour
me, how does this end?” Yet the long
shadow of the invasion still looms over
the international order, staining the
reputation of those who instigated
it and dealing a heavy blow to the
confidence that had buoyed the west
after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
At this distance, 20 years on, it
seems to matter less whether the
war was launched on a deceit, a dis-
tortion or a sincere false premise. It
was a blunder that looks worse with
every year and memoir. Barack Obama
drew one lesson from the episode:
“Don’t do stupid shit.”
The risks for Iraq were spelt out by
experts in Britain such as Rosemary
Hollis and Toby Dodge and by innu-
merable US Middle East specialists,
they were planning to occupy it and
run the place. It was hubris of the
highest order.”
The breathtaking mishandling
of the biggest attempt at liberal
interventionism since Vietnam is
now acknowledged by almost all
those involved. As looting swept the
capital and the institutions of the
dictatorship were dismantled by the
new occupiers, the US official desig-
nated to oversee the ministry of trade,
Robin Raphel, walked the streets of
Baghdad with an interpreter, asking:
“Do you know anybody who is in the
ministry of trade?”
The chaos has spawned a vast
literature on post-conflict planning,
and multi-volume official inquiries.

The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023


“We have all, over the past 20 years,
sifted through and tried to read the
runes about what was the big mistake.
Some things accelerated the collapse,
such as the legacy of sanctions or de-
Baathification,” Dodge said. “But the
big mistake, the original sin, was to
invade a country you know nothing
about with a bunch of exiles that had
not been there for 20 years. It was
destined for failure. Full stop.”
The aftershocks are so pervasive
that the only risk is that a line of cau-
sality is drawn to almost every major
global event of the past 20 years. Dis-
entangling what can be traced back to
the invasion and what may have other
origins is no easy task.
Ending Saddam Hussein’s 24 years
in power, with no coherent plan for
who or what was to replace him,
reawakened sectarian Shia-Sunni
competition for supremacy across
the Middle East. It prompted first an
insurgency by displaced Sunnis within
Iraq, the birth of what would become
Islamic State. Then, in the chaos of
the Syrian civil war, the emergence of
the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate
across Syria and Iraq in 2011.
The war strengthened Iran and its
proxies across the Middle East, and
 Baghdad created in the west a wariness about
in April 2003 military intervention that was to help
MICHAEL MACOR/ the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad,
SAN FRANCISCO
CHRONICLE/AP
survive an armed rebellion and give
Vladimir Putin an unexpected re-entry
ticket to the Middle East.
 A US soldier If other Arab leaders needed a rea-
inspects son to suppress the threat posed by
preparations the Arab spring in 2011, the chaos of
to leave Iraq democracy in Iraq gave them that
MARTIN BUREAU/ excuse. The US withdrawal from
AFP/GETTY Afghanistan, instigated by Donald
Trump and pursued by Joe Biden, was
born of an exasperation with the failed
nation-building exemplified by Iraq.
The reputation of intelligence
agencies is only just starting to recover.
Brown University’s Costs of War Pro-
ject estimates that the taxpayer bill for
post-9/11 US wars reached $8tn. About
400,000 Iraqis died.
Even now, the invasion has a sharp
contemporary relevance, with a
western wariness about regime change
in Tehran, let alone Moscow.
When the US denounces Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine, and extols the
sacrosanct virtues of national sover-
eignty, territorial integrity and the UN
charter, it only takes seconds for China
and Russia to point to Iraq and accuse
the US of double standards.
American unilateralism in Iraq was
critical in convincing Putin, initially an
ally in Bush’s war on terror, of what he
saw as the irredeemable arrogance of
the US. In his diaries, Alastair Camp-
bell, Blair’s press secretary, captures
the confrontation between Putin and
Blair in May 2003: “This was someone
who felt he ought to be treated as an
equal and was not being treated as
an equal. He said the whole post-9/11
▼ A statue of response was designed to show off
Saddam Hussein American greatness.” As Blair started
is toppled in his justification, Putin interjected:
Baghdad in 2003 “Don’t answer. There is no answer.
SEAN SMITH That is the truth. There are bad people
Opinion p45
31
‘No one had the first
idea about Iraq …
it was hubris of the
highest order’
in the administration, Tony, and you
know it.”
From Putin’s perspective,
everything the US did subsequently
– including flirting with Islamists dur-
ing the Arab spring, misleading him
over UN authorisation for the toppling
of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, siding
with groups that included jihadists
against Assad’s Syria and supporting
Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan protests – were
signs of a country that saw no distinc-
tion between a “rules-based order”
and US hegemony.
The Saudis, the US’s long-term ally
in the region, also felt betrayed by the
invasion. Riyadh did not favour elec-
tions in principle; it especially did not
favour them when a Shia majority
meant any elections would naturally
turn out in their favour, as they duly
did in 2005. Saud al Faisal, the king-
dom’s foreign minister for 40 years,
said the US had “effectively handed
Iraq to Iran on a silver platter”.
Iran was quick to exploit the power
vacuum in Baghdad and eventually
built its foreign policy on its success.
The Pentagon was later to claim
that more than 600 of the 4,000 US
soldiers killed in Iraq were felled by
Iranian-backed terror groups. In its
assessment, within two years of the
2005 elections, Iran proxies in effect
controlled two-thirds of the council of
representative seats in Iraq.
It is often said that the sectarian
violence that engulfed Iraq after the
removal of the Sunnis from power 
was inevitable. It is true that with
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly

32 Spotlight
Middle East
the ending of the Sunni minority rule,
there was an immediate reassertion
of Shia identity, symbolised at the
end of April 2003 when more than
2 million Shias, many crossing over
the Iranian border, marched on the
holy city of Karbala in a pilgrimage
that the Saddam regime had banned. It
was also natural when they were given
the chance to vote in 2005 that they
gravitated to what they knew.
The US had handpicked Nouri al-
Maliki to be prime minister in 2006
in the belief that he would not act
in a sectarian way. Before the fall of
Saddam, Maliki had lived in exile in
Iran but left, objecting to a demand
that he swear allegiance to Ayatollah
Khomeinei. Once prime minister, he
chose to make Sunni Saudi Arabia the
venue for his first official foreign visit.
Maliki, encouraged by the US,
genuinely wanted a positive relation-
ship with Saudi Arabia, and to pursue
If anything, the
Iraq war acted as
a brake on the spread
of democracy
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
a course independent of Iran. But the
July 2006 meeting between Maliki and
King Abdullah was the only one the
two men had. As relations with the
Saudis deteriorated, and Maliki did
not do as well as he hoped in the 2010
elections, he found himself ever more
dependent on Tehran to stay in power.
The psychological effect of the
rise of a Shia-dominated government
with ties to Iran inevitably shook the
Saudi royal family. Obama’s decision
to reduce US engagement in the Middle
East only made Saudi unease worse.
That disengagement had many
twists, but the decisive point came
when the west, haunted by the shadow
of Iraq, refused to punish Syria in 2013
after Assad used chemical weapons,
crossing Obama’s stated red line. First
the British parliament, then Angela
Merkel and finally the US Congress
rejected military action. Obama was
determined not to repeat the disas-
trous overreach of Iraq and pulled
back from striking at Assad.
The effective impunity granted
to Assad was a salutary moment for
Riyadh. The Saudi ambassador to the
UK, Mohammed bin Nawaf, attacked
“the west’s excuses for inaction”.
Iraq war: 20 years on
Scan the code for more stories from
our series examining the legacy of the
US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003
▼ Anti-Iraq war Riyadh, he said, would have to go it
protesters march alone, intensifying its proxy war with
in London in Iran by arming a wider ideological
March 2005 range of Islamist rebels in Syria.
ALESSANDRO ABBONIZIO/ Bush initially cast the American
AFP/GETTY
response to 9/11 primarily in terms of
making the US safe from terrorists, and
suggested Saddam was arming those
terrorists. By August 2002, Bush had
signed off a classified document sug-
gesting the US could act as a midwife to
a new Iraq based on democracy. In his
new account of the administration’s
deliberations on the war, Confronting
Saddam, Melvyn P Leffler, an emeritus
professor of American history at the
University of Virginia, argues that the
Pentagon had no true interest in this
agenda, but democracy promotion
became a useful alibi once no wea-
pons of mass destruction were found.
By January 2005, Bush had made
democracy into a reason for the war on
terror:“The best hope for peace in our
world is the expansion of freedom in
all the world. America’s vital interests
and our deepest beliefs are now one.”
If anything, the Iraq war acted as a
brake on the spread of democracy. Polls
showed that massive majorities in the
Middle East opposed the US invasion.
As Burns admitted: “The debacle in
Iraq, including the miserable images
from Abu Ghraib, poisoned America’s
image and credibility. If this was how
America promotes democracy, few
Arabs wanted any part of it.”
What of Iraq itself ? Baghdad-based
Marsin Alshamary of the Brookings
Institute said there was “now a pas-
sionate turn against the sectarian
lens”. The 2019 Tishreen uprising had
marked a reconciliation between Shia
and Sunni youth, she said, brought
together in a revolt against the
corruption of the entire ruling class.
The uprising led to the resignation of
the prime minister. But the changes
envisaged in 2019 were not achieved.
It took 382 days to form a governing
coalition, and the undisputed win-
ners were Iranian-backed parties.
At the end of the day, Alshamary
said, Iraqi youth were in the same
place as a lot of youth in the Middle
East. “They thought democracy would
produce socioeconomic rights, and
when it failed to do so, their attach-
ment to democracy has loosened.”
It is not the glorious legacy that
was envisaged by those who started
the invasion.
PATRICK WINTOUR IS DIPLOMATIC
EDITOR FOR THE GUARDIAN
 Spotlight
North America
U N I T E D S TAT E S
Trump’s
legal woes
mount as
2024 race
hots up
By Peter Stone WASHINGTON
A
s Donald Trump runs again
for the White House, he’s
dogged by four criminal
investigations, shortening
the odds that he will face charges, say
former federal prosecutors.
Two investigations are homing in
on Trump’s nonstop efforts to thwart
his 2020 election loss with bogus fraud
charges. The others are looking into
Trump’s retention of hundreds of
classified documents after his presi-
dency, and his role in a $130,000 hush
money payment in 2016 to the porn
star Stormy Daniels, with whom he
allegedly had an affair. An indictment
of Trump in the Daniels case was
expected this week.
The four inquiries have been exam-
ining separately whether Trump vio-
lated laws including obstruction of
an official proceeding and defraud-
ing the US by his actions to attempting
to overturn the 2020 election. The
investigations, two led by the justice
department’s special counsel Jack
Smith, are unparalleled for an ex-
president, say former prosecutors.
“It seems quite possible, or even
likely, that Trump will be defending
himself in four different criminal cases
as he is campaigning for president in
2024,” said Barbara McQuade, a former
US attorney for eastern Michigan,
adding: “Trump, no doubt, will use
criminal charges as a fundraising tool
and as a way to portray himself as the
eternal victim.”
The criminal inquiry by the Fulton
county district attorney, Fani Willis,
into Trump’s efforts to reverse his
2020 defeat in Georgia with his call
to the secretary of state, Brad Raffen-
sperger, on 2 January 2021 asking him
to “find 11,780 votes”, and other calls,
is expected to result in charges.
Smith’s inquiry into Trump’s drive
to thwart Joe Biden’s election seems
to be in its late stages, in light of sub-
poenas to the former vice-president
Mike Pence and Trump’s former chief
of staff Mark Meadows. Those subpoe-
nas “show that the January 6 investi-
gation is serious and narrowing”, said
Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of
the justice department’s fraud section.
On another front, Smith has led an
inquiry into Trump’s retention of hun-
dreds of classified documents.
Trump has blasted all the investi-
gations as politically motivated and
said he has done nothing illegal, decry-
ing Smith’s appointment as “part of
a never ending witch-hunt”.
But ex-prosecutors envisage huge
legal headaches ahead for Trump, and
probable charges, at least in Georgia.
33
“With the Manhattan DA now
presenting evidence to a grand jury,
Trump now faces four credible crimi-
nal investigations – unprecedented for
the most hardened criminals, never
mind a former president who is seek-
ing to enter the White House again,”
Pelletier said.
Other former federal prosecutors
see strong signs that, in Georgia,
charges against Trump, and some of
his top lawyers and allies, are coming.
“My sense is that the Fulton county DA
is putting the final touches on bringing
Rico [racketeering] charges involving
 Donald Trump is Trump and others,” said Michael
dealing with four Moore, of Georgia, a former US attor-
concurrent crimi- ney, adding that Trump, Meadows and
nal investigations Rudy Giuliani “are likely to each see
SUE OGROCKI/AP more of the inside of a courtroom than
any of them might like”.
Other ex-prosecutors note that
there is significant overlap between
the Georgia investigation and that of
the special counsel.
“While Trump’s calls to secretary of
state Raffensperger and other Georgia
state officials appear to be at the centre
of the Fulton county DA’s probe, that
investigation likely extends to efforts
by Trump’s legal team, including Rudy
Giuliani, to convince Georgia legisla-
tors to overturn the election results,”
said Dan Richman, a Columbia Univer-
sity law professor, who worked for the
justice department.
“Yet the legal team’s nationwide
efforts by Giuliani, [former Trump
lawyer John] Eastman and others –
encouraged by Trump to an extent that
will need to be clarified – to present
slates of phony electors to Congress
and to otherwise disrupt the electoral
certification also seems to be at the
heart of one prong of Jack Smith’s
federal investigation.”
Not surprisingly, Trump’s legal
expenses have been hefty. According
to federal records, Trump spent about
$10m last year out of his political action
committee to pay law firms represent-
‘Trump, ing him and the Trump Organization.
no doubt, Little wonder that as Trump runs
for the White House again, quite a few
will use Republicans are feeling very edgy. “It
criminal does not bode well for the Republican
charges party if Trump should be indicted and
win the nomination,” said former
as a way Pennsylvania Republican congress-
to portray man Charlie Dent. “The electoral out-
himself as come would be disastrous for the GOP.
How much losing can we take?”
the eternal PETER STONE IS A POLITICS REPORTER
victim’ FOR GUARDIAN US
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
By Simon Hattenstone
When Ben Leyland’s mum said she was in trouble, nothing prepared
him for the revelation that she was about to be exposed for sending
hundreds of abusive tweets about Madeleine McCann’s parents.
My mother,
What happened next would change his life for ever
‘T HERE WAS THIS ENTIRE
PART of Mum that I never knew about,” Ben Leyland says.
Brenda Leyland was a stylish, well-spoken and rather
private woman who lived in a picturesque village in
Leicestershire. He knew she told stories, and that some
of them may have been on the tall side. He also knew that
she spent a lot of time on her laptop and was increasingly
living online. What he didn’t know was that his mother had
become a Twitter troll who spent the final years of her life
relentlessly attacking the parents of Madeleine McCann,
the girl who disappeared in Portugal in 2007 at the age of
three and hasn’t been seen since.
In 2014, Brenda was approached by a Sky News journalist
who asked her why she was trolling the McCanns on Twitter.
She was about to get into a car with her friend to visit a
garden centre, and declined to comment. The journalist
then told her that she had been reported to Scotland Yard
and her tweets were being investigated as part of a larger
campaign of abuse against the McCanns. “Well, that’s fair
enough,” she said calmly. But Brenda’s face gave her away.
Her eyes blinked and her cheek twitched anxiously. Four
days later, on 4 October 2014, Brenda killed herself.
Her trolling and subsequent suicide resulted in a number
of newspaper stories: about the toxic culture of Twitter;
the danger of people hiding behind avatars and fake names
on social media; the biliousness of Brenda’s attack on the
McCanns; and the tragedy of her death. What could have
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
led a woman to post hundreds of tweets attacking a couple
she had never met, and why did she think there was nothing
left to live for when she was caught out?
Ben, 38, has not talked to a newspaper about his mother
before. But, nearly a decade on, he believes there are lessons
to be learned from her story – lessons that have been crucial
to his own survival. Ben, who graduated from Oxford Uni-
versity with a degree in theology, is a recovering drug addict
who works as a life coach in Los Angeles for people with
 Tragic case
Brenda Leyland
took her life in
2014, days after
being exposed as
a troll on Twitter
REX
mental health and addiction problems.
Although he recognises there was much he didn’t know
about his mother, in other ways they were painfully close.
“When she died, she took me out too,” he says. “It was a
suicide bomb. I never had a separate identity from Mum.”
Over the past seven years, he has done detective work, try-
ing to piece together Brenda’s life. Only by understanding
her has he been able to understand himself, he says. But
it’s not been easy. So much of her life was a fiction, and he’s
still trying to disentangle the truth from the make-believe.
After Brenda’s death, Ben gave up his job and devoted
himself to his own destruction. He had been working
in corporate law for seven years, and the wealth he had
accrued, along with the money he received after his
mother’s death, meant he could afford not to work for a
few years. “I was in grief, but numbing myself with
drugs and alcohol. I was like: I’m done, I’m just going 
to quit the world for a while, eat out for breakfast,
 35

the troll

24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly

36 My mother, the troll

lunch and dinner, and do enough cocaine to kill a small

village.” He pauses. “Or maybe a large village, frankly. And
I just kept going.” When the money ran out, he turned to
crystal meth. That was when Ben reached his nadir.
Brenda Leyland, who was 63 when she died, grew up
in a military family in Albrighton, Shropshire. She went
to convent school and briefly worked in marketing. When
she met her future husband, Ben’s father, in the 1970s, she
told her parents that he didn’t make much money and she
was bringing home the bacon. In fact, he was doing very
well for himself. A working-class boy, he had grown up
in Birmingham and qualified as an accountant. He later
went on to develop an assisted-living complex for elderly
people, which he sold at a profit. The reality was that Brenda
had expensive tastes and was in debt, and her husband
frequently had to help her out of her financial difficulties.
Brenda was famous in the family for her stories. There
were so many of them that Ben doesn’t know where to
start. One that she liked to dine out on was how she had
known Elton John when he was a teenager called Reggie
Dwight. “She would tell us how she was living on an army
barracks when her dad was in the RAF, and Reggie lived
next door. She said he was besotted with her school friend
and came across to our house to give her love letters for her
friend – only to be confronted by my handle-bar-mousta-
chioed grandfather, who scared the living daylights out of She took enormous pride in me. She
young Reggie. Mum had this theory that maybe those early
experiences made him gay. It was only when we watched dined out on my Oxford education,
that movie Rocketman about Elton John that me and my
dad were like, ‘Really?’” but I trod on eggshells around her
Rocketman came out in 2019, five years after Brenda’s
death. By then Ben was suspicious about many of the stories
she had told him. The thing is, he says, his mother’s stories
were so colourful that he wanted to believe them, even if he
had his doubts. Take the tale about her father. “She would but she turned it into something special,” Ben says. Brenda
have you believe he was involved in more missions than renovated the place, turning it into a classic English coun-
anybody else in the RAF. She had these stories about how try cottage. “She liked the challenge – maybe part of her
he got shot down over Crete, and ended up crash-landing had to keep up with the Joneses. She found a good way of
and living with the Crete resistance in a cave, subsisting on making cheap things look expensive, which has a certain
nothing more than Worcestershire sauce.” He laughs. “She metaphorical value because she always wanted you to
said he got the Victoria Cross, but he didn’t.” think she was someone other than who she was. She was
She sounds as if she had an amazing imagination, I say. terrified that if you knew the real her, you wouldn’t like her.”
“She had a Lewis Carroll, Jabberwockian level of madness Who did she think the real Brenda Leyland was? “A girl
and eccentricity,” Ben says. “When there’s been serious who didn’t get an education, a woman who hardly ever
trauma, sometimes people retreat into their imagination.” worked, who didn’t do the things she thought she deserved
But Ben was never sure about the nature of the trauma at to do or was destined for, whose mummy and daddy didn’t
the heart of Brenda’s life. She would say that her brother like her very much,” Ben says. Who did Brenda want people
had been abused by a Catholic priest, and that had affected to think she was? “Many of the things she actually was.
her badly. There were also periods in her life when she went She wanted people to see her as this elegant, insightful,
away “to get better”. She never talked about what she was articulate person, maybe with an element of mystery. She
in hospital for, but she would come home regaling him with wanted people to pay attention, and speak of her when she
stories about the rich and famous people she had met there. wasn’t there and say, ‘My God, that Brenda Leyland! She
From the outside, the Leylands looked like a happy can spin a yarn and see through to the core of what’s going
family. Ben’s father was a successful businessman, they on.’” And did people think that? “I thought that, to a certain
lived in a big house, and both Ben and his brother were sent extent.” He compares her to Anna Sorokin, the Russian fake
to private schools. They went on holidays to the Caribbean, heiress who conned her way into New York high society as
and Brenda was indulged. “She spent a lot of time buying Anna Delvey, before being jailed for fraud in 2019.
clothes and at makeup counters. She liked the fine life.” In many ways, Ben says, his mother was wonderful.
Then, when Ben was 12, the family fell apart. His father “She was beautiful, intelligent, funny. She had a good way
left Brenda for another woman, to whom he is still happily with one-liners. I remember when hand soap got fancy
married. His brother, then 19, had recently left home, so with things like Molton Brown, and she’d be like, ‘Smell
Brenda and Ben moved to a rented property in Burton my hands, I’ve just been to the toilet.’ We knew what she
Overy, a village in Leicestershire. Brenda transformed was referring to, but there was this double entendre. She
their new home. “It was a shit-show when we moved in, had an acerbic wit.”

The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023


Brenda adored her younger son. “She took an enormous
amount of pride in me,” Ben says. “She dined out on my
Oxford education.” But there was a downside. She was
possessive, demanding of his attention, and constantly
gave him the impression that he had failed her. She would
tell him he didn’t spend enough time with her, didn’t think
about her enough, didn’t love her. “You could always tell
she was keeping a scorecard. I was treading on eggshells
around her, for fear I might say the wrong thing. There were
things you thought she had dealt with that she still held on
to. Grudges and resentments. Like, ‘You don’t come home
for Christmas, you forgot Mother’s Day.’” Ben says Brenda
cost him his relationship with his brother and father. She
made him choose between her and them.
He became her life, and Ben found it oppressive. Not
least because he was dealing with his own problems. By
the age of 16, he was taking cocaine and drinking too much.
He knew he was gay, but couldn’t come to terms with it.
He was a child of the 90s, and homophobia was rife. “I
remember Stephen Gately of Boyzone being smoked out
of the closet and the coverage in the newspapers about
all these betrayed female fans,” Ben says. “I saw George
Michael getting dragged through the mud. I remember the
news of Freddie Mercury dying and the coverage of HIV.
 Stateside There was a lot of shame about it. I remember when there
Ben Leyland in was a story about David Hyde Pierce, who played Niles in
Santa Monica, Frasier, going to bath houses in LA, and my mum saying,
California, nine ‘That’s dirty. I don’t want to watch Frasier any more.’”
years after his By this time, Brenda was becoming increasingly
mother’s death fascinated by Madeleine McCann’s story. After Madeleine
ROBERT GALLAGHER went missing in 2007, everybody was talking about it.
Brenda, who lived just 25km from the McCanns’ home
in Rothley, Leicestershire, was no exception. But, at this
point, Ben did not think there was anything unusual in her
interest in Kate and Gerry McCann.
In 2008, Ben moved to the US. He couldn’t cope with the
idea that he was responsible for his mother’s happiness.
“The only person she said she cared about was me,” he
says. “It was too much pressure.”
In 2009 he met a French woman in the US and they wed
two years later. The pressure of the sham marriage and
Brenda’s increasing demands took their toll. “After I got
married, Mum pulled me to one side as she got into the
taxi to go to the airport and said she had three months to
live,” Ben says. “It wasn’t true. It was just that the attention
was on me and my then wife, and she couldn’t handle it.”
Ben was unhappily married, closeted and living a white-
picket-fence life that was a lie. By 2013, Ben and his wife
had separated, and in 2014 they divorced.
In her final decade, Brenda went on trips to India, Africa
and the Middle East. “She loved to travel and would go on
her own.” Did she have relationships after the divorce? “She
met this much older guy when walking her dog, who she
claimed was the owner of Steinway, the piano maker.” Was
that true? “I met the guy. He seemed suave and sophisti-
cated. I don’t know what the owner of Steinway was doing
living in Leicester.” He shrugs, and smiles.
About three years before she died, Brenda spent a low-
key Christmas with Ben and his wife in Washington DC.
They played Monopoly, ate pork loin, and did nothing
noteworthy. A few days later, after Brenda had returned
to England, she accidentally forwarded him an email she
had sent to her brother about her Christmas. “She described
how, on 26 December, when she was with us at home, we
37
were in Langley, Virginia, at a soiree with heads of state,
diplomats and the head of the CIA.”
Ben might have suspected Brenda had made stuff up
before, but now he was sure. For the first time, he chal-
lenged her. “I said to Mum, ‘No, we were eating pork, playing
Monopoly and I think you were losing.’ We had to go three or
four rounds before getting anywhere near the truth. I said,
‘What the hell was that story about?’ In the end she said,
‘I was probably drunk and your uncle was giving me a hard
time about coming out to see you so often, and I wanted
him to think I was having an incredible time.’” Ben began
to realise his mother was a mythomaniac.
After this, there were other times when Ben confronted
her about lying. “We’d have arguments that reached boiling
point, then we wouldn’t talk for months at a time,” he says.
But Ben was having his own problems with the truth. “I was
in a marriage that was window dressing, and my wife didn’t
know about my cocaine habit. I had my own shit going on.”
When they spoke on the phone, Brenda invariably
updated him on Madeleine and her latest theories about
the McCanns. After Madeleine’s disappearance, Kate and
Gerry McCann admitted that they had left their three chil-
dren alone in their apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal,
when they went to eat with friends. Along with many other
conspiracy theorists, Brenda was convinced that they were
responsible for Madeleine’s abduction, as a result of neg-
O
ligence or worse. Ben admits that he barely listened while
she rattled on. At least, he thought, it kept her occupied.
N 30 SEPTEMBER 2014, BEN RECEIVED
a phone call from Brenda. She sounded panicked in a way
he had not heard before. She told him that earlier in the
day she had been questioned by a TV journalist about the
McCanns. Ben didn’t know what she meant. “Mum said,
‘I’m in trouble.’ I was like, ‘What’s going on?’”
She told him that her Twitter handle was @sweepyface
(named after Sweep, her first boxer dog), and he visited the
account where she had been writing about the McCanns. He
discovered that her avatar was a photograph of his boxer dog
and she had recorded her address as Los Angeles. “When
I saw that I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ Then I started
reading through her Twitter account and I was like, ‘Holy
shit.’” There were hundreds of messages about Madeleine
and the McCanns. They were vitriolic and potentially libel-
lous. Tweets included: “#mccann Q ‘How long must the
mccanns suffer?’ Answer ‘For the rest of their miserable
lives’”; “I think Kate #mccann sees herself as a modern
day Eva Peron beautiful, suffering, instead of a booze filled
nymphomaniac”; “Hate a powerful emotion, it is a compli-
ment to Maddie that we ‘hate’ her parents who betrayed
her”; “You can move to France, anywhere, but social media
is everywhere, our memories are long”; “To Kate and Gerry,
you will be hated by millions for the rest of your
miserable, evil, conniving lives, have a nice day.” 
How did Ben react when he saw the tweets? “My
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
38 My mother, the troll
initial reaction was crisis management,” he says. “Damage
limitation. I was working in law at that time, and I thought,
‘There’s a story that’s going to come out, we have very little
time to deal with it, I have to jump into action mode.’”
He admits that he also took a perverse pleasure in her
situation. “There was this part of me that was like, for
years I’ve put up with never having been good enough
for you, always being told you don’t love me, and finally
you’ve fucked up. The tables were turned. So some of it
was schadenfreude. I felt vindicated that she was coming
to me, cap in hand. But I also felt: now it’s my responsibility
to make this go away.”
Ben advised Brenda not to invite the Sky News reporter
Martin Brunt into the house, and to say nothing. But he
found out at the inquest that she had already spoken to him
for half an hour in her home – albeit off-camera. “She was
more helpless than I’d ever seen her before,” he says. Was
she panicked because she realised she had done something
wrong or because she had been found out? “I think she’d
had time to reflect that she’d gotten a little bit carried away.
That’s what she said in her final email.” Did she have any
sense of the pain that the tweets might cause the McCanns?
“It’s difficult to say. I think she lost sight of their humanity,
and they were just the target of the ‘investigation’.”
He uses the word investigation deliberately. Ben was
later to discover that Brenda didn’t think of herself as a troll,
but as a journalist investigating the McCanns. “In her last
will and testament, she said her job title was investigative
journalist. That was the role she had assumed,” he says.
Had she ever done any journalism? “No.”
A couple of days later, the story broke on Sky. When Ben
called Brenda, it just went to voicemail. By this time, he
was really worried. He was talking to his brother, whom
he hadn’t spoken to for years after they had drifted apart.
“I said to my brother, ‘Do you think there’s a chance she
might try to take her life?’ And he said, ‘Well, it wouldn’t be
without precedent.’” Ben hadn’t known she had attempted
suicide before.
He started to fear the worst. “I had entertained suicide
many times, and I knew I was cut from the same cloth as
Mum.” A couple of days passed without any contact. It was
early morning, and he was already drinking white wine
when his iPad lit up with a FaceTime call from her. He
answered it, but there was nobody there. He called back,
and it went to voicemail. Nevertheless, he was relieved.
“I was like, ‘She’s sent up a flare. She doesn’t want to talk,
but she wants me to know everything’s OK.’ I had another
couple of glasses of wine and thought, ‘Thank God.’” A few
minutes later, his father called and told him that Brenda
had fatally overdosed in a hotel 25km from home. “I said,
‘That doesn’t make any sense, she’s just called.’” He now
thinks that the police at the scene accidentally rang him.
Ben felt that as well as taking her own life, she had taken
his. He worked for a few more months, but his addictions
were getting out of hand. He was drinking whisky with his
morning coffee, going to the toilet to take cocaine. He had to
choose between his addictions and work, so he quit work.
It was only at the inquest in March 2015, five months
after Brenda’s death, that he began to fully understand his
mother’s life. Consultant psychiatrist Dr Kris Zakrzewski
said he had treated Brenda throughout the 1990s, and that
she had been diagnosed with borderline personality dis-
order and depression. Dr Zakrzewski recorded that she had
twice been admitted to psychiatric hospitals in the 1990s
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
when her depression was “severely exacerbated”. He said
there had been “suicidal attempts or gestures”, but her
“religion and intense love of children” were regarded as
suicide risk limiting factors: “She was a deeply, sometimes
morbidly, reflective thinker, often getting despondent over
the ways the world is, and particularly angry and despond-
ent over real or perceived mistreatment of children, both
her own and others’.”
Dr Zakrzewski said he had lost contact with Brenda in
the early 2000s. “Mrs Leyland was an extremely intelligent
and proud woman with a streak of mistrustfulness in her
complex though vulnerable personality, time and again
giving way to clinical depression. Overall, the risk of serious
harm was always there.”
S
KY NEWS SAID AT THE INQUEST THAT
it had authorised Brunt to “doorstep” Brenda as it was
in the public interest to challenge her about trolling the
McCanns due to the growing debate about the lack of control
of social media, and because courts were now handing jail
sentences to trolls. It believed its investigation would have
been frustrated if she had been forewarned. Sky decided to
show Brenda’s face in the report, but named her only by her
Twitter handle to limit the risk of online abuse by others.
Brunt, a hugely experienced reporter, was described by
his employer as a “sensitive journalist and man of integrity”.
One reason he chose Brenda rather than the other McCann
trolls was because she couldn’t be identified by her Twitter
handle. He said she was “self-assured” and “seemed quite
confident”. Brunt told the inquest that, on her return from
the garden centre, she had invited him into her home. “I sat
down and said something like, ‘Sorry to have ruined your
day.’ Mrs Leyland said something like, ‘I don’t know yet
whether you’ve ruined my day or my life.’”
He asked Brenda to do “a more considered” interview
on camera. She declined, but he said she told him, “I just
want the McCanns to answer questions,” “It’s about how
they left their children” and “I don’t believe their story.” She
also said she hoped that she hadn’t broken the law and she
had “honestly thought tweeting was a vehicle by which you
could express things”. At the inquest, Brunt said he told her
the report would appear on Sky News. “She said, ‘I don’t get
that.’ I said something like, ‘Well, it may be uncomfortable
for a day, but these things tend to blow over.’ I was trying
to make her feel less bad about it because I do understand
I exposed Mrs Leyland and two days
later she was dead. The enormity of
what happened will always be with me

the enormity of being exposed on television.” Brunt said
Brenda had been “very pleasant” and that “there had been
nothing about her demeanour or anything she said” that
had caused him concern.
The following day, Brenda called Brunt and asked if they
could blur her face. He told her that wasn’t his call. He told
her the report would be broadcast the following day. “I think
I said, ‘I hope it isn’t too grim,’ meaning for her,” Brunt said
at the inquest. “And she said, ‘Well I’ll go out for the day.
I was thinking of ending it all, but I’ve had a glass of wine
and I’m feeling better now.’ The last thing she said to me
was that it had been nice meeting me. After that, I had no
further contact with Brenda Leyland.” Brunt said he did
think the comment about “ending it all” was a reference
to suicide, but he regarded it as “a throwaway remark” and
believed there was no risk of her taking her life.
Two days after the report was broadcast, Brenda was
found dead in a hotel room. Brunt told the inquest at
Leicester town hall: “I recognise that my feelings are of
little importance compared with those of Mrs Leyland’s
family, but I wish to put on record that I was, and still am,
devastated by Mrs Leyland’s death.” He said he took his
journalistic responsibilities seriously and was not cavalier
in his pursuit of stories, but acknowledged that two facts
were inescapably linked. “I exposed Mrs Leyland and two
days later she was dead. Her death is a haunting reminder
that anything we do as journalists can lead to consequences,
big or small, and in this case tragic. The enormity of what
happened will always be with me.”
Two weeks after Brenda took her own life, the then
justice secretary Chris Grayling quadrupled the maximum
custodial sentence for trolling to two years. Grayling said:
“These internet trolls are cowards who are poisoning our
national life. No one would permit such venom in person,
so there should be no place for it on social media.”
The abuse of the McCanns was an early example of
armchair detectives and conspiracy theorists swarming
around a news story. It heralded a new era of trolling
that has now become all too familiar. There had been
a dramatic rise in the number of trolls jailed by the time
Brenda died. In 2014, 1,209 people were found guilty
of offences under section 127 of the Communications
Act 2003, compared with 143 in 2004. Most are believed
39
to be trolls abusing social media platforms. Last month,
the family of Nicola Bulley, a British woman whose body
was pulled out of the River Wyre in Lancashire three weeks
after she went missing in January, were repeatedly savaged
on social media. In the nine years since Brenda died, social
media companies have done little to clamp down on people
using their platforms to defame and abuse individuals.
In April 2022, convicted rapist and paedophile Christian
Brückner emerged as the prime suspect in the Made-
leine McCann case.
Brenda Leyland spent her life hiding – by making things
up, and concealing herself behind fake names and avatars.
After she died, Ben examined her Twitter account closely.
There were friends in the McCann trolling community
who grieved her passing. But, by and large, after she was
exposed, people on social media were cruel and unforgiv-
ing. In her final days, the troll was trolled mercilessly. “On
Twitter people said things like, ‘I hope you beg for mercy,
I hope you get gang raped orally, anally and vaginally,’” Ben
says. “They Photoshopped pictures of her to make her look
like she had fangs and was a zombie with blood pouring
out of her.” As Brenda had forgotten about the McCanns’
humanity, so her critics forgot about hers. Ben believes in
her final hours she would have read some of these tweets.
Nine years on, he no longer blames the Sky News exposé
for his mother’s death. It was inevitable that at some point
she would be exposed for one thing or another, he says.
There were so many things she was ashamed of that she
had never addressed – her mental health problems, her
mythomania, her anger, her lack of purpose. “That’s what
killed my mum,” Ben says. “It was encrusted layers of shame
over the years that made it impossible for her to do more
than allude to stuff that she had to deal with. Her inability
to say, ‘I need help’; her inability to say, ‘I am not OK.’”
As for Twitter, Ben says that’s merely a platform. “The
 Happier days problem isn’t what these trolls are saying, or that these trolls
Brenda Leyland are nasty people who have nothing else in their life but to
with son Ben sit in a basement being awful. The question is why are they
in the late 80s, like that?” He talks about how many people feel alienated
below right, from society, the number living in poverty, the paucity of
and online at mental health support. “If you treat the symptom, you
home, left never get to the heart of the problem. The problem is: why
BENJAMIN LEYLAND are people so angry and afraid?”
Ben began to realise that, if he was going to survive, he
would have to overcome the shame that was suffocating
him. So he finally came out, and owned his addictions. For
the past few years he has been writing about his life and
his mother’s. There is not a taboo, indignity or humiliation
he doesn’t expose – whether it’s experimenting with his
mother’s vibrator, dressing in her clothes, or a compulsion
to shit in the garden. He is on a one-man mission to root
out shame from our existence.
We’ve been talking on Zoom for about three hours. Ben
says he wants to make one thing very clear – he doesn’t
want to dishonour his mother. “Because at the end of the
day, I fucking love my mum. I miss her, and I’d pretty much
do anything to bring her back. This is the worst thing that
ever happened to me, and it damn near destroyed me. But
if there is something positive to come out of this, it’s the
experience I’ve had of completely unburdening myself of
my shames and my secrets and my pain, and finding out
that if you do that, not only are you going to be OK, but you
can help other people get better, too.” •
SIMON HATTENSTONE IS A GUARDIAN FEATURES WRITER
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
40

Disabled

the trope th

PICTURELUX/HOLLY-
WOOD ARCHIVE/
ALAMY; BIANCA DE
MARCHI/EPA; ALL-
STAR/WARNER BROS;
RONALD GRANT;
SNAP/REX; ALASTAIR
MUIR/REX/SHUTTER-
STOCK; NEW LINE
CINEMA/ALLSTAR;
EVERETT/ALAMY;
LANDMARK /ALAMY;
NICOLA DOVE/
DANJAQ/ MGM;
MGM/KOBAL/REX/
SHUTTER STOCK;
TRISTRAM KENTON;
ALLSTAR/WARNER
BROS; UNITED
ARTISTS/EON /
ALLSTAR
 41

villains:

at For centuries, fictional narratives

have used outer difference to telegraph
inner monstrosity. And, as Jan Grue
has learned, editing out a few slurs
or bad words cannot fix this
ugly characterisation

won’t die
I
DECIDED, SOME YEARS AGO, TO READ ALL OF IAN FLEMING’S
James Bond novels. It may have been a fit of nostalgia for
the Roger Moore films I grew up watching, or perhaps I was
bored with writing short stories for a minuscule readership
and wanted to know what mass-market success read like. It
was quite an experience – and one I found myself recalling
when I found out that Fleming’s books were being revised, chiefly in
order to remove some, though not all, of the casual racism. Also some
of the misogyny, though probably not all of that either.
My first question, on reading the news, was what kind of reader
exactly was Ian Fleming Publications Ltd envisioning. Presum-
ably someone who would, were it not for the most explicit slurs, 
really enjoy the ethnic stereotypes. Or someone who would,

24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly

42 The trope that won’t die
were it not for the full-on rapes, really enjoy the pervasive sexism.
The other question that struck me was this: what on earth are they
going to do about disability?
As a wheelchair user, I could not help noticing that the original
Bond books had, shall we say, an interesting relationship to embodied
difference. It was a feature of Fleming’s writing that would be all but
impossible to alter through the interventions of a sensitivity reader.
Fleming’s attitude to disability was encoded not only in words and
phrases, but in characterisation and plot. It is not a novel observation
that Bond villains tend to be, to use a less sensitive register, disfigured
and deformed. Dr No with his steel pincers instead of hands, Blofeld
with his scars, Hugo Drax, the villain from Moonraker, with his facial
disfigurement and his pathetic attempt to conceal it with a “bushy
reddish beard”. Were they not successfully self-employed, most of
Bond’s enemies would probably qualify for disability benefits.
Even as Fleming’s storylines have in the Bond films been progres-
sively stripped of their racism and misogyny, disability has remained
an essential aspect of their characterisation. This is particularly jarring
in the recent Daniel Craig movies, which are otherwise marked by a
sensitive approach. In Skyfall, Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva is a striking
example of the narrative logic at work. He at first appears handsome
and polished, but something about his face seems a little … off. He
then reveals himself as a villain by removing a set of hidden facial
prosthetics. As his visage literally collapses, his inner monstrosity
comes into view. Now Bond, and the audience, can see who he really
is. And that is the main function of disability in these stories – an
outwardly visible sign of an inner quality.
THIS PARTICULAR TROPE, where a character’s moral and physiological
natures mirror each other, is as universal as it is ancient. It is reflected
in the philosophy of Plato, in phrases such as “a healthy mind in a
healthy body”. In Buddhist tradition, too, disability has been con-
strued as an impediment to understanding and enlightenment – and
even, for some, as a punishment for actions in a past life.
As disability scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have
pointed out in their books Narrative Prosthesis and Cultural Locations
of Disability, using disability as a means of characterisation is a feature
of the storytelling tradition. It offers a shorthand for separating good
characters and bad, and explains motivation and narrative function.
Sometimes, this connection between embodiment and motiva-
tion is explicit. In the opening monologue of Richard III, Shake-
speare’s version of the king – made significantly more disabled than
his historical counterpart – takes pains to establish that he will be
the villain and not the hero of the play. This, he argues, is a logical
consequence of his embodiment:
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
What is a sensitivity reader to do with this? Does it make a difference if
the Yorkist king is referred to as “differently abled” and not a “cripple”?
Undoubtedly – but I don’t think the change would be for the better.
In many ways it would be worse. The fundamental problem lies not
with the words used to describe the character, but with the attributes
ascribed to him. And if those attributes are demanded by the narrative,
we are facing a challenge that can be unexpectedly subtle.
A FEW YEARS AGO, having written a disability memoir, I had a spell of
minor celebrity in Norway, appearing on the local equivalent of Have
I Got News For You and some other TV shows. After this, I received
an unexpected phone call. It was from a casting agency who wanted
me to read for a small part in a television series called Occupied. The
show (occasionally available on Netflix) was derived from an idea by
Jo Nesbø about a Russian invasion of Norway – an idea that seemed
a little more fanciful in 2019 than it might today.
I said yes to the audition, of course. I was curious, flattered, and
wanted to know whether I would completely embarrass myself. But
I also wanted to know what the experience of playing a disabled
character in a mainstream television series would be like.
My character, Ivar Salvesen, was initially conceived as an assis-
tant of sorts to the Norwegian prime minister. His job was to feed
information to the politician, and thus to the viewers, on key plot
developments. But as the drafts progressed, he turned into a villain.
He became the head of an unscrupulous consultancy, vaguely reminis-
cent of Cambridge Analytica, promising to deliver the parliamentary
election – before collaborating with various shadowy characters who
threw acid at the prime minister’s political enemies.
Whether the change in Ivar’s character was accidental or a result
of the writers coming to appreciate my villainous nature I will never
know. But, for whatever reason, he joined the ranks of Dr Strangelove
and the usual wheelchair-using baddies. When I pointed this out to
one of the other actors, she seemed thoroughly surprised. “Oh, I never
thought of that. He just seemed to be written as a sort of classically
cerebral, calculating villain. That sort of type.”
Well, yes. That sort of type. Cerebral, calculating. Compensating,
perhaps, for some essential inner flaw. Concealing, possibly, his hatred
of able-bodied humanity. We know the type.
The series was set in modern, progressive Norway, so no one
referred to my character as a “cripple” or with any other kind of slur.
That did not change the fact of characterisation. And no sensitivity
reading on the verbal, or even conceptual, level could change that.
MY ACTING ADVENTURE taught me much about the often reactionary
elements of popular storytelling. It was also educational in other
ways. Chiefly, it gave me insight into why mainstream stories often
resort to shorthand when it comes to representations of disability.
Like many western European productions, Occupied was partly
filmed in eastern Europe, specifically in Lithuania. I was wary of
travelling there, as I am always wary of travelling as a wheelchair user.
The logistics are complicated at best, involving labyrinthine booking
procedures and endless bureaucratic requests or information about
one’s wheelchair: How wide is it? How heavy? What kind of batteries
does it have? This information, which must be supplied, is promptly
forgotten by the airline, and has to repeated to sometimes befuddled,
occasionally hostile, check-in staff.
In addition, there was only one airline with a direct flight from
Oslo to the capital, Vilnius, and, like most low-budget airlines, it was
bad at disability accommodation. I did my due diligence, spending
hours online in order to find out the exact dimensions of the cargo

doors for the plane on this flight. I also talked to my sister and her then
boyfriend, both professional actors, who assured me that transporting
an electric wheelchair from one place to another was a minor challenge
for a large-scale TV production. This, at least, was mildly reassuring.
The plane trip was as troublesome as I’d predicted. The airline had
no record of my need for assistance and, for unexplained reasons,
I spent an hour waiting on the tarmac in a freezing cold Ambulift,
the cargo container on wheels that modern airports use to transport
disabled passengers along with in-flight meals.
But it turned out that the professionals were right. Once I was in
Lithuania, transportation was smoothly arranged by the production
company. Even though the only wheelchair-accessible van they’d
been able to hire in Vilnius broke down the day before I arrived, they
were able to find another one at the other end of the country. There
was a simple reason for this efficiency: once I’d been cast, a lot of
money was staked on my being on set, on time, and so a solution was
found. Unlike in real life, where there are no consequences to, say,
keeping me waiting on the tarmac.
And so I was able to act, to my limited ability, in a range of scenes set
in the prime minister’s office, in the hospital where my character had
helped put one of his enemies, and even in the government limousine
that took us both to the hospital. This final scene we shot was by far
the most interesting one in terms of disability representation, though
it had nothing to do with the good/evil binary. My character used an
electric wheelchair. This was no problem in the office and hospital
scenes: plenty of room. But it would not fit in the back seat of a limo.
So there I was, in a regular car seat. This was almost as exotic an
experience for me as trying to say my lines “without trying to act”, as
I’d very sensibly been instructed. I rarely move from my wheelchair
when in transit, which is usually in vans that are as boxy and as
 Villainous
Javier Bardem in
43
Skyfall, left; Jan
Grue in Occupied,
below
ALAMY; NETFLIX
ugly as an Ambulift. The luxury car seat felt infinitely more soft and
comfortable by comparison. Gradually, helped along by one of my
fellow actors, a veteran and patient professional, I relaxed into the
scene. Something kept bothering me, though, and around take three
or four, I couldn’t help asking the director certain questions.
The scene in the car would lead into a scene outside the
hospital? Yes. And in the scene outside the hospital, Ivar would
be in his electric wheelchair? Yes. But right now, in the limousine,
he was not in his wheelchair? Yes. And in the following scene, the
wheelchair would in fact, it seems, be waiting for him? Yes. So how
exactly would the wheelchair get there?
There could, of course, be a num-
ber of explanations. There might be
multiple wheelchairs. The prime
minister’s staff might have spirited
I wanted to the wheelchair away, rushing to have
it in place. The Secret Service did this
know what for Franklin D Roosevelt, providing
commando-style accessibility where
it would be none existed previously. Alternatively,
I suppose, the wheelchair could be
like to play strapped to the roof of the limousine,
out of frame. It certainly wasn’t visible,
a disabled or even alluded to.
character on The director, a friendly and thor-
oughly experienced man, someone
mainstream who had worked with international
stars such as Christina Ricci and
television Jonathan Rhys Meyers, considered
my question. After a long pause, he
suggested that we may have to gloss over this one.
This was clearly the right answer. If the narrative in Occupied was
to progress at all, we couldn’t dwell on every logistical conundrum
that a wheelchair user would face in the real world. We wouldn’t
have got past Ivar’s first scene. Or, Beckett-style, we wouldn’t
have got to his scene at all. He would have been infinitely delayed,
waiting for assistance to get out of bed in the morning, waiting for
accessible transportation to take him the prime minister’s office,
trapped on the phone with one public office or another. This would
not make for good TV.
Still, having navigated the airline’s dark joke of a disability service
system, and having come to Vilnius to sit in the back of the very nice
car, I couldn’t help but envy Ivar just a little bit. His life was obviously
easier than mine on a number of counts, owing to his trick of living
in a fictional universe where disability was merely a character trait.
I HAVE A SIX-YEAR-OLD. When reading to him, I routinely edit the
books we enjoy together. Sometimes I edit for clarity, sometimes
for brevity, sometimes for scariness, and sometimes for racism and
misogyny. (We haven’t got to Ian Fleming yet, I should say.)
Sometimes, though, I am at a loss. Reading Roald Dahl, who was
born to Norwegian immigrant parents and is as popular in Norway as
he is in the UK, we had fun with many of his books. Fantastic Mr Fox
was a success and, on balance, I decided to leave the three grotesque
farmers as they were. We enjoyed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
too, though I had to improvise in many places, particularly when
it came to the Oompa-Loompas origins as a “pygmy people from
Africa”, happy to work for Willy Wonka without pay. (It should
be noted that Dahl himself revised this particular aspect of 
the story in 1973, but in the 2015 Norwegian translation, they
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly

44 The trope that won’t die
still hail from a “big, dark jungle” and have only grubs to eat.) With
George’s Marvellous Medicine, though, we couldn’t get past page 3.
The baddie in this story is George’s horrible and horribly decrepit
grandmother, on whom George takes his revenge by concocting
his medicine. There is no way to soften Dahl’s description of the
grandmother, because without it, George would have no motivation
and the story would have no point. And so I followed Philip Pullman’s
sensible suggestion to let some of Dahl’s worst stories “fade away”,
rather than trying to edit them past recognition. I did not need to read
it, and my son was happy not to have to hear it. There were better
stories for us to explore.
We are in fraught territory here, living – as all generations do –
through historical change. I grew up on JRR Tolkien’s stories, and my
nostalgic love for them hasn’t dimmed, even as I’ve come to appreci-
ate their troublesome aspects. They are fairly explicitly racist when
it comes to skin colour, drawing on the same trope of physiology
intertwined with morals that underpins so much characterisation of
disability. Does it matter whether Tolkien’s Haradrim are evil because
they are dark, or dark because they are evil? Not so long as the two
qualities are inextricable.
Tolkien’s way with non-human races has also been thoroughly
explored and critiqued – particularly the degree to which he drew on
antisemitic stereotypes in fashioning his dwarves. Here, too, there is
no quick fix. Even the word itself is a problem. It would be absurd to
rename the dwarves of The Lord of the Rings “people with restricted
growth”, since that is quite simply not what they are.
There is, of course, a fantasy universe that does feature at least
one character with restricted growth, created by another author
with the same middle initials. In his series of fantasy novels A Song
of Ice and Fire, on which the TV series Game of Thrones was based,
George RR Martin plays off and subverts Tolkien’s legacy in a number
of ways, but to my mind never as interestingly as when depicting
Tyrion Lannister.
Although Tyrion is called an “imp” by other characters, he is clearly
a person with restricted growth, not a fantasy creature. And in the
novels as well as the series, he faces what the disability scholar Tom
Shakespeare has called the “predicament” of disability, even though
he lives in a fantastical world. Portrayed by Peter Dinklage, Tyrion
becomes a memorable character partly because of the precise way
in which this predicament is presented. Tyrion cannot meet the
medieval standard of masculinity and martial prowess. He has to live
by his wits and must be extremely sensitive to social nuances – an all
too familiar consequence of disability.
I AM NOT CHAMPIONING one double R over the other; I am simply
pointing out that sensitivity reading has both its purposes and its
limitations. Sensitivity reading “on the fly” is an invaluable tool for
parents reading to children. It can even be a useful exercise for authors
who revisit their work at a later stage. It is less helpful, I think, when
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
 Predicament
Peter Dinklage
as Tyrion
Lannister in
Game of Thrones
HBO
it is used by commercial entities to obscure the cultural history of
storytelling. It is no accident that the biggest recent debates over
sensitivity reading have been initiated by two companies that strive
to maximise the value of the intellectual property of dead authors.
Their real sensitivity is to the market. One of them, the Roald Dahl
Story Company, was acquired by Netflix to help it combat the biggest
such company of all – the house that Walt Disney built.
Disney has been on a decades-long acquisition rampage, absorb-
ing the Marvel and Star Wars universes, among many others. Thus
the Disneyfication of culture has proceeded from the fairly dark
European fairy tales with which it began to more recent mythologies.
Many new works of genuine quality
have emerged from this process, but
it has also been one of endless rep-
etition – and homogenisation. Very
We risk new different strands of folk culture and
popular culture are uprooted from
words and their specific historical contexts and
subjected to the demands of global
euphemisms marketing campaigns. Equally
important, there is less oxygen for
being genuinely original stories. It makes
overtaken by little difference if the label has been
changed but the product inside the box
old stigmas: is essentially the same.
We can and should exchange
the problem new words for old slurs, particu-
larly when the effects are obviously
remains positive. Some disabled people have
reappropriated the term “cripple”,
and are using it for politically progressive purposes. “Crip theory”
is a burgeoning field of academic inquiry. Even so, I am quite happy
not to be called crippled in everyday life. This is not only because
of the word’s derogatory meaning, but because “cripple” in its con-
ventional meaning implies something essential about one’s status
– something that is inextricably linked to one’s body, independent
of circumstance. I prefer “disabled” partly because that word leaves
room for multiple interpretations of what I am disabled by – includ-
ing, crucially, society. Most days, I am first and foremost disabled
by a lack of accessibility.
Showing my age, I am less keen to enter into a debate on the
merits of “person with disabilities” versus “disabled person”. And
to my middle-aged ears, “differently abled” is clearly a euphemism,
and a reactionary one at that, a term that does as much good to alle-
viate disabling policies as “underprivileged” does to fight poverty.
Language is powerful, but never on its own. It is entwined with
politics, culture and history. If we replace older and ostensibly more
stigmatising words with newer and softer-sounding labels, but do
nothing to change the context in which the words appear, we leave the
job half done. Arguably, we also risk new words and euphemisms being
overtaken by old stigmas, in which case the fundamental problem of
representation remains. Politely calling a Bond villain a “differently
abled person” does nothing to undo the link between their embodi-
ment and their villainy.
No, I don’t want to read an Ian Fleming novel in which a differently
abled person overcomes his physical challenges in order to become
an inspirational example of world-threatening villainy. I’m much
happier reading the old books as products of their time, and then
moving on to stories new •
JAN GRUE IS A NORWEGIAN WRITER, ACADEMIC AND ACTOR
 45
Comment is free, facts are sacred CP Scott 1918

STEFAN STERN
Perk-cession
means a work
culture rethink
Page 47

I R A Q I N VA S I O N:
20 YEARS ON
In global affairs, the US still acts
only in its own best interests
▲ Ukraine’s president,
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Randeep Ramesh
with his US counter-
part, Joe Biden
KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
46 Opinion
I
n the two decades since the second Iraq war,
the United States appears like the Bourbon
kings who had learned nothing and forgotten
nothing. The illegal invasion and occupation
of Iraq was a story of geopolitical failure and
domestic political disaster. To understand
the foolhardy decision to launch the war, one
must first understand the US grand strategy
of global hegemony, pursued by Washington since 1945.
The “war on terror” provided political cover for
the further pursuit of supremacy, despite threatening
democratic government with lies, fraud and violence.
George W Bush’s rash actions did provoke some
murmurs of concern about the damage being inflicted
but these faded from the corridors of power. Instead the
US has refused to move on, believing that countries are
“either with us or against us”.
The key to US strength has been its ability to dominate
three regions of the world for security and economic
reasons: western Europe, east Asia and the Middle East.
American power depends on preventing the emergence
of a dominant rival on the Eurasian landmass or a single
power in the Gulf controlling the majority of the world’s
oil reserves. Nonetheless the present-day coalitions
emerging could lead to these outcomes.
History suggests that when one great power becomes
too powerful it is defeated by the counter-balancing
efforts of the other major powers. Vladimir Putin’s
unlawful invasion of Ukraine has thrown into sharp
relief how differently the conflict is viewed by US allies
and the rest of the world. It is the latter’s expanding trade
with Moscow that helps Russia dodge western sanctions.
This, along with China’s rise, has exposed US attempts
to maintain its “unipolar” power in the international
political system, which it obtained after the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1989.
The US portrays the arrival of a world that is both
multipolar and ideologically diverse as a moment of
great danger. The more great powers, the reasoning
goes, the greater the number of rivalries and the greater
chance that wars could break out. The opposite could
also be true with nations such as Turkey and India acting
to avoid picking sides in disputes. States freed from a
US policy to entangle rising powers in a web of rules
designed to benefit Washington may find better terms
elsewhere. The deal this month to restore relations
between Saudi Arabia and Iran, negotiated by China,
underlines the accelerating Sino-American rivalry.
In global affairs the road to hell is paved with
good intentions. Yet policies must be judged on their
A Ukrainian victory now
would still leave it in
need of rebuilding. The
seized $300bn Russian
assets could help
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
consequences. US strategy since the 1970s had been to
keep Moscow out of the Middle East. The calamitous
invasion and occupation of Iraq proved an invitation for
other powers to enter the region. By 2016, there was a
Saudi-Russian oil partnership, Russian support for the
Iranian regime and a Russian military presence in Syria.
In that year, the US had a choice of electing a confront-
China candidate, Donald Trump, or a confront-Russia
candidate, Hillary Clinton. US president Joe Biden is now
apparently willing to take on both giant rivals at once in
the belief that the US can be safe only in a world of like-
minded democratic states.
The capricious and self-centred nature of American
power is well known. The US was prepared to split with
old allies to bomb the Middle East into a shape that
suited it. Washington had little time for French and
German diplomatic protests. Hundreds of thousands
of civilians were killed. The political system planted in
Iraq by Washington has intensified divisions and made
it practically ungovernable. While Iraq’s oil has flowed
on to world markets, about $150bn has been corruptly
siphoned off. A token number of US troops remain to
keep Islamic State at bay, but Iran’s allied militias have
the casting vote in Iraqi politics.
The US never lost its taste for being the world’s sheriff.
Against the backdrop of the Arab spring, in 2011 Barack
Obama sent US forces back into action in Libya, on a
mission that drifted into an unannounced goal of regime
change and a bloody civil war. The botched American
withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 came as a shock
to Britain, which had suffered the second-highest
casualties among western nations in keeping the Taliban
out. As to the wisdom of letting the militants overrun
Kabul, London’s view was judged irrelevant.
There is a warning in Iraq’s recent travails for Ukraine:
in US politics success is supreme and no moral law is
binding. For all the talk of “unwavering support”, there
is a domestic constraint on US war casualties that Iraq
helped to reanimate. Biden won’t see American troops
fight Russian ones. That would be the third world war.
But Washington has already achieved three significant
foreign policy objectives. First, Putin is now a pariah in
European eyes. Second, the US is displacing Russia as
Europe’s top gas supplier. Third, Germany’s industrial
power will not rely on the Baltic
 Randeep transit of Russian gas. The EU is likely
Ramesh is chief to be a more pliant American ally in
leader writer for the future. The US won’t want to look
the Guardian like it is pulling the rug from beneath
Kyiv. But history suggests Washington
would prefer an imperfect peace to a forever war. If a
Ukrainian victory could be declared now it would still
leave the country in need of rebuilding. The $300bn of
seized Russian central bank assets could help.
Washington will also not want to be out of step with
public opinion in large swathes of the globe for too
long. Iraq showed that international politics is not an
ideological crusade of good versus evil. Putin’s invasion
has revived the solidarity of the west. But Washington
should stop pretending that the global triumph of US
hegemony is within reach again 

WOR K
We’re in a perk-cession.
Bosses should consider
what staff really want
Stefan Stern
T
hree-course dinners, access to
wellness centres, even free dry-
cleaning – for years the goodies
that came with a job in the elite
tech sector were more than mere
accessories – they symbolised your
membership of an exclusive club.
Now, as some companies begin
what the Wall Street Journal has called the perk-cession,
is it time for a conversation about what office workers
really want from their jobs in a post-Covid world?
First, the background: amid rising interest rates and
recessionary pressures, even towering tech companies
are facing harsh new realities. “Our management theme
for 2023 is the year of efficiency, and we’re focused on
becoming a stronger and more nimble organisation,” said
Mark Zuckerberg, keen to signal to Meta’s investors last
month that the party, as it were, was over.
His company’s share price fell by more than 60% last
year. In November, Meta announced that 11,000 jobs
would go – about 13% of its workforce. The boss wanted
to be clear. Costs would be cut. Wall Street responded
positively, pushing the share price almost a fifth higher
when this “year of efficiency” was declared. (Last week,
Zuckerberg announced 10,000 further jobs would go.)
In truth, the belt-tightening at Meta began a year ago,
when some perks at its Manhattan “campus” were cut.
It was goodbye to the free laundry and dry-cleaning.
And the gratis evening meal started being served later
in the day, more than half an hour after the last free bus
Illustration Nuthawut Somsuk
47
ride back into midtown had left. At the HQ of Salesforce,
a customer relationship management company in San
Francisco, the speciality coffee baristas have gone. In
the same city, regime change at Twitter brought in some
notoriously unpleasant (“hardcore”) working practices.
Some managers might object that if people are no
longer coming to the office, why should there still be
office perks? That is a lot of wasted free food, as the new
Twitter owner, Elon Musk, complained. “There are more
people preparing breakfast than eating breakfast. They
don’t even bother serving dinner, because there is no
one in the building,” he claimed on Twitter.
This continuing tussle, about where and when and how
we work, is an enduring symptom of the post-Covid
economy. There was a thought, when lockdowns came
to an end, that free food and other perks might help lure
people back in. But any temporary pickup in attendance,
and relief at making human contact again, was often
quite short-lived. People had got used to the new, work-
from-anywhere flexibility, and they liked it. City centres
are still quieter, especially on Mondays and Fridays.
Edgar Schein, the great organisational theorist, who
died in January, could have told you
 Stefan Stern that the visible “artefacts” of office life
is co-author – furniture, dress code, free croissants
of Myths of – may not necessarily tell you much
Management about the underlying values and
and the former assumptions that help to shape an
director of the organisation’s culture.
High Pay Centre It is better to have employee
benefits that are truly valued by
employees. Earlier this year, Wired magazine reported
a Glassdoor analysis of 70,000 comments posted
by tech workers. Between 2019 and 2022, mentions
of workplace benefits such as gym membership or
free food reduced by half. Effective hybrid working
arrangements seem to be more important.
The real challenge here, as usual, is for managers
themselves. What sort of work environment are you
creating? If you were a twenty- or thirtysomething
employee, paying high rent, still dealing with a student
loan and having to travel in for an hour or more to reach
the sacred office, would you really bother leaving the flat
if you could do the job from home? It will take more than
a free croissant to get people to show up.
Managing talented people was already a challenge.
But in a hybrid world greater skill and sensitivity will be
needed to make sure everyone can do their best work.
Extrinsic motivators will not do. The organisational
anthropologist John Curran suggests it might be
necessary to concentrate on our working relationships
and workplace culture. Management just got harder.
Perks probably will survive, in some limited form. But
we will know we are heading for tougher and meaner
times if we start getting pep talks from the boss like the
one given by a character called Blake, played by Alec
Baldwin, in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross.
“We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales
contest,” he tells his real estate sales team. “As you all
know, first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado … Second prize is
a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” 
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
48 Opinion
Biden’s Alaska drilling
UNITED
S TAT E S
consent betrays the
planet and his pledges
Rebecca Solnit
T
he Willow project is an act of
terrorism against the climate, and
the Biden administration has just
approved it. This massive oil-drilling
project in the wilderness of northern
Alaska goes against science and the
administration’s many assurances
that it cares about climate and agrees
that we must make a swift transition away from fossil
fuel. Like the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau,
Joe Biden seems to think that if we do some good things
for the climate we can also do some very bad things and
somehow it will all even out.
To make that magical thinking more obvious and
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
to try to smooth over broad opposition, the US federal
government also coughed up some protections against
drilling in the Arctic Ocean and elsewhere in the National
Petroleum Reserve (and only approved three of the
five drilling sites for ConocoPhillips’ invasion of this
wilderness). This is like saying, “We’re going to kill
your mother but we’re sending guards to protect your
grandmother.” It doesn’t make your mum less dead.
With climate you’re dealing with physics and maths
before morality. All the carbon and methane emissions
count, and must decrease rapidly in this decade. As Bill
McKibben likes to say, you can’t bargain with physics.
You can try to bargain with the public, but the
motivation behind this decision is hard to figure out. The
deal was inherited from the Trump administration, and
rejecting it would have been a break with convention,
but convention dooms us, and we need the break.
Biden was elected in no small part by the participation
of young voters who supported his strong climate
platform. As a candidate he promised: “And by the way,
no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period,
period.” Six million letters and 2.3m comments opposed
to the project were sent to the White House, many
from young people. The American public, Republican
minority aside, is strongly engaged with the reality of
climate crisis and the urgency of acting on it.
Illustration Matt Kenyon
 Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust 49

I call it an act of terrorism, because this drilling project

in Alaska produces petroleum, which will be burned,
which will send carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,
Rohingya refugees live in
where it will contribute to climate chaos that will affect
people in the South Pacific, the tropics, the circumpolar
Arctic, will affect the melting of the Greenland ice
perpetual insecurity –
shield (this month reaching a shocking 10C warmer than
normal). It will result in an estimated 278m tonnes of they need a stable future

T
carbon emissions.
This makes it, like the Permian Basin oil extraction in he hungry and Conditions in Bangladesh
the US south-west and the tar sands in Alberta, a carbon desperate are now have become so poor that the
bomb. Former vice-president Al Gore recently put it this much more so. Last number attempting dangerous
way: “The proposed expansion of oil and gas drilling month, the rations to sea crossings to Malaysia or
in Alaska is recklessly irresponsible … The pollution it Rohingya living in the world’s Indonesia increased fivefold
would generate will not only put Alaska Native and other largest refugee camp – Cox’s last year, to more than 3,500,
local communities at risk, it is incompatible with the Bazar, Bangladesh – were at the cost of about a tenth of
ambition we need to achieve a net zero future.” slashed. This is, as a UN expert those lives. Earlier this month,
Earlier, the New York Times reported: “The warned, a matter of life and a huge blaze tore through one
administration says the country must pivot away from death. The Rohingya have lived of the camps at Cox’s Bazar,
fossil fuels but backed a project set to produce more than on a knife edge for too long. leaving an estimated 12,000
100,000 barrels of oil each day for 30 years.” In 30 years Their suffering made global people without shelter. This
it will be 2053, three years after we are supposed to have headlines in 2017, when the has been blamed on the armed
achieved a fully fossil-free future. Myanmar military, supported gangs that rob and murder
by militias, launched a inhabitants in the camps.
There is actual bargaining in the government’s record murderous campaign that Rohingya say that Bangladeshi
of decision, stating that “Permittee shall offset 50% took thousands of lives, forced police have failed to root out
of the projected net [greenhouse gas emissions] … 700,000 to flee Rakhine the violence, and instead
in accordance with US commitments under the Paris state for Bangladesh and was harass and extort from them.
Agreement. GHGs shall be offset through reforestation described by a UN human Dhaka wants UN help to
of land …” Pretending that trees are our atmospheric rights expert as genocide. In move more Rohingya to Bhasan
janitorial service belies both the ways that forests the last two years, what little Char, an island vulnerable
across the globe are devastated by attention has been paid to to cyclones. Officials portray
 Rebecca Solnit climate crisis – burgeoning pests, Myanmar has focused on the it as an opportunity for a
is a Guardian US drought, fire, ecosystems changing military’s coup and attempts to fresh start. Refugees have
columnist faster than trees can adapt – and that crush civilian resistance. described dangerous and
planting trees does not necessarily But the suffering of the prison-like conditions.
result in a healthy long-lasting forest. Rohingya began decades ago Bangladesh is an
Each tree, according to this document, can sequester and continues now, even impoverished nation grappling
22kg of carbon dioxide a year. Except tiny saplings outside Rakhine state. Many with a humanitarian crisis.
will not be doing that, and it will be too late to help had fled before, returning when It needs help. The support
our current climate goals by the time the trees, if they they were assured it was safe. offered in 2017 dwindled, even
survive, are full-grown. I asked a friend with a talent for It was not. They experienced before Covid, the Ukraine
maths to crunch the data; he concluded that “12.8bn discrimination, military war and soaring food prices.
trees could sequester the produced carbon in one year; operations, pogroms and the The World Food Programme
or, 1/100th of that – 128m trees – could sequester the stripping of their citizenship. says it needs $125m just to
produced carbon in 100 years”. That’s not a solution to The 600,000 or so who remain avoid further ration cuts
emitting those 278m metric tons of carbon dioxide. in Myanmar are held in camps. in a community where
Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic, an Indigenous “There was no peace … malnutrition is rife. The US has
Alaskan organisation, pointed out in a letter to Biden wherever they went,” the pledged $26m, but overall the
that this project means devastation: “Approval of a Guardian journalist Kaamil response has been lacklustre.
project the size of Willow would be climate suicide. Ahmed writes in his new book, The UK’s promise of a $6m
Coastal villages in Alaska are losing land to erosion at I Feel No Peace: Rohingya package does not come close
breakneck speed, permafrost thaw is causing dramatic Fleeing Over Seas and Rivers. to compensating for the cuts
changes to the ecosystem and the destruction of oil and “The Rohingya have run from it imposed when it slashed the
other infrastructure, and Alaska Natives are at risk of the Burmese troops who kill aid budget in 2021. What the
losing their jobs, homes, and lives in a place which is them to their Bangladeshi Rohingya need is citizenship
warming at four times faster than the rest of the world.” counterparts, who have policed in Myanmar to safely return,
We are already failing to stop runaway climate their lives in a different way, but failing that, resettlement
change. Adding this carbon bomb to the total makes it looming over them in their would allow them to establish
worse – both for the actual damage to the climate and exile then turning the screw new lives instead of dwelling
for the signal the US is sending to the world. The Biden when governments decide they in perpetual insecurity. They
administration has made a colossal mistake • need to return to Myanmar.” need a future • Observer

24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly

50 Opinion
Letters

WRITE The BBC ought to look at
TO US its own conduct first
In contrast to some other
presenters, Gary Lineker
was not revealing any
Letters for party preferences nor
publication his voting intentions
weekly.letters@ in his tweet (Spotlight,
theguardian.com 17 March). He was not
—
offering general criticism
Please include a
or endorsement of any
full postal address
and a reference
party per se. He was
to the article. simply commenting on
We may edit letters. a single government
Submission and policy affecting a human
publication of all rights issue to which he is
letters is subject committed. Given the BBC
to our terms and director-general’s own
conditions, see: history of Tory activism,
THEGUARDIAN.COM/
LET TERS-TERMS
isn’t it he who needs to
defend himself – and thus
the BBC – against charges
Editorial
of political partisanship in
Editor: Graham
Snowdon this matter?
Guardian Weekly, Ian McCormack
Kings Place, Leicester, England, UK
90 York Way,
London N1 9GU, • Does anyone think Gary
UK Lineker would have been
suspended or even noticed
To contact the if he had tweeted in favour
editor directly: of government policy?
editorial.feedback
This, together with not
@theguardian.com
broadcasting an episode
Corrections of David Attenborough’s
Our policy is to Wild Isles, shows where
correct significant the real political bias is. It
errors as soon as is the BBC that is biased –
possible. Please not Gary Lineker.
write to guardian. Geoff Wheeler
readers@ Coventry, England, UK
theguardian.com
or the readers’
• My mother was a
editor, Kings Place,
secretary to the general
90 York Way,
London N1 9GU,
manager of Croydon
UK airport in the late 1930s.
She used to relate how
German Jews arriving by
air were refused entry.
We were not party to
the appalling events of the
Holocaust but before we
become sanctimonious
about the use of language
relating to immigration
policy, we should reflect
on whether the UK indeed
occupied the highest
moral ground, in this area,
at that time – or now.
Philip Sutton
Bradford-on-Avon,
England, UK
Social media needs to be
wrested back from elite
Emily Bell, in her article
about how ChatGPT is
undermining truth in
journalism, and Sonia
Sodha, on the way
WhatsApp leaks are
being used to buttress a
Covid-19 anti-lockdown
cause, illustrate the way
social media, for all its
many advantages in other
directions, is undermining
our social wellbeing
(Opinion, 10 March).
On the positive side
social media provides
us with an enhanced
means for popular free
expression. But it serves
as a form of mind control
operating in the interests
of the wealthy few, as Bell
and Sodha indicate.
Much better regulation
of social media is needed
to tip the balance away
from elitist mind control
towards genuinely
unfettered online popular
discourse.
Terry Hewton
Adelaide, South Australia
Time travel will inevitably
have a messy ending
Ronald Mallett thinks
he can save his father
by going back in time
(Spotlight, 10 March).
As for predicting
earthquakes and
anticipating Covid, surely
that would involve going
forward? Or perhaps
relying on future people
to come back and warn us?
In any case, the intention
is to change the present
and/or the past.
John Brunner once
wrote that any society
that invents time travel
will inevitably destroy
itself; sooner or later
someone changes the past
in such a way that time
travel is never discovered.
In the case of Mallett,
would saving his father
prevent Mallett from
pursuing this path?
SW Davey
Torrens, ACT, Australia
The dangerous ‘wisdom’
that we now rely on
Dan Milmo’s excellent
coverage of the threat
and promise of the
internet (Spotlight,
17 February) is best
understood through Irish
engineer Mike Cooley’s
1980 Architect or Bee,
in which his learning
curve graph outlines how
we identify patterns in
masses of data, using
our multiple subjective
filters of language, gender,
religion, race, class and
politics, to turn those
patterns into information.
With broader filters and
patterns that information
becomes knowledge and
then “wisdom” in our
learning curves.
With electronic data
now far exceeding our
memory capacities, we
allow media, academic
and political “gurus”
with different filters and
cultural narratives from
our own, to spoon feed us
“wisdom”, and sometimes
misinformation, using
their subjective filters
and therefore patterns,
not ours.
Bob Thomson
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
How rival chess masters
can make a sartorial move
Leonard Barden’s column
(24 February) tells us
that the world No 4 chess
master, Alireza Firouzja,
is pursuing an alternate
career in fashion design,
while the world No 1,
Magnus Carlsen, is in
action with Chessbrahs.
Sounds like Alireza and
Magnus could start a
lingerie line.
Anthony Walter
Coldstream, British
Columbia, Canada
COR R ECTIONS
In an article about Sally
Rooney’s popularity
in China (Spotlight,
17 February), the podcast
Stochastic Volatility
was wrongly named as
Scholastic Volatility.

A WEEK
IN VENN
DI AGR A MS
Edith Pritchett

The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023

 51
Film, music, art, books & more

BOOKS
Show goes on for
Shakespeare’s
First Folios
Page 54 

His spectacular sequin designs

have won Ashish Gupta legions of fans
around the world. As he prepares for his first
retrospective in London, he looks back at
20 years of fighting gloom with glitter

Mr.Brightside

24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly

52 Culture
Design
sequin. They’re all, presumably, on the work currently being
hung at the William Morris Gallery in east London. “The
curator said,” Gupta grins, “‘This is really interesting for
me, because it’s the first time I’ve ever worked with a living
artist.’ And I said, ‘Well, we’ve still got three months, you
never know what might happen!’” Revisiting his archive
at the age of 47 has been a strange experience, “a little bit
surreal, actually. You kind of time travel. In some ways it
feels as if a lifetime has gone by quite quickly.”
He never planned to start a label. Growing up in Delhi,
Gupta papered his walls with the pages from fashion mag-
azines, and moved to London to study at Central Saint
Martins. When he graduated in 2000, he was invited to
Paris for interviews at design studios, but while at the Gare
du Nord, his portfolio, containing all his work (along with
his cash and papers), was stolen. He had nothing to show
for all his years of study and no chance of getting a job.
“It was devastating! One of the most horribly gut-
wrenching experiences of my life. The police thought it was
funny. They told me to check the bins around the station.”
It was soon after that, though, that he got a call. A friend
had worn one of his embroidered tops out shopping, and a
buyer at Browns asked where she’d bought it. They wanted
to put in an order. He went back to India, produced a small

I
collection, big on glamour and (to cut a long story) Ashish,
the label, was born.
But, he says: “In the early 2000s the world was a different
place, in terms of just being a brown person in fashion. I
don’t think people expected that I would be around for very
long.” He struggled to get UK citizenship, which added a
particularly pointed pressure to his work, and when he
INTERVIEW s the sequin perhaps the started doing shows he found himself stereotyped. “I’d get
By Eva Wiseman most glamorous product of called things like ‘Bollywood designer’ or ‘Hindu designer’,
evolutionary biology? Psy- which I didn’t quite understand the relevance of. I wanted
chologists say humans are to be judged on what I was doing, not my identity.”
drawn to things that sparkle Recently, though, he has started to lean into his heritage.
because once our ancestors “I’m Indian, I have my own gaze, which comes from my
searched for light reflecting sense of having grown up in a particular country, so there are
on rivers in their search references that I react to differently. The way I use colour,
for water. Now we search for example, things that are so deeply rooted. Everything
for sparkle elsewhere – a you do is through your gaze, your lived experience – the
diamond ring, a disco ball fact that you’re an immigrant or a queer person.” He feels
– and find new meaning more comfortable exploring that today, through “the idea
in it beyond survival. Like of dual culture dressing. Like, I remember Indira Gandhi,
glamour, or value, or – in when she travelled abroad, would do the silk sari, but then
the case of Ashish Gupta, a she’d have a fur coat on top. This interesting clash of east
fashion designer renowned and west. And in queues at Heathrow you’ll see Indian
for his artistry with sequins women wearing a sari with a big cardigan and trainers. So
– freedom. I’ve been exploring a lot of that in my work, which becomes
Next month sees Ashish’s kind of political. Because it’s about dress codes and how
 Centre stage first retrospective, show- people react, what messaging you’re sending.”
Ashish Gupta casing 20 years of his label’s Last year, Gupta shot a collection in India for the first
at 2015’s V&A hand-embroidered sequined time, clothes inspired by such things as Indian movie maga-
Fashion in Motion clothes, like the dressing zines and the velour bedspreads his family bought in the
show in London
gown in zardozi, a south Asian embroidery method using 1970s. There were geeky knit tanktops alongside 50s style
DAVID M BENETT/GETTY
gold thread, and the pink T-shirt with the slogan “Fall in prom dresses, all hoisted to new levels of glamour with
love and be more tender”, and sparkling pieces worn by their dense embroidered sequins.
▲ Word play
stars such as Beyoncé, Rihanna and Debbie Harry. Walking In 2016, baffled and upset by Brexit, Gupta took a bow
Gupta’s into his London home feels like stepping backstage – he’s at the end of his London show in a T-shirt that read “Immi-
‘Immigrant’ replaced his front-door panels with red glass, so we stand grant”. It was an attempt to reclaim the word, to show
shirt caused a
bathed for a calm minute in dark light. He designed the pride and to seek compassion. It sold out instantly. “The
stir in 2016 kitchen countertops to house huge planters, and lush trees older I get, the more I think about the political situation
NIKLAS HALLE’N/
grow up towards the glass roof. There are stone busts, and its structures. This constant dialogue, for example,
AFP/GETTY Indian glass paintings and piles of books, but not a single about immigration really upsets me. It’s completely

The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023

 53

insensitive. It’s almost as if people don’t understand the really had this dodgy cocktail dress kind of association. I
traumas immigrants go through. And even if you look at the love a bit of bad taste, so that was part of it.” He strokes his
vocabulary around it – when people from the west move beard as he thinks. “The other thing is this idea of glamour.
to countries in the so-called ‘developing world’, they call The word
wo comes from the idea of witches casting a spell. So
themselves expats. The word immigrant becomes reserved it’s a very
ver powerful association. And I think about the golden
for people of colour who move to predominantly ly white age of Hollywood
age of H and how sequins look on film. There’s
countries, which I find really interesting, because se I have such a magical
m quality about them. Plus, the danger and
yet to find the difference between the two.” beauty
b eauty I associate with nightlife – you want to be seen, but
He hopes that art and fashion remain a voice off dissent, there’s a mystery there. They light you up,” he shakes his
but he remains worried. “I emigrated here to bu build
uild
ild head, a kind of casual wonder. “It’s a very magical medium.”
a life and I don’t see myself as differentt from othe
otherer Today, he’s
h wearing an orange shirt in a muted psychedelic
people. But, obviously, I am seen as different by b pattern. Does he ever wear a sequin? “No. I like to have a
pattern
some people. When Brexit happened it was so sad sad,d, little bit
bi of distance. They feel like … I don’t want to say
because there’s a whole generation of youngoung peopl
peoplele ‘sacred’? But I suppose I like to be on the outside looking
‘sacred
now who will be deprived of so many experiences,
eriences, in.” He looks a little sheepish.
it’s such a shame, isn’t it? When you think Pulling old work out for the retrospective, Gupta was
Pulli
about food and fashion and just falling in love pleasantly surprised to find … it was fabulous? Like the ear-
pleasan
… it’s such a shame. Why would you not want liest pie
piece, from 2003: “It’s like the campest rugby shirt in
that?” This government, he adds, “instead d of the wor
world,” in gold and silver stripes, which came from “the
trying to fix real problems – energy prices, es, idea of taking something hyper-masculine, fetishising and
the environment, trading with Europe, e, subverting it.” And the bags, where he reimagined plastic
subver
which from recent personal experience I bags in sequins – instead of Tesco, the letters spelled Disco.
can say continues to be an absolute clus-- Instead of M&S, S&M. “They had a gentle humour about
Inste
terfuck – is trying to deflect by blaming g them. But also it was that idea of taking something
the
refugees. It would be laughable if it wasn’tt disposable from everyday life and making it really
di
so cruel and tragic. Privileged people who o special, elevating it.” He shrugs. “It’s a really nice
have such a lack of humanity and empathy hy thing, to be able to create joy. I’m grateful for that.”
should not be in these positions of power.” r.” In the past, Gupta has booked holidays – flights,
When he wore the T-shirt, “I felt like ike I wa
wasas hotels, packed a suitcase – but found himself unable to
ho
coming out as an immigrant,” Gupta chuckles. chuckle es. leave for
fo the airport. “I don’t think I’ve had longer than four
But the subject creeps into his work in less ss obvious
ous days off in a row in the past 20 years,” he winces. “Running
ways, too. Growing up in Delhi, homosexual- mosexual-  Model looks a smalll fashion business is hard and it’s really difficult to
ity was illegal and he dreamed of moving ng to New Gupta uses bright disengage. But Bu there are so many more things I’d like
York, or Paris, or London, “a world of escapismapism and colours and to do!” He’d like to take more pictures, for instance.
fabulousness. Sequins remind me of that,, of big cit- sequins in his He’d like to do gardening, he’d like to design more
ies at night. Because cities have always been such designs interiors and “I’d like to write a book about
interi
a refuge for people, or communities, who o have felt ALESSANDRO LUCIONI/ sex.” Oh yes? He has so many stories, he says.
IMAXTREE; WILL
not the norm. For gay men, moving from romm small ll SANDERS And it’s a subject he’s close to because,
A
towns, a city’s nightlife becomes a kind nd ofo ref- “Often we dress up to get undressed. So
“
uge. Using sequins reminds me of thatt idea, ea of when I design a dress I’ll think about how
w
not being hidden.” easy it is to get off – I always put zips. And
ea
The clothes Gupta designs use sequinsequins to I love
lo pockets. I once lent a trenchcoat to
disrupt and deceive the eye, with trompe mpe l’oeil [redacted A-list celebrity] and when I got
[red
effects and unexpected references. The he draw it back,
ba there was a pair of knickers in the
of the sparkle feels primal – that ancientnt pocket. I thought, well, she’s had a great
poc
search for water – but in his 20 years rs time!” The ultimate compliment.
tim
working with sequins, making his own wn When he says trenchcoat, of course,
fabrics, hand-embroidering them (they’re y’re iit’s important to realise what he means
the opposite of fast or throwaway fashion ion – is something
s more like a sculpture in the
a typical dress costs about £2,000 [$2,400]),
400]), shape of a trenchcoat, but made pain-
sh
working out how best to help them catch tch the sstakingly by hand. When we talk about
light, Gupta has had time to go deeper. “Part of politics, about that doomful year of
my attraction to sequins is that collision of high Brexit and Trump, he remembers being
and low taste. When I started designing, g, they at a rally and seeing a gold sparkling sign
a
that said: “
tth “Fighting Gloom With Glitter!”
“II was inspired
“ in by that,” he says. “And – sequins
are a kind of protest in themselves, aren’t they?”
a
There’s such a A protest
A pprotest aga
p against what? He thinks. “A protest against
fucking blandness!” • Observer
fuck
magical quality EVA WISEMAN
COMMI
W
COMMISSIONING
IS AN OBSERVER MAGAZINE
EDITOR
about sequins. Ashish:
A shish: Fall
F in Love and Be More Tender, is at the William
M orris G
Morris Gallery, Forest Road, London, (wmgallery.org.uk)
They light you up ffrom
rom 1 April
Ap to 10 September

24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly

54 Culture
Books

F
H E R I TAGE our hundred years ago, a small band
of William Shakespeare’s loyal friends
and fellow thespians embarked on the
complicated challenge of bringing his
annotated handwritten copies or prompt books.
The trio took the edited scripts to a printing shop
where compositors copied them into metal type.
Many mistakes were made, and survived because

Bard times complete works together in one bound volume.

Whether it was an act of love and respect or a
money-making venture is unknown.
paper was so costly. The printing process was
“very labour intensive in a very nasty working
environment”, said Coles, but by November 1623
Shakespeare’s But without the First Folio, published in 1623,
seven years after Shakespeare’s death, half his
they were ready to go on sale.
First the 18 unpublished plays had to be signed

First Folios plays would be lost. Now in this quatercentennial

to be revived
Surviving original copies
of the lauded English
playwright’s complete
works are going on display,
to mark 400 years since
they were first published
By Harriet Sherwood
▼ All’s well
The First Folio
was published
in 1623
SARAH LEE
year, institutional and private owners of First
Folios will make their copies available to be
viewed by the public across the UK and Ireland.
A website dedicated to “one of the great
wonders of the literary world” tells the story of
the First Folio and logs the homes of the surviv-
ing 235 copies, including five in the possession of
the British Library. Only 56 are complete copies,
with most missing some of their original pages.
The British Library will hold an exhibition
this year, and a feature film with a screenplay by
Richard Bean and Clive Coleman is in production.
Two books, The Making of Shakespeare’s First
Folio and Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries
of an Iconic Book, both by Emma Smith, a profes-
sor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford University,
will be published next month. Marcus Coles, a
former businessman behind the website, said the
bound collections of Shakespeare’s work were
“the closest we can get to his original writing”.
In Shakespeare’s day, plays were written to be
performed, and rarely printed. But in 1616, the
year of Shakespeare’s death at the age of 52, his
friend and rival Ben Jonson published a collec-
tion of his own poems and plays in folio format.
Shakespeare’s three associates from the King’s
Men acting company, John Heminges, Henry
Condell and Richard Burbage, set to work on a
compilation of the Bard’s plays. Eighteen had
been printed but another 18 existed only as
off by the “master of revels” at Stationers’ Hall in
the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral. The original
register, still stored at the hall, records “Master
William Shakespeare’s comedies, histories and
tragedies”, including The Tempest, Twelfth
Night, and Antony and Cleopatra.
About 700 to 750 copies of the First Folio were
produced. Some were bound with the skin of
calf, sheep or goat, costing a sovereign, but most
were left unbound. Of the surviving copies, 50
are in the UK and 149 in the US. It took “a long
time to become a book of value”, said Coles, but
a pristine copy, with all its original leaves intact,
fetched nearly $10m at auction in 2020.
“No First Folio is the same, they all have
different histories and stories. But the book is
foundational to our language. Rarely a day goes by
when you don’t hear a phrase from a Shakespeare
play being spoken – often without the speaker real-
ising they are quoting Shakespeare,” said Coles.
Smith said: “Without the First Folio, we would
have some of Shakespeare’s plays, scattered in
individual editions. But we wouldn’t have the
sense of significance, weight (literally), and
permanence that this large volume gives to the
author. Without this book and the way it has pre-
served and solidified his reputation, we wouldn’t
be quoting, performing, teaching, arguing about
Shakespeare today.”
HARRIET SHERWOOD IS THE GUARDIAN’S ARTS AND
CULTURE CORRESPONDENT

Useful idioms Shakespeare’s

gifts to the English language
Green-eyed monster those that understood
“O, beware, my lord, him smiled at one
of jealousy! It is the another and shook
green-eyed monster” their heads; but, for
Othello, Act III, mine own part, it was
Scene III Greek to me” Julius
Fair play “For a score Caesar, Act I, Scene II
of kingdoms you Love is blind “Love
should wrangle, and I is blind, and lovers
would call it fair play” cannot see the pretty
The Tempest, Act V, follies that themselves
Scene I commit” The
Be cruel to be kind Merchant of Venice,
“I must be cruel only Act II, Scene VI
to be kind” Hamlet, Too much of a good
Act III, Scene IV thing “Why then,
It’s Greek to me can one desire too
“Nay, an I tell you much of a good
that, Ill ne’er look you thing?” As You Like It,
i’ the face again: but Act IV, Scene I

The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023

 Culture
Screen
Psst! Wanna
buy an Oscar?
Award winners are banned
from selling the prize figurines,
except back to the Academy for $1.
And yet, a murky and mysterious
trade continues …
By Steve Rose
I
n March 2000, three weeks before the 72nd
Academy Awards, that year’s shipment of
Oscars – 55 individually marked, 24-carat
gold-plated statuettes – disappeared en
route from the manufacturer in Chicago to Los
Angeles. The story briefly became a showbiz sen-
sation: the Academy set up a 24-hour tip line; the
handling company offered a $50,000 reward;
the FBI became involved. The culprits were a
couple of light-fingered delivery workers. They
were arrested within days and the show went on.
Had these thieves been able to sell the Oscars
on the open market, they might have been in for
a shock. The going rate for 55 new Oscar statues
is $55. Since 1951, all Academy Award winners
must sign an agreement that they “shall not sell
or otherwise dispose of the Oscar statuette, nor
permit it to be sold or disposed of by operation of
law, without first offering to sell it to the Academy
for the sum of $1”. The rule also applies to anyone
who receives or inherits someone else’s Oscar.
Despite the Academy’s rules, there is a small
but lucrative trade. Some statuettes have changed
hands for millions of dollars. Quite a few have
disappeared. “I would say that approximately
150 statuettes have been sold either publicly or
semi-secretly over the years,” says Caroline Ash-
leigh, a veteran auctioneer and appraisal expert,
who put prices at $10,000 to $1.5m.
The trade began in earnest in 1993, when
Vivien Leigh’s family auctioned her best
actress Oscar from Gone With the Wind for an
eye-catching $563,000. Since it was a pre-1951
statuette, the Academy was powerless to act, but
issued a statement saying it “regrets the traffic in
Oscars … and will consider all legal options open
to it with regard to each sale.”
Many would-be sellers have fallen foul of
those “legal options”. In 2008, for example, three
heirs of the silent-movie star Mary Pickford were
blocked in their attempts to sell her 1930 best
actress award, for Coquette, and an honorary
Oscar she received in 1976.
Some Oscars would almost be worthy of
55
a biopic. Orson Welles’s 1942 best screenplay
Oscar for Citizen Kane was reported lost by his
daughter Beatrice in 1988. The Academy issued
a replacement, only for the original to resur-
face. Welles had left it with a cinematographer
named Gary Graver who tried to sell it in 1994,
but Beatrice regained possession. When she tried
to auction the original in 2003, the Academy
tried, but failed, to stop the sale (courts eventu-
ally ruled that she could sell the original, but not
the replacement). She reportedly sold it for an
undisclosed sum. In 2011, it was sold for $862,000
by an anonymous seller to an anonymous buyer.
Another courtroom drama unfolded over the
sale of Judy Garland’s “juvenile” Oscar (which
was smaller than the standard statuette) from
1940 for The Wizard of Oz. It was reported lost
by her husband, Sid Luft, in 1958. The Academy
provided a replacement, which Luft tried to sell
in 1993. The Academy obtained a court order pro-
hibiting the sale, so Luft reportedly gave it to his
daughter, Lorna. Then, in 2000, Garland’s origi-
nal 1940 Oscar appeared in the hands of a memo-
rabilia dealer – starting price: $3m. The Academy
obtained a restraining order, after which Luft and
the seller denied having the 1940 Oscar.
Pre-1951 Oscars continue to come up for
legitimate sale on a regular basis. Who is collect-
ing them? “It’s pretty hard to do it out in the open
unless it is something that’s pre-1951,” Ashleigh
says. “But mostly, it’s because they’re truly movie
buffs … if they have the money, they’re going
to try to find something on the secret market.”
Some buyers have gone public: in 2003, the
magician David Copperfield bought Michael
Curtiz’s best director Oscar for Casablanca at
auction for $232,000. Reportedly, he kept it in
his bedroom, claiming without irony: “Objects
should be where they do the most good.” In what
could be his greatest trick, Copperfield resold
the statuette for more than $2m in 2012. Another
highly unanonymous collector paid a record
$1.5m for the best picture Oscar for Gone With
the Wind in 1999: Michael Jackson. Steven 
Spielberg bought Oscars belonging to Clark
▲ Without trace Hattie McDaniel’s Merit for
Outstanding Achievement vanished in 1970 GETTY
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
56 Culture
Screen
Gable and Bette Davis for a total of $1.4m. He
donated all three statuettes to the Academy.
So how many Oscars does the Academy have in
its possession? It declined to say. Twenty are on
display at the Academy Museum in LA, although
several are borrowed. Where are the others? The
Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco
has 27, including a 1939 award for Snow White,
which came with seven mini-Oscars. Katharine
Hepburn’s four best actress statuettes are in the
National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC.
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has
Vivien Leigh’s for A Streetcar Named Desire and
Paul Scofield’s for A Man for All Seasons.
More intriguing are the statuettes nobody
has seen for decades. Hattie
▼ Heir lock McDaniel’s best supporting
Descendants of actress award for Gone With
Mary Pickford the Wind – the first won by a
were prevented Black actor, though it wasn’t
from selling her
a statuette but a plaque – was
1930 award on display at Howard Univer-
NBC/GETTY sity in Washington DC until
1970, when it disappeared.
Olympia Dukakis’s award for Moonstruck,
Marlon Brando’s two for On the Waterfront and
The Godfather (the one Sacheen Littlefeather
refused to accept), Matt Damon’s for Good Will
Hunting, Angelina Jolie’s for Girl, Interrupted,
Frank Capra’s for Prelude to War are all missing.
And a few years after Jackson’s death in 2009,
lawyers admitted “the estate does not know
where the Gone With the Wind statuette is”.
The Academy did learn one lesson from the
ill-fated Oscar heist of 2000, though: it alleg-
edly keeps a stock of emergency statuettes in
a secure vault at a secret location. Let’s hope
they’re well guarded.
STEVE ROSE IS AN ASSISTANT FEATURES EDITOR
FOR THE GUARDIAN
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
Reviews
MUSIC
Lizzo
Ovo Hydro, Glasgow, Scotland
★★★★☆
The US singer’s UK tour kicked off
on International Women’s Day with
an all-female band, three female
backing vocalists, the Little Bigs,
Lizzo’s longtime DJ, Sophia Eris,
and the 10-strong Big Grrrls dance
troupe, stars of Lizzo’s triple-Emmy-
winning reality competition show,
Watch Out for the Big Grrrls.
We know we are in Glasgow
because Lizzo revels in shouting
it – “GlasGOH!” she hollers, often –
and twice starts a chant of “here we,
here we fucking go”.
Tonight’s extravaganza of glitter
and sisterhood is both slick and
authentic. As has become customary
– certainly since Lizzo’s breakout
album of 2019, Cuz I Love You, but
in her previous indie career as well
– a night out in Lizzo’s company is
like downing a quadruple espresso
martini of female self-reliance and
LGBTQ++ positivity.
For act one, Lizzo is resplendent
in a nude bodysuit on which skimpy
bright blue swooshes accentuate her
curves. There is so much twerking,
it almost ceases to be provocative.
One of the most memorable tracks
of the night is Naked, a ballad to her
body that also takes in vulnerability
in love. It’s as though she knows
she has roughly two hours a night
in which to rebalance cosmic scales
weighted in favour of hate, division
and cruelty. So every held note,
every high kick, every message
is replete with upliftment, re-
education and seenness.
Covers of Lauryn Hill and Chaka
Khan play well, while a mashup of
Lizzo’s stark hip-hop track Phone and
a new song, Grrls, is harder, faster
and more fun. Observer Kitty Empire
Touring North America, Europe,
Australia and Japan
Podcast of the week Countered Terrorism
The verdict on David Harewood’s portrayal of counter-terrorists
in Homeland and Spooks? “Oversimplifies reality,” according to
the actor in this behind-the-scenes look at foiled terror plots. As
FBI agents and ex-IRA operatives talk, the gravitas of Harewood’s
narration lends even more drama to their tales. Alexi Duggins
FILM
Rye Lane
Dir: Raine Allen-Miller
★★★☆☆
Feature first-timer Raine Allen-
Miller directs this romcom urban-
pastoral, goofing and freewheeling
around the streets of south London
with an almost childlike innocence.
Unsubtle and on-the-nose, there is
also an amiable, upbeat energy.
Vivian Oparah plays Yas, a
wannabe fashion designer. She
befriends recently heartbroken Dom
(David Jonsson) and is incensed to
hear he is on his way to a demeaning
lunch date with his high-handed
ex and her new boyfriend. So Yas
pretends to be Dom’s assertive new
girlfriend, an imposture that ends in
chaos. But it is also a liberation for
them both. Yas opens up about the
man she recently broke up with. The
problem was that he was a “non-
waver”; when they were on a bridge,
and people on a tourist boat below
waved at them, Yas would always
wave back but this man was too cool
to do so, indicating a fundamental
lack of humanity.
There’s not much in the way of
nuance or realism, but it has an
engagingly unpretentious style
and Jonsson and Oparah are likable
performers. Peter Bradshaw
Rye Lane is out now in the UK and
Ireland, and elsewhere from 31 March
 Culture
Books
BIOGR APHY
Mary, quite contrary
A philosophical look
at George Eliot’s life
and work asks why
marriage was a central
concern when she lived
an unconventional life
By Kathryn Hughes
▲ Class act
Rufus Sewell and
Juliet Aubrey in
the BBC’s 1994
production of
Middlemarch
MINKE SPIRO/REX
57
This was even though the real Mrs Lewes
was alive and well, busy producing babies with
Lewes’s former best friend, the newspaper editor
Thornton Leigh Hunt. Carlisle also reminds us
that the second, phantom “Mrs Lewes” made a
point of having her accelerating income paid into
Lewes’s bank account on the grounds that he was
her “husband”. A very rich husband, in fact: in
1862 Eliot was offered the equivalent of £1m for
her fourth novel, Romola, by far the greatest sum
ever offered to a writer anywhere in the world.
When you add in the fact that Eliot didn’t think
women needed the vote and that she contributed
only £50 to the first women’s college at Cam-
bridge, you are left with the realisation that she
was no one’s idea of a feminist “foremother”.
Why was Eliot like this, especially given that
changes in Victorian law meant that Lewes could
have got a divorce from Agnes, and that women
now had the right to control their own money?
Carlisle offers no single and reductive answer
because, of course, there isn’t one. Instead, she
M
points to the way that Eliot’s response to the
id-Victorian society never forgave challenges of living and loving was always plural
George Eliot for setting up home in and protean, always taking on shimmering new
1854 with a rackety married man, the shapes and dimensions.
journalist and scientist GH Lewes. In a frankly brilliant reading of Middlemarch,
Late-Victorian society, by contrast, could not Carlisle shows Eliot’s characters grappling not
forgive her for choosing to wed in church when, simply with the stark binary of desire v duty, but
following Lewes’s death in 1878, she walked up the also with the “imagined otherwise” of ghostly
aisle with a much younger and duller man called roads not taken and lives unlived. Ardent teenage
John Cross. On the question of marriage, George idealist Dorothea gets married to dry-as-dust
Eliot could never seem to get it right. Casaubon because she has convinced herself
In this thrilling book, the academic he is a great man who will unlock the classical
philosopher Clare Carlisle explores the novel- world for her and make her a different, cleverer
ist’s interrogation of “the double life”, meaning person. The equally ardent but people-pleasing
not only Eliot’s own 25 years of unsanctioned Dr Lydgate marries the worldly socialite Rosa-
coupledom with Lewes, but also the difficult mond Vincy simply because it would be too
love relationships she unleashed on her heroines, much bother not to. Examples such as these
including Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss have led to accusations that Eliot deprived her
and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Carlisle, characters, especially the women, of the free-
then, is less concerned with reheating the stale doms that she claimed for herself. For indeed,
gossip that still gets Eliot’s biographers going – once the early sniggering and finger-pointing
was Lewes unfaithful, why did Cross jump into had died down, Eliot enjoyed a rather fabulous
the Grand Canal during their honeymoon, how life. Lewes created the conditions in which her
come so many people developed a crush on a art could blossom, carefully shielding her from
woman who Henry James claimed looked like a negative reviews and negotiating fat fees and
horse? – and instead takes a more soulful look at innovative publication deals that made her the
what “the marriage question” meant for the girl richest self-made woman in the country.
who had been born Mary Anne Evans in 1819. Carlisle speaks of wanting to employ biography
The ambiguities and ambivalence had been as philosophical inquiry and here she succeeds
there from the start. After a series of magnificently. She has filleted details
calamitous and one-sided early rela- from Eliot’s own life, read closely into
tionships, often with men who weren’t her novels and considered the wider
available, Evans, still a literary jour- philosophical background in which
nalist at this point, “eloped” with she was operating. The question of
Lewes in 1854. The new couple spent marriage mattered to George Eliot not
months in Germany to allow artistic as a rhetorical device or a question of
London the opportunity to gossip to its BOOK OF law or custom, but as a series of lived
grubby heart’s content without having THE WEEK possibilities that needed to be tested
to mount a defence. When the wander- The Marriage and tinkered with in a perpetual cycle
ers eventually returned, Eliot informed Question of renewal and self-healing.
everyone that from now on she would By Clare Carlisle KATHRYN HUGHES IS A BIOGRAPHER,
answer only to “Mrs Lewes”. ACADEMIC AND LITERARY CRITIC
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly
58 Culture
Books

T
FICTION here is an irony in this novel’s title being were handy vehicles for his explorations of
the name of its protagonist/narrator. consciousness. He told interviewers that he
Tomás Nevinson has had many perso- respected Ian Fleming, but his fictional uni-
nae. He sometimes loses track of which verse is not the Bond sphere. Instead of novel
Doubting Tomás character he is inhabiting. In the long middle weaponry and shiny cars, we have extended
section, when he is living undercover in a pro- evocations of cities whose histories weigh on
Javier Marías’ final vincial Spanish city where his true identity (he their present like incubi. Instead of quick-sharp
hopes) is unknown to anyone, his narrative slips prose and incessant action, we have intricately
book is a seductive unpredictably from first person to third. He is “I”: meandering sentences and long periods of wait-
thriller with a plot Tomás, an Anglo-Spanish British secret agent ing. This is a spy thriller, but it reads like one
with a complicated history containing lethal transposed into music by Philip Glass.
secondary to evocative violence, enforced disappearances and betrayed There is a plot. Nevinson must decide which
descriptions and love. But then in the very next sentence he is of the three women he is stalking is an IRA ter-
“he”: Miguel Centurión, an innocuous-seeming rorist on loan to the Basque separatist group
literary dialogue all-Spanish schoolteacher. Whoever Eta. Having identified her, he must
he is, though, Tomás/Miguel has been “take her out of the picture”. It’s a
By Lucy Hughes-Hallett sent to watch three women, one of straightforward setup, with fairytale
whom he may be required to kill. echoes (the princess who must choose
This is Javier Marías’s last book. between three suitors, and woe betide
Or, more accurately, it is the last part her if she makes the mistake of picking
we will get of a composite work the the obvious candidate). But Marías,
late and much lamented author was Tomás Nevinson having used it as a scaffolding to hang
writing for decades. It’s not a sequel By Javier Marías, his thoughts on, jettisons it. The back
WESTEND61 GMBH/
ALAMY
or a prequel to its predecessors – those translated by story is not revealed. The climactic
words imply a narrative progression Margaret Jull Costa moment is a non-event. In Marías-
quite alien to the way Marías operated. world, morality is ambiguous and
He preferred the phrase “companion piece”. conclusions elusive. At the novel’s end, Nevinson
The first part of the novel takes the form of an is maybe sealing his bond with his wife, Berta
extended verbal duel between Nevinson, who Isla (eponymous heroine of an earlier novel),
thinks he has retired from undercover work, and from whom his secret missions have repeat-
his handler, Bertie Tupra. Tupra is a tempter and edly taken him away. He recites a poem – Yeats’s
manipulator, a modern Mephistopheles. Years When You Are Old – which is so far from being a
ago, he entrapped Nevinson into the service. declaration that we are left wondering what he
Now he wants to make use of him again, and means her to understand by it.
Nevinson is sucked back in. It is one of many quotations and allusions
Marías was interested in spying for the same in this book. “Literary fiction” is generally an
reason he was interested in fiction. Secret agents, otiose phrase, but it fits Marías’s work exactly.
with their false identities and shifty evasions, Nevinson was in a bookshop in Oxford reading

SOCIETY
Beat the clock
Maybe the point is to
be more alive, rather
than to live longer, says
an intriguing look into
our attitudes to time
By Rebecca Liu
T
ime took on an elastic and sinuous to 19th-century industry and empire. An 1861
quality during the Covid-19 lockdowns, letter from a British arrival in South Africa say-
if it retained any coherence at all. Days ing “we have left time and been launched on
bled into each other, as did walks and to eternity” encapsulates contemporary beliefs
Zoom catchups and Sopranos episodes. Feel- that positioned the time-keeping, industrious
ing a sense of “temporal weirdness”, California “civiliser” against the timeless, idling “other”.
artist and writer Jenny Odell set up a This is echoed in the present day.
camera on a tripod facing her window. Saving Time considers modern forms
“Time felt the same in my room, but in of surveillance in the workplace, in
the photos, it rained, it stormed, and which employees’ movements are
the fog rolled in from San Francisco,” tracked in the name of efficiency,
she says. Flicking through the photos, productivity guides that view time as
Odell felt an emotion that she calls “it” scarce, and a belief that time is money.
– being taken out of the present, with Saving Time Odell also presents a striking discus-
all that was familiar made strange. By Jenny sion of leisure. Is genuine rest possible
This feeling of “it” runs through Odell in a hypercommercialised world?
her cultural and political meditation, Later chapters turn to the
Saving Time. Odell sets the stakes high for her environment. As wildfires burned across her
investigation. Observing that popular attitudes home state in the summer of 2020, Odell read a
to time – as, say, an unrelenting march towards transcript of an earnings call from BP, in which
climate apocalypse – encourage a self-fulfilling the CEO reassures analysts that the development
nihilism, she proposes a different model, more of a natural gas field is still on schedule. It is a
attuned to the natural world. statement that would be unimaginable in a world
Odell begins by tracing the roots of our system temporally organised around the demands of the

The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023

 59

Little Gidding when Tupra’s trap snapped shut BOOKS OF THE MONTH
on him. Decades later, TS Eliot is still one of his The best recent crime and thrillers
most constant references, along with Marlowe,
Baudelaire, Di Lampedusa, Wilfred Owen and
– most insistently – Shakespeare. Taunted by By Laura Wilson is being groomed for the Gil reluctantly agrees to
Tupra, Nevinson defends himself with a line from job of latest mistress to the look after his 17-year-old
Macbeth. He is confident Tupra knows the play now middle-aged “merry nephew Matthew. Gil’s
by heart, “like any truly cultivated murderer”. monarch” Charles II. conviction that Matthew is
Tupra learned his craft from the Kray twins, With a mixture of real and a psychopath began with
who probably didn’t have much Shakespearean fictional characters, this an incident on a family
tragedy on the tips of their tongues, but Marías tale of intrigue and power holiday, and now it’s
is not mirroring reality. He is weaving a many- imbalance is well up increasing by the day. But
layered meditation on mortality and memory to standard. Gil is also middle-aged,
and free will and its opposite. with debts and a stalled
His subsidiary characters are puppets. The career, whereas Matthew
three female suspects are as unreadable to us Strange Sally Diamond has not only won over Gil’s
as they are to Nevinson. The men with whom By Liz Nugent wife and daughters but
they are linked are not so much people as Sally doesn’t see why has his whole life – and a
props’n’costumes: the drug dealer in his cow- everyone is up in arms multimillion-dollar trust
boy boots and sideburns, the grandee with his when she attempts to fund – ahead of him. Great
collection of antique swords, the scheming busi- incinerate her adoptive characterisation and
nessman wearing chaps and sombrero for sex father’s corpse. genuine suspense in
as Nevinson watches on a hidden camera, the Psychiatrist Thomas a psychological thriller
journalist who favours suits in shades from dried Diamond, to whom she Mother’s Day par excellence.
blood to faded rose. was case study as much as By Abigail Burdess
This novel leaves its plotlines dangling, not daughter and with whom There’s a touch of grand
bothering to answer simple questions about she has lived a reclusive guignol to this debut.
who did what to whom, because its author is life in an isolated County Abandoned as a baby,
more concerned with larger, more suggestive Roscommon bungalow, Anna lost her adoptive
mysteries. As Nevinson’s quest stalls, readers specifically told her to mother early and was
may sometimes feel as impatient as Tupra “put [him] out with the consigned to boarding
does, longing for forward movement. But then bins”. He has left letters school by a distant father.
Marías mesmerises us again and we are swept on detailing what he knows Unsurprisingly, she has
by the long, powerful swells of his prose, flaw- of the horrific events that a lot of issues around
lessly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, and the led up to her adoption, but family, and her alcoholic The Man Who Lived
circling currents of his thought. we know, from a second boyfriend is no help. Anna Underground
LUCY HUGHES-HALLET IS A CULTURAL HISTORIAN, narrator, that the truth finds her birth mother By Richard Wright
BIOGRAPHER AND NOVELIST is even worse. Nugent’s at the same time as she Black American author
fifth novel is her best yet: discovers she is pregnant, Richard Wright finished
evil perpetuates evil in a but Marlene soon turns The Man Who Lived
climate emergency; yet, in one dominated by heartbreaking but humane out to be a manipulative, Underground in 1942,
quarterly earnings reports, it is entirely ordinary. tale of people damaged narcissistic monster. Dark, but it is only now being
Odell calls for a way of living that is less beyond repair. funny and downright icky published in its entirety.
dependent on domination, less about the human in equal measure. Set in Chicago, it is the
self at all. Watching the plumage of birds change tale of Fred Daniels,
and observing a patch of moss unfurling from who is picked up by two
her kitchen, she appreciates the different time- white cops on his way
scales at work in nature. It is in these moments of home from work – a white
surrender that Odell sees the possibility of rest, couple nearby have been
and of a more fruitful approach to time. “Maybe murdered, and a culprit
‘the point’ isn’t to live more, in the literal sense of is required (“I think he’ll
a longer or more productive life,” she writes, “but do”). Tortured until he
rather, to be more alive in any given moment.” confesses to the crime,
Odell makes a good case for an elongated The Shadows of London Fred manages to escape
present, though I would have liked more about By Andrew Taylor A Flaw in the Design into the city’s sewers.
the “temporal weirdness” she felt during the In the sixth novel in By Nathan Oates At once allegorical and
pandemic. A survey of how different societies Taylor’s series set in the This American debut brutally realistic, this
have thought of time felt too brief. years after the Great Fire explores family and short novel is a powerful
“I live on their clock,” she writes, after reading of London, a body is class tensions in a fight indictment of racism and
the BP earnings call transcript – a clock that ticks discovered in the ruins over who controls the an unsettling portrait of
to the rhythm of the business cycle. Perhaps it is of an almshouse that narrative. When his sister a man in the grip of an
possible to live on another. architect Cat Hakesby is and her rich husband are existential nightmare.
REBECCA LIU IS A GUARDIAN COMMISSIONING rebuilding. Meanwhile killed in a car accident, LAURA WILSON IS A CRIME
EDITOR young Louise de Keroualle creative writing lecturer WRITER AND CRITIC

24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly

60 Lifestyle
MODER N LIFE
Tim Dowling
There’s a hole
in my roof –
but I have an
ingenious fix
T
he gap between the side of
the house and the garden
wall is roofed over with
sheets of clear corrugated
plastic. It’s where we keep things
that don’t need to be warm, but do
need to be dry: paint, scrap wood,
garden tools and a toaster that isn’t
quite broken enough to throw away.
I notice the plastic roof has a hole
in it, about 15cm in diameter. I think
a fox probably put its foot through
it while gnawing on the chicken
bones I found up there when I finally
dragged the ladder out for a look.
The problem qualifies as urgent,
because the stuff that sits under
the plastic roof is getting wet.
But corrugated roofing sheets
come in many different sizes and
thicknesses, not to mention varying
levels of corrugation.
“Even if I manage to order the
right kind,” I say, sitting up in bed
with my laptop, “I’m not sure I can
install it.”
“Uh-huh,” my wife says.
“Metre-wide sections are no
good,” I say, “because once it’s in
STEPHEN COLLINS
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
place I won’t be able to reach the
screw holes on the far side.”
“You don’t need to say any of this
out loud,” my wife says.
“Of course the beauty of
corrugated roofing is that it
overlaps,” I say. The dog barks
from the garden.
“Your turn,” my wife says.
I go down to the kitchen and
stand facing the cat flap.
“It’s fine!” I shout. The dog
noses the flap from the other side,
hesitates a moment, and then
squeezes through.
“Idiot,” I say.
The dog will go out through the
cat flap, but it won’t come back in
unsupervised in case the cat is on
the other side waiting to pounce.
After a few ugly encounters, the
cat no longer needs to be present to
maintain this threat. The dog stands
outside barking until someone
comes downstairs to announce that
the coast is clear. Mostly me.
“It’s not mostly you,” says the
youngest one the next morning.
“I had to come down at 3am to tell
her to come in.”
“The kitchen door needs to be
shut at night,” my wife says. “So the
dog can’t go out in the first place.”
“Then the dog pees inside,” I say,
“And the cat gets trapped in the
kitchen all night.”
“Have you got a better idea?” my
wife says.
“We just need to decide which
animal to get rid of,” I say.
I take my coffee outside and
stare up at the roof hole, imagining
successful repair scenarios. Maybe
I could abseil down from an
upstairs window, tool-belt on. Then
something occurs to me.
I go inside, get an umbrella, poke
it up through the hole in the roofing,
open it and let go. It settles on top of
the roof, covering the hole.
“Problem solved,” I say.
The next morning is windy
and cold. On my way back from
the shops I find my umbrella two
streets over, still open, lying against
a hedge.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I say,
to no one.
That evening my wife comes
into the kitchen while I’m sitting at
my laptop.
“I was about to order some new
roofing,” I say. “Enough to re-cover
the whole area.”
“Good,” she says. “What’s
for supper?”
“And then I decided that was a
very big job,” I say, “one perhaps
better suited to the people who live
here after we’re dead.”
The next morning I am staring
The next up at the hole when something
morning occurs to me.
I go inside and return with a
I find my heavy-duty adjustable wrench, and
umbrella the umbrella. I poke the umbrella
through the hole, open it and let go.
two Then I tie the wrench to the handle
streets to weigh it down.
That night in bed I hear rain
over, lying hitting the windows and imagine the
against umbrella doing its work, firmly in
place. I fall into a satisfied slumber,
a hedge until the dog starts barking at four.
 H A P P Y E AT E R
By Jay Rayner
I don’t want gadgets in my kitchen
– well, maybe that herb stripper
S
ometimes, in pursuit of
a better life, I turn to the
ads on Instagram, because
the world is always better
there. It has the gloss you get off a
coffee table that’s just had a polish
after a spray of Mr Sheen. For here
are an array of devices specifically
engineered to make working in the
kitchen a more blissful experience,
a place where you can cook un-
aproned in a white shirt and never
get stained. I trust Instagram.
A chef friend of mine has a
cast-iron rule that no gadget in his
kitchen can have a single use. His
rice-cooker is also a slow cooker.
The toastie-maker can be used to
grill vegetables. The frying pan can
be used to smack intruders across
the head, and so on.
While I understand the
decluttering instinct, this is to miss
some life-enhancing fabulousness.
For example, until I saw it for myself
on Instagram, I didn’t know there
was a moulded yellow plastic cuff
called the Chef’n Cob Corn Stripper
solely designed to get the kernels
off ears of corn. Oh, what sweet corn
kernel-stripping joy.
I was thrilled to come across
the wonder of non-stick silicone
kitchen spatula tongs. They have a
little hammock of flexible silicone
in fluorescent green, between the
ends of the tongs so you can, I don’t
know, rock your vegetables to sleep
while you lift them out of the pan.
Not interested? How about the
SARAH TANAT-JONES
611
6
T H E W E E K LY R E C I P E
By Melissa Thompson
№ 210
Smoked
haddock and
coconut soup
Prep 15 min This soup riff
ffss somewhere
somewh
Cook 45 min between a chowder and rundown,
a Jamaican stew that’s “cooked
Serves 4 down” with coconut milk.
The smokiness of the fish and
• DAIRY FREE
• GLUTEN FREE
paprika add depth, while the
sweetcorn gives welcome pops
of sweetness. Don’t be alarmed
by the scotch bonnet – it’s to add
flavour more than heat, hence
metal plunging tube that is the Ingredients its inclusion whole. Leave it in
pineapple corer. To meet my pal’s Vegetable oil for just 10 minutes for a gentle
ban on single-use items, I’m sure 1 onion, peeled and warmth, or for the whole cook for
you could carry out a full-frontal finely chopped a higher heat level.
Salt
lobotomy on an annoying family
½ tsp smoked
member with it, so there’s that. Not paprika
Method
for you? Then surely you want the ½ tsp ground Put a tablespoon of oil in a saucepan
Chef’n Stalkchop Cauliflower Prep turmeric on a medium heat, then fry the
Tool for getting the stalks out of 1 tsp ground cumin onion and a pinch of salt for five
cauliflowers. Because using a knife 1 tsp ground minutes. Add the spices, cook,
would be so pre-social media. coriander stirring, until they smell fragrant,
I blink. All of a sudden I am ½ tsp black pepper then add the garlic, thyme, ginger,
back in my own kitchen, which 2 garlic cloves, spring onion, red pepper and
peeled and crushed
doesn’t have a cauliflower corer. I carrot, and cook for another five
3 thyme stalks
realise that, as I age, my real-world 1cm piece fresh
minutes, adding another splash of
kitchen-kit desires have become ginger, peeled and oil, if necessary.
so much simpler. I want a pepper finely grated Add the coconut milk and
grinder that always works, and not 2 spring onions, vegetable stock, leave to cook for
one that functions for just the first trimmed and finely 10 minutes, then add the squash
three months. I want a cafetiere that chopped and scotch bonnet, and simmer for
doesn’t dribble when you pour from ½ red pepper, 15 minutes; remove and discard the
it. I want a glass measuring jug from chopped chilli once you’re happy with the
1 carrot, halved
which the scale hasn’t rubbed off heat level. Add the sweetcorn and
lengthwise and cut
with time. That’s it. into 3mm-thick
haddock, and cook for about seven
Then, like the addict I am, I half-moons minutes, until the fish is cooked
glance at my phone and see an 400ml coconut milk through. Taste for seasoning,
Instagram advert for a bright orange 150ml vegetable adding salt if needed, and serve
oval-shaped piece of plastic with stock garnished generously with chopped
holes of different sizes. It costs a 200g butternut parsley or chives.
mere £10 ($12). It’s for stripping the squash or pumpkin
leaves off fresh herbs. (frozen is fine),
cut into 1cm dice
I realise that what I really want is,
1 scotch bonnet
yes, the functional pepper grinder, 200g sweetcorn
the non-drip cafetiere and the age- 300g smoked
resistant measuring jug. But also, haddock, cut into
the herb stripper. That is what will large pieces
make my kitchen life complete. Parsley or chives,
Observer chopped finely,
to garnish
JAY RAYNER IS THE OBSERVER’S
RESTAURANT CRITIC
24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly

62 Diversions
QUIZ
Thomas Eaton
1 Three-year-old Eliza
Armstrong was the first
patient at which hospital?
2 What is the world’s
largest trade book fair?
3 Marduk was the chief
god of which city?
4 Which songwriter was
musical director for
Marlene Dietrich?
5 Which three
countries border both
Russia and China?
PUZZLES
Chris Maslanka
1 Wordpool
Find the correct definition:
PILEUS
a) footballer
b) cap of mushroom
c) fescue
d) Roman sword-carrier
2 Jumblies
Rearrange the letters of
IMPORTUNATE to make
another word.
3 Dropouts
Replace each asterisk with
a letter to make a word:
T*I*D*E
CHESS
Leonard Barden
Magnus Carlsen’s reign
as an abdicated world
champion will formally
end late next month when
a winner is declared in
the €2m ($2.1m), 14-game
match for the newly
vacant title between
Russian world No 2, Ian
Nepomniachtchi, playing
under a neutral Fide flag,
and Chinese world No 3,
Ding Liren. The venue is
Astana, Kazakhstan.
Some chess fans may
not recognise the Astana
winner as a genuine world
champion; for them there
is now the prospect of two
major events, one online,
The Guardian Weekly 24 March 2023
Notes and Queries
Scan the code for more Notes and
Queries from the Guardian website
6 Hakuhō Shō is 11 Zika virus; COU N T RY DI A RY
considered the greatest Chikungunya; West N EW BROUGH
ever competitor in Nile virus; dengue; Northumberland, England, UK
T
which sport? malaria?
7 Where is England’s 12 Pui Fan Lee; voice of he snowdrops in the
only statue of Bonnie Jack Black; Turin and churchyard of St Peter’s are
Prince Charlie? Piacenza; 84? starting to wane and reveal
8 How is the boss of 13 Cunningham; Owen; patches of green again.
Stratton Oakmont Beckham; McManaman; This Victorian church stands west of
described in a film title? Woodgate? Newbrough village and is probably
14 Washington DC (1st the fourth to be built on this spot.
What links: and 2nd); Buffalo (3rd); A previous building was “in ruins
9 Labino; Lalique; Lipofsky; Dallas (4th)? and much decayed” during the days
Liskova; Littleton? 15 Pseudonymous of the border Reivers (raiders from
10 Arius; Marcion; Satoshi Nakamoto; both sides of the Scottish border) in
Nestorius; Pelagius; programmer Vitalik the lawless 17th century.
Sabellius? Buterin; singer Akon?  The family names of Reivers
persist. Some are inscribed in the
4 Word Centre lychgate stones to commemorate
Identify the word from its men who died in the first world
centre: war: Charlton, Bell, Hetherington
**SPAN** log/burner, f) quick/sand/bar.
cake, d) snow/plough/share, e) back/
and Elliott. These high quality
b) Cambridge/blue/sky, c) silver/fish/ sandstone blocks came from
5 Cryptic 6 Missing Links a) marsh/gas/light, nearby Prudhamstone, a quarry
5 Cryptic LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.
A dead giveaway? (4,4,3,9) (TRINDLE). 4 Word Centre HISPANIC. that provided for many impressive
PERMUTATION. 3 Dropouts TWIDDLE buildings in Newcastle.
6 Missing Links Among the paling snowdrops
Maslanka 1 Wordpool b). 2 Jumblies
akoin.
Find a word that follows cryptocurrencies: bitcoin; ethereum; stand rows of table tombs,grand
the first word and precedes presidential assassinations. 15 Founded
Madrid football club. 14 Location of US
monuments to landowning families,
the second. Eg the answer 13 Englishmen who have played for Real their lettering unreadable from
to bat man could be he through; Po(lonium) atomic number. weathering and moss. Hidden below
(bathe & he-man). ground are the remains of a much
Po in Kung Fu Panda; Po River flows
diseases. 12 Po: Po in Teletubbies;
a) marsh light heresies. 11 Main mosquito-borne earlier building, a Roman fortlet that
b) Cambridge sky predates Hadrian’s Wall by decades.
10 Originators of early Christian
9 Glass artists and designers.
c) silver cake 7 Derby. 8 The Wolf of Wall Street. It was when a grave was being
d) snow share and North Korea. 6 Sumo wrestling.
Bacharach. 5 Kazakhstan, Mongolia
dug in 1929 that a small bronze coin
e) back burner 2 Frankfurt. 3 Babylon. 4 Burt was unearthed, a halfpenny piece
f ) quick bar Quiz 1 Great Ormond Street. of Constantine the Great. St Peter’s
Answers
© CMM2023 is next to the Stanegate, a Roman
road that was the original northern
the other over-the-board. Caruana won last year. frontier. Excavation revealed a
Carlsen, still No 1 in the There is also a women’s Roman building under the north side
classical rankings and still American Cup with a of the churchyard.
the world rapid and blitz $100,000 prize fund. Beyond stretch the ordered
champion, will take on the Next up, from 3 April, pastures of parkland, with a small
four top US grandmasters. is the second leg of round pond cupped in a hollow of
Before that, there is the the online Champions the field. Close by is St Mary’s well.
American Cup at St Louis, Tour, where the seeded Brooklime grows in a trickling flow
a $200,000 invitation players Carlsen, Hikaru and a wide sweep of ground is boggy.
knockout, which Fabiano Nakamura, Caruana and Beneath hazel catkins the trefoil
Wesley So are joined leaves of wood sorrel have unfolded,
3859 Kobalia v Shevchenko,
European Championship 2023. Black
by four qualifiers from there is a sprinkling of white flowers
to move and win. the Play-In, open to all on barren strawberries, and spears
grandmasters. One of of wild garlic shine a gleaming
8
those four, after fighting emerald. Susie White
7 his way through a nine-
6 round Swiss, is Levon
5 Aronian; and also in the
4
mix is Le Quang Liem.
3 Kxd2 Ne4+.
or 3 Kxe3 Nd5+ or 3 Ke1 exd2+ 4
2 king and queen after 3 Bxe3 Ne4+
1 If 2 Bxd2 e3+! with a knight fork of
3859 1...Qxd2+! and White resigned.
a b c d e f g h
ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER
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
9 No 16,490
10 11 1 2 3 4

12 13 6 7

8 9

14 15 16

 All solutions published next week

10 11 12

17 18 19 20 21

22 13 14 15

23 24 25

16 17 18

26 27

19

28 29

The Weekly cryptic By Matilda Across 4 Edible green pods (4)

5 Travel by road without paying (9) 6 Utter (3-3-3)
No 29,017 8 Character from an ancient 7 Swear word (9)
Germanic alphabet (believed 12 Naturally occurring sugar (8)
to have its own magical 14 Strange eccentricity (6)
Across 21 Right in leaving out passage (7)
significance) (4) 15 Painter of Rain, Steam and
1 Another country and this one are in trouble (7) 22 Rough sounding path (6)
9 Polite behaviour towards others Speed (6)
5 See 2 25 Show stuff in revolting commercial (5)
(8) 17 Small duck found in northern
10 Handle a bit of butter (4)
10 Persuade with flattery (6) Eurasia, which nests in tree
11 Golf in Africa may be conditionally possible
11 Alter (6) holes (4)
(10)
13 Musical composition played
12 Let’s deal with flyaway hair (6) Solution No 16,484
slowly and gracefully (6)
13 Effort of past orient travelling (8) C H A R D O N N A Y
15 Difficult (6)
14 High-tech spree leaves an uneasy feeling D A L O A V
16 Someone excluded from the
(3,6) O T T OM A N P R A N G
group (8) W E S A O T E
16 Edward Ledger (5)
18 Mechanical repetition of N O R M S T A L WA R T
17 A northerner, of course (5)
something to be learned (4) A A E E R U
19 Single and in good shape after Matilda leaves
19 Defining ideas and beliefs of a N O T A R Y G O S S I P
(9) D E O U N A
particular historical period (9)
23 Hobby for dad? Stamp collector? (8) O I N T M E N T S T U N
24 One hooked and held by mad dictator (6) Down U S A P Z W D
26 Memorial King George originally built for unit 1 Lasting one’s whole existence (8) T W I S T I C E B E R G
(10) 2 Spike of frozen water (6) O I C T R O
27 Dior fashionista’s retro style (4) 3 Belief in a god (6) K N I C K K N A C K
28 Quiet provider of milkshake (7)
Solution No 29,011
29 Extremely dreary and unpleasant line (7) Sudoku
Down W A L L O W P U M P S U P Medium
2,5 Director, born in Kent, first to have better A U V A I O E A Fill in the grid so
managed a good hospital (7,7) D O G K E N N E L U T T E R that every row,
3 Capone’s behind collection of songs (5)
E E R G A R P T every column
4 Unlikely item from Nike etc? (7)
S H R U B I N T E N S I V E and every 3x3
6 Mountie catching a thief (6)
I O N E E D box contains the
7 What one needs to retire near fresh water (9)
N I A G A R A S C O T C H numbers 1 to 9.
8 Complaint about individual having left the
B R N E
building (4,3) Last week’s solution
T O P D O G G R E A S E S
9 How the story began came out in open letters
P U R A A A
(4,4,1,4)
15 What are you doing, Socrates, half-drunk with I N T E S T A T E N I G H T
weapon? (9) S T C P L D R I
18 European resort hotel covering up immorality S L U S H P R I M A V E R A
(7) U R W L C L B T
20 School rogue in casualty? Gosh! (7) P A N C A K E A L L E G E

24 March 2023 The Guardian Weekly

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