AI
Will it
lead to
utopia or
dystopia?
 G2
Lung cancer diagnoses in women
to outnumber men’s for first time
Exclusive
Andrew Gregory
Health editor
The number of women diagnosed
with lung cancer in the UK is expected
to overtake men this year for the first
time, according to projections prom-
pting calls for the same vigilance
about the disease as for breast cancer.
Fossil fuel
lobbyists
also work
for climate
groups
Exclusive
Oliver Milman
More than 1,500 lobbyists in the US
are working on behalf of fossil fuel
companies while at the same time
representing hundreds of liberal-run
cities, universities, technology com-
panies and environmental groups
that say they are tackling the climate
crisis, the Guardian can reveal.
Lobbyists for oil, gas and coal
interests are also employed by a vast
sweep of institutions, ranging from
the city governments of Los Ange-
les, Chicago and Philadelphia; tech
giants such as Apple and Google;
more than 150 universities; some of
the country’s leading environmental
groups – and even ski resorts seeing
their snow melted by global heating.
The breadth of fossil fuel lobbyists’
work for other clients has been cap-
tured in a database of their lobbying
interests that was published online
yesterday. It shows the reach of state-
level fossil fuel lobbyists into almost
every aspect of American life, span-
ning local governments,
•••
4 
large corporations, cultural
Lung cancer is the most deadly
form of the disease in the UK, account-
ing for one in five cancer deaths. It has
one of the worst survival rates too,
which is largely attributed to diagno-
ses at a late stage, when treatment is
less likely to be effective.
Analysis by Cancer Research UK
for the Guardian suggests female
cases will eclipse those for men for
the first time in the 2022-24 period,
A royal row
Charles faces
protests at
coronation
in Scotland
News Page 7 
Just stop tennis Climate
protesters at Wimbledon
 Page 8
Thursday
6 July 2023
£2.80
From £2.03 for subscribers
with 27,332 and 27,172 cases respec- more men than women have been
tively. Cancer experts said the “very ‘By 2038-40, an diagnosed with lung cancer in the UK.
stark” figures reflected long-term The most recent statistics show that
differences in smoking prevalence,
estimated 52.6% of for 2016-18 there were 25,404 male
specifically that smoking rates new lung cancer cases and 23,396 female. The inci-
peaked much earlier in men than dence rate for every 100,000 people
women. Women should now be as
cases will be women’ was 91 in men and 71 in women.
alert to potential lung cancer signs as By 2038-40 the reversed gender
they are about checking for lumps in gap will widen, the data suggests,
their breasts, they said. Alizée Froguel with 34,835 women diag-
12 
Every year since records began, Cancer Research UK nosed, compared with
‘It is just like
the intifada’
Palestinians
clear up after
raid on Jenin
Bethan McKernan
Sufian Taha Jenin
O
n the second floor
of the Shibli family
home in the Jenin
refugee camp, three
small boys knelt on
the tile floor, picking
up hundreds of spent cartridges
left behind by Israeli snipers who
had used their kitchen as a firing
position. The bullet casings clinked
and chimed gently as the children
cleared up and their glum parents
surveyed the extent of the damage
inflicted on their property.
The 50 members of the extended
family, who all live in apartments
in the same building,
22 
returned to their


 
PHOTOGRAPH: MARK RUNNACLES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
 ••• The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023

Inside 06/07/23 News

Four sections
every day

Ditching
 The then chancellor, Rishi Sunak,
News and Sport at Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021, when
the climate funding goal was agreed

£11.6bn
PHOTOGRAPH: PHIL NOBLE/REUTERS
Brexit
• Counting other already-committed
UK edges closer to rejoining amounts as part of the £11.6bn. Civil
the EU’s £85bn Horizon
science programme climate servants said: “This would be seen
as the UK ‘moving the goalposts’ and
would be seen as a backwards step,
Page 5
vow ‘could reducing UK standing and influence
in climate negotiations.”
• Eating into Defra and net zero
Journal Outside G2
Opinions and ideas undermine department budgets. Currently half
of the international funding paid
by these departments is part of the
 Get ready for
Enemies of the People 2: trust in UK’ £11.6bn commitment.
• Obtaining a one-off sum from the
Treasury. Officials admitted this
it’s all Sunak has left would be “strongly resisted” by the
Martin Kettle bold and deliberate action now, we chancellor but said if the Treasury
Page 1 Helena Horton judge that we will quickly render the Global temperatures directly funded loss and damage
Environment reporter £11.6bn target (and associated sub- options, it “would be a strong signal
targets) out of reach.”
Record broken again of climate leadership by the UK”.
G2 Centre pullout Rishi Sunak risks damaging trust in A document, seen by the Guard- Even a mixture of these would not
the UK among developing countries ian, confirms that the government World temperature records have necessarily be enough, officials said.
Features and arts and reducing the country’s standing continues to underspend on its cli- been broken for the second day They told ministers: “It is possible
in negotiations because of a failure to mate commitments. It states: “We in a row, data suggests, as experts that a combination of these measures
Wayne Sleep at 75 meet climate spending pledges, civil have confirmed that HMG ICF issued a warning that this year’s could get us over the line – although
The triumphs, the servants have told ministers. [international climate fund] spend warmest days are still to come – there would remain significant risks
They said that under current poli- for 2022/23 was £1,347m and initial and with them the warmest days associated with uncertainties. There
gossip, the rumours, cies the only way to meet the £11.6bn analysis of business plan returns for recorded by humans. is a possibility that we pull out all of
the friendships … international climate funding target 2023/24 suggest that our HMG ICF The average global air the stops, take significant reputa-
Page 8 agreed at Cop26 was to take a drastic spend will be c.£1,586m. This is a temperature was 17.18C (62.9F) tional hits in other areas and still fail
combination of “hugely reputation- total of £1.1bn (£421m and £720m on Tuesday, according to data to hit £11.6bn.”
ally damaging” measures including respectively) below the internal tar- collated by the US National Centers In the Commons yesterday the
Save up to 34% delaying meeting the target, redefin- get trajectory agreed after the last for Environmental Prediction, deputy prime minister, Oliver Dow-
with a subscription ing already-committed spending as
climate funding, and cutting money
spending review.”
Civil servants have drawn up a
surpassing the record, 17.01C,
reached on Monday.
den, said the UK was a reliable partner
on climate, and that the prime min-
to the Guardian for research and development, plan for the prime minister to meet The previous record was set ister remained committed to the
biodiversity and plastic pollution the spending commitments by 2026, in 2016, during the last El Niño £11.6bn pledge.
and the Observer mitigation. none of which will be well received weather event, when the global Dowden added that the aid budget
Visit theguardian. The Guardian revealed this week
that Rishi Sunak was drawing up
by countries vulnerable to climate
breakdown. Currently, the proportion
average temperature reached
16.92C. On Tuesday, the World
was distributed by several depart-
ments, not just the FCDO, and was
com/paper-subs plans to drop the target. Although the of bilateral development spending Meteorological Organization, the deliberately phased over five years.
Foreign Office said such claims were that would have to be climate fund- UN’s weather body, confirmed He also said that Sunak would be
“false”, a leaked briefing showed ing would be 83% if the target was El Niño had returned. Experts attending Cop28 in the UAE.
Weather that ministers were being prepared to be reached. Officials have recom- predicted that, combined with the The Green MP, Caroline Lucas,
Page 30 for the target not being met because mended a range of options to reduce heat from anthropogenic warming, said: “Not only would delaying or
of government cuts to aid funding, this to 50%. it would lead to more record- dropping this commitment shatter
underspending and new commit- These include: breaking temperatures. any remaining fragment of our global
Quick crossword ments such as aid for Ukraine. • Delaying the target. Officials said “El Niño hasn’t peaked yet climate leadership; it would be just
Back of G2 Officials told ministers this spring they could move it to the end of the and summer is in full swing in the latest in a long string of measures
that they would have to enact a “rapid 2026 calendar year instead of the the northern hemisphere, so it from this government showing total
Cartoon but not impossible pivot towards cli-
mate-focused development” if the
financial year 2025-26, giving another
three-quarters of a year to spend
wouldn’t be surprising if the record
were broken again in coming days
and utter disregard for some of the
world’s poorest and most vulnera-
Journal, page 4 target were to be reached. money. They warned this would “be or weeks,” said Dr Paulo Ceppi, ble, and for the accelerating climate
This has not happened, and spend- hugely reputationally damaging at a lecturer in climate science at the emergency.”
Cryptic crossword ing has remained the same. The civil time when the global south mistrusts Grantham Institute, Imperial The FCDO was contacted for
servants warned: “If we do not take wealthy countries”. College London. Damien Gayle comment.
Back of Journal
Contact
For missing sections call 0800 839 100.
Starmer to target ‘class ceiling’ the Times that the current focus on
reading and writing is “shortsighted”.
Extracts of the speech released in
of respect – a snobbery that too often
extends into adulthood, raising its
ugly head when it comes to inequal-
as he sets out education vision
For individual departments, call the Guardian
switchboard: 020 3353 2000. advance show Starmer wants a focus ities at work, in pay, promotions,
For the Readers’ editor (corrections & clarifications
on specific editorial content), call 020 3353 4736 on skills needed to adjust to the onset opportunities to progress”.
between 10am and 1pm UK time Monday to Friday of artificial intelligence. He adds: “This mission is my core
excluding public holidays, or email
guardian.readers@theguardian.com.
specific policies until closer to an He also points out that he was purpose and my personal cause: to
Letters for publication should be sent to guardian. Peter Walker election, Starmer will argue against the first person in his family to go to fight, at every stage, for every child,
letters@theguardian.com or the address on the Deputy political editor the “snobbery” of dividing education university. the pernicious idea that background
letters page.
into vocational or academic, insist- He rails against the “barrier in our equals destiny, that your circum-
NEWSPAPERS Britain needs to shatter its snobbish ing that young people require both. collective minds that narrows our stances … where you come from, who
SUPPORT
RECYCLING
The recycled paper “class ceiling” that prevents children His proposals include revamping ambitions for working-class children you know, might shape your life more
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in 2017 was 64.6%
getting ahead, Keir Starmer will argue the schools curriculum and creating and says, sometimes with subtlety, than your talent, effort and enter-
Guardian News & Media, Kings Place, 90 York Way, today in a speech setting out his fifth more opportunities for vocational sometimes to your face: ‘This isn’t prise. No – breaking that link: that’s
London N1 9GU. 020-3353 2000. Fax 020-7837 2114. and final “mission”, aimed at remov- training, an already-announced for you.’” what Labour is for. I’ve always felt
In Manchester: Centurion House, 129 Deansgate, ing barriers to opportunity. programme to boost early years pro- Such a “class ceiling”, Starmer that. It runs deep for me.”
Manchester M3 3WR. Telephone Sales: 020-7611 9000.
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does not endorse them or guarantee their authenticity Kent, the Labour leader will say improve teacher recruitment and injustices but “a fundamental lack will say, will be to create a curricu-
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students must be taught creativity retention. lum fit for the modern economy. “The
Published by Guardian News & Media, Kings Place, and the “human” skills that cannot Another strand brings in exist- sheep and goats mentality … has no
90 York Way, London N1 9GU, and at Centurion House, be done by computers, advocating a ing pledges on planning reform and ‘This mission is my place in modern society,” he is to say.
129 Deansgate, Manchester M3 3WR. Printed at Reach
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shift in focus needed for the artificial housebuilding, with the target of core purpose and One Labour backbencher said that
WD24 7RG; Reach Oldham Limited, Hollinwood Avenue, intelligence age. He will also pledge helping 1.5 million more people own while the pledge to equalise opportu-
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Maintaining his practice of set- yourself” at the centre of the national Keir Starmer yet to say if it will scrap Tory policies
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Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
Impossible coincidence: how Tom Cruise’s
new blockbuster uncannily echoes real life
Steve Rose
Given that Mission: Impossible –
Dead Reckoning Part One is the
seventh instalment in the action
movie franchise, fans may be for-
given for feeling a creeping sense of
familiarity at theatres this weekend.
But it’s not just Tom Cruise hurl-
ing himself out moving vehicles that
will trigger the deja vu. The plot of
the film features eerily similar echoes
to tensions and tragedies that have
made up much of the real-world news
agenda in recent months.
In what has been described as acci-
dental topicality, Cruise’s character,
Ethan Hunt, takes on a familiar vil-
lain in the form of an AI computer
Film review
The newest
Mission proves
that nobody
does it better
Mission: Impossible –
Dead Reckoning Part One
★★★★★
•
News
program gone rogue, and in the
movie’s opening scene, a Russian
nuclear submarine meets a grim fate –
another incidence of uncanny timing,
given the Titan submersible tragedy
last month.
Military powers around the world
quickly realise that the all-powerful
AI, known as “the Entity”, can break
into any secure facility, fake or steal
human identities, manipulate digi-
tal reality and generally cause chaos
without leaving a trace – it’s the per-
fect spy. It is also far smarter than
humans; our weapons are useless
against it.
The film has been in production
for about four years, making the
prescience of its plot as much luck
as intention. Blockbuster movies
have tackled malevolent AI many
Peter Bradshaw
T
he keynote stunt has
become a legend, the
one he reportedly
did six times in one
day before he was
satisfied.
Tom Cruise’s compact body
floats free of the motorbike as it
drops to earth, having launched
him with a roar off an unfeasibly
high cliff. He sails through the
sky, pulls the cord on a parachute,
and swoops down towards … the
speeding Orient Express, for the
traditional carriage-top punch-up.
We gasped in the audience.
Someone behind me went: “Oh
shi-i-i …” Carly Simon should have
times before, from the Terminator
franchise to Marvel’s Avengers: Age
of Ultron, and had Mission: Impossi-
ble – Dead Reckoning been released
as intended in July 2021, before Covid
derailed production, it would have
appeared to be simply a speculative
thriller. Now it feels like a credible
scenario.
In March this year, leading AI
researchers were so stunned by
recent advances in the field, such as
OpenAI’s chatbot GPT-4, they wrote
an open letter stating that “AI systems
with human-competitive intelligence Cruise is also eager to see
can pose profound risks to society and rival blockbuster Barbie
humanity”. They called for a pause
in AI development, asking: “Should
we develop nonhuman minds that
might eventually outnumber, out-
smart, obsolete and replace us?”
come in with a new song: Fair
Enough, Somebody Does It Better.
This outrageously enjoyable
spectacle has compelled my
awestruck assent with its sheer
stamina, scale and brio: the seventh
in the Mission: Impossible action
franchise with Cruise as Ethan
Hunt, the superfit leader of a top
secret intelligence/combat unit
called the Impossible Mission
Force, brought in by a shadowy
US government agency when they
want deniable stuff doing.
Seven films! Daniel Craig got
sick of 007 after just five. But at
61, Cruise looks better than ever.
Other actors his age might be
turning to offbeat character turns,
but Cruise was doing those for Paul
Thomas Anderson and Michael
 Hayley Atwell
and Tom Cruise
in the prescient
Mission:
Impossible –
Dead Reckoning
Part One
PHOTOGRAPH:
FLIXPIX/ALAMY
‘You saved
Hollywood’s
ass, and
you might
have saved
theatrical
distribution’
Steven
Spielberg
to Tom Cruise
Mann 20 years ago. The M:I series
is his vocation, and Cruise has
singlehandedly persuaded us
that the action genre has a new
respectability and purpose.
But I can’t help wondering: does
he have an exit strategy for this
franchise? Like Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows, this film is split
into two parts, and Tom does a fair
bit of talking here about his friends
and what he might sacrifice for
them. Should we be worried about
the end of part two?
Evil forces are once again trying
to get hold of a MacGuffiny object
to control/destroy the world, and
Ethan and the gang are the only
people able to stop them. There
is some tremendous stunt work,
including an Italian Job-style chase
3
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckon-
ing asks the same question.
The movie’s zeitgeist-captur-
ing relevance stands in contrast to
Cruise’s last blockbuster, Top Gun:
Maverick , which scrupulously
avoided any references to real-world
geopolitics, sending its fighter pilots
on a mission to bomb an unspecified
enemy at an unnamed location. That
didn’t seem to matter to the audience:
Maverick was the highest-grossing
movie of 2022, taking nearly $1.5bn
worldwide. After the pummelling the
industry took during the pandemic,
Cruise was credited with singlehand-
edly rescuing cinema. At an Oscars
lunch earlier this year, Steven Spiel-
berg told the actor: “You saved
Hollywood’s ass, and you might have
saved theatrical distribution.”
Whether Cruise can do it again
with Mission: Impossible remains
to be seen. The year so far has been
marked by high-profile disappoint-
ments such as Indiana Jones and
the Dial of Destiny, The Little Mer-
maid, The Flash. Even Fast X, the
latest in the Fast and Furious series,
has underperformed by the stand-
ards of its predecessors – Furious 7
made $1.5bn; Fast X $700m. Analysts
are predicting Dead Reckoning will
have highest opening of the Mission:
Impossible franchise.
Perhaps the high-risk nature of
big budget blockbuster releases can
explain the outbreak of bonhomie
which appears to have developed
between rival productions in recent
weeks. Cruise faces two big com-
petitors at this summer’s box office:
Christopher Nolan’s atomic bomb
drama Oppenheimer and Greta
Gerwig’s pinktastic reinvention of
Barbie, both of which are set for gen-
eral release on 21 July.
Last week, Cruise tweeted photos
of himself and Mission: Impossi-
ble director Christopher McQuarrie
proudly brandishing cinema tick-
ets to Indiana Jones, Oppenheimer
and Barbie. “This summer is full of
amazing movies to see in theatres,”
he wrote. “I love a double feature, and
it doesn’t get more explosive (or more
pink) than one with Oppenheimer
and Barbie.”
Cruise intends to see Oppenhe-
imer and Barbie on consecutive days,
he told reporters in Australia while
promoting Mission: Impossible. No
doubt he is looking to surf the “Bar-
benheimer” wave that threatens to
steal Mission: Impossible’s thunder –
but it’s also clear evidence that Cruise
sees saving cinema as a joint mission.
round Rome in a titchy yellow Fiat,
and the biggest train scenes since
Paddington 2.
Of course, we have the
traditional scenes of Cruise
sprinting, and the rubber masks,
with a new comedy emphasis on
people tugging at faces to see if
they are real – although a slightly
goofy plot quirk at one stage
requires Benji’s plastic-mask
machine to go terribly wrong.
I have been a naysayer about
M:I in the past, but the pure fun in
this film, its silly-serious alchemy,
and the way the franchise seems to
strain at something crazily bigger
with every film, is something to
wonder at.
In UK cinemas from Wednesday

4 News
Fossil fuel industry lobbyists
also working for US groups
trying to fight climate crisis
 Continued from page 1
institutions such as museums and
film festivals, and advocacy groups,
bringing together clients with starkly
contradictory aims.
For instance, State Farm, an insur-
ance company that announced in
May it would halt new homeowner
policies in California because of
the “catastrophic” risk of wild-
fires worsened by the climate crisis,
employs lobbyists that also advocate
for fossil fuel interests to lawmakers
in 18 states.
Meanwhile, Baltimore, which is
suing big oil firms for their role in
causing climate-related damages, has
shared a lobbyist with ExxonMobil,
one of the named defendants in the
case. Syracuse University, a pioneer
in the fossil fuel divestment move-
ment, has a lobbyist with 14 separate
oil and gas clients.
“It’s incredible that this has gone
under the radar for so long, as these
lobbyists help the fossil fuel indus-
try wield extraordinary power,” said
James Browning, a former Common
Cause lobbyist who put together the
database for a new venture called
F Minus. “Many of these cities face
severe costs from climate change and
yet elected officials are selling their
residents out. It’s extraordinary.
“The worst thing about hiring
these lobbyists is that it legitimises
the fossil fuel industry,” Browning
added. “They can cloak their radical
agenda in respectability when their
• The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
▲ The Los Angeles County Museum
of Art said it no longer worked with a
lobbyist linked to fossil fuel interests
PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT HARDING/ALAMY
lobbyists also have clients in the arts,
or city government, or with conserva-
tion groups. It normalises something
that is very dangerous.”
The database, created by compil-
ing the public disclosure records of
lobbyists up to 2022, reveals:
• Some of the most progressive-
minded cities in the US employ
fossil fuel lobbyists. Chicago shares
a lobbyist with BP. Philadelphia’s
lobbyist also works for the Koch
Industries conglomerate. Los Ange-
les has a lobbyist contracted to the
gas plant firm Tenaska.
• Environmental groups that push for
action on climate change also, incon-
gruously, use lobbyists employed by
the fossil fuel industry. The non-profit
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)
shares lobbyists with ExxonMobil,
Calpine and Duke Energy, all major
gas producers. A lobbyist for the
Natural Resources Defense Council
Action Fund also works on behalf of
the mining company BHP.
• Large tech companies have
repeatedly touted their climate cre-
dentials but many also use fossil
fuel-aligned lobbyists. Amazon
employs fossil fuel lobbyists in 27
states. Apple shares a lobbyist with
the Koch Industries network. Micro-
soft’s lobbyist also works on behalf of
ExxonMobil. Google has a lobbyist
▼ A new database of fossil fuel
lobbyists shows how they represent
clients with contradictory aims
ILLUSTRATION: JAVIER PALMA/THE GUARDIAN
who has seven fossil fuel companies
as clients.
• More than 150 universities have
ties to lobbyists who also push the
interests of fossil fuel companies.
These include some that have vowed
to divest from fossil fuels under
pressure from students concerned
about the climate crisis, such as the
California State University system,
the University of Washington, Johns
Hopkins University and Syracuse
University.
• A constellation of cultural and
recreational bodies also use fossil
fuel lobbyists, despite in many cases
calling for action on the climate cri-
sis. The New Museum in New York
City, the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art (Lacma) and the Sundance
Institute in Utah all share lobbyists
with fossil fuel interests. Even ski
resorts such as Jackson Hole and Vail
that face the prospect of dwindling
snow because of rising temperatures
use fossil fuel lobbyists.
Cities, companies, universities
and green groups that use fossil fuel-
linked lobbyists said this work did not
conflict with their climate goals and
in some cases was even beneficial. “It
is common for lobbyists to work for a
variety of clients,” said a spokesper-
son for the University of Washington.
A spokesperson for Lacma said
it had retained a lobbyist on the F
Minus database “for a period during
the pandemic … We are not currently
working with the company.”
A spokesperson for the EDF said
that working for big oil was “not in
itself an automatic disqualification.
In some cases it can actually help us
find productive alignment in unex-
pected places.” Microsoft said despite
its lobbying arrangements there was
150
The number of US universities with
ties to lobbyists who also represent
fossil fuel companies
“no ambiguity or doubt about Micro-
soft’s commitment to the aggressive
steps needed to address the world’s
carbon crisis”.
But the vast scale of the use of fos-
sil fuel lobbyists by organisations that
advocate for climate action under-
lines the influence of oil, gas and coal
interests, according to Timmons Rob-
erts, an environmental sociologist at
Brown University.
“The fossil fuel industry is very
good at getting what it wants because
they get the lobbyists best at playing
the game,” he said. “They have the
best staff, huge legal departments,
and the ability to funnel dark money
to lobbying and influence channels.”
Nearly all US states require lobby-
ists to register and submit periodic
disclosure reports, and lobbyists tend
not to advocate for both sides of the
same piece of legislation. Beyond
that, the laws around lobbying are
scant. There is no bar to lobbyists
working for clients with seemingly
diametrically opposing aims.
Seth McKeel, a former Republican
state legislator in Florida, is a lobbyist
for Apple, which has vowed to decar-
bonise its supply chain by 2030, and
Kinder Morgan, which has more than
140 oil and gas terminals.
Syracuse University’s lobbyist,
Brown & Weinraub, also has 14 fossil
fuel clients, including Koch Industries
companies, Shell and the American
Petroleum Institute, a situation Alex
Scrivner, a Syracuse PhD student and
campus climate advocate, described
as “disheartening”. Koch Industries
itself shares lobbyists with a broad
range of institutions, from the Pitts-
burgh Ballet Theatre to Google.
Denis Dison , the director of
communications for the National
Resources Defense Council Action
Fund, said the environmental group
“as a rule” did not use people who
also worked with the fossil fuel indus-
try. However, he added that “at times
we retain vendors that specialise in
engagement that can help build sup-
port for climate and equity progress
across both sides of the aisle”.
Browning said his advice would
be to avoid “cynical calculations”.
He said: “We got into this mess on
climate by groups seeking short-term
wins but empowering the fossil fuel
industry and giving them credibility.”
State capitols can act as a sort of
“alternate reality” where existen-
tial issues such as the climate crisis
are overshadowed by the desire to
cultivate alliances and bolster influ-
ence, he added.
“People just assume there is no
alternative to the status quo, but it’s
time to take a side. It’s all about who is
in the room when decisions are made,
and the only way to force change is
to get these fossil fuel companies and
their lobbyists out of the room.”
Lobbyists, like lawyers, are not
required to hold the same worldview
as their clients, according to Sarah
Bryner, the director of research at
OpenSecrets, a non-profit that tracks
lobbying. “But you could see it would
be problematic to represent clients
with radically opposed views to other
clients,” she said.
“The money thing matters, too.
These environmental groups, and
even cities, can’t pay lobbyists
as much as huge multinational fossil
fuel companies can, so there is an
imbalance there. Loyalties would
be split,” she added.
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian •

‘I dare you’ Happier than ever? 5

Adele takes aim at Britons like their lives
ngs
fans who throw things but not state of world
Page 7 Page 16

UK close to
deal with EU
on rejoining
£85bn Horizon
research hub
Lisa O’Carroll

The UK is on the brink of a deal to

return to the EU’s £85bn flagship sci-
ence research programme.
Diplomatic sources say negotia-
tions to become an associate member
of Horizon Europe will continue over
the weekend and the two sides are
close to a deal after three months of
talks, largely over the cost of re-entry.
The UK was locked out of Horizon
in 2020 in a dispute over the failure
to implement the Northern Ireland
protocol trade arrangements in the
original Brexit withdrawal deal. But
the door to associate membership
was reopened when the replacement
Windsor framework was sealed in
March, with the European Commis-
sion chief, Ursula von der Leyen,
saying a deal could be done “swiftly”.
The EU has said the UK will not be
expected to pay for 2021 and 2022,
when it was not an associate member,

Most railway ticket offices

▲ Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria is but sources say the UK wants greater
among hundreds of railway stations discounts on its overall contribution.
in England to lose its ticket office One source said talks had gone back-
PHOTOGRAPH: KEITH DOUGLAS/ALAMY wards in recent weeks.

in England to close by 2026

Gwyn Topham
Transport correspondent
Rail firms have confirmed plans for
the mass closure of England’s ticket
offices to “modernise” the railway,
ramping up the battle with unions
and infuriating disability and passen-
ger groups.
The move has been pushed by the
government to save costs. Train oper-
ators told staff yesterday of proposals
to shut down almost all of the 1,007
remaining offices, bar at the busiest
stations, within three years.
The industry body, the Rail Deliv-
ery Group, said ticket office staff
would move on to platforms and con-
courses in “new and engaging roles”.
However, many fear job losses.
The RMT union called it “a savage
attack on railway workers, their fam-
ilies and the travelling public” and
claimed operators had issued stat-
utory redundancy notices affecting
hundreds of staff.
Train operators said there were no
redundancy notices, but it is under-
stood section 188 letters – informing
unions and staff that posts were at
risk, and a legal requirement for pos-
sible widespread redundancies – have
been sent. The RMT general secre-
tary, Mick Lynch, said: “It is clear
that the whole enterprise of closing
ticket offices has got nothing to do
with modernisation and is a thinly
veiled plan to gut our railways of sta-
tion staff.”
Among the proposed closures are
131 out of 149 remaining Northern Rail
ticket offices; stations as big as Dar-
lington and Durham on LNER; and
all those run by Avanti West Coast.
Offices will be axed and support
staff hours reduced across stations
including London Euston, Birming-
ham New Street and Manchester
Piccadilly.
Labour has warned “rushed” plans
could worsen the “managed decline
of our rail network”, while transport
campaigners said it would put more
vulnerable people off rail travel.
Yesterday marked the start of
the three-week formal consultation
period. Passengers have been urged
to make their voices heard through
the independent watchdogs Trans-
port Focus and London TravelWatch.
However, the industry argues that
only 12% of tickets are now bought at
offices, down from 82% in 1995, with
moves continuing to expand contact-
less payments and online purchases.
‘I might end up driving’
“Increasingly, with age and
arthritis, ticket machines and
my smartphone are too difficult
to use. I sometimes get into a
muddle operating a ticket machine,
especially if a train is about to
arrive. I do have a computer but my
fingers don’t work very well any
more on the keyboard. Some of my
friends aren’t even online.
“I find the ticket office really
helpful when asking questions
about whether the next train will
run, or if there are strikes.
“If my local ticket office closes I
might end up driving more, which
is ridiculous because it costs me
more because of the Ulez [ultra-low
emission zone]. Not to mention the
increase in pollution.
“Closing ticket offices is yet
another example of ageism
creeping into society and people
like me are feeling more and more
marginalised. It makes growing
older in this uncaring country
unpleasant and scary. This is no
country for old people.”
Tim Preece, 84, actor, Deal
England’s big passenger train oper-
ators are directly contracted by the
government. They have been told to
find savings to bridge the gap in reve-
nue, with fare income still more than
20% down since the Covid pandemic
and the decline in commuting amid
a switch to hybrid working patterns.
The RMT and TSSA unions have
said they will “vigorously oppose”
the proposals.
The RDG chief executive,
Jacqueline Starr, said: “The ways our
customers buy tickets has changed
and it’s time for the railway to change
with them. Our proposals would
mean more staff on hand to give face-
to-face help with a much wider range
of support, from journey planning,
to finding the right ticket and help-
ing those with accessibility needs.”
Labour accused ministers of
“ducking and diving from scrutiny”
through the short consultation.
The Royal National Institute of
Blind People, said the closure would
have a “hugely detrimental impact
on blind and partially sighted peo-
ple’s ability to buy tickets, arrange
assistance and, critically, travel inde-
pendently”, citing research that
showed only 3% could use a vend-
ing machine without problems.
A DfT spokesperson said the
moves were about “enhancing the
role of station workers” to “better
support all passengers” and would
not leave more stations unstaffed.
Under the 2020 Trade and Coop-
eration Agreement (TCA), UK
contributions were to be based on
success rates in terms of research
funds awarded to UK projects from
2019. The UK argued that contribu-
tions should be based on success
rates in 2023, which would be much
lower given the reduced applications
to the fund because of the uncertainty
over membership. It is understood
there was also discussion about what
level of under- or over-achievement
should trigger a correction.
The foreign secretary, James
Cleverly, met the commission’s vice-
president Maroš Šefčovič on Monday,
when the linked membership to Eur-
atom’s nuclear research programme
was on their agenda. According to
Politico, the UK will recommend
that the nuclear programme should
be excluded from the deal on the
grounds that it is not value for money.
A spokesperson for the commis-
sion said: “We have no comment to
make. As foreseen by the TCA, we are
in discussions with the UK on its par-
ticipation in EU programmes.”
A government spokesperson said:
“Talks are ongoing and therefore we
have not yet agreed a deal.”
The government’s plan B involved
separate science funds for the UK
but science leaders say member-
ship of Horizon is imperative for
international collaboration, talent
recruitment and the advancement
of science.

6 National
Legal aid rate rise ‘not
enough to deal with
Rwanda asylum cases’
Diane Taylor
The Law Society has warned that a
proposed 15% increase in legal aid
rates will not be enough to ensure
sufficient numbers of immigration
lawyers to deal with the govern-
ment’s controversial scheme to send
asylum seekers to Rwanda.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ)
launched a consultation on increas-
ing legal aid rates by 15% on 27 June
for immigration lawyers represent-
ing asylum seekers threatened with
removal to Rwanda under new rules
in the illegal migration bill.
Lubna Shuja, the Law Society’s
president, said the pay rise would
not deal with the shortage of immi-
gration lawyers in the system.
“There is a severe lack of capac-
ity in the asylum and immigration
sector, with many asylum seekers
dispersed to areas with no legal aid
provision, and a growing asylum
• The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
backlog,” she said. “The proposed fee
increase alone is not going to address
this capacity crisis.”
Immigration lawyers share the
Law Society’s concerns. They say
the work involved in representing
asylum seekers facing removal to
Rwanda is both complex and inten-
sive and that a 15% increase in the low
rate of legal aid would not cover it.
At the moment the hourly rate for
asylum work is approximately £52 in
London and £47 elsewhere. If asy-
lum seekers are unable to access legal
advice the government’s removal
notices could be challenged in court.
Duncan Lewis, the UK’s largest
law firm provider of legal aid asylum
and immigration services, with thou-
sands of asylum cases, warned that
it may have to largely pull out of rep-
resenting asylum seekers threatened
with being sent to Rwanda because
the proposed increase in legal aid
rates was “unworkable”, it said.
Jeremy Bloom, a solicitor and
supervisor in the public law and
immigration departments at Dun-
can Lewis, said: “We have already
made it clear to the Ministry of Jus-
tice that the current legal aid system
is unworkable, and that, with regret,
we will be unable to provide legal ser-
vices to people facing removal under
the illegal migration bill at anything
like the scale that will be required.
“Drastic change is required to
ensure access to justice for individ-
uals affected by the bill. The MoJ’s
proposals do little more than fiddle at
 A shortage of
lawyers could
block Suella
Braverman’s
plan to remove
asylum seekers
to sites in
Rwanda, which
she visited in
March, left
PHOTOGRAPH: STEFAN
ROUSSEAU/PA
the edges of a massive and ever-grow- that ministers could face crippling
ing legal aid representation gap.” legal actions without a substantial
James Elliott of Wilson Solicitors, increase in legal aid fees for lawyers
another leading immigration firm, who advise refugees.
said: “The 15% increase will not make A government spokesperson said:
any significant positive impact on our “Our illegal migration bill will change
ability to provide legal work to this the law so people who come to the UK
most vulnerable group. You can do illegally can be promptly detained
the maths. Rates have not increased and removed. We are consulting
in 25 years.” with providers to make sure the sec-
Internal documents obtained by tor can meet increased demand for
the Guardian about the implementa- legal advice, and that cases can be
tion of the illegal migration bill state resolved swiftly and fairly.”
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
Scottish minister at
forefront of protests
at king’s coronation
event in Edinburgh
Severin Carrell
Libby Brooks
A ceremony in Edinburgh marking
King Charles III’s coronation has been
targeted by politically significant
republican protests led by a Scottish
government minister.
The king was presented with Scot-
land’s medieval crown jewels in a
short ceremony at St Giles’ Cathedral,
where his late mother, Queen Eliz-
abeth II, lay in rest with the same
crown on her coffin last September.
The short event was witnessed by
far fewer wellwishers than the vast
crowds who thronged the Royal Mile
then to watch the queen’s funeral cor-
tege. Many Scots are away on holiday;
most onlookers were curious tourists.
As the king and Camilla left their
official residence at Holyroodhouse
for a short drive to St Giles’, about
100 republicans noisily protested
opposite the palace at the cost and
“extravagance” of the event.
Patrick Harvie, a co-leader of the
Scottish Greens and the minister for
zero-carbon buildings, active travel
and tenants’ rights, told protest-
ers the public money spent on this
“rigmarole” and on the coronation
in London was unjustified during a
cost of living crisis.
“What we’ve seen over the last few
months is a genuinely extraordinary
attempt to lavish your money, our
money, on some of the wealthiest
people, not just in this country, but
some of the wealthiest people in the
world, so that they can do some sort
of overpriced Game of Thrones cos-
play exercise,” Harvie said.
Having a monarch enriched by
untaxed, inherited wealth ran coun-
ter to Scotland’s desire for a modern
democracy, and an independent
Scotland ought to have a directly
elected head of state, he added.
Police Scotland said two women,
20 and 21, had been arrested in con-
nection with a breach of the peace
after allegedly trying to climb over
a crowd safety barrier on the Royal
‘I dare you’: Adele takes aim
at projectile-throwing fans
Sian Cain
Adele has spoken out against a recent
spate of people throwing objects at
musicians on stage, telling an audi-
ence she would “kill” them for it.
The British singer was filmed hold-
ing a “gun” that fires T-shirts as she
spoke to the crowd at Caesars Palace,
•
National
Mile. Police later confirmed four peo-
ple had been arrested in total, with
another four people issued with a
warning.
Several mounted troops of House-
hold Cavalry and massed pipers
from the Royal Marines and Royal
Regiment of Scotland had preceded
the king and the queen consort up the
Royal Mile towards St Giles’, where
the violinist Nicola Benedetti and a
Gaelic singer, Joy Dunlop, performed.
Inside St Giles’, the king was pre-
sented with the Honours of Scotland,
‘This is the height of
nonsense … has he
no self-awareness?’
Lynda Flex
Protester
Las Vegas. “Have you noticed how
people are like, forgetting fucking
show etiquette at the moment? Peo-
ple just throwing shit on stage, have
you seen them?” she said.
“I fucking dare you. Dare you to
throw something at me and I’ll fuck-
ing kill you.”
After shooting a T-shirt into the
crowd, she joked, “Stop throwing
things at the artist when you can
a crown and sceptre dating to the
1540s and a ceremonial sword forged
for the occasion to replicate the orig-
inal, fragile sword in the collection.
Nora McGregor, who watched the
event near St Giles’ with her 10-year-
old daughter, said: “The whole world
watches us with curiosity wonder-
ing why we still have this tradition.”
“I think most us really enjoy it,” she
added, before gesturing to a group
of republican protesters gathered
across from the cathedral. “Some
just don’t want to admit it. It’s a real
shame folk aren’t more accepting.”
Nearby, a second group of repub-
lican protesters had erupted into a
chorus of Flower of Scotland, which
celebrates the defeat of England’s
King Edward II at Bannockburn, to
be met by boos from monarchists.
Holding a handwritten sign affirm-
ing her opposition to the ceremony,
Lynda Flex, 69, said: “This is the
shoot things to people … I’ve been
seeing these people. These people
lost it, can you imagine?”
Last week, Pink paused a perfor-
mance in London to address a fan
who had thrown a bag containing
their mother’s ashes on to the stage.
“This is your mum?” the American
singer can be heard asking in footage
of the incident. “I don’t know how I
feel about this.”
Also last week, the American coun-
try-pop singer Kelsea Ballerini was
hit in the face by an object during a
performance in Idaho. “If you ever
don’t feel safe, please let someone
around you know,” Ballerini said on
 Charles III
is presented
with the crown
of Scotland
inside St Giles’
Cathedral.
Below, the
Prince and
Princess of
Wales, the king
and the queen
watch a Red
Arrows flypast
PHOTOGRAPH:
JOHN LINTON/AP
height of nonsense. They’ve already
spent all that money down in England
when people can’t afford to feed their
children. Has he no self-awareness?”
Harvie’s presence marks a distinct
shift towards open republicanism in
Scotland since Humza Yousaf’s elec-
tion as first minister in April.
With the king in Edinburgh for the
monarch’s Scotland week, Yousaf had
a private audience with Charles on
Monday. And as holder of the ceremo-
nial title of keeper of the Scottish seal,
Yousaf took part in the ceremony at
St Giles’. Yet he has openly declared
himself a republican, the first SNP
leader of modern times to do so.
Polls show marked ambivalence
towards the monarchy in Scotland.
The British Future thinktank said in
May last year that while nearly 60% of
voters across the UK wanted to keep
the monarchy after the queen died,
that fell to 45% in Scotland.
▲ Adele railed against people who
had been ‘forgetting show etiquette’
7
People with
Alzheimer’s
urged to join
drug trials
Rachel Hall
More people with Alzheimer’s are
needed to join groundbreaking drug
trials similar to the one that the TV
presenter Fiona Phillips is taking part
in, a professor close to the research
has urged.
People living with dementia who
take part in clinical trials tend to
have better outcomes regardless of
whether the medication they are
given works, according to a profes-
sor in University College London’s
dementia research centre, which is
running the miridesap trial that Phil-
lips is participating in.
“We are certainly firm believers
that the way forward is to take part in
research,” said Prof Jonathan Schott,
a neurologist at UCL and Alzheimer’s
Research UK’s chief medical officer.
As well as potentially granting
patients early access to “extremely
exciting studies from new treatments
that have shown clinical benefits”,
they benefited from being in contact
with experts in the field and helping
to drive forward understanding of
dementia, Schott said.
Schott noted that many drug
trials failed, but he added: “There
is a definite chink in the armour” of
understanding Alzheimer’s, which is
likely to revolutionise treatment in
the coming years and decades.
Phillips, 62, who co-hosted GMTV
for a decade from the late 1990s,
revealed yesterday that she had been
diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease
after experiencing brain fog and anx-
iety. This is considered early onset as
she is under 65.
An estimated 70,800 people in the
UK have early-onset Alzheimer’s,
which can be difficult to diagnose as
many associate it with older age.
Phillips said she was undergo-
ing trials for a new drug scientists
hope could slow or reverse the ill-
ness by removing a protein called
SAP (serum amyloid P component)
from the brain, which binds amyloid
plaques. This means amyloid plaques
may break down faster and delay the
progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
Phillips does not know whether she
is receiving miridesap or the placebo.
stage afterwards. “If anyone’s push-
ing too much or you just have that
gut feeling, just always flag it. Don’t
throw things.”
Last month, the singer Bebe Rexha
was hit in the face by a phone thrown
at a concert in New York, leaving her
with a black eye. A 27-year-old man
was later charged with assault.
A day later, a person ran on stage
during an Ava Max show in Los Ange-
les, slapping the singer so hard that
he “scratched the inside of my eye”,
according to her tweet.
Last year, the singer Steve Lacy
smashed an iPhone that had been
thrown on to the stage by a fan.
 • The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
8 National
Wimbledon
In G2
Joel Snape
I taught myself to
make friends – and
you can too
Page 3 
Protesters from
Just Stop Oil held
after jigsaws stop
play at Wimbledon
Emine Sinmaz
Katie Boulter said she was shocked
when a Just Stop Oil protester dis-
rupted her first-round match at
Wimbledon by throwing jigsaw pieces
and orange confetti on to court.
The British No 1 said she was not
sure if it was “the right place or time”
for such action after protesters dis-
rupted two matches on the same
court yesterday in another move to
draw attention to the climate crisis.
William John Ward, 66, threw him-
self over his front row seat at Court
18 before scattering a 1,000-piece
Wimbledon-branded puzzle and
environmentally friendly orange con-
fetti glitter on to the grass at 4.30pm.
The retired civil engineer was
chased around by two security guards
as he continued to scatter the confetti
and remove his jacket to expose his
Just Stop Oil T-shirt. He was dragged
off court as Boulter, 26, helped the
clear-up, which involved vacuum
cleaners and leaf blowers. After a
10-minute delay, the Leicester-born
player went on to claim victory over
the Australian Daria Saville.
Two hours earlier, Deborah Wilde,
68, a retired teacher from London,
and Simon Milner-Edwards, 66, a
retired musician from Manchester,
had disrupted a match between Bul-
garia’s Grigor Dimitrov and Japan’s
Sho Shimabukuro with the same
puzzle protest.
After his victory, Dimitrov, 32, told
reporters the incident was “not pleas-
ant” and his instinct was to remove
the protesters. “My first reaction was
initially to go also, but then I realised
that’s not my place to do that.”
All three protesters were arrested
on suspicion of aggravated tres-
pass and criminal damage before
being escorted off SW19. Spectators
could be heard booing and shouting
“losers” and “are you happy with
yourselves” as Wilde and Milner-
Edwards were led away in handcuffs.
Milner-Edwards, who had been
arrested in the past, said he felt
“absolutely fine”, adding: “I would
run in front of a car to save my
grandchildren.” “Our politicians are
the criminals, they’re destroying
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
everything,” he said. “In 10 years’
time Wimbledon will not resemble
anything like this. New fossil fuels
are a stain on this country and I’m
not going to allow my grandchildren
to have to pick up the pieces.”
The protesters managed to evade
Wimbledon’s newly beefed-up secu-
rity. Undercover specialist police
have been positioned in key spots
this year as organisers attempt to
thwart environmental protesters.
Staff have been checking all bags
and doing body searches, which has
caused delays.
Chalk dust and other powders have
been banned for the first time to try
to stop Just Stop Oil protesters. Cable
ties, glue, chains and padlocks are
also among 19 prohibited items.
It is believed that Milner-Edwards
and Wilde joined the queue for Wim-
bledon at 6am but it is unclear if they
brought the centenary edition of the
puzzle featuring Roger Federer with
them. Wilde said: “I’m just an ordi-
nary grandmother in resistance to
this government’s policy of serving
us new oil and gas licences. In normal
circumstances this sort of disruption
•
▼ Katie Boulter helps pick up
confetti after her match against
Daria Savile was interrupted
PHOTOGRAPH: HANNAH MCKAY/REUTERS
 The Just Stop
Oil protester
Simon Milner-
Edwards is
removed by
security staff
after scattering
puzzle pieces
on Court 18
PHOTOGRAPH:
ALASTAIR GRANT/AP
would be entirely unacceptable, but
these aren’t normal circumstances.”
Ward said: “I have no choice but to
get the message out in whatever way
I can. I’m retired and want to enjoy
my retirement, but I feel I have no
choice but to take action. I’ve tried
everything else.”
Suella Braverman, the home sec-
retar, condemned the activists on the
day she chaired a meeting on pro-
tests at sporting events with police
and sports bodies. She said: “This
is unacceptable. We will be uncom-
promisingly tough on the selfish
protesters intent on spoiling our
world-class sporting occasions.”
A Met police spokesperson said
that two members of Just Stop Oil
had run on to court at 2.08pm dur-
ing a match “and discharged what
is believed to be orange paper pet-
als and jigsaw pieces”. Both were
arrested on suspicion of aggravated
trespass and criminal damage. At
4.30pm a man ran on to the same
court and was arrested on suspicion
of the same charges, they said.
Sport Match reports Page 36 
Wild Wednesday Can I catch all 87
matches? I’ll give it my best shot
Hannah Jane
Parkinson
F
orget Manic Monday
and Super Sunday:
welcome to Wild
Wednesday. Due to
the sort of weather
that Tube announcers
quaintly always describe as
“inclement”, almost all of
Wimbledon’s Tuesday outdoor play
was a washout. This means there
are a lot of matches to catch up on.
A lot. Eighty-seven matches to be
played, in fact, before curfew at
11pm. And I have been tasked with
watching them all.
It occurs to me that I could do
with Rishi Sunak’s helicopter.
The day’s forecast, however, is for
bright skies with some cloud and,
all importantly, no rain.
At 10.30am, half an hour before
the day’s play begins: rain. It does
not stop until 1.30pm, apart from
a brief interlude, and canopies
of umbrellas go up. It’s at this
point that I think: you know
what, probably not gonna end
up watching 87 matches today.
But at circa 1.45pm we’re off, and
I head to Centre Court to watch
the Russian Daria Kasatkina take
on the home hope, the British
No 2, Jodie Burrage – who is in
form having reached the final of
the Birmingham Open a couple
of weeks ago. Unfortunately,
Kasatkina is also in great form –
and is world No 10. Kasatkina takes
the first set 6-0. This is known as
being bagelled.
But the crowd goes wild as
Burrage breaks at the beginning of
the second set … before Kasatkina
breaks right back. Then it rains
again. Who’d have seen it coming.
ctually
In scenes I have never actually
ilitary
witnessed before, the military
attendees wheel the umpire pire off
court without him leaving ng his seat,
which is objectively very y funny.
I dash to outdoor courtsrts numbers
14-17. It is extremely hard d to see
anything as crowds of tennis-nnis-
eep, peering
starved fans are eight-deep,
in. Imagine a busy Friday y night at
arman’s
a pub, but also it’s the barman’s
first day. Over a woman’ss hat that
nhelpful),
features a tennis ball (unhelpful),
I clock Rebecca Peterson n, who
sounds like she should be e British
aying
but is in fact Swedish, playing
against the rather forgotten ten former
US Open champ Sloane Stephens,
who has already broken Peterson in
phens goes
the very first game. (Stephens
on to win 6-2, 6-3.) The other courts
in this area are too crowdedded right
now to see anything, so I abandon
them before it rains again n (which,
naturally, it does).
he grounds,
On the other side of the
on Court 2, the Greek Mariaaria Sakkari
is taking on the Ukrainian n Marta
Kostyuk. Sakkari has dished hed out
a bagel of her own in the first set.
▲ Umbrellas up on the third day of
Wimbledon, but rain interruptions
were few and far between yesterday
PHOTOGRAPH: DANIEL LEAL/AFP/GETTY
I catch Kostyuk breaking to take
the second set 7-5. I ask a fellow
spectator, Catherine, who she is
supporting. Her son, Enzo, she tells
me, who is a ball boy. Kostyuk goes
on to win 6-2 in the final set; the
first time she’s beaten Sakkari in
three tries. Over on Court 12, I arrive
just as Brazil’s Beatriz Haddad Maia
is about to break the unfortunately
named Yulia Putintseva in the
third set. Which she does, with an
incredibly jammy net cord.
I’ve seen enough. By which I
mean, I am now stressed. I stand
in between Courts 9 and 10, my
head swivelling around. I arrive
just as South African Lloyd Harris
wins a second-set tie-break to
level his match against Grégoire
Barrère who, as you might imagine,
is French. On the adjacent court,
Roberto Batusta Agut is up against
Roman Safiullin. Their match is
stopped when Barrère shanks a ball
and it bounces on to their court.
Daria
Kasatkina
celebrates
beating
Jodie
Burrage
9
Next stop: disaster is unfolding
as Camila Giorgi is about to go 5-0
down against Varvara Gracheva.
“That’s not good”, says a passing
guy, sipping a Pimm’s. It isn’t.
Court 3, and I see that charismatic
American Frances Tiafoe has won
the first two sets against Wu Yibing.
I then witness five breaks of serve
in a row as each play stunning
passing shots. Meanwhile, Iga
Świątek is on Centre, and I already
know by the time I get there – and
it’s literally two minutes walk away
– she will have won. She does: 6-2,
6-0. It is the third bagel of the day,
and yet here I am, still without
any lunch.
But I have a plan! I take an
innovative, possibly unsportsman-
like approach. Which is to say I
ascend to the media centre roof
terrace so that I can watch five
matches simultaneously. On one
hand, this is cheating. On the other?
87 matches, guys.
Nearest to me, I watch as the
Croat Borna Coric breaks to go
2-0 up in the fourth set against
the recently injury-returned
Argentinian Guido Pella. On the
Argentinian,
two courts in i between, fellow
Argentinian Franciso Cerundolo
old brother of Juan
(and the older
Manuel, whowh was Jannik Sinner’s
latest victim on Monday) is
smashing his hi usual deadly
forehand pa past Nuno Borges, a good
pl
clay court player who isn’t up to
gra And Milos Raonic,
much on grass.
a 32-year old Canadian probably
hi last Wimbledon, is
playing at his
about to bea
beat Dennis Novak. Novak
nam to have in tennis.
is a good name
Finally – aand now it’s 6pm and I
have to file, like, now, I check out
Boulte , the British No 1 and
Katie Boulter
girlfriend of fellow tennis pro Alex
a
de Minaur, also from the roof. I
watch as she breaks in the second
w to beating Daria
set on the way
who partner is also a
Saville, whose
tennis playe
player (now you understand
why the WimWimbledon organisers had
to plead wit
with people not to have
desi
sex in a designated quiet room).
Boulter’s is tthe 11th match I have
witnessed withw my own eyes.
no I know, 87. But 11
Eleven is not,
matches in lless than four and a half
hours? It’s a clean winner.

10
Sketch
John Crace
Rish! avoids scrutiny again
with help of nonentity Dowden
and another moral shortcut
M
ister Sunak
Regrets …
The prime
minister has
never much
liked scrutiny.
He considers himself to be one
of the world’s natural leaders. A
man born to the elite. Someone
to be listened to in silence. Not
someone who is to be in any way
held accountable for his actions.
Worse still, be judged by those
whom he considers beneath him.
Us, in other words.
Rishi Sunak never much liked
being questioned when he was an
ordinary MP. Meeting real people
has never been his style. I mean,
what do you say to them?
But since Rish! has become
prime minister he is positively
•••
National
phobic about being held to
account. The prospect of actually
needing to have principles terrifies
him. In any question and answer
session, he’s sure to get snitty
within seconds. He’s far happier
just dividing up the world with a
Goldman Sachs spreadsheet where
people are reduced to expendable,
inanimate objects.
So much so that he now has two
full-time staff members whose sole
job is to get him out of anything he
doesn’t want to do. A quasi sub-
committee of the Cabinet Office.
They aren’t short of work.
When Sunak was in danger of
having to vote on whether it was
acceptable for a former prime
minister to lie to parliament, his
crack team went into overdrive.
Phoning every charity with an
event that night to ask if they
wanted a special guest speaker.
The only rider was that the speech
would have to be given at 9.30pm
so there was no danger of him
being free in time to vote. Sure
enough, they found Rish! a gig and
their boss was off the hook.
Mister Sunak Regrets …
That was a one-off though.
The team’s main job is to think
of excuses for longstanding
engagements.
So far the team has got Sunak
out of four PMQs with a variety of
feeble excuses. He needed to take
his dog to the groomers. The nanny
was ill. Rish! has no shame about
his absenteeism.
He already has the worst
attendance record of any prime
minister. Imagine being worse than
Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
Make that five times. Because
yesterday the No 10 team came up
with a brilliant plan. To organise a
service at Westminster Abbey for
the 75th anniversary of the NHS –
the country’s preferred religion – at
the same time as PMQs. It would be
a bit weird having a prime minister
celebrating a health service he
almost never used, but he could
live with that. When you’ve taken
as many moral shortcuts as Sunak,
there’s always room for another.
Mister Sunak Regrets …
The other deciding factor
▲ Oliver Dowden at PMQs, which
Rishi Sunak has missed five times
in Rish! electing to go awol so
frequently is that in Oliver Dowden
he has the ideal deputy. Someone
with no obvious talents. The Man
Without Qualities. The Nonentity’s
Nonentity.
So there’s never any danger of
Dowden showing the boss up. No
one is ever going to imagine Olly as
a serious replacement for Sunak.
It would be a bit
weird having a prime
minister celebrating
a health service he
almost never used, but
he could live with that
The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
And that is the main point of him.
The downside for the rest of us
is that it makes PMQs even more
pointless than usual.
Most MPs at least have the
luxury of staying away. Which
they did. There are always plenty
of empty seats even for Rish! these
days – a measure of just how badly
he performs – but for Olly there are
even more than usual.
Normally Angela Rayner comes
into her own on occasions like this,
but too much close contact with
Olly has dragged her down. She
won the exchanges easily – how
could she not? If you breathe,
you’re more than Dowden’s equal –
but it was all very low key.
Thank God then for Mhairi
Black. The SNP deputy leader has
said she will be leaving parliament
at the next election. She won’t
be forgotten after this. Olly tried
to pay her a compliment, saying
they had arrived in Westminster
together in 2015. Lightning quick
she replied that she was pretty
sure they’d be leaving at the
same time too.
Olly smiled. But only just. Deep
down that hurt. Because it could
well be true. And what then? Were
there actually jobs in the real world
that someone as hopeless as him
could do? Second Top of the world,
Ma. Not so much.
Mister Sunak Regrets …
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
Strikes undermine children’s
Covid recovery, says Keegan
Richard Adams
Education editor
The education secretary, Gillian
Keegan, accused striking teachers
yesterday of undermining children’s
recovery from the Covid pandemic,
saying she did “pretty well” at get-
ting extra funding for schools from
the Treasury.
Keegan told a conference in
Bournemouth: “Children have been
through so much in the pandemic and
I can’t think of a worse time to be will-
ingly keeping them out of school.”
The strike over pay by National
Education Union members in Eng-
land is said to have affected about half
Husband of Zaghari-Ratcliffe
attacks UK’s hostage strategy
Patrick Wintour
Diplomatic editor
Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of
the British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-
Ratcliffe, has criticised the Foreign,
Commonwealth and Development
Office (FCDO) for rejecting a call by
MPs to overhaul the way it goes about
trying to secure the release of British
nationals overseas.
A report by the foreign affairs
select committee published in April,
•
National
of the country’s 23,000 state schools,
which closed or restricted attend-
ance yesterday for the seventh day of
industrial action this year. An eighth
strike day is scheduled tomorrow.
About one in 20 schools are
thought to have closed completely
but many more restricted access
to certain year groups, with some
having to cancel sports events or
transition days for incoming pupils.
“This disruption is undermining
the stability we have been working so
hard to recover after the pandemic,”
Keegan told the Local Government
Association conference yesterday,
while teachers protested outside.
Pressed by Laura Wright, deputy
leader of Exeter city council and a
after members took evidence from
Zaghari-Ratcliffe and the families
of other political prisoners, said
the FCDO’s attitude was secretive,
inconsistent and built on a false
assumption that quiet diplomacy
works. It said a churn of ministers
meant figures such as Zaghari-Rat-
cliffe had been kept in jail in Iran
because it took time for department
heads to grasp the issues, including
the need to repay a £450m debt.
In its written response to the
committee report, the FCDO said:
former teacher, to meet union leaders
to discuss pay and funding, Keegan
hinted there could be an announce-
ment soon on the 2023-24 pay round.
“I think I’ve done pretty well, actu-
ally, in terms of getting money from
the Treasury, but all of it has not
stopped a single strike so it’s very
disappointing. I’m hoping that we
can be in a different place, let’s say
soon,” Keegan said.
Keegan is said to have received the
report of the School Teachers’ Review
Body (STRB), the independent group
that advises the government on
teachers’ pay rates in England.
Reports suggest the STRB has rec-
ommended teachers receive a 6.5%
pay increase from September, above
“It would not have been appropri-
ate for the government to pay a debt
still under consideration by a court.”
It said the discharge of the debt had
taken so long because of the “com-
plexity involved in doing so legally”.
The response did not acknowledge
that the court proceedings lasted so
long partly because of the approach
adopted by UK lawyers in first deny-
ing that the debt existed and then
wrangling over the interest payable.
Rejecting the committee’s central
recommendation for a special envoy
to oversee cases where UK nationals
are detained for diplomatic lever-
age, the FCDO said: “It is ministers,
ambassadors and senior officials who
hold the necessary relationships to
intervene decisively.”
▼ Teachers outside Trafford town
hall yesterday, during a day of
strike action by the NEU PHOTOGRAPH:
CHRISTOPHER THOMOND/THE GUARDIAN
the 4.3% and £1,000 bonus offered by
the government that was decisively
rejected by all four major teaching
and headteachers’ unions this year.
School leaders have been calling
for Keegan to publish the report and
the government’s response, to allow
them to finalise budgets for the com-
ing school year.
All four unions – the NEU, NAS-
UWT, National Association of Head
Teachers and Association of School
and College Leaders – are ballot-
ing their members in England over
potential strike action from Sep-
tember. If they pass the legal ballot
thresholds, unprecedented coordi-
nated strikes would close almost all
state schools.
Daniel Kebede, the NEU general
secretary-elect, told a rally of thou-
sands of members in Parliament
Square in London: “If this govern-
ment doesn’t deliver there will be
a general strike in education, get
ready now. It’s not going to be easy,
and it will get harder, but we will win
because we have justice on our side.”
The department denied it had
instinctively put broader bilateral
relationships ahead of consular cases.
Relatives of the political prisoner Abd
el-Fattah, a British national held in
Egypt, have questioned whether
the UK is willing to jeopardise trade
▲ Richard Ratcliffe and his wife,
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
11
Why I’m quitting teaching
Andrew Draper, 50, from
Chippenham, Wiltshire, will leave
teaching at the end of July.
“I recently handed in my
resignation, after eight years in the
job,” the secondary maths teacher
and head of key stage 4 says. “The
reasons are various, but the current
strikes and government response
have caused me to question my
efforts and commitment to a
profession I have enjoyed and
supported. This profession is just
not valued enough.”
Like many colleagues, Draper
says rising stress levels have made
it untenable for him to remain.
“I regularly work a 55-hour
week, and usually spend four
hours every Saturday planning.
My wife can’t understand how and
why I devote so much of my time.
Although my salary of around £42k
is not the reason I’m leaving, it’s
not enough for what I do. I’m not
rewarded fairly in terms of pay.
Behaviour has worsened since
Covid and more students are not
attending class.”
Draper worries staff shortages
will mean even bigger class sizes,
more non-specialist teachers and
reduced subjects for students. “By
the time the government addresses
the issues, I fear too much damage
will have been done to the
prospects of our young people.”
Since he handed in his notice in
May, Draper says, the school has
received almost no applications for
his position despite advertising.
“A second maths teacher is also
leaving, to become a taxi driver,
and the school is now in a very
difficult position, which I feel bad
about.
“I will absolutely miss helping
students with their social and
educational development, but I
will be moving on to an improved
salary in engineering, and more
importantly, I’ll be working a
37-hour week and not a minute
longer.” Jedidajah Otte
and security relations to secure his
release. The FCDO also denied the
high turnover of ministers since 2015
had affected the speed with which
cases had been addressed, as well as
suggestions that it had locked fami-
lies of detainees out of discussions.
In a joint statement, Ratcliffe and
his local MP, Labour’s Tulip Siddiq,
described the FCDO’s response as
“incredibly disappointing”. They
said: “It beggars belief that after
everything Nazanin went through
and the detailed work of the foreign
affairs committee, the government
is still refusing to take the issue seri-
ously. Their refusal to engage with
the fact that Nazanin’s release was
clearly linked to the payment of the
[Iran] debt … is utterly confounding.”
 • The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023

12 National
National
xSubjectxxxx
NHS

Austerity caused
The NHS’s ability to treat A&E
patients within four hours, provide
surgery within 18 weeks or get an
ambulance to people quickly after a

serious deterioration 999 call has seen “the largest collapse

in performance against key targets”.
Some delays are so great that they

in key areas of NHS

“put patients at real risk of harm”.
But, Morris added: “There has also
been a steep decline in preventative
health care, mental health and care

care, research finds for children and young people.”

Denis Campbell
Health policy editor
The quality of care the NHS provides
has got worse in many key areas, and
patients’ long delays to access treat-
ment are set to become even more
common, new research has found.
The coalition government’s auster-
ity programme in the early 2010s led
to the health service no longer being
able to meet key waiting-time targets,
the Nuffield Trust and Health Foun-
dation said.
But austerity ushered in “really
concerning deterioration across the
board” in the overall quality of NHS
care, as judged by patients’ experi-
ence and prevention of ill heath, not
just speed of access.
The big fall in the government’s
funding of the NHS produced “a
turning point” that meant its qual-
ity of care began to decline between
mid-2013 and mid-2014 and has got
progressively worse since. That is
the conclusion of an analysis by the
two thinktanks’ joint Quality Watch
programme, which monitors more
than 150 indicators of care quality
over time.
As a result, England has seen:
• Fewer people with long-term
health conditions such as cancer, dia-
betes and depression getting enough
help to manage their condition.
• Breast cancer screening rates for
women aged 53-74 have fallen.
• It has become harder for patients
to see a named GP.
• Only 6% of midwives think their
maternity unit has enough staff to
do its job properly.
Jessica Morris, the Nuffield Trust
fellow who leads the programme,
said: “We are seeing really concern-
ing deterioration across the board.
“While some measures are hold-
ing up, the trajectory is worrying and
if these trends continue patients can
expect long waits for care to become
even more commonplace than now.”
Warning that failings today will
result in greater ill-health in future
years, she added: “What is per-
haps most concerning of all is that
deteriorating performance on immu-
nisations and child health suggests
we are storing up major problems for
the future.”
▲ Cuts in the austerity years have
impaired preventative healthcare
Vaccination rates among children
are going down and 2021-22 was the
fourth year in a row in which the NHS
did not meet the threshold – set by
the World Health Organization – for
ensuring that 95% of them had had
recommended jabs.
The research refutes Rishi Sunak’s
insistence that the pandemic caused
the record 7.3m-strong backlog in
care hospitals are facing.
“Most indicators suggest that
the pandemic has heaped unbear-
able pressure on services that were
already struggling to meet expecta-
tions for quality and access prior to
the pandemic,” Morris said.
Prof Dame Helen Stokes-Lampard,
the president of the Academy of Med-
ical Royal Colleges, said that doctors
had already witnessed, and were wor-
ried by, the dropoff in quality of care.
“The findings are of course deeply
concerning but also won’t surprise
any NHS doctor, as the fall in quality
of care over recent years is something
that troubles many of us.”
Labour’s Wes Streeting, the
shadow health secretary, said: “The
Conservatives have run down the
health service over more than a dec-
ade, failing to train enough staff
needed to treat patients on time.”
The Department of Health and
Social Care was approached for
comment.
Some areas of healthcare have
improved, the thinktanks also found,
citing an ongoing fall in smoking
rates, a drop in teenage pregnancy
and a high uptake of adult flu jabs.

Waiting list Women to

pledged to cut the length of NHS
waiting lists and speed up care for
patients, but last week conceded it
Further rise
would “take time” to do so.
Caulfield claimed that the length
is likely, says of time people were waiting for their
said: “We are rightly focusing on Ministers must do more to help
those waiting the longest, so those smokers quit, Froguel said. “Lung
waiting two years, 18 months and cancer causes more deaths in the
make up
now one year, and we are making UK than any other cancer type, and
progress on all of those. smoking is by far the biggest cause
“At the same time, as I think we of the disease. But funding cuts have

majority of
procedures was “actually going acknowledged coming out of Covid, meant that there aren’t enough public

minister down” because more procedures

were being offered. Challenged on
we knew that waiting lists would
increase before they came down. But
health campaigns to encourage peo-
ple to quit smoking, and many people

lung cancer
the 7.4 million record figure, she told we are committed to reducing wait- don’t have access to the services that
Sky News: “That probably will go up ing lists overall.” will support them to do so.
higher because we are offering more Prof Philip Banfield, the British “If governments across the UK

Aletha Adu
Political correspondent
The NHS waiting list, which stands at
a record high as more than 7.4 million
people await treatment in England,
will “probably go up” before it goes
down, a minister said.
On the 75th anniversary of the
creation of the NHS, health lead-
ers, experts and senior politicians
expressed fears that the service was
facing the “biggest financial squeeze
in its history” and might not last
another five years.
Maria Caulfield, a health minis-
ter, rejected the warnings, claiming
procedures.”
She added: “To patients, what
matters is how long they’re waiting.
They’re not really worried about who
else is on the waiting list. They want
to know when their procedure or
operation is happening, and we’ve
significantly reduced that delay.
We’ve virtually eliminated a two-
year wait.”
Downing Street has stressed that
the prime minister is committed to
reducing overall waiting lists but said
the initial focus was on patients wait-
ing the longest for treatment.
The prime minister’s spokesperson
Medical Association’s chair of coun-
cil, said the health service was so
fragile it might not survive until its
80th anniversary.
The shadow health secretary, Wes
Streeting, said the NHS would die
without “necessary investment and
reform” to change and modernise.
Responding to a call by the for-
mer health secretary Sajid Javid for
a royal commission to examine the
NHS, Caulfield said it would take an
“awful long time”.
She added: “We are investing now
and building a workforce for the
future, so I’m very confident that in
25 years’ time the NHS will be thriv-
patients
 Continued from page 1
31,353 men. The incidence rate gap
is expected to narrow to 78 cases for
every 100,000 women and 80 in men.
Alizée Froguel, Cancer Research
UK’s prevention policy manager,
said the analysis showed that “from
2022-24, 49.9% of new lung cancer
cases are projected to be in males,
with 50.1% in females. By 2038-40,
in comparison, 47.4% of cases will
are serious about preventing can-
cer and achieving a smoke-free UK,
they must urgently deliver the vital
funding required to address the
leading cause of cancer and save
countless lives.”
Paula Chadwick, the chief exec-
utive of the Roy Castle Lung Cancer
Foundation, said the data should be a
wake-up call. “While we are not sur-
prised by these latest figures, they
still paint a very stark picture. That
said, knowledge can equal power.
“These calculations can serve as
an important reminder to women
about the prevalence of lung cancer
and potentially minimise the devas-

the NHS would be “thriving” in 25
years’ time, and suggested cutting
long waiting times was of greater
importance than reducing the head-
line waiting-list number.
At the start of the year, Rishi Sunak
7.4m
Number of people waiting for NHS
treatment in England, a record
high that will ‘probably go up’
ing. We’re now seeing record levels of
investment into staff, into our infra-
structure with our new surgical hubs,
community diagnostic centres, new
hospitals, but also the way we treat
people as well.”
be in males, with 52.6% in females.
“This change is mainly due to
historical differences in smoking
between the sexes. Rates peaked
much earlier in males, so incidence
started falling earlier.”
tation it could cause,” she said.
“Women are regularly reminded
of the importance of checking for
lumps in their breasts and attending
mammogram appointments. We now
need them to be just as vigilant about
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
Rates of lung cancer in men and
women projected to become similar
Lung cancer rates per 100,000 people,
UK, three-year rolling average
Males
Females
Projection
1995 2005 2015 2025
Source: Cancer research UK. Data shows observed figures up to 2016-18 and projections for 2019-21 to 2038-40
potential lung cancer symptoms and
going for lung screening, if invited.”
Dr Vanessa Gordon-Dseagu, a
research interpretation manager at
the World Cancer Research Fund, said
increasing cases in women showed
‘These figures paint
a stark picture.
However, knowledge
can equal power’
Paula Chadwick
Roy Castle Foundation
•
Cases in women projected to
overtake those in men in 2022-24
New cases of lung cancer a year, UK,
three-year rolling average, thousands
150
34,835
Males
31,353
100
80
78
Females Projection
50
2035 1995 2005 2015 2025 2035
the disease had a “long lag time, in
many instances several decades”.
She said: “Smoking rates in the
UK started a downward trend in the
middle of the 1970s, predominantly
driven by men quitting smoking and
at the same time, more women were
taking up the habit. In essence, men
were quitting while an increasing
percentage of women were smoking.”
Last month it was announced that
everyone who has ever smoked in
England is to be offered lung screen-
ing in middle age under plans to
detect and treat cancer earlier. About
a million screenings of people aged 55
to 74 will be carried out every year.
As well as attending a screening if
▲ Rishi Sunak addresses the NHS’s
75th anniversary celebrations at
Westminster Abbey yesterday
PHOTOGRAPH: JORDAN PETTIT/GETTY IMAGES
40 invited, everyone should be aware
of the signs of lung cancer, Chad-
wick said.
30
“There are many different symp-
toms of lung cancer. People are likely
20
aware that a persistent cough is a
sign of lung cancer, as well as with
10 shortness of breath, repeat chest
infections, coughing up blood,
extreme tiredness or unexplained
weight loss.
“However, very few know that
back or shoulder pain, a lump in your
neck or clubbed fingers can also be
indicators of the disease.
“Our advice is if you spot any
changes in your health that are
unusual for you, it is always best to
err on the side of caution and get
it checked out because the sooner
lung cancer is caught, the easier it is
to treat.”
More than 55 out of 100 people
with stage 1 lung cancer will survive
for five years or more after they are
diagnosed.
Fewer than five in 100 with stage
4 lung cancer will survive five years
or more after diagnosis, according to
Cancer Research UK.
‘I had zero symptoms’
Abnormalities found early
in pilot checkup scheme
Andrew Gregory
A
s an extremely fit
56-year-old who
has climbed to the
base camp of Mount
Everest and trained
in the Arctic, and
who drags around five-stone tyres
as part of her fitness regime, Jackie
Head, from Essex, did not think
lung cancer was something she
needed to worry about.
But after getting an invitation
for an NHS checkup at the end of
2022, and given her family history
of the disease, she thought it was
best to make sure. “I went to the
appointment full of confidence,
overconfident in fact. It was just
before Christmas so I wished all the
nurses a merry Christmas, safe in
the presumption that I wouldn’t see
them again. But then, a few days
later I received a call to say they had
found two abnormalities.”
Head, from Chalkwell in
Southend-on-Sea, was told in
January she had lung cancer.
“My lungs are my strength,” she
said. “I climb under altitude so I
never thought I would get lung
cancer, or, if I did, I would at least
feel something. But I had zero
symptoms. It was only because of
my family history that I went for
the check.”
Further tests confirmed the
diagnosis – stage 1a non-small cell
lung cancer. On 2 March Head had
Know the symptoms
The main things to look out for are:
• A cough that does not go away
after three weeks.
• A longstanding cough that gets
worse.
• Recurring chest infections.
• Coughing up blood.
• An ache or pain when breathing
or coughing.
• Persistent breathlessness.
• Persistent tiredness or lack of
energy.
• Loss of appetite or unexplained
weight loss.
Less common symptoms include:
• Changes in the appearance of
your fingers, such as becoming
more curved or their ends
becoming larger (this is known as
finger clubbing).
• Difficulty swallowing or pain
when swallowing.
• Wheezing.
• A hoarse voice.
• Swelling of your face or neck.
• Persistent chest or shoulder pain.
People are advised to see their GP
if they have any of the main or less
common symptoms of lung cancer.
Andrew Gregory
13
▲ Jackie Head, now cancer free, says
she owes her life to the lung check
a video-assisted thoracoscopic
surgery lobectomy, a minimally
invasive procedure to remove
a lobe in the lung. The surgery
involves one to three small cuts just
a few centimetres long, in the side
of the chest.
Three weeks later she was told
she did not need further treatment.
“It’s been a complete whirlwind.
I don’t think I ever really had time
for the reality to sink in. Now I’m
cancer free.” She said she owed her
life to the NHS lung check.
The check was part of a
successful pilot scheme that led
to more than 2,000 people being
found to have cancer, 76% of them
at an early stage of the disease,
compared with 29% outside the
programme in 2019. Last month
it was announced that everyone
in England who had ever smoked
would be offered lung screening in
middle age under plans to detect
and treat cancer earlier.
Lung cancer is the UK’s biggest
cancer killer, taking more lives than
breast, prostate and pancreatic
cancers combined and killing more
women than breast and ovarian
cancers combined.
The recent news of the death
of Emily Morgan, the 45-year-old
ITV News health editor, as well as
Dame Esther Rantzen’s incurable
diagnosis, have served as fresh
reminders about the disease.
Cases of lung cancer in about
9,000 people a year could be caught
sooner under the scheme being
introduced across England.
Backed by a recommendation
from the UK national screening
committee, patients will have their
risk of cancer assessed based on
their smoking history and on other
factors. People considered at high
risk will be invited for specialist
scans every two years.
Under the scheme, 325,000
people are expected to be eligible
for a first scan each year, with a
total of 992,000 scans a year.
There are no similar initiatives
in Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Wales is aiming to implement its
own pilot this year.

14
Water firms
will push for
big bill rises,
warns Ofwat
Sandra Laville
Environment correspondent
Water companies will be seeking big
increases in bills as they face huge
infrastructure investment demands,
according to the chief executive of the
water regulator, Ofwat.
David Black denied the industry
was badly regulated and defended
Ofwat’s role in a sector saddled with
debt and facing public anger over
poor performance, high dividends,
executive pay and sewage pollution.
Black said the £60bn of debt that
had been taken on by privatised
water firms, including Thames Water,
which has the highest gearing (the
level of net debt) in the industry, was
“their issue to sort out”.
As taxpayers face having to bail out
Thames Water if it fails to secure bil-
lions from its shareholders to secure
its future, Black said the regulator
had not had the right powers to tackle
• The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
National
▲ Thames Water workers are having to deal with a rising number of leaks
huge dividend payments by water
firms, or high levels of debt.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today
programme yesterday, he said he
“completely disagreed” that water
was a poorly regulated industry.
He blamed the lack of powers given
to the regulator at privatisation more
than 30 years ago for the behaviour
of some companies, with soaring lev-
els of executive pay, £72bn paid out
in dividends, high levels of leaks, and
the worst levels of pollution for years.
Black told the House of Lords
industry and regulators committee
most water companies would be
PHOTOGRAPH: JONATHAN BRADY/PA
asking for significant rises in water
bills. “We are very concerned about
the impact on bills,” he said.
Black said Thames Water – which
is seeking billions of pounds from
shareholders to secure its future –
was a long way off needing special
administration to secure services.
He said Thames was talking to its
investors, but admitted they were
reluctant to provide the money. The
backstop option was special adminis-
tration, but “we are still a long way off
that”, he said. “Thames are looking
for new finance to come to business in
the early part of next year,” said Black.
Health chiefs
heard of policies
from TV, Covid
inquiry is told
Robert Booth
Social affairs correspondent
Communication from central gov-
ernment was so poor during parts
of the Covid pandemic that direc-
tors of public health relied on TV
and newspapers to find out about
key decisions, the UK Covid public
inquiry has heard.
Government departments did not
even have contact details for some
of the 150 senior public health offi-
cials based in councils, said Prof Jim
McManus, president of the Associ-
ation of Directors of Public Health.
McManus told the inquiry: “ They
physically couldn’t contact us.”
Directors of public health have
expertise in contact tracing and a key
role in managing infection control
in settings such as care homes. But
McManus said that when communi-
cation routes failed “we didn’t know
what was going on, we found out by
looking at the television or reading
the papers”.
He added: “Sometimes, we had no
response or communication, and we
found out at the same time as the rest
of the population on the 5pm [tele-
vised press conference] bulletin
about the new guidance.”
McManus was giving evidence in
the fourth week of the inquiry’s mod-
ule examining national preparedness
for the pandemic that claimed more
than 220,000 lives.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary
for most of the pandemic, has already
told the inquiry he was “profoundly
sorry” the UK had not been properly
prepared for Covid.
McManus described how some
government officials did not under-
stand what directors of public health
did, despite those directors’ expertise
in dealing with sexual disease out-
breaks, and having local knowledge
about inequalities.
For example, said McManus, the
directors could have avoided “put-
ting a vaccine centre in a golf club …
a mile and a half from a deprived area
with no public transport”.
He said problems with sharing data
had become an urgent issue in the
pandemic when local health lead-
ers struggled to get addresses for
infected people. “We do not have
information and data governance
rights for an emergency in any part
of the UK in the way it needs to be to
save lives,” he said.
The inquiry continues.
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
Almost human Summit showcases AI
robots designed to improve normal life
Hannah Devlin
Science correspondent
G
race is a nursing
assistant, Ai-Da is a
contemporary artist,
Desdemona is a
purple-haired rock
singer and Nadine
is on hand for companionship
and conversation. They are all
at the world’s largest gathering
of humanoid robots, under way
yesterday at the United Nations AI
for Good global summit in Geneva.
In recent years, rapid advances in
AI have fuelled increasing unease
that the technology could become
more powerful than humans, with
potentially dire consequences.
The summit is focused on more
favourable scenarios, in which AI
could be harnessed for positive
causes. Among the most optimistic
are the creators of the humanoid
robots in attendance, which they
suggest could enrich our lives
in ways that sometimes seem
bewildering to the uninitiated.
•
National
▲ Ai-Da, an artist robot, says she
enjoys painting and ‘loves to make
things that have meaning’
PHOTOGRAPH: ITU
“With a robot you can really do
things together,” said Prof Nadia
Magnenat Thalmann, a pioneer
in robotics at the University of
Geneva, who is attending the
conference with her robot, Nadine.
“They can support you, help you.”
Nadine recently spent six
months in a home for elderly
people in Singapore, where
she played bingo and talked to
residents. Magnenat Thalmann
said many people would prefer to
live at home, overseen by a robot,
rather than move to supported
accommodation.
The summit foyer was humming
with robotic voices, the whirring
of automated wheels and limbs,
and Desdemona, the “rock star”
humanoid, who chanted “the
singularity will not be centralised”
on stage backed by a human band.
Ai-Da, an artist robot who paints
and performs, answered questions
in a quiet, high-pitched voice.
“I enjoy painting,” Ai-Da said,
citing Yoko Ono and Ai Weiwei as
influences. “I love to make things
that have meaning. I like art that is
intelligent and interesting.”
Aidan Meller, the project lead
for Ai-Da, said the artist was
“deliberately mirroring back the
confusion and difficulties” posed
by powerful AI, including the
direction the technology was taking
and on the meaning of agency.
“Contemporary art is all about
asking questions,” he said. “We
think we’re asking some of the most
important questions of our time.”
Not all the robots are humanoid.
TrashBot is a recycling bin robot,
Roboclette a raclette-maker, while
others included a therapeutic “seal
pup” and various robotic animals.
At one point, a delegate’s bulldog
was surrounded by three robotic
dogs of various sizes.
The UN summit is being
attended by diplomats, academics,
thinkers such as Yuval Noah Harari
and Stuart Russell, and industry
executives from technology
companies including Google,
Amazon and Microsoft.
15
Sleep ‘is key to
slowing memory
loss for over-50s’
PA Media
Middle-aged people not getting
enough sleep are less likely to see the
benefits of exercise when it comes to
protecting against a decline in cog-
nitive skills such as memory and
thinking, scientists have said.
Researchers from University Col-
lege London found that those in their
50s and 60s who performed regu-
lar physical activities but slept less
than six hours a night had a faster
decline in these skills overall. The
team found that after a decade, their
attention, memory and learning were
the same as those who did less phys-
ical activity.
The researchers said their study,
published in the Lancet Healthy Lon-
gevity, highlights the need for sleep
to protect against cognitive decline as
people get older. Researchers looked
at data from the English Longitudi-
nal Study of Ageing for nearly 9,000
people over 50 and assessed their
cognitive function over 10 years with
various memory and verbal tests.
 • The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
16 National
Britons happy with their lives
but not the state of the world
anxiety caused by global events, 70%
Robert Booth of people polled said they felt “we’ve
Social affairs correspondent lived through a collective trauma”.
But when asked to rate their happi-
Britons are staying happy by divorcing ness, 91% felt “happy or OK”.
themselves from the fortunes of the “We are a nation of self-improvers;
wider world, according to research after a long period of instability and
for the Guardian. After several years insecurity, we’re taking responsibil-
of exhaustion, hypervigilance and ity for our own happiness and finding
TikTok UK
data security:
independently
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locally stored.
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In an industry-leading first, our data security
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by a third-party security company to further
safeguard against unauthorised access or
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tiktok.com/data-security
joy in small, everyday moments,” said
Imogen Fox, the chief advertising
officer of the Guardian.
When respondents were asked
about the outside world, there was
“a sense that we’ve lost stability; that
the future will no longer be better
than the past”, the researchers found.
One respondent from Birming-
ham, Jack, said: “It’s like the world
happened all at once. We had Brexit,
then the pandemic, then proper
Brexit when we actually left, then
vaccines, then Partygate, then
Ukraine, then the cost of living.”
Nearly three times as many
respondents rated their personal
lives good compared with the num-
ber who said the same about the
“world out there”. And although
eight out of 10 think their personal
lives will stay the same or improve,
the same number think the world
91%
Proportion of survey respondents
who said they felt ‘happy or OK’,
despite anxiety over global events
SAS must be named in
Afghanistan inquiry,
families’ lawyer says
Dan Sabbagh
Defence and security editor
An admission by the defence sec-
retary that “UK special forces”
were present in Afghanistan, with-
out explicitly naming the SAS, risks
discrediting a public inquiry into
allegations of unlawful killings,
according to a lawyer representing
victims’ families.
Richard Hermer KC said Ben
Wallace had only made “a semi-con-
cession” in a preliminary hearing
yesterday, when the minister made
a rare acknowledgment that spe-
cial forces had been present in
Afghanistan.
The inquiry, Hermer argued,
should directly name the SAS – the
elite force at the centre of allegations
of 80 unlawful killings of Afghans
between 2010 and 2013 – and that
not doing so would “infantilise the
approach of this public inquiry”.
The lawyer for the Afghan families
also challenged a Ministry of Defence
request to withhold the identities of
all members of British special forces
during the inquiry, arguing that “one
cannot and should not apply a blan-
ket approach”. Anonymity requests
should be decided on a case by case
basis, he added. Their legal team has
highlighted online postings in which
individuals have identified them-
selves as members of the SAS.
Earlier, Brian Altman KC, repre-
senting the MoD, said Wallace had
decided to confirm the presence of
the soldiers in conjunction with the
Cabinet Office, but that doing so was
▲ Wallace said only that ‘UK special
forces’ had served in Afghanistan
will stay the same or get worse. This
showed a nation that was “personally
optimistic, nationally pessimistic”;
70% are just getting on with life and
worrying less about what they cannot
control, the research found.
Half of respondents said they had
been getting outdoors more over the
last two to three years, and the same
proportion said living well meant
focusing on mental health.
The research was based on a repre-
sentative survey of 2,600 UK adults
aged 18 to 65, as well as diaries and
interviews.
“not intended to act as a precedent”
for the future.
The barrister also argued that the
statement meant that identities and
significant portions of evidence had
to be heard in secret session, and that
“the MoD is expert in assessing the
national security risks” involved.
Identifying individuals could put
the lives of soldiers and their families
at risk of harm, damage the work of
the SAS and other special forces, and
could “effectively end the individ-
uals’ current careers”, according to
paperwork from the MoD legal team.
Lord Justice Haddon-Cave, presid-
ing, said the MoD acknowledgment of
the presence of UK special forces was
“a welcome development”.
At the start of the hearing, Had-
don-Cave also said the starting point
of any public inquiry was that “as
much as possible should be heard in
public to allay public concern”. But
he conceded that there may be “good
reason in the public interest” to hear
some military evidence in secret.
The inquiry had translated much
of its paperwork into Dari and Pashto,
the judge added, and he had held
meetings with counterparts in Aus-
tralia and New Zealand, countries that
have already inquired into unlawful
killings by their special forces.
The judge was speaking at the start
of a two-day initial session of a pub-
lic inquiry into alleged war crimes
committed by British SAS soldiers in
Afghanistan just over a decade ago.
Lawyers for the bereaved families
are challenging the MoD’s requests
for anonymity and secret hearings,
in parallel with the Guardian and a
group of other media organisations.
Afghans were often killed at or near
their homes after allegedly produc-
ing weapons when separated from
their wider family by SAS soldiers,
but there were five incidents in which
the number shot dead exceeded the
number of weapons found.
One of the elite soldiers is believed
to have “personally killed” 35
Afghans on a single six-month tour
of duty as part of an alleged policy
to terminate “all fighting-age males”
in homes raided, “regardless of the
threat they posed”, according a sub-
mission to lawyers representing the
families of the bereaved.
A conclusion is expected later this
month. The hearing continues.
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
Murdoch lawyers deny
Harry’s claim of secret
deal with royal family
Jim Waterson
Media editor
Prince Harry is pushing “Alice in
Wonderland stuff ” by claiming the
royal family struck a secret deal with
Rupert Murdoch’s media company
over phone hacking, according to the
newspaper group.
Harry is attempting to take the
publisher of the Sun to trial, alleg-
ing that journalists working for the
tabloid hacked his voicemails and
illegally targeted him using private
investigators over several decades.
Murdoch’s company is trying to block
the case on technical grounds, argu-
ing that Harry waited too long to file
his legal paperwork.
According to Harry, the royal fam-
ily privately agreed they would not
sue the Sun and the News of the
World over phone hacking. In return,
royal family members would receive
apologies and payouts at a later date
as a reward for staying out of court.
•
National
Murdoch’s lawyers claimed Harry’s
case was “fundamentally flawed”.
David Sherborne, Harry’s barris-
ter, told the high court the prince’s
case had been delayed by the exist-
ence of this secret deal, which was
known by senior executives such as
Rebekah Brooks, who was editor of
the Sun during the period when Harry
alleges phone hacking took place and
is now chief executive of News UK,
Murdoch’s British media business.
Sherborne also asked why Brooks
and her fellow Murdoch executive
Robert Thomson, the CEO of News
Corp, would not come to court and
officially deny the existence of such a
deal. “The only explanation for them
not having provided evidence is it’s
entirely tactical,” he said.
The barrister also alleged that
Prince William, the heir to the throne,
was aware of the supposed agree-
ment when he agreed to secretly
take a “very large sum of money”
from Murdoch’s company in 2020
over his own phone-hacking claim.
Sherborne told the court that this
payout was further evidence of the
existence of a secret deal that also
affected Prince Harry. “His broth-
er’s role is very important. He took
exactly the same stance,” he said.
The court previously heard that
the late Queen Elizabeth II knew
of the secret deal when Harry
unsuccessfully attempted to seek
an apology from with Murdoch’s
company in 2017.
Harry was not present in court for
the hearing, which came just days
after the conclusion of his seven-
week phone-hacking trial against
Mirror Group Newspapers. He hopes
▲ Prince Harry is attempting to take
the publisher of the Sun to court
PHOTOGRAPH: TEJAS SANDHU/
SOPA IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK
‘Prince Harry’s case
is legally flawed;
his factual case
fundamentally so’
Anthony Hudson KC
News Group barrister
17
to take the Sun to trial in January as
part of his legal battles with the Brit-
ish media, which could involve a
further phone-hacking trial against
the publisher of the Daily Mail.
Harry claims he learned of the sup-
posed secret agreement between
Murdoch’s company the royals at
some point around 2012, though
he remained vague on its details,
including who had brokered the deal
and who had told him about it. No
written copy of any agreement has
been shown to the court.
Anthony Hudson KC, the barris-
ter for News Group Newspapers,
which publishes the Sun, said the
prince did not even know who had
told him about the supposed deal,
let alone who had supposedly agreed
on each side. He said: “His case is
legally flawed. His factual case is
fundamentally flawed.”
News Group Newspapers has
found itself in the unusual position of
both denying that the Sun engaged in
illegal activity while also arguing on
a procedural point that Prince Harry
should have suspected illegal activity
at the Sun at an earlier date.
News Group Newspapers insists
phone hacking only took place at the
defunct News of the World. Yet in
recent years Murdoch’s company has
made substantial payouts to a grow-
ing number of people who allege their
voicemails were intercepted by the
Sun, without admitting any liability.

18
Most prime central London
homes ‘bought with cash’
Rupert Neate
Wealth correspondent
More than 70% of “prime central Lon-
don” properties sold so far this year
have been bought entirely with cash,
according to the estate agents Savills,
adding to concerns that rich overseas
•••
National
buyers are snapping up properties at
the expense of working Londoners.
In the seven months from January,
71% of sales in prime central London,
classed as an area stretching from
Chelsea to Camden and from Not-
ting Hill to Westminster, have been
without a mortgage. That compares
with about 35% for the UK as a whole.
Soaring inflation has led the Bank
of England to push interest rates to a
13-year high of 5%, which has raised
mortgage rates, making large home
loans costly.
Frances McDonald, the director of
residential research at Savills, said:
“The established prime markets most
synonymous with equity-rich buy-
ers are holding up the strongest amid
mortgage market turbulence.”
Prices across London’s prime mar-
kets have fallen by 1% compared with
this time last year. That compares
with 3.5% for overall UK house prices.
Prices for the £5m-plus London prime
market remain flat (-0.1%), while the
£500,000-£1m market has had some
falls (-2.1%), and the under-£500,000
market has fallen further still (-2.5%).
Mayfair, Westminster and Maryle-
bone were the most popular areas
with overseas buyers looking for
71%
Proportion of property sales in
prime central London this year
that have not required a mortgage
In brief
Culture
Colosseum tourist sorry
for damage to landmark
A tourist from England accused of
defacing the Colosseum has said
he was not aware of the age of the
ancient monument.
Ivan Dimitrov, a 27-year-old
fitness instructor living in Bristol,
has written a letter of apology
to the mayor of Rome, Roberto
Gualtieri, after allegedly engraving
his and his girlfriend’s names into
Health
Theatre’s cake poster
falls foul of obesity rule
London’s transport network has
defended a decision to ban a
theatre poster featuring an image
of a cake for flouting rules aimed at
tackling childhood obesity.
The poster for Tony n’ Tina’s
Wedding depicted a bride and
groom on top of a severed wedding
cake with a jam and cream filling.
Transport for London confirmed
the advert was prohibited under
guidance designed to reduce
children’s exposure to sugary
and fatty foods. Paul Gregg, the
theatre impresario behind the West
Lifestyle
One in four Britons
‘unable to boil an egg’
One in four Britons would struggle
to cook soft-boiled eggs and
soldiers, according to a new study.
While more than a third of those
interviewed about their culinary
skills rated themselves “excellent”
or “very good” cooks, about a fifth
had “no confidence” and a small
group admitted they “look up how
to cook every meal”.
One in four “have never boiled
The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
pieds-à-terre. “International travel
picked up at the start of this year, led
by passengers from Asia, the Middle
East and US,” McDonald said.
In the 2022-23 financial year 161
properties worth £10m or more were
sold in London. The highest number
of £10m-plus sales was in Kensing-
ton (26), followed by Belgravia (25)
and Mayfair (22). Recently put on the
market was 2-8a Rutland Gate, over-
looking Hyde Park, with 45 rooms,
priced at £200m. Agents selling The
Holme, in Regent’s Park, with 40 bed-
rooms, seek offers above £200m.
an internal wall of the 2,000-year-
old landmark with a key.
In the letter, Dimitrov, who was
traced by Italian police to England
after a five-day search, wrote
that only now had he realised
“the seriousness of the deed
committed”.
“Through these lines I would
like to address my heartfelt and
honest apologies to the Italians and
to the whole world for the damage
caused to an asset which, in fact,
is the heritage of all humanity,”
he wrote in the letter, which
was published in Il Messaggero
yesterday. Dimitrov, who faces a
hefty fine and possible prison term
if convicted, added: “It is with
deep embarrassment that only
after what regrettably happened
did I learn of the antiquity of the
monument.”
The Roman amphitheatre,
completed under Emperor Titus in
AD80, is where gladiators would
fight against each other and wild
animals in vicious combats.
Dimitrov, wearing a blue flowery
shirt, was allegedly filmed, left,
by an onlooker, scratching “Ivan
+ Hayley 23” into the wall of the
monument. Angela Giuffrida Rome
End show, said it was a ridiculous
decision. He told the Sun: “I never
dreamed it would be a problem.
It’s ridiculous and just makes
everything hard work.”
TfL’s guidance bans posters that
directly or indirectly promote food
that is high in fat, salt and sugar. It
takes its lead from the Department
of Health and Social Care’s
nutrient profiling model aimed at
reducing children’s exposure to the
advertising of such foods.
A TfL spokesperson said: “We
welcome all advertising on our
network that complies with our
published guidance. We are always
happy to work with brands to help
them follow our advertising policy.”
Matthew Weaver
an egg and don’t know how to”,
according to the poll of 4,000 UK
adults for Waitrose’s 2023 report.
The lack of cooking skills may be
explained by another finding in the
poll showing sales of microwaves
at John Lewis up 13% on last
year. Searches for “microwave
meals” are also up 70% on the
supermarket’s website, it said.
Nearly one in seven people
admitted to regularly hosting a
“Deliveroo dinner party” where
they feed friends by ordering in
takeways, the study found.
Zoe Wood
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
Armed
officer
loses
appeal
over fatal
London
shooting
Caroline Davies
A police officer who shot a man dead
could face professional misconduct
proceedings after the supreme court
dismissed an appeal in a landmark
ruling that provides significant clarity
over officers’ accountability.
The unanimous judgment ends a
long legal case by the firearms officer
known as W80, who shot unarmed
Jermaine Baker, 28, during a foiled
attempt to free an inmate from a
prison van near Wood Green crown
court, north London, in 2015.
The ruling determined it is the civil
law test on use of force – on whether
an honest but mistaken belief is
reasonable – that applies to police
conduct decisions, not the crimi-
nal law test of self-defence, which is
whether the belief is honestly held.
No live firearm was found in the
car in which Baker died. He was one
of three men waiting in a stolen Audi
to break out a senior member of the
Tottenham Turks gang. An imitation
firearm was found in the back of the
car. A public inquiry found the Met-
ropolitan police operation that led
to the shooting was lawful, but there
were failings at almost every stage.
W80’s account was that during
the intervention, Baker’s hands had
moved quickly to a bag on his chest,
and fearing for his life and those of
colleagues, W80 had fired one shot.
No firearm was found in the bag.
Stephen Lawrence Early errors
in investigation costly – Rowley
Jamie Grierson
The head of the Metropolitan police
has said the Stephen Lawrence
murder investigation may have been
irreparably damaged by “egregious”
errors in the weeks after the killing.
Sir Mark Rowley told the London
assembly’s police and crime com-
mittee that some detectives had
worked to gain ground but he could
not promise that new opportunities
would arise. He said a routine foren-
sics review was taking place in the
•
National
Policing
▲ Jermaine Baker was shot during
an attempt to free a prisoner in 2015
The CPS did not prosecute W80 for
the shooting. A later investigation by
the then Independent Police Com-
plaints Commission, now replaced
by the Independent Office for Police
Conduct (IOPC), concluded W80’s
belief of imminent danger was hon-
estly held but unreasonable, so he
had a case to answer for gross miscon-
duct on the basis of the civil law test
that a mistake of fact could be relied
on only if it was a reasonable mistake.
The Met disagreed and W80, sup-
ported by the Met, took the IOPC to
court to get the decision overturned.
The IOPC general counsel, David
Emery said: “This judgment does
not mean that officers will be held
hope it would identify new evidence,
aided by advances in technology.
He said: “The sad truth is that if
you do such a bad job at an investi-
gation in its first weeks and months,
you lose evidence … some of it can
never be recovered. You miss foren-
sic opportunities. You miss witness
opportunities and witnesses’
memories degrade.
“I don’t want to pretend you can
necessarily always catch up the
ground that you’ve so badly lost in
the early days. That’s what makes it
so egregious, and makes the error so
egregious, that they’re not repairable
to an impossible standard, that they
can’t make mistakes or that hindsight
will be unfairly used against them.
The supreme court judgment simply
means officers can’t rely on unrea-
sonable mistakes when justifying
their use of force.”
The IOPC’s acting director general,
Tom Whiting, said it would now
review the decision as to whether
there remained a disciplinary case
to answer, taking into account this
judgment, evidence heard during
the public inquiry, and further rep-
resentations from W80 and Baker’s
family. He said the supreme court had
expressed concern that the number of
rules about use of force had resulted
in “unnecessary” complexity.
‘The court judgment
means officers can’t
rely on unreasonable
mistakes’
David Emery
IOPC general counsel
always. And some really top detec-
tives have moved heaven and earth
to try to cover some ground and have
made some progress but haven’t been
able to recover it all. I always keep
hoping that we’ll find a new opportu-
nity, but I’m not going to promise that
we definitely will because I can’t.”
Lawrence was murdered by five or
▲ Only two of Stephen Lawrence’s
killers have so far faced justice
▼ Margaret Smith, the mother of
Jermaine Baker, urged the Met to
begin proceedings against the officer
PHOTOGRAPH: LINDA NYLIND/THE GUARDIAN
Jermaine’s mother, Margaret
Smith, said: “It is more than seven-
and-a-half years since Jermaine was
shot while he was unarmed and try-
ing to put his hands up. Throughout
that time, W80 has fought tooth and
nail to avoid facing justice for what
he did, including by taking the matter
right to the supreme court. Shock-
ingly, he has been backed all the way
by the Metropolitan police service.”
She said the Met had to respect the
IOPC’s direction and the court’s deci-
sion “and bring proper and effective
proceedings against W80, so he can
finally be held to account”.
The campaign group Inquest said
the case brought legal clarity that
could improve police accountability.
The Met commander for armed
policing, Fiona Mallon, said: “Today’s
judgment has implications for use of
force by all police officers and we will
need time to consider the detail with
policing colleagues nationally. This
will include carefully considering
the legislation, guidance and training
currently in place for police officers.
“We will liaise with the IOPC to
determine next steps for W80 and the
holding of any misconduct hearing.”
six racist attackers in Eltham, south-
east London, in April 1993. Only two
have faced justice: Gary Dobson and
David Norris were jailed for life in
2012 after a trial that hinged on tiny
traces of forensic evidence.
Last month, the BBC named Mat-
thew White as a sixth suspect and
outlined the bungled handling of
evidence against him. But Rowley
told the committee: “To suggest he’s
a ‘new suspect’ is not accurate. He has
been in the inquiry for a long time, he
has been twice arrested.”
He said White was first arrested
in 2000 and a file went to the Crown
Prosecution Service in 2005. He was
arrested again in 2013 and a file was
sent to the CPS again, but on both
occasions the prosecutors said there
was not enough evidence to charge.
White died in 2021.
19
Trafficking
MPs allege
police ‘cosied
up’ with sex
work websites
Rajeev Syal
Home affairs editor
Senior police officers have “cosied
up” with “pimping websites” that
allegedly allow trafficked women to
be “raped multiple times a day”, MPs
have said.
Dame Diana Johnson, the chair of
the home affairs select committee,
said it was “disgraceful” that police
forces and the National Crime Agency
(NCA) were engaging with businesses
such as Vivastreet – a classified web-
site with an adult section where users
can pay to advertise sexual services.
While it is legal for a sex worker to
sell their services in the UK, pimps
and people traffickers were accused
by MPs of using the same online
platform to pose as women and bring
in punters.
Police officers were unable to
tell the cross-party committee of
MPs investigating modern slav-
ery whether any prosecutions had
resulted from working alongside such
sites to gather intelligence.
Johnson told Rob Jones, a director
at the NCA: “You’re pursuing a strat-
egy that seems to me to be cosying
up and enabling adult service web-
sites to carry on allowing trafficked
women to be raped multiple times a
day. I think it’s disgraceful.”
She also questioned why Home
Office officials had attended an online
adult services websites (ASW) indus-
try event co-hosted with the NCA.
Johnson said: “There was some-
one who was convicted as a trafficker,
he was given an account by Viva-
street. A representative from that
website was invited by the NCA to
speak at a conference co-hosted by
police ... You’re having people that
enable trafficking to your conference,
and you’re saying that’s OK.”
She said sites such as Vivastreet
were “pimping websites” known to
trade in trafficked women, and ques-
tioned why law enforcers were failing
to clamp down on them.
Jones, who is also director general
of the National Economic Crime Cen-
tre, said the relationships were vital
for harvesting information about traf-
fickers. “It’s not a policy decision to
cosy up to any of these companies,”
he said. “We haven’t cosied up to
anyone: there’s a real tension, and
we welcome legislation to bring these
companies to justice.”
A Vivastreet spokesperson said:
“Sex work is legal in the UK, and
adult services websites like Viva-
street allow sex workers to advertise
their services, vet clients, and access
support. We work closely with police
forces to detect and report potential
exploitation, and have helped secure
a number of convictions.
“Vivastreet supports calls for
better regulation of the sector to com-
pel other sites to provide the same
cooperation.”
 • The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023

20
Eyewitness
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian •

▼ Pamplona, Spain 21
Animal rights protesters stage a
demonstration against bullfighting
before the city’s traditional festival
PHOTOGRAPH: JESUS DIGES/EP

22
‘Like North Korea’:
angry backlash as
Macron threatens
social media curbs
Kim Willsher
Paris
Emmanuel Macron is facing a back-
lash after threatening to cut off social
media networks as a means of stop-
ping the spread of violence during
periods of unrest.
Elysée officials and government
ministers responded yesterday
by insisting the president was not
threatening a “general blackout” but
instead the “occasional and tempo-
rary” suspension of platforms.
Ministers have blamed young
people using social media such as
Snapchat and TikTok for organising
and encouraging rioting and violence
after police shot and killed a teenager
during a traffic stop in a Paris suburb
last week.
“We need to think about how
young people use social networks, in
the family, at school, the prohibitions
there should be … and when things
get out of hand we may have to reg-
ulate them or cut them off,” Macron
told a meeting on Tuesday of more
than 250 mayors whose municipali-
ties were hit by the violence.
“Above all, we shouldn’t do this
in the heat of the moment and I’m
pleased we didn’t have to. But I think
it’s a real debate that we need to have
in the cold light of day,” Macron told
the mayors in a video obtained by the
BFM television news channel.
Critics said it would put France
alongside authoritarian countries
such as China, Russia, Iran and North
Korea in considering such measures.
Olivier Faure, the leader of the
Socialist party, tweeted: “The coun-
try of the rights of man and citizens
cannot align itself with those great
democracies of China, Russia and
Iran.” Olivier Marleix, from the cen-
tre-right Les Républicains, added:
“Cut social media? Like China, Iran,
North Korea? Even if it’s a provoca-
tion to distract attention, it’s in very
bad taste.”
Fatima Ouassak, a co-founder of
the Front de Mères (Mother’s Front)
collective representing parents in
the working-class banlieues, said
the issue was a distraction.
“It’s a diversion tactic. Instead of
debating the issue of police violence
… we are diverting to the responsi-
bility of the social media networks
and parents,” Ouassak told BFM. “It’s
secondary and about the authorities
avoiding their responsibility.”
• The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
An Elysée source insisted Macron
had “at no moment said he envisaged
cutting the network in the sense of a
general blackout”. The president had
made it clear he wanted a “calm and
considered” debate about the role of
social media in the recent unrest, the
source said.
“The president thinks we should
be reflecting on the use of social
media networks and what basis there
could be for eventual bans or admin-
istrative measures.”
Speaking after a ministerial
meeting yesterday, the government
spokesperson Olivier Véran said a
cross-party committee would be
set up to look at modifying a law
on cybersecurity currently going
through parliament.
Véran said the government had
made a “firm request” to social media
platforms to take down material
encouraging violence as quickly as
possible and remove the anonymity
of suspected lawbreakers.
“A young person should know they
cannot sit behind their screen and
write, organise or do whatever they
want. Anonymity in terms of offences
doesn’t exist. You have to understand
this can have consequences that can
lead to punishment,” Véran said.
Asked if it meant suspending social
media, the Véran added: “It could be
something like suspending a func-
tion, such as geolocalisation.”
The government has battled riots
and looting since a police officer
killed 17-year-old Nahel M during
a traffic stop on 27 June, rekindling
longstanding accusations of systemic
racism among France’s security
forces.
▲ Emmanuel Macron said social
media could be cut off during unrest
A 38-year-old police officer has
been officially put under investiga-
tion – the French equivalent of being
charged – for voluntary manslaughter
and is being held in custody.
As France reflects on how to avoid
further social turbulence amid accu-
sations of systemic racism in the
police and in wider society, one of
the country’s most senior right-wing
politicians was accused of “crass rac-
ism” by claiming those taking part in
the riots had undergone “a regression
to their ethnic roots”.
Dismissing the interior minis-
ter Gérald Darmanin’s report to the
Assemblée Nationale that 90% of
those arrested are French, Bruno
Retailleau, who heads Les Républic-
ains in the senate, said this was not
“their identity”.
“Unfortunately, for the second
and third generations [of immi-
grants], there is a sort of regression
towards their ethnic roots,” he told
FranceInfo.
Afterwards, Mathilde Panot, par-
liamentary leader of the leftwing
La France Insoumise (LFI – France
Unbowed) denounced the remark
as “crass racism”. Another LFI MP,
Clémentine Autain, added: “These
people, oozing racism, dare give les-
sons about good behaviour.”
As the violence appeared to be
dropping – with 17 arrests overnight
on Tuesday, seven in Paris – the
transport minister Clément Beaune
announced that public transport
services, halted at 9pm to persuade
people to stay at home, would return
to normal yesterday. In the Ile de
France region the damage to buses
and trams, several of which were set
alight, is estimated at €20m (£17m).
An investigation has opened into
the death of a 27-year-old man who
was hit by a projectile during riots and
looting in Marseille on Saturday, the
Marseille prosecutor’s office said. The
man is believed to have died from a
violent shock to the chest from a
‘It is like the intifada’
“flash-ball” used by riot police that
led to a cardiac arrest.
Prosecutors said it was not possi-
ble to determine where the man was
when he was shot or whether the vic-
tim had taken part in the riots.
Flash-ball guns are designed to be
Cleanup starts in Jenin
less-lethal riot control weapons that
do not penetrate the skin. Their use
by police in France is disputed as the
projectiles have led to the loss of eyes,
after raid in which 12
head injuries and other trauma.
The EU justice commissioner, Did-
ier Reynders, said yesterday that
Palestinians were killed
violence in France by some police
officers and demonstrators “poses
a problem”.  Continued from page 1 house. There were no resistance
“It is striking” that a “very high youths here,” said the family
level of violence” was seen in pro- homes yesterday morning after patriarch, Hussein, 68.
tests in France in recent years over Israeli forces withdrew the night Twelve Palestinians, at least four
cost of living, pension changes and before. The three-day operation, of whom were combatants, and
last week’s police killing of a teen- codenamed Home and Garden, one Israeli soldier were killed in the
age driver, he told the Belgian public was the largest Israeli offensive intense fighting, which the army
radio station RTBF. in the occupied West Bank in two said targeted an important militant
Reynders said the issue was with decades, involving airstrikes and command centre in the slum-like
“a certain number of police offic- up to 2,000 ground troops. neighbourhood of Jenin city.
ers … [and] the behaviour of people “The soldiers forced everyone On the second day of Home
who have the right to freely protest into one room while they searched and Garden, another nine people
– that’s a fundamental right – but not the house. Then they made us go were wounded in Tel Aviv after
to loot shops, to destroy stores, not to outside, and they used a shoulder- a Palestinian attacker ran down
destroy public equipment”. launched rocket to fire into the pedestrians with his car and
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian •
Wagner group Making waves
Kremlin targets Jordan’s female divers
Prigozhin businesses take on plastic waste
Page 24 Page 26
 Children sit stabbed people. In Jenin, the
in the rubble Israel Defence Forces (IDF) denied
of a building in accusations that soldiers had shot
Jenin targeted and injured people gathered in the
by Israeli forces courtyard of a hospital, although
during their the hospital director confirmed
three-day attack to the Guardian the incident had
taken place, and four people were
injured by live ammunition.
The violence spiralled further
overnight on Tuesday, when five
rockets were launched from the
blockaded Gaza Strip. All of the fire
was intercepted. Israel responded
by striking what it said were two
weapons-making sites operated by
 One of the 12 the Hamas militant group.
Palestinians By dawn yesterday, the situation
killed in the appeared to have calmed. In the
Israeli raid morning cool, Jenin’s residents
on Jenin extinguished the smoking remains
being buried of tyre fires and knocked out the
yesterday, remaining shards of glass in broken
the day after window frames, as the process of
the military rebuilding and repairing began.
operation ended Israeli forces did not manage to
penetrate the heart of the camp,
but the destruction caused by
Home and Garden is still on a scale
more reminiscent of fighting in the
Gaza Strip than the West Bank – and
Mediterranean
Sea
Jenin
Major Israeli aerial and Jenin
ground offensive began
about 1am on Monday
Nablus
Tel Aviv West Bank
Area C
Fully Israeli-co
controlled
co Ramallah
territory insi
side the
si
West Bankk
Jerusalem Jericho
Gaza Israel Bethlehem
Hebron
Gaza
Strip
20 km
20 miles
 Militants and mourners march
through Jenin during the funeral of
Palestinians killed in the clashes
PHOTOGRAPH: RONALDO SCHEMIDT/GETTY IMAGES
not witnessed in Jenin since 2002,
during the height of the second
intifada, or Palestinian uprising.
Israelis and Palestinians are
aware there has been pressure
on the army from Israel’s right
wing to launch a large operation
as a response to the bloodiest
year in Israel and the West Bank
since 2005: 140 Palestinians and
26 Israelis have been killed so far
in 2023, mostly in IDF raids and
Palestinian terrorist attacks.
Home and Garden is a portent of
the city’s future, and that of other
restive areas of the West Bank, such
as Nablus, if this new chapter of
violence continues to spiral.
Most of the 3,000 to 4,000
people who fled the densely
populated, 1 sq km camp during a
lull in the fighting on Monday night
picked their way home through
rubble yesterday, many still numb
with shock. “Thank God we have
some water left,” said Umm Fatiyeh
Asadi, 69, a widow living alone near
the camp’s main entrance.
“I lived in Saudi Arabia for 20
years, working as a teacher. When
my husband and I came back to
Palestine, we thought life would
be better. But what happened,
the destruction, is just like the
intifada.”
The civil defence team at
Jenin’s fire station, who for days
sat outside their headquarters
waiting for something to do,
sprang into action, coordinating
‘The Palestinian
Authority is no help
to us. They let this
happen. They are in
the Israelis’ pockets’
Ala Ghazawi
Jenin shopkeeper
23
construction equipment to clear
roads and surveying damaged
homes. Cherrypicker trucks lifted
electricians to inspect broken
cables, and a bulldozer picked up
the skeleton of a burnt-out van,
expertly manoeuvring it between
parked cars and into an empty lot.
Ala Ghazawi, 34, was standing
outside what used to be his white-
goods repair business before it
was blown up by IDF soldiers on
Monday. The washing machines
and fridges, blackened with fire
damage, had been thrown out of
the building into the street.
His neighbour, Jamil Shadi,
66, cleared broken glass in his
daughter’s beauty salon. The heat
of the explosion was so intense the
plastic flower pots outside melted,
leaving behind neon green and
pink puddles on the concrete. “On
a personal level, this is much worse
for our family than 2002,” he said.
As the morning wore on, and
masked men carrying M16s and
pistols began to arrive before
the funeral processions for dead
fighters, the mood in the camp
turned from distress to anger.
The first of the dead, a young
man wrapped in a Palestinian
flag, with his grey face exposed,
was carried through the streets
of the camp and Jenin centre on
the shoulders of his comrades,
themselves wearing insignia and
waving flags of many different
armed factions,including the
al-Aqsa Brigades – the armed wing
of the Palestinian Authority’s ruling
Fatah party – Palestinian Islamic
Jihad and the Marxist Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine.
Gunfire rang out as thousands of
young men chanted: “Rest assured,
martyr, we will continue your
struggle.”
In an extraordinary incident,
when senior members of the semi-
autonomous Palestinian Authority
(PA) arrived to pay their respects
– including Mahmoud Aloul, a close
ally of the president, Mahmoud
Abbas – they were booed and
chased away by the mourners.
“The PA is no help to us. They
let this happen and did not defend
the camp … They are in the Israelis’
pocket,” said Ghazawi.
Maj Nir Dinar, a spokesperson
for the IDF, said the army
considered the operation a success,
having made about 120 arrests and
seized large amounts of guns and
materials for making explosives.
“The operation minimises the
possibility we will see more
terror in the future. Peace won’t
come tomorrow, though. It’s
the terrorists’ decision: if they
keep doing attacks, there will be
more raids.”
Most people in Jenin whom
the Guardian spoke to believed
more violence was on the horizon.
“My daughter is wearing a
T-shirt commemorating the 2002
incursion,” said Fadi Shibli, 33, in
the ruins of his apartment holding
his six-year-old, Maha. “Now she is
living through the same thing I did.”

24
Kremlin unravels web of companies
woven into state by ex-Wagner chief
Pjotr Sauer
Jason Burke
As Wagner mercenaries captured a
Russian military base and began their
armed march on Moscow, members
of Russia’s federal security services
stormed one of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s
offices in St Petersburg.
Masked men quickly seized com-
puters and documents belonging to
the Patriot group, a media holding at
the heart of Prigozhin’s information
empire that for years promoted the
warlord at home while sowing chaos
and interfering with elections abroad.
“They barged in, smashing the
front door. It felt like they were bust-
ing a brothel, and not the workplaces
of patriotic journalists,” said a sen-
ior staffer at Ria Fan, the flagship
Patriot online outlet, who was pre-
sent during the search.
The incident on 24 June, described
by several Patriot members, marked
the start of the Kremlin’s efforts to
clamp down on Prigozhin’s vast
business empire, after a mutiny that
• The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
National
World
xSubjectxxxx
War in Ukraine
presented the biggest challenge to
Vladimir Putin’s 23 years in power.
Over three decades, Prigozhin built
a shadowy and complex corporate
structures that included companies
in media, logistics, mining, film and
catering – for which he earned his
nickname of Vladimir Putin’s chef.
But after Putin accused the warlord
of treason, Moscow began to disman-
tle Prigozhin’s corporate behemoth.
Last week, Putin hinted that the
warlord’s finances would be inves-
tigated, pointing out that alongside
Wagner, Prigozhin’s catering com-
pany Concord had received almost
£1.6bn in military contracts between
May 2022 and May 2023.
“I hope nobody stole anything, or
didn’t steal much, but we’ll sort this
out,” Putin added.
The Kremlin appeared to target
Prigozhin’s communication channels
first. Last Friday, the country’s infor-
mation watchdog, Roskomnadzor,
blocked most media outlets linked
to Prigozhin and, soon after, Patriot’s
director announced that the media
operations would close immediately.
▼ A woman in Kyiv pays her respects
to Ukrainians killed in the war
waged by Putin and Prigozhin
PHOTOGRAPH: ERCIN ERTURK/GETTY IMAGES
Andrey Karpov, a Moscow-based
producer at Ria Fan, said: “On
30 June, we were all fired, the edi-
tor-in-chief wrote to everyone that
Ria Fan was closed. My colleagues are
very angry. They are suddenly with-
out a job and don’t know what to do.”
Patriot had taken a strongly
nationalist, pro-Kremlin editorial line
while providing positive coverage
 The offices of Prigozhin and his Wagner group.
of Yevgeny Patriot was also used by Prigozhin to
Prigozhin’s attack his longstanding opponents
Patriot group including the defence chief, Sergei
in his home city Shoigu, and the St Petersburg gov-
of St Petersburg ernor, Alexander Beglov.
photographed There are also signs that the
last month authorities have started to absorb
Prigozhin’s most notorious online
outfit, the Internet Research Agency
(IRA), a troll factory loosely linked
to Patriot group and best known for
interfering in the 2016 US presiden-
tial election.
Some of the IRA’s trolls appear to
 The same have turned against their creator.
building with the Prigozhin’s Trap, a monitoring group
logo removed that tracks internet trolls linked to
following his the mercenary leader, said thousands
abortive uprising of accounts on VK, a Russian social
on 24 June media platform, had flooded the site
PHOTOGRAPH: with negative comments about the
ANTON VAGANOV/ “treacherous” warlord after previ-
REUTERS
ously praising him.
A representative of the monitoring
group said: “Prior to May, Prigozhin
controlled around 15,000 accounts
on VK that praised him, but most of
them are now working against him.
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
Nuclear arms
Xi has not
warned Putin,
Moscow says
Pjotr Sauer
The Kremlin has denied a report
that the Chinese president, Xi Jin-
ping, personally warned his Russian
counterpart, Vladimir Putin, against
using nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
“No, I can’t confirm it,” Putin’s
spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told
reporters yesterday when asked
about a Financial Times report that
said Xi had delivered the message
when he visited Moscow in March.
Peskov said the two countries had
issued statements at the time on the
content of their talks, calling all other
reports “fiction”.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine,
Xi has been unwavering in his sup-
port for his “dear friend” Putin, while
Beijing has helped to prop up Russia’s
sanctions-hit economy. China has
also repeatedly expressed publicly
its opposition to the use of nuclear
weapons in Ukraine. In November,
Xi told the German chancellor, Olaf
Scholz, that the international com-
munity should oppose the threat or
use of such weapons and “prevent a
nuclear crisis in Eurasia”.
Xi reportedly made his nuclear
warning to Putin while on his first for-
eign trip after securing a third term
as president, suggesting China was
concerned about the possibility that
the war in Ukraine would escalate.
It is clear that the government has
taken control over them.”
Darren Linvill, an associate pro-
fessor of communication at Clemson
University who has studied the IRA
since 2018, said his research had iden-
tified more than 180 IRA-linked trolls
active on Twitter who had been criti-
cal of Prigozhin after his revolt.
“Once the mutiny kicked off, the
activity level of these trolls increased
and we saw blistering attacks on
Prigozhin,” Linvill said, suggesting
the Kremlin had gained control over
at least some of Prigozhin’s former
troll farms. “Prigozhin lived by the
troll, and now he dies by the troll,”
Linvill added.
Observers have suggested that
some of Prigozhin’s international
operations in Africa were too useful
to Moscow to be dismantled, with the
Kremlin likely to be eager to take con-
trol of Prigozhin’s lucrative mining
contracts in Central African Republic.
Last week, Sergei Lavrov, the
Russian foreign minister, moved to
reassure allies in Africa that thou-
sands of Wagner fighters deployed to
the continent would remain in place.
Prigozhin’s fortunes also wors-
ened at home last week. Days after
the failed mutiny, Prigozhin-linked
companies started to lose out on
school-meal contracts, according to
several reports by independent Rus-
sian media.
The warlord’s firms for now
remain responsible for supplying
•
Beijing earlier proposed a 12-point
peace plan, urging all parties to avoid
nuclear escalation but critically not
suggesting Russia withdraw its forces
from Ukraine. Some of Kyiv’s western
allies have been sceptical of Beijing’s
deterrence credentials, given Xi’s “no
limits” partnership with Putin.
Although Xi has not explicitly
endorsed the invasion, he has refused
to condemn it and has echoed many
of Russia’s justifications, blaming
the west for fuelling the conflict by
supplying arms to Ukraine.
Since ordering his troops into
Ukraine, Putin has occasionally
issued veiled threats of using nuclear
weapons against the country, warn-
ing the west last September he was
not bluffing when he said Moscow
would use “all available means to pro-
tect Russia”. Several Kremlin-linked
analysts have also advocated a pre-
emptive nuclear strike on Europe.
Putin has recently appeared to sof-
ten his nuclear rhetoric. Speaking in
St Petersburg last month, he said
there was “no need” to use nuclear
weapons because the “existence of
the Russia state was not threatened”.
Kyiv has warned that Russia may
be planning to “simulate an attack”
on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power
plant, claiming that Russian troops
have placed “objects resembling
explosives” on the roofs of buildings.
▲ Xi Jinping is said to have warned
Putin against using nuclear weapons
some of Russia’s vast network of
military towns with food and other
provisions as well as catering to the
country’s military bases in Armenia
and Kyrgyzstan.
“One of the biggest challenges
for the Russian authorities will be to
complete the takeover of Prigozhin’s
supply chains without disrupting the
work of the military bases,” said Denis
Korotkov, an expert on Wagner.
While his empire crumbles,
Prigozhin’s whereabouts remains a
mystery. He is supposedly in Bela-
rus under a deal brokered by the
Belarusian president, Alexander
Lukashenko, although he has not
been photographed there recently
and the warlord’s jet has flown sev-
eral times between Belarus, Moscow
and St Petersburg.
By the weekend, most reminders
of Prigozhin’s existence had been
erased from his hometown, St Peters-
burg. A big Wagner sign was removed
from the company headquarters on
Saturday as cleaners inside the glass
tower were photographed scraping
the group’s logo off a large window.
Speaking on the Telegram mes-
saging app on Monday for the
second time since leading his aborted
rebellion, Prigozhin sounded unchar-
acteristically downbeat as he thanked
supporters inside Russia.
“Today we need your support
more than ever,” Prigozhin said,
promising new victories at the front
“in the near future”.
Hong Kong support groups
say UK funds charity linked
to Chinese Communist party
Amy Hawkins
Senior China correspondent
A consortium of Hong Kong com-
munity groups have accused the
government’s programme for wel-
coming Hongkongers of funding an
organisation with alleged links to the
Chinese Communist party (CCP).
Last week, the government
announced grants worth more than
£3m to a range of organisations that
support east and south-east Asian
communities, including Hong-
kongers who have recently arrived
in the UK via the British national over-
seas (BNO) visa scheme.
Of the grants issued, £39,990 went
to the Wai Yin Society, a charity that
runs three community centres in
Manchester.
In an open letter published on
Monday, 28 groups that support
Hongkongers accused the Wai Yin
Society’s leadership team of hav-
ing “an unusually close relationship
[with] the Chinese Communist party
and its apparatus in the UK”. The spe-
cific concerns relate to the Wai Yin
Society’s chair, Juanita Yau, and vice-
chair, Karen Wang.
In 2021, Yau attended a virtual
event hosted by the Chinese
consulate in Manchester to celebrate
100 years of the CCP. The signato-
ries argue that this amounted to “a
public display of political support”
for the CCP.
President urges
action after
floods in China
kill at least 15
Emma Graham-Harrison
Taipei
China’s president, Xi Jinping, has
called for stronger efforts to protect
lives and property from severe
flooding, as the country’s scientists
warned July would bring more mis-
ery from extreme weather.
Fifteen people died and four were
missing after torrential rain lashed
the metropolis of Chongqing and
swaths of south-western China,
local officials and state media said
yesterday.
Heavy rain has displaced thou-
sands of people in the centre of
China, and destroyed bridges and
other property. Video captured one
building in south-west Chongqing
crumbling into a raging torrent, and
the national broadcaster reported a
railway bridge had collapsed after it
was weakened by flood waters in the
same region.
More than 10,000 people were
also evacuated in recent days from
‘Organisations we
fund have to go
through a thorough
application process’
Department for
Levelling Up
Since 2010, Wang has been the
deputy director of the University of
Manchester’s Confucius Institute. In
2015 she was involved in a visit to the
university by Xi Jinping, the presi-
dent of China.
Responding to the claims, a
spokesperson for the Wai Yin Soci-
ety said: “We go to every event:
Muslim events, Jewish events, Bud-
dhist events, we even go to the king’s
birthday … we attend all these as a
courtesy for community cohesion.”
The charity said some families
had already started to retreat from
the community centres. The spokes-
person added there was a risk that
“people who need support in the
future will be reluctant to approach
us because of social media”.
Confucius Institutes provide
Mandarin and Chinese cultural les-
sons through British universities.
In recent years they have been crit-
icised for their links to the Chinese
state. Rishi Sunak had pledged to
close the institutes but since taking
▲ Sightseers visit Huangguoshu
waterfall in Guizhou province, in full
flow after sustained summer rainfall
PHOTOGRAPH: QIN GANG/VCG/GETTY
homes in central Hunan province,
where dozens of buildings collapsed
and initial damage estimates reached
nearly 600m yuan (£65m).
Flood warnings are now also in
place for the north including Liaon-
ing, Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces.
China regularly faces severe flood-
ing, and as global warming fuels more
frequent extreme weather, problems
are likely to intensify.
Chinese meteorological authori-
ties warned the country could expect
“multiple natural disasters in July,
including floods, severe convection
25
office as prime minister has said such
a move would be “disproportionate”.
Public concerns about the insti-
tutes started to mount after tens of
thousands of Hongkongers, many
of them critics of the CCP, started to
arrive in the UK after the BNO scheme
was launched in 2021. They have been
vocal about the dangers of engaging
with the Chinese government.
Some figures in Britain’s Chinese
community fear that engagement
with China, which was previously
welcomed by the government, has
since been cast in a negative light.
Last year, Lord Wei of Shoreditch,
the only ethnically Chinese peer in
the House of Lords, stepped down
from the Hong Kong Welcoming
Committee, a civil society group,
after he was accused of having links
with the United Front, the CCP’s
overseas affairs outfit. At the time
he wrote that he “genuinely wanted
to build bridges” between the UK and
China, and that “the CCP is literally
everywhere [in China] so any visit
or meeting … would have involved
ultimately the Chinese government”.
But as awareness of transnational
repression, in particular from Bei-
jing, has increased, some argue that
any form of engagement with the CCP
presents risks to dissidents.
The Department for Levelling Up,
Housing and Communities, which
administers the funding, is looking
into the claims made in the letter.
A government spokesperson said:
“Any attempt by any foreign power
to intimidate, harass or harm indi-
viduals or communities in the UK
via third parties will not be tolerated.
“We recognise the importance
of building trust with the commu-
nity, which is why the organisations
we fund through the welcome
programme have to go through a
thorough application process.”
weather, typhoons and high temper-
atures”, AFP reported.
Beijing has already endured its
hottest June since 2000, with tem-
peratures over 35C (95F) for 14 days.
China’s rapid urbanisation, along
with the global climate crisis, mean
even major cities are at risk from
rising waters. In 2021, flood waters
swept through Zhengzhou, the capi-
tal of Henan province, turning streets
into rivers and trapping travellers in
flooded metro trains. At least 12 peo-
ple were killed.
China is the world’s biggest emit-
ter of greenhouse gases, responsible
for around a quarter of all emissions
contributing to global heating. It has
pledged emissions will peak in 2030,
and it will be carbon neutral by 2060.

26
Deep blue thinking How female
divers are tackling Red Sea litter
Annika Brohm
Aqaba and Amman
T
he yacht Diversity
leaves the harbour
of Aqaba, the only
coastal city in Jordan.
A boxfish makes
leisurely circles in the
absurdly clear, turquoise water of
the Red Sea.
The boat soon anchors, just in
front of Aqaba’s power station,
and suddenly everything happens
quickly: the passengers don
wetsuits, pass around gloves and
cloth bags, and dive. They all have
one mission: to collect as much
rubbish as possible in 30 minutes.
Led by 34-year-old Beisan
AlSharif, these are the women of
Project Sea – an initiative born
two years ago when AlSharif, a
keen diver, and her friend, Seif Al
Madanat, began to collect rubbish
every time they dived. It is now a
community of 150 volunteers.
“There’s not one dive with
a female participation of less
than 50% – which is amazing for
a Middle Eastern country like
Jordan,” says AlSharif. Although
Jordan is considered liberal in the
region, the predominantly Muslim
country still only ranks 126th
out of 146 countries in the World
Economic Forum’s Global Gender
Gap Index. Female economic
participation is low and, in most
of Jordanian society, women must
conform to the traditional role of
wife and mother.
“Gender stereotypes and societal
expectations have influenced
perceptions about certain
activities, including diving,” says
Hana Gammoh, one of the divers.
“However, these stereotypes are
evolving, and the notion of what
women should do is becoming
more inclusive and diverse.”
Since her first clean-up dive,
Gammoh says she has never
received anything other than
“constant support and enthusiasm
from everyone around us”.
Together, the divers have
removed more than seven tonnes
Italian brothers hid father’s body
to claim his pension, police say
Angela Giuffrida
Rome
Italian police believe the body of man
found by walkers in a remote spot in
the Abruzzo region a year ago, baf-
fling investigators, had been left there
by his sons while they continued to
pocket his pension.
The body of Bruno Delnegro, 81,
who died of natural causes in his
home in Trani, in Puglia, was found
• The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
World
of waste; most of it plastic, such as
disposable cups, bottles and bags.
Another group of women then
benefits from recycling the waste –
Palestinians in the Jabal el-Hussein
refugee camp in Amman, who
create tote bags from it.
The blue bags, with the Project
Sea logo are sold on social media
and during clean-ups, providing
the Palestinians with a much-
needed source of income.
in a cave 220 miles away by two Cana-
dian walkers in July last year.
He is believed to have died sev-
eral days previously, Italian media
reported. But instead of reporting the
death, his sons Benito, Domenico and
Salvatore, and a girlfriend, are alleged
to have put the body in a sleeping
bag and taken it to the remote ham-
let of Castrovalva, in Abruzzo, to
leave it there while they claimed his
€3,000-a-month (£2,500) pension.
The four are under investigation
 The haul from
one single ocean
floor ‘litter pick’
in the Red Sea,
which is helping
protect the coral
reefs – home to
500 fish species
such as the red
lion fish (top) –
and recycle the
plastic waste
MAIN PHOTOGRAPH:
JOHN GOODWIN
“The whole community has one
purpose,” Gammoh says. “To get
as much trash out of the Red Sea
as possible and protect our unique
reefs.” Not only is the Gulf of Aqaba
home to 157 species of hard coral,
120 species of soft coral, 500 fish
species and 1,000 mollusc species,
but it is one of the few places on
Earth where the corals seem, so far,
to survive coral bleaching.
The power station dive site
for not reporting a death, fraud
against the pension authority, and
unlawful use of an ATM card.
Police were unable to estab-
lish the identity of the body, and
so it was decided in April that the
man would be buried in a grave
marked “unknown”. The only clue
was a hip implant found during the
autopsy, which finally gave police a
breakthrough.
Investigators homed in on Del-
negro’s sons after a car owned by one
of them was spotted on CCTV near
Castrovalva around the right date.
Delnegro, who had worked for
the local health authority in Trani,
is reported to have been bed-
ridden . Police believe his sons
features larger and denser corals
before a 100-metre drop.
The divers must consider if
they can free the rubbish without
damaging the corals, or leave it
behind. Nevertheless, after half an
hour their bags are filled and they
emerge, somewhat frustrated.
“Clean-up dives are challenging,”
Gammoh says. “Seeing how
polluted it is, trying to get all the
trash out, and eventually realising
you can’t.” Later, they count more
than 10,000 individual pieces of
waste from just this one trip.
“With every clean-up dive, we
make an important contribution,”
says AlSharif, knowing the corals
will soon be littered again.
Project Sea aims to overcome
this sisyphean task by framing the
dives as part of a larger mission to
create awareness, showing how
everyone can contribute. “We
encourage everyone to recycle
plastic waste and even make new
products out of it,” she says.
were motivated by his considerable
pension, which together with his sav-
ings, netted them €60,000 over the
last year.
The story is not without precedent
in Italy. In May it was discovered that
a son had kept his mother’s dead body
at home in Verona, northern Italy,
for five years while he claimed her
pension. In March, a similar discov-
ery was made in a town in Puglia,
although in that case a son had man-
aged to conceal his father’s body at
home for 10 years.
In California, a man last week
pleaded guilty to hiding his moth-
er’s death for three decades, enabling
him to claim more than $800,000
(£630,000) in benefits meant for her.
Fourth of July
weekend in US
marred by 16
mass shootings
Ed Pilkington
New York
The Fourth of July long weekend in
the US was overshadowed by 16 mass
shootings in which 15 people were
killed and nearly 100 injured.
The Gun Violence Archive, an
authoritative database on gun
violence in America, used its defini-
tion of a mass shooting as an incident
in which four or more people exclud-
ing the shooter are killed or injured by
firearms. The grim tally was recorded
from 5pm on Friday until 5am yes-
terday across 13 states as well as
Washington DC. Texas and Maryland
entered the register twice.
In one of the final catastrophes
to mar the weekend honouring the
nation’s founding, nine people were
injured in a drive-by shooting at a
house party in Washington at 1am yes-
terday. The victims included children
aged nine and 17. All injuries were
reported as non life-threatening.
Hours earlier, Joe Biden issued a
Fourth of July statement from the
White House in which he lamented
the “wave of senseless shootings
in communities across America”.
Biden repeated his call for “mean-
ingful, commonsense” gun control
reforms including a renewed ban on
assault weapons and high-capacity
magazines and an end to gun man-
ufacturers’ immunity from liability.
By the reckoning of the Gun Vio-
lence Archive, the US is on track for
one of the worst years of mass shoot-
ings. The database has identified 350
incidents so far this year and warns
that should the pace remain steady in
the second half of the year, the final
total for 2023 could reach 679, about
double that recorded in 2018.
One of the youngest victims of
the weekend was a 14-year-old boy
who was killed early yesterday at a
fourth of July block party on Mary-
land’s eastern shore. Six others were
injured in the incident in Salisbury.
Two people were killed and 28
wounded, including 15 children, in
a mass shooting in Baltimore, Mary-
land on Sunday. Videos recorded at
the scene showed teenagers scram-
bling to get away from the gunfire.
Police were still searching yesterday
for the shooters, who were thought
to have opened fire with a semi-auto-
matic weapon.
The greatest fatality in a single
incident over the long weekend was
seen in Philadelphia, where five peo-
ple were killed when an attacker with
an assault rifle went on a random
rampage on Monday night.
Additional reporting
Associated Press
15
The number of people killed across
the holiday weekend, including a boy
aged 14. Nearly 100 were injured
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
FTSE 100 All share
-77.62 - 39.98
7442.10 4055.33
Odey investigated by regulator over
fitness to work in financial services
Mark Sweney
The UK’s financial regulator is inves-
tigating whether Crispin Odey, the
hedge fund manager facing allega-
tions of sexual misconduct, is a “fit
and proper person” to work in finan-
cial services.
The Financial Conduct Authority
(FCA) told MPs it was investigating
claims that Odey, who was forced out
of his firm, Odey Asset Management
(OAM), by its board last month, had
dismissed the firm’s executive com-
mittee “for an improper purpose”.
“It is necessary and appropriate
for me to confirm to the committee
that the FCA has ongoing investiga-
tions into both Mr Crispin Odey and
Odey Asset Management,” said Nikhil
Rathi, the regulator’s chief execu-
tive, in a letter to the Treasury select
Leicester City
fined £880,000
for price fixing
with JD Sports
Sarah Butler
Leicester City football club has been
fined £880,000 by the competition
watchdog after admitting restricting
online sales of its football kit with JD
Sports. The Competition and Markets
Authority (CMA) said Leicester City
and JD had both admitted that they
had broken competition law.
The companies had a deal in which
JD agreed not to sell Leicester kit for
the 2018-19 season and then said
it would apply a delivery charge to
all orders of Leicester City-branded
clothing for the following two seasons
in order not to undercut the club’s
own online store. During that period
JD was offering free online delivery
for all orders of more than £70.
JD was not fined by the CMA as it
had reported the illegal conduct and
admitted its participation.
Michael Grenfell, the executive
director of enforcement at the CMA,
said: “Strong and unimpeded com-
petition between retailers is essential
to consumers’ ability to shop around
for the best deals.
“Football fans are well known for
their loyalty towards their teams. In
this case we have provisionally found
that Leicester City FC and JD Sports
colluded to share out markets and
•
Dow Indl Nikkei 225
-124.15 - 83.82
34294.32 33338.70
committee published yesterday. “We
are investigating whether Mr Odey
is a fit and proper person to work in
financial services and whether Mr
Odey has failed to comply with the
FCA’s conduct rules relating to integ-
rity and acting with due skill, care and
diligence.”
The multimillionaire Conservative
donor has been accused of sexually
abusing or harassing 13 women over
decades, after an investigation by the
Financial Times and Tortoise Media.
Odey has denied any misconduct.
Odey allegedly dismissed the
OAM executive committee in 2021
after it tried to discipline him for his
behaviour for a second time, having
previously issued him with a formal
written warning.
The regulator said OAM and Odey
Wealth Management had asked it last
month to remove Odey’s position as
a certified individual, which made
fix prices – with the result that fans
may have ended up paying more than
they would otherwise have done.
Both parties have now admitted their
involvement, allowing us to bring the
investigation to a swift conclusion.
“The fine that Leicester City
FC and its parent companies have
agreed to pay sends a clear message
to them and other businesses that
anti-competitive collusion will not
be tolerated.”
JD said it had been able to apply
for leniency in relation to the fine as
£/€ £/$
1.1696 1.2717
+0.0023 -0.0008
▲ Crispin Odey is facing allegations
of sexual misconduct, which he denies
‘We expect firms
to have a healthy
culture, where people
are able to speak up’
Nikhil Rathi
FCA chief executive
it had brought the deal to the CMA’s
attention in January 2021 and had
“cooperated fully with the CMA
throughout this investigation”.
It added that no current or former
directors or senior management of
JD were involved in the “offending
conduct”.
“JD has taken a number of steps
to strengthen its competition com-
pliance programme and the board
reaffirms its commitment to making
the necessary resource available,
internal and external, to ensure that
him unable to work with any of the
firm’s clients.
The FCA said Odey, one of Britain’s
best-known hedge fund managers,
had not held an approved senior man-
ager role since 2020.
“An assessment that leads us to
believe an individual is not fit and
proper may result in us making a
prohibition order banning them
from performing regulated activity,”
Rathi said. “The central question ...
is whether the individual is fit and
proper to perform specified func-
tions in the future on the basis of
their honesty, integrity and reputa-
tion; competence and capability; and
financial soundness.”
The FCA said it was also investigat-
ing OAM for possible contraventions
of its principles for business for “fail-
ing to conduct its affairs with due
skill, care and diligence, and failing
to take reasonable care to organise
▲ Leicester City was found by the
CMA to have broken competition
law over the sale of replica team kit
PHOTOGRAPH: MICHAEL REGAN/GETTY
this is embedded into its daily oper-
ations,” the company said
The CMA’s ruling comes just over
nine months after it fined JD almost
£1.5m for breaking competition law
by fixing the prices of some Rangers
FC kit in 2018 and 2019. The sports
retailer Elite Sports and Rangers were
also fined in relation to the deal.
27
and control its affairs responsibly and
effectively”.
The watchdog said that its super-
vision of OAM has been “intensive”
since 2020 and that it had opened
investigations into the company in
mid-2021. “We have repeatedly and
publicly set out that we expect firms
to have a healthy culture, where
people are able to speak up and chal-
lenge,” Rathi said.
The FCA said it would not be cowed
by the threat of legal action by Odey,
after lawyers acting for him sent the
regulator a letter “threatening judi-
cial review” when it first opened
its investigation. “We responded
robustly to this,” said Rathi.
The financial regulator said it
had been in contact with the police
over the allegations against Odey,
although its focus is on alleged
breaches of financial regulations.
“Regulatory action or an investi-
gation of regulatory matters is not
intended as a replacement for, or
alternative to, a police investigation
or criminal prosecution,” he said.
“As some of the allegations
reported in the press are potentially
criminal in nature, we have been in
contact with the police. Any decision
on whether or not to investigate is a
matter for them.”
Bank of England
interest rates
‘could hit 7%’
Richard Partington
Economics correspondent
The Bank of England may need to
push interest rates to as high as 7%
to tackle stubbornly high inflation,
economists have warned, amid fears
the soaring cost of borrowing could
drive the economy into recession.
With households under growing
pressure from rising mortgage costs,
the US investment bank JP Morgan
said there was a risk that inflationary
pressures could lead the central bank
to raise rates by more than expected.
Lenders have been withdrawing
cheaper deals after the Bank raised
rates to 5% last month, with the UK
struggling to bring down the highest
inflation rate in the G7.
Financial markets expect the Bank
to increase its base rate above 6%
before Christmas. JP Morgan said its
forecast was for rates to peak at 5.75%
by November, but warned they could
rise as high as 7% under “some sce-
narios”. The US bank said there were
heightened risks of a “hard landing”
for the British economy next year,
from the impact of rising borrowing
costs hitting business confidence.
The Bank’s former deputy gov-
ernor Charlie Bean said there was a
“way to go” before inflationary pres-
sures in the jobs market would fade,
with employers pushing up wages to
lure staff, and workers seeking pay
rises to compensate for high inflation.

28
Business view
Nils Pratley
Private equity is failing water
companies again. These firms
must return to the stock market
A
s we wait
for Thames
Water’s crew of
international
investors to decide
if they want to
inject more capital into their
ailing and over-borrowed asset,
it is hard to escape the thought
that a recapitalisation – if doable
– would have happened by now if
only the company were listed on
the stock market. What’s needed
at Thames is a large rights issue or
debt-for-equity swap. The stock
market tends to cut to the chase.
Recall the crisis in the
outsourcing sector a decade
ago, which has parallels with
water in terms of scandal (with
overcharging, rather than the
sewage) and loss of confidence.
• The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
Business
The stock market was admirably
brutal with companies such as
Serco: it whacked the share price
down 90%, inflicting necessary
pain on owners; it forced
management change; then it
became possible to raise funds.
By contrast, everything moves
in slow motion in the murky world
of non-quoted water companies.
At Thames, the current dance
started last year when the company
said its owners – led by Omers, a
Canadian pension fund, and the
UK’s Universities Superannuation
Scheme (USS) – would put in an
extra £1.5bn of capital.
The first £500m only arrived in
March. The other £1bn was billed
as “subject to certain conditions”,
and the process grinds on. Thus we
have the spectacle of USS telling
the FT that it backs a turnaround
plan subject to “an appropriate
regulatory environment”,
whatever that means.
It is ownership by investment
committee. Or, rather, ownership
by several investment committees
with different risk appetites.
Yes, the financial engineers of
Macquarie, who “hollowed out”
Thames and exited in 2017, are
mostly to blame. But indecision
seems to reign among the
infrastructure investors who
supposedly signed up to haul
Thames out of the gutter.
The regulator Ofwat’s ability
to force events seems limited.
Extracting these companies from
the lobster pot of over-leverage –
the product of the absurd buyout
boom of 2006-08 that should never
have been allowed – has been a
mission for about a decade.
Southern Water had to be
threatened with “virtual special
administration”, as the rating
agency Moody’s put it, before its
owners, led by funds advised by JP
Morgan and UBS, could be forced
to accept a loss and sell to a new
owner with new capital in 2021
(Macquarie, as it turned out).
Or look at Yorkshire Water. Last
October, Ofwat ruled the company
was in breach of its licence because
£940m worth of inter-company
loans (approved by the regulator in
2008 and 2009) had been shuffled
within the capital structure of the
broader Kelda group. But Yorkshire
was given until 2027 to get itself
into compliance.
Once again, this column
concludes that the privatised water
system would work better if the
companies had to have a stock
market listing. Accountability
and transparency are better. Is it
a coincidence that Southern and
Thames, which have copped the
heaviest fines for environmental
offences, were also the most over-
extended? And one suspects that
Severn Trent and United Utilities
have got themselves to the top
of the environment performance
tables because they are in the
FTSE 100 index. They have to
comply with regulatory norms of
gearing of 60%-ish. The correlation
The stock market was
admirably brutal
with Serco, inflicting
necessary pain on
owners and forcing
management change
isn’t perfect because South West
Water (Pennon) has had a terrible
pollution record recently. But it’s
close enough.
Sir Ian Byatt, the chair of Ofwat
from privatisation to 2000, noted
that he appealed as early as 1996
for the licensed companies to
retain a listing of some form.
His intention was to prevent the
leakage of dividends to non-
regulated activities. “My plea went
unheeded,” he wrote.
Jonson Cox, the chair of Ofwat
from 2012 until last year, told
a Lords committee: “I regret
there aren’t more publicly listed
companies because it gives real
visibility.” Investment banks
created skewed incentives and
created “the predisposition of
thinking of water companies as
financial assets”, he argued.
None of which excuses past
regulatory failures, but it ought to
give Labour, which has ruled out
renationalisation, a direction for a
policy. Forcing private owners to
list at least 25% of shares in their
water companies on the London
Stock Exchange wouldn’t be a cure-
all, but it would be a step towards
saner financing models and greater
accountability – a minimum
requirement if customers must pay
more. It would also give Labour
something to say. Its current policy
silence on water is embarrassing.
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
Towers to let
Canary Wharf bids
to reinvent itself as
tenants flee to City
Julia Kollewe
‘I
t’s not happening.” This
is the blunt assessment
of the success of efforts
to turn Canary Wharf into
a shopping and leisure
destination. “Mondays
and Fridays are dead,” said a shop
worker. “This shop used to take
a fair bit before Covid but now
everything’s changed.”
It’s a verdict that appears to be
shared by other tenants in the vast
east London financial hub. HSBC’s
decision to leave its “tower of
doom” in Docklands and move back
to the City of London after more
than 20 years has dealt a hammer
blow to Canary Wharf’s standing as
a global financial centre.
The move has left onlookers
examining the plans of the
landlord, Canary Wharf Group
(CWG), to raise the appeal of the
former wasteland at a time when
hybrid working has reduced the
daily throng of office workers.
HSBC will ditch its 45-floor
•
Business
skyscraper at 8 Canada Square
when the lease expires in 2027 and
move to an office near St Paul’s
Cathedral that is roughly half the
size, following in the footsteps of
other companies such as the law
firm Clifford Chance.
The decision says a lot about
demand for office space post-
pandemic, and the “sterile”
perception of Canary Wharf that
the developer’s management is
trying to shake off. Shops, bars
and restaurants have been added
in recent years, areas between the
glass-and-steel towers have been
landscaped and a public art trail
created. Over the summer there are
free events aimed at families.
Numbers of office workers
have dwindled since the Covid
pandemic, even though several
US banks have ordered their staff
back to the office for all or most of
the week. Other financial firms are
more relaxed about working from
home: many staff only go in to work
between Tuesday and Thursday.
While the City is also affected,
Canary Wharf – owing to its less
central location – has to work
▲ A Canary Wharf bar, 2014. A plan
to boost the area’s appeal includes
more shops, bars and public events
PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT STAINFORTH/ALAMY
harder to attract firms and visitors.
To reduce its reliance on financial
services it wants to build a life
sciences hub, and is courting
technology and media companies
as well as charities.
The early vision
Since Margaret Thatcher’s big bang
financial reforms of the 1980s,
Occupancy of offices in Canary
Wharf has fallen faster than those
in the City since the pandemic
• Docklands • City of London
88.9%
2023 Q2
to date
84.5%
2023 Q2
to date
2014 2016 2018 2020 2022
Source: CoStar
▼ Canary Wharf has lost out as
employers embrace hybrid work
patterns tried out in the pandemic
PHOTOGRAPH: DAN KITWOOD/GETTY
east London’s docks have been
transformed from a wasteland with
derelict warehouses into a cluster
of gleaming skyscrapers teeming
with bankers and lawyers. Canary
Wharf takes its name from the
quay where fruit and veg from the
Canary Islands were unloaded.
In 1981, Thatcher’s government
established the London Docklands
Development Corporation and
enlisted the Canadian property
tycoon Paul Reichmann. By the
time the first tower, One Canada
Square, had risen in 1990, Thatcher
had been ousted, and two years on
the developer filed for bankruptcy.
CWG, today owned by Canada’s
Brookfield Property Partners and
the Qatar Investment Authority,
100% later took up the baton and turned
52 hectares (128 acres) of wasteland
95 into a financial hub. It has been
built despite opposition from locals
90 – the estate is in one of London’s
poorest boroughs, Tower Hamlets.
85
Evening ghost town
80
Despite CWG’s attempts to bring
a buzz to the area through open-
water swimming, paddleboarding
29
and go karting, some shops and
food sellers still operate reduced
hours or do not open at weekends.
Evenings are quiet too. “The last
hour is a bit strange, when it gets to
between 7pm and 8pm,” said one
worker at a beauty outlet. Quite
a few people only went in to the
shop after getting lost, she said.
The underground mall around the
station felt soulless. More outdoor
space would help, she added.
Mianika Sikabofori, a seller at the
shirt retailer Charles Tyrwhitt, said:
“At the weekend we get [those]
looking to buy something for an
event, like Ascot.” But in recent
months Church’s Shoes and Ted
Baker have shut stores in the mall.
CWG says 97% of its shops are
occupied by tenants, but did not
disclose the office occupancy
rates. About 15.5% of Canary Wharf
offices are empty, compared with
11% in the City, according to the
commercial real estate firm CoStar.
Attracting clients
CWG is trying to lure firms with
cheaper rent, which averages about
£50 a sq ft, compared with £72.50
a sq ft in the City. But firms such as
HSBC can easily afford the higher
rate if they are also downsizing.
Marie Dormeuil, European office
analyst at Green Street Advisors,
said: “It’s all about the vibrancy of
an area that outweighs even the
prime amenities … it’s not a dead
area but from an office perspective
it has certainly lost its appeal.”
She said Canary Wharf – equating
to almost a tenth of London’s huge
market for office space – is most
at risk in the capital as its office
buildings typically offer large
floorplates, mainly let to banking,
legal and tech tenants that have
now embraced hybrid working.
The credit agency Moody’s cut
CWG’s rating to junk last month,
citing a “difficult operating and
funding environment”.
Commuter levels at Canary
Wharf tube station are at 70% of
pre-pandemic levels. But transport
links have improved, with the
Elizabeth line making central
London about 15 minutes away.
And the numbers going to Canary
Wharf are now higher than before
Covid, says Transport for London.
London City airport had about 3
million passengers in 2022 but that
was below the 5.1 million in 2019.
What next?
While three-quarters of the estate is
offices, CWG is building apartment
blocks, comprising 3,900 homes.
More than 3,500 people live on
the estate, where there were none
three years ago. Canary Wharf has
been compared to the La Défense
business district in Paris, which has
a similar office vacancy rate of 16%,
but Dormeuil said Canary Wharf
“has a lot more to offer residents”.
One of CWG’s ambitions is to
build a life sciences cluster to rival
those in Oxford and Cambridge.
It has managed to attract the UK
health regulator and Genomics
England. A 750,000-sq-ft
commercial laboratory building is
also in the works, with the hope of
luring small biotech firms.
CWG will be hoping health
specialists might help to breathe
new life into the area.
 • The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023

30

Weather
Thursday 6 July 2023
UK and Ireland Noon today Forecast Around the UK

London
Sunny Mist Fog
Low 13 High 26 Lows and highs Precipitation Air pollution
1008
Tomorrow
17 12 22 0% Low
Sunny intervals Hazy
Manchester
1004
Mostly cloudy
11 Inverness Shetland 13 20 45% Low
Overcast/dull Edinburgh
16 17
14
15 19 25% Low
Sunny showers Slight
Belfast
Edinburgh
11 Low 17 High 23
Sunny and heavy showers Glasgow 14 16 85% Low
Saturday
Birmingham
Light showers Newcastle
ca
16
1000
11 21 25% Low
Rain Sleet Light Belfast Slight
Brighton
snow 20
York

Snow showers 13 19 0% Low

Dublin Liverpool
rpoo
oll 20
17
Bristol
Heavy snow Ice Nottingham
Nott m
1016 Carbon
count
35C 21 Norwich
Birmingham
ming
12 20 40% Low
30
Thundery rain Cardiff
25 Daily atmospheric CO2
readings from Mauna Loa,
20 17 22
2 Hawaii (ppm):
Thundery showers 15
Cardiff
Ca L
London 13 20 40% Low
Latest
X
10 21 03 Jul 2023 422.79 Newcastle
5
Dover Weekly average
Temperature, 0 1012
25 Jun 2023 422.19
ºC
-5
21 12 19 25% Low
Plymouth 05 Jul 2022 420.37
-10 20
05 Jul 2013 398.78 Penzance
-15
Slight 7 Pre-industrial base 280
Wind speed, Windy
mph -20 Safe level 350
The Channel Islands 15 19 55% Low
Source: NOAA-ESRL

Atlantic front Weatherwatch Around the world

The hotter the weather, the busier Algiers 31 Lisbon 26

paramedics become. A study in the Ams’dam 21 Madrid 34
German city of Würzburg found Athens 35 Malaga 29
ambulance calls for cardiovascular Auckland 16 Melb’rne 15
complaints rose by more than a B Aires 15 Mexico C 24
third in heatwaves, with areas with Bangkok 35 Miami 33
the least green space and highest Barcelona 27 Milan 27
Cold front population density worst affected. Basra 48 Mombasa 28
Between 2011 and 2019, Beijing 40 Moscow 28

Warm front scientists from the University of Berlin 23 Mumbai 28

Potsdam monitored temperature, Bermuda 28 N Orleans 32
air pollution and ambulance Brussels 22 Nairobi 22
Occluded front dispatches across Würzburg. The Budapest 26 New Delhi 31
study, published in the Weather, C’hagen 20 New York 30

Trough Climate and Society journal, found Cairo 35 Oslo 18

poor air quality did not have a Cape Town 24 Paris 27
significant influence on ambulance Chicago 25 Perth 16

High tides
Source: © Crown Copyright. All rights reserved. Times are local UK times
Sun & Lighting callouts – perhaps because the Corfu 32 Prague 25
negative health effects of pollution Dakar 32 Reykjavik 15
Moon up often take longer to manifest. Dhaka 32 Rio de J 25
However, callouts associated Dublin 17 Rome 29
Aberdeen 0355 4.3m 1643 4.2m London Bridge 0441 7.3m 1705 6.9m Belfast 2202 to 0458 with cardiovascular complaints Florence 32 Shanghai 36
Avonmouth 1017 13.0m 2236 13.2m Lossiemouth 0225 4.1m 1509 4.0m Birm’ham 2130 to 0454 increased by 37% when the average Gibraltar 28 Singapore 31
Barrow 0158 9.4m 1432 9.1m Milford Haven 0913 6.8m 2135 7.1m Brighton 2115 to 0456 temperature hit 30C, compared H Kong 33 Stockh’m 19
Belfast 0135 3.6m 1415 3.3m Newquay 0805 6.9m 2027 7.2m Bristol 2129 to 0503 with days with an average of 18C. Harare 20 Strasb’g 27
Cobh 0824 3.9m 2049 4.1m North Shields 0602 5.1m 1848 5.0m Carlisle 2150 to 0443 Increased demand on the health Helsinki 19 Sydney 18
Cromer 0912 5.1m 2209 4.9m Oban 0836 3.6m 2102 3.9m Cork 2154 to 0524 service lingered for up to two days. Istanbul 30 Tel Aviv 29
Dover 0137 6.6m 1401 6.7m Penzance 0736 5.3m 2000 5.6m Dublin 2154 to 0506 The Bavarian city’s busy centre Jo’burg 17 Tenerife 26
Sun rises 0451
Dublin 0157 4.2m 1445 3.9m Plymouth 0855 5.3m 2108 5.6m Sun sets 2118 Glasgow 2203 to 0443 and area around the train station K Lumpur 33 Tokyo 32
Galway 0808 5.0m 2024 5.3m Portsmouth 0151 4.7m 1438 4.7m Moon rises 2344 Harlech 2142 to 0501 were hotspots for such callouts. K’mandu 27 Toronto 30
Greenock 0300 3.6m 1537 3.2m Southport 0115 9.2m 1340 8.8m Moon sets 0817 Inverness 2214 to 0429 This was probably compounded Kabul 31 Vancouv’r 25
Last Quarter 10 July Kingston 32 Vienna 25
Harwich 0227 4.1m 1446 4.0m Stornoway 0959 4.5m 2210 4.9m London 2118 to 0452 by the urban heat island effect. As
Kolkata 31 Warsaw 23
Holyhead 0052 5.8m 1327 5.4m Weymouth 0906 1.2m 2121 1.5m M’chester 2138 to 0451 heatwaves become more likely,
L Angeles 25 Wash’ton 32
Hull 0900 7.6m 2145 7.3m Whitby 0640 5.6m 1922 5.5m Newcastle 2146 to 0438 urban planners and public health
Forecasts and Lagos 30 Well’ton 12
Leith 0514 5.6m 1752 5.6m Wick 0152 3.5m 1436 3.3m
graphics provided by
Norwich 2120 to 0440 managers will need to heed such
Lima 22 Zurich 26
Liverpool 0141 9.5m 1413 9.1m Workington 0202 8.5m 1433 8.1m AccuWeather ©2023 Penzance 2133 to 0521 findings. Kate Ravilious
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian •
Manchester United Tour de France
Sheikh Jassim Australia’s Hindley
uncertain Glazers seizes yellow
still plan to sell jersey from Yates
Page 34  Page 33 
▲ Jonny Bairstow has
his eye on the ball in
the nets but all eyes
will be on him during
the Headingley Test
ALLAN MCKENZIE/SWPIX.COM/
SHUTTERSTOCK
I
heard about Jonny Bairstow’s stumping
Moral maze muddle before I saw it. When I finally caught a replay
the first thing I noticed was the speed with
which Alex Carey got rid of the ball. People who
follow county cricket will have seen keepers
Only in England is throw the ball at the stumps regularly – most
of the time because people bat outside their
crease to seamers – rolling it at the stumps just
to keep the batters on their toes.
there an obsession The difference was that Bairstow was in his crease
to start with. If we are to believe the Australian version
of events – and I think the evidence probably backs
their view – he has developed a habit of marching off
with this fantasy down the wicket, which they identified as something
to target. Given the speed with which the keeper threw
the ball, technically it was still live, so to the letter of
the law the dismissal was fair. I wouldn’t want to see it
spirit of cricket happen regularly, but in my view it was legitimate.
In the following days I saw footage of Bairstow
keeping against Nottinghamshire’s Samit Patel in a
Twenty20 nine years ago, standing up to the stumps.
Patel tried to drive the ball, Jonny took it and held it
close to the stumps. Patel did not attempt a run, but as
he moved from his position of trying a front-foot drive
he slightly lifted his back leg. Bairstow took the bails off
and everyone celebrated. It was not the end of an over,
but I don’t see much difference between what he did
there and what Carey did at Lord’s.
Mark Ramprakash I have been amazed by the fuss this incident has
received – even the prime minister waded in – but I
think many people are simply misinformed: it was
within the laws, it’s been happening for a long time,
and Bairstow himself has done similar.
31
Taken in isolation, Bairstow’s dismissal might
make people feel aggrieved, but when you look at the
evidence and the protagonists involved, all the fury has
been hard to understand. And more than anything, it
reminded me that the application of the so-called spirit
of cricket seems amazingly inconsistent.
E
arly in England’s second innings at
Lord’s Zak Crawley nicked one down
the leg side, where it was caught by
Carey. The umpire took a while to make
up his mind, in which time Crawley
just scratched his guard innocently,
as if nothing had happened. When the
finger went up he instantly marched
off, and there is no doubt he knew he had hit it, but he
was trying to influence the umpire’s decision. Where
was England’s spirit of cricket then?
In England’s second innings at Trent Bridge in
2013 Stuart Broad nicked a delivery from Ashton
Agar, which then flicked off the keeper’s gloves
and was caught at slip. The umpire said not out,
Australia had no reviews remaining, and Broad
pretended nothing had happened. He went on to score
another 28 runs, and England won the Test by 14.
Sometimes people should have a bit of a think before
they try to grab the moral high ground.
In my travels around the world, only in this country
is there an obsession with this fantasy spirit of cricket,
a concept that we seem to bend to our convenience.
In the end you should play hard, play within the rules,
and play to win. The Australians have always gone
about it that way, England only sometimes.
At Edgbaston Ollie Robinson gave Usman Khawaja a
big send-off, and that’s his prerogative. But if you want
to play hard, play hard. If you want to be guided by
some kind of moral code, be consistent about it.
I think the whole spirit of cricket thing creates
more trouble than it’s worth. There was similar
fuss last year when Charlie Dean was run out at the
non-striker’s end to end a women’s ODI between
England and India. With Mankads the batter is trying
to gain an advantage, and that method of dismissal is
within the laws for a reason. Only in this country does
it cause a moral outrage.
But perhaps that sense of indignation can help fuel
England at Headingley. A thumping at Lord’s would
have been hard to come back from
In the end but with that and Ben Stokes’s
play hard,
incredible innings on the last day
you should they will have belief and motivation.
The environment Stokes has
created, the confidence he gives his
play within players, his tactical awareness, his
the rules
and play
field placings and bowling changes,
and on top of all of that his own
performances – I struggle to think
to win.
Australia
of a leader of any team who has
come close to what he is doing right
now. As they try to find a way back,
have always England really need it.
gone about Once again, with the team for
Headingley, they are flying in the
it that way face of convention. Promoting
Harry Brook, who has just had a
couple of very unconvincing dismissals, to three is a
real show of faith. He is going to be right in the firing
line, likely to come up against Australia’s best bowlers
when they are fresh and the ball is new. Brook has had
great success already for England, mainly on pretty flat
wickets, and this is the ultimate test. Added to that,
with four seamers and a spinner, the onus is on that top
six to stand up and be counted.
England need to win every game from here but they
will see that as giving them real clarity. For any side
to come back from here – and particularly with the
forecast suggesting rain – they would need to get on
the front foot and be ambitious. For this side, that fits
perfectly into the mantra. England might be 2-0 down
but they will be looking to change nothing about their
approach – except its outcome.

32
Can England
rise from the
smouldering
Ashes of
discontent?
Stokes’s side must beat
Australia to retain hope of
winning series on a ground
with a rich Ashes pedigree
edigree
Ali Martin
Headingley
R
ight, deep breath. It
feels strange casting
thoughts towards a
crunch Ashes Test
that gets under way
today when the skip
fire that resulted from the last
one – sparked by the stumping
of Jonny Bairstow by Alex Carey –
is still raging.
This swift return to on-field
action may well be a good thing.
Over the past three days there has
been so much said, written and
tweeted about Bairstow’s dismissal
on the final day at Lord’s; an
outpouring of cultural differences,
grudges, prime ministers and false
equivalences that have gone well
beyond the wicket itself. Fresh
cricket to watch and digest should
move things on, mercifully.
• The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
Sport
Cricket Third LV= Insurance men’s Ashes Test
The quick turnaround may
also work well for England,
allowing indignation to fuel their
cricket – however misplaced or
otherwise – before it mellows.
Brendon McCullum spoke of his
players being “galvanised” and
though this raises the question of
why a jolt was needed – their basics
have been awry thus far, summed
up by the extras column – the
backs-to-the-wall scenario of 2-0
down with three to play should
sharpen minds.
There is also a slight sense
of trepidation about a hasty
resumption forced by the overall
squeeze on the international
schedule, however, and not just
for cricket writers hoping this
Ashes series remains live for as
long as possible.
Headingley and its West
Stand – previously the Western
Terrace – were always going to
be hostile towards Australia,
regardless of events last week. The
same goes in both countries, of
course, with Yabba, the notorious
heckler of the early 20th century,
immortalised in a statue at the
Sydney Cricket Ground. But with
Bairstow one of their own in these
parts, and passions running high,
there are concerns things could
move from the pantomime end of
the spectrum towards something
less savoury.
Yorkshire could certainly do
without any trouble, given the
club – like English cricket as a whole
– is trying to rebuild its reputation
as a welcoming, inclusive place.
To that end, security has been
beefed up. But then perhaps such
thoughts are doing a disservice
to the cricket-loving Headingley
faithful. One expects they will
primarily be looking to give
Bairstow, Joe Root and Harry
Brook their fullest support over
the next five days, as well as the
England team as a whole. Here’s
hoping this is the case.
And where better to kickstart an
English fightback than a ground
that has delivered past feats of
derring-do, Botham, Stokes et
al? Pat Cummins, who remains
smilingly unrepentant about
Carey’s removal of Bairstow at
Lord’s, needed little reminding of
his previous outing here, when
Stokes lashed his long-hop to the
rope to complete a famous heist.
“I’ve seen it about 1,000 times in
the last four years,” Cummins joked
before training, still sporting that
black eye from a misfield last week.
England could do without
needing a miracle this time
around, it must be said. A
collective performance that sets
them up for the rest of the series
is the order of the day; one which
reaffirms their approach under
Stokes and McCullum.
That said, there is a departure
from past strategy here. Ollie
Pope’s shoulder injury has forced
Brook into an unfamiliar role at No
3 – the 24-year-old immediately
calling for a new ball to face when
he was informed of this in the nets –
and England will play five frontline
bowlers. Bairstow moves to No
5, where he starred last summer
(albeit without the gloves).
The reshuffle is a necessity,
Stokes is unsure whether, after 12
overs off the reel at Lord’s, he can
bowl much this week and Jimmy
Anderson is in need of a breather.
Moeen Ali’s return as the spinner
was a given on this ground, even
if his move to No 7 was not, while
Chris Woakes offers extra security
at No 8, even if his record against
Australia is suboptimal.
Then there is Mark Wood, back
from niggles and set to inject extra
pace into England’s attack on a
pitch which has live grass but,
crucially, is said to be hard and
bouncy. Expect another bumper
barrage to follow.
Josh Tongue being stood down
after troubling Australia the most
at Lord’s reflects uncertainty over
his ability to play back-to-back
Tests. That Stuart Broad remains
owes much to his experience in
this regard, as well as the fight
shown on that final day. Like that
old Yorkshire favourite Brian Close,
Broad was left with bruises all over
his upper-body. “He’s a proper
champion, a proper warrior and
Yorkshire could do
without trouble,
given the club is
trying to rebuild
its reputation
 Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian •••

33

▼ England’s Sophie Ecclestone

celebrates victory over Australia
MATTHEW CHILDS/ACTION IMAGES/REUTERS

‘Impeccable’
Cycling Tour de France
Captain
may have Hindley climbs
to focus on Cummins clear with
batting

Ben Stokes
hails conduct Vingegaard
prepares for
the third Test
but airs fears sitting pretty
at Headingley
but there are
doubts about Simon Burnton
how many Headingley Jeremy Whittle
overs he can Laruns
bowl due to his Pat Cummins has reiterated his belief
long-standing in the spirit of cricket and described Jai Hindley of Australia won the
knee injury his players’ interpretation of it as Women’s Ashes Second T20 first mountain stage of the Tour de
STU FORSTER/
“impeccable”. Australia’s captain France after the cruel climb of the

Wyatt stars in record

GETTY IMAGES
England v Australia
Headingley
11am 20°
England Australia
Official Zak Crawley, Possible David Warner,
Ben Duckett, Harry Usman Khawaja, Marnus
Brook, Joe Root, Jonny Labuschagne, Steve Smith,
Bairstow (wkt), Ben Travis Head, Cameron
Stokes (capt), Moeen Green, Alex Carey (wkt),
Ali, Chris Woakes, Mitchell Starc, Pat
Mark Wood, Ollie Cummins (capt), Todd
Robinson, Stuart Broad Murphy, Josh Hazlewood
Umpires K Dharmasena (Sri) and N Menon (Ind)
Third umpire J Wilson (Tri) Referee R Madugalle (Sri)
TV Sky Sports Cricket Radio BBC 5 Live
Over-by-over Follow our coverage
live at theguardian.com/cricket
just loves the Ashes,” said Stokes,
hoping this rubs off on a few others
this week.
Australia, meanwhile, have
to make one change, with Todd
Murphy replacing Nathan Lyon as
the spinner. This feels a huge ask
of the bespectacled 22-year-old,
highly rated though he is, having
only bowled outside of Australia
in India and then, on surfaces that
ragged square. Elsewhere there is
another late call on whether Scott
Boland returns, with Cummins
admitting Josh Hazlewood,
physically fragile of late, could
swap out.
This is also Steve Smith’s 100th
Test – a fine achievement for a fine
cricketer who still finds himself
the target of boos from English
crowds. “Welcome to my life,”
Smith jokingly told his teammates
at Lord’s when the ground turned
on them all.
Given events of the past few
days, they likely will be living in his
shoes a little longer. But with any
luck this will be kept in check and
the cricket reclaims the headlines.
Mark Ramprakash Page 31 
is braced for a hostile reception
when the third Ashes Test begins
at Headingley today, and he has
requested extra protection for the
team’s families in case they become
the subjects of abuse.
The atmosphere at Lord’s on
Sunday became so vitriolic – when
Australia’s dismissal of Jonny
Bairstow caused indignation in
England’s dressing room and fury
in the stands – that Steve Smith’s
mother, who is English, felt it
necessary to leave the ground early,
while the child of one of the team’s
support staff was moved to tears.
“We’re in our partner period here
so we’ve got loads of family and kids
around,” Cummins said. “ There
might be an extra eye on them, just
to make sure everything’s fine.”
Cummins said he would not
change anything about his handling
of the Lord’s incident or his players’
approach to the game in general.
“The team did nothing wrong so
we’re all comfortable,” he said.
“ The way our team’s conducted
themselves over the last couple of
years has been flawless. That showed
again on day five at Lord’s. The way
they conducted themselves in the
Long Room was fantastic. Even the
Mitchell Starc decision [when it was
ruled he grounded a catch] the night
before, the ways our boys accepted it
and moved on was really good.”
Though many felt the Bairstow
dismissal contravened the spirit of
cricket, Cummins described it as “one
of the beauties of our sport”, adding:
“You want to maintain respect for
the opposition at all times, for the
umpires, the fans, the game. It’s one
of the strengths of our game.”
Cummins confirmed Todd
Murphy’s selection in place of the
injured Nathan Lyon, but has yet to
select a full team. Having bowled with-
out a spinner throughout the final day
at Lord’s their seamers have had less
recovery time than England’s and Aus-
tralia will leave it as late as possible to
judge fitness. “The last couple of days
us bowlers haven’t been here, we’ve
been chilling out,” Cummins said.
Pat Cummins said his
side ‘did nothing wrong
– we’re comfortable’
total to keep series alive
Raf Nicholson
Kia Oval
England kept their Ashes hopes alive
with a remarkable three-run win
here, handing the Australians their
first outright defeat in any format
since September 2021.
Ellyse Perry struck back-to-back
maximums off the final two balls to
finish on 51 not out, but her efforts
could not quite overhaul England’s
record total of 186 for nine.
Australia now lead the series 6-2,
with England still needing to win
every remaining match to regain
the Ashes, but their leg-spinner
Sarah Glenn nonetheless labelled
it an “emotional” moment and said
she had been “screaming with hap-
piness” as England sealed the win.
“It’s been a long time coming,” she
added. “We’ve had a lot of really close
calls and we’ve always known we can
beat them, it’s just getting over the
line against a top line-up.”
A display of clean hitting by Alyssa
Healy and Beth Mooney had got Aus-
tralia off to a flyer, but a first inter-
national scalp for Dani Gibson and
a 100th wicket in T20 internationals
for the 24-year-old Sophie Ecclestone
headlined an Australian collapse
from 58 for none in the powerplay
to 96 for five in the 13th.
The No 8, Georgia Wareham,
ramped up the pressure by smash-
ing successive sixes off the 18th over,
but Lauren Bell responded in the 19th
by bowling her with a brilliant slower
ball, and Ecclestone then kept it tight
to defend 20 off the final over.
“It felt like we were slightly off, in
every facet of the game,” Healy said.
“With the bat, we had a little bit of a
handbrake on at times and couldn’t
get ourselves going.”
A crowd of 20,328 watched the
match, fully justifying the decision
to bring England Women back to
the ground for the first time since
the semi-final of the 2009 Women’s
World T20. England had succumbed
from 100 for one to 112 for five in the
space of 13 balls, before Danni Wyatt’s
76 from 46 balls propelled them to
their highest ever T20 total against
Australia.
Alice Capsey and Heather Knight
fell to successive deliveries from
Annabel Sutherland, and while Amy
Jones dug out the hat-trick yorker,
she fell victim to a brilliant diving
Scoreboard
The Kia Oval England beat Australia by three runs.
England
SIR Dunkley c McGrath b Brown..........23
DN Wyatt c Wareham b Sutherland......76
NR Sciver-Brunt c Sutherland b Gardner .23
A Capsey c Healy b Sutherland ..............5
*HC Knight b Sutherland......................0
†AE Jones c Sutherland b McGrath ........3
DR Gibson c Brown b Perry ...................1
S Ecclestone run out (Sutherland) ......22
S Glenn c Brown b Gardner .................10
CE Dean not out ..................................2
Extras (b4, lb1, w15, nb1) ..................21
Total (for 9, 20 overs) ......................186
Fall 57, 100, 109, 109, 112, 119, 150, 181, 186.
Did not bat LK Bell.
Bowling Brown 4-0-31-1; Schutt 3-0-41-0;
Sutherland 4-0-28-3; Gardner 4-0-39-2;
McGrath 3-0-30-1; Perry 1-0-5-1;
Jonassen 1-0-7-0.
Australia
*†AJ Healy b Glenn............................37
BL Mooney c Wyatt b Gibson...............22
TM McGrath run out (Dean) .................4
A Gardner c & b Ecclestone ...................9
EA Perry not out ................................51
GM Harris b Dean .................................9
A Sutherland c Knight b Glenn ............20
G Wareham b Bell ..............................19
JL Jonassen c Capsey b Ecclestone ........6
ML Schutt not out ...............................0
Extras (lb2, w4) ...................................6
Total (for 8, 20 overs) ......................183
Fall 59, 65, 71, 75, 96, 125, 160, 168.
Did not bat D Brown. Bowling Sciver-Brunt 2-0-18-0;
Bell 4-0-45-1; Dean 4-0-41-1; Glenn 4-0-27-2;
Ecclestone 4-0-35-2; Gibson 2-0-15-1.
Toss Australia elected to field. Umpires J Naeem (Eng)
and RJ Warren (Eng). TV Umpire S Redfern (Eng).
England trail 6-2 in the series with one T20 (2pts) and
three ODIs (2pts x 3) remaining
catch by Sutherland at long-on in
the next over.
Sutherland would go on to have
Wyatt caught at deep third in the 17th;
but in between times, the England
batter took 25 runs off one Megan
Schutt over, including four suc-
cessive boundaries - sliced, lofted,
pulled and cut. At last, the crowd had
something to shout about – as they
did when Ecclestone speared Eng-
land’s only six over midwicket during
her 12-ball, 22-run cameo.
Earlier on, Sophia Dunkley had
continued the charmed life she had
lived during Saturday’s half-century
at Edgbaston, sending a shorter ball
from Schutt skywards, only for the
ball to slip through the outstretched
hands of a sheepish-looking Tahlia
McGrath at cover.
Three overs later, McGrath finally
saw her off for 23 by clinging on to a
catch in the same position, though
only at the third attempt. But by
then, England had a 57-run opening
partnership on the board, and the
platform for a record-breaking total.
Col de Marie Blanque saw Adam
Yates’s race leadership evaporate
and then exposed the frailties of his
UAE Emirates teammate, the former
Tour champion, Tadej Pogacar.
As Hindley, of Bora-Hansgrohe,
rode alone over the climb and sped
down into Laruns, to win the stage
and take the maillot jaune, the
defending champion, Jonas Ving-
egaard, left Pogacar in his wake, 1km
from the summit. It may yet prove a
Balls 4s 6s definitive moment.
19 3 0
46 13 0 Hindley, riding his first Tour,
18 4 0 seemed stunned by his solo success.
5 1 0
1 0 0 “I didn’t really expect this when I
5 0 0 rolled about of bed this morning,” the
5 0 0
12 2 1
27-year-old said. “I’ve been watch-
8 2 0 ing the Tour since I was six and never
2 0 0 thought I’d find myself in the yellow
jersey.”
Behind him, Vingegaard too was
seizing the day, attacking Pogacar
and quickly opening up a significant
gap. “The main focus for Jonas today
was to avoid Pogacar taking too many
Balls 4s 6s seconds,” the Jumbo-Visma team
19 5 2 manager Merijn Zeeman said, “and
25 2 0
5 0 0 also to make it hard for UAE Emirates.
8 1 0 We smelled the chance on the Marie
27 5 2
9 1 0 Blanque. It was a good day to make
12 4 0 it hard.”
11 1 2
3 1 0
“I don’t really think Pogacar
1 0 0 cracked,” he added, “but Jonas was
stronger today. And UAE didn’t have
the numbers on the Marie Blanque.”
But Zeeman does not underesti-
mate Hindley. “He’s a Giro winner
and he’s one of the few to have won
a Grand Tour. He’s very strong. He
had the balls to do it, so big respect
to him.”
Pogacar, meanwhile, was worry-
ing about matters beyond the Tour,
after hearing that his partner and
fellow professional, Urska Zigart,
had crashed in the Giro Donne, the
women’s Tour of Italy, and may have
a concussion. “That’s more sad than
losing one minute to Jonas,” Pogacar
said.
Vingegaard, the Slovenian said,
had spotted he was struggling on
the Marie Blanque. “For the last two
kilometres on the climb, I was on the
limit. He could see I was going full gas
and tried to attack. I couldn’t follow.”
By the finish, Vingegaard, the
Jumbo-Visma leader, had signifi-
cantly eroded a chunk of Hindley’s
advantage and struck a blow to
Pogacar’s morale, taking more than
a minute from the winner of the Tour
in 2020 and 2021.
Five stages in and already it feels
like the die may have been cast. Ving-
egaard has already put Pogacar to the
sword, much as he did on the Col du
Granon alpine stage a year ago. It now
seems clear Vingegaard is the rider to
beat in this year’s Tour.

34
European Under-21 Championship Semi-final
Gibbs-White shines to give
England final shot at glory
Israel 0 English men’s professional
England 3
Gibbs-White 42, Palmer 63, Archer 90
Jamie Jackson
Lee Carsley’s England Under-21
side has a chance to emulate Dave
Sexton’s class of 1982 and 1984 and
become European champions on
Saturday, after defeating Israel in
their semi-final last night.
England reached the showpiece
thanks to a Morgan Gibbs-White mas-
terclass that featured his opening
strike of the tournament, a key
role in Cole Palmer’s second, plus
numerous flicks and runs – all the
more impressive as it came after an
early penalty miss.
Cameron Archer’s 90-minute fin-
ish made this an emphatic victory and
in the final England will face Spain in
Batumi, Georgia. A delighted Carsley
Sheikh Jassim
not sure Glazers
will sell United
Jamie Jackson
Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani is
increasingly uncertain whether the
Glazers will sell Manchester United,
with the Qatari banker yet to receive
a response to a fifth bid of about £6bn
lodged four weeks ago in a process
that has reached an eighth month.
Sheikh Jassim’s last offer was a
take-it-or-leave-it price because he
and his advisers are frustrated with
the pace of the process, and they are
unsure about the American family’s
intent because there has been no con-
crete communication regarding the
fifth bid from the Raine Group, the
US bank which is handling any sale.
Sheikh Jassim is aware the lack
of clarity means the situation could
change quickly. He and Sir Jim
Ratcliffe, the Ineos founder and
Football
In brief
Newcastle
Howe hopes to win race
for Leicester’s Barnes
Newcastle are leading the race to
sign Leicester’s Harvey Barnes,
who is a target for Aston Villa,
Tottenham and West Ham. Eddie
Howe wants to bring in a new left
winger and one could arrive if he
sells Allan Saint-Maximin, who
•••
Sport
Football
said: “All the credit goes to the squad –
they’re a very determined bunch. But
there are still a lot of things we can
sharpen up ahead of the next game.”
England’s anthem before kick-off
closed with the captain, Taylor
Harwood-Bellis, telling his team
“let’s go boys” and they responded.
Guy Luzon’s side were overrun by
a red wave that began when Luke
Thomas found Anthony Gordon
who relayed to his strike partner,
Emile Smith Rowe, before Israel’s
goalkeeper, Tomer Tzarfati, squeezed
the ball away from his feet.
Israel’s packed shape cast this as
▲ England’s Morgan Gibbs-White
and Anthony Gordon celebrate
co-owner, are the only publicly
declared bidders. Sheikh Jassim’s
offer is for 100% of the club and
Ratcliffe’s proposed deal is for just
over 50%, which would mean one
or more of the Glazers could retain
a minority share.
In November the Glazers indicated
their 18-year ownership could end
when starting “a process to explore
strategic alternatives”.
Yesterday Mason Mount com-
pleted his £55m transfer from Chelsea
to United to become Erik ten Hag’s
first summer signing, with United
also stepping up their intent to
buy the keeper André Onana from
is the subject of interest from the
Saudi Pro League. Leicester were
hoping for £50m for Barnes, 25,
but could accept a lower fee after
relegation. Jacob Steinberg
England Women
Players are not robots,
warns captain Bright
Millie Bright has warned about
player burnout in the women’s
game. Bright, who is England’s
World Cup captain after Leah
Williamson was ruled out through
injury, said: “We are not robots,
we need time to recover. For me, I
a test of how creative England could
be and what those in white did not
require was the Tzarfati dawdle
that presaged the penalty. Hassled
by Gordon, the keeper lost the ball
and Smith Rowe’s shot was blocked.
When he was teed up again Tzarfati
pushed the effort on to his right post,
Gordon was felled by Karem Jaber
and Morten Krogh pointed to the
spot. After a VAR check the referee
was vindicated but Gibbs-White
spooned his kick wide.
By the interval England were
ahead: Gibbs-White ghosted into
the area to float home a header
from Palmer’s cross. As bright was a
Gibbs-White backheel to Smith Rowe
that had the latter shooting wide in
an opening salvo to the second half.
A second England goal felt inevi-
table. Gordon forced a corner with
a deflected shot and from this they
gave their foes the runaround via pro-
longed keep-ball play masterminded
by Curtis Jones’s man-of-the-match
display. Israel were reduced to chop-
ping at their opponents and hoping
England would allow them a way
back. They did not: a Gibbs-White
burst fed Smith Rowe who skimmed
the ball over and Palmer stabbed in.
This was match over. Gibbs-White
said: “We’ve been working hard with
the same team for the last two years,
our only goal to reach this final.”
Internazionale by offering £39m
(€45.5m). Internazionale value the
Cameroonian at closer to €60m and
rejected the bid, but talks continue.
Mount, who will wear No 7, said:
“I can’t wait to be part of this group’s
drive to win major trophies. Everyone
can see that the club has made big
steps forward under Erik ten Hag.
Having met with the manager and
discussed his plans, I couldn’t be
more excited for the seasons ahead.”
Meanwhile, Chelsea want Milan to
raise their offer for Christian Pulisic
after the Italian side made a second
bid worth up to £18.9m for the Ameri-
can winger.
 Mason Mount
poses after
signing for
Manchester
United
yesterday
think the scheduling of everything
needs to be looked at so we can
keep the quality at the highest it
can possibly be.” PA Media
PSG
Luis Enrique replaces
Galtier in Paris hotseat
Paris Saint-Germain have sacked
Christophe Galtier and replaced
him with the former Barcelona
and Spain coach Luis Enrique. “I
am delighted to be here … I do not
speak French, but I have started to
learn it,” Luis Enrique said. “I love
this pressure.” Reuters
Small town, big moment:
Dingley makes history
The first female manager in
football oversees opening
game with Forest Green
Ben Fisher
Oakfield Stadium, Melksham
‘G
o Hannah Go!”
reads the giant
cardboard sign
that greets Hannah
Dingley as she
heads down the
tunnel a touch embarrassed an
hour before kick-off at the Oakfield
Stadium, home to eighth-tier
Melksham Town. It is an unlikely
spot for a slice of footballing
history to be made but it is here,
at the end of a new-build housing
estate in this Wiltshire town
familiar with life as a thoroughfare,
where Dingley became the first
female to lead a men’s team in the
professional English game. On the
night Forest Green Rovers draw 1-1
but it is an evening when the result
all feels rather secondary.
A beefy but warm security
guard, who got the call at 2.30pm,
stands at the gate of the turnstiles.
“It’s all gone a bit Pete Tong,” he
says. Such is the interest, there is
personal security for Dingley too.
It is 5.30pm and Alfie Sparks, Forest
Green’s first-team analyst, is setting
up his camera from a vantage
point on halfway. Dan Connor, the
goalkeeping coach, arrives and
then Dingley enters, hopping out
of a hatchback before accepting
the offer of a cup of tea from the
Melksham chairman, Darren Perrin,
who was up until the early hours
fielding requests from international
media. “Tonight was a quiet
one until a few things happened
yesterday,” Perrin says, grinning.
Namely the small matter of
Dingley taking interim charge in the
dugout after Forest Green sacked
Duncan Ferguson. Dale Vince,
owner of the League Two club,
turned to Dingley, their academy
manager of four years. She is keen
to stress she has not “just rocked
up today” and has coached men
for much of the past two decades,
referencing her days coaching
non-league sides Gresley Rovers
and Shepshed Dynamo. By the
end of the evening Dingley was
busy posing for photos and signing
autographs. “Do you know what’s
nice with that? How many young
girls are down there. Hopefully
we are inspiring young girls in
football and in any industry that
there aren’t these glass ceilings and
if there are then you just have to
break through them.”
Could Dingley be handed the
reins on a full-time basis? “I don’t
know if she’s going to apply for it or
not,” said Vince. “If she does she’ll
be in the process with everybody
else. We’ll have hundreds of
applicants, we’ll do a thorough
job and we’ll appoint on merit. It
doesn’t matter what your gender is,
The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
your sexuality, your race, we’re not
interested.”
Regardless, Vince hopes Dingley
will inspire others. “It could inspire
a generation of coaches, to think
that there is not a bar and that they
can be in the men’s game,” he says.
Forest Green have never shied
from pushing the envelope. Last
year they became the first team
to travel to a sporting event game
in a zero-emissions vehicle, a
few months after using their
advertising hoardings to flash
up climate emergency warnings.
“Twelve years ago when I rescued
Forest Green everyone said that
the environment doesn’t belong
in football,” Vince says. “[Now]
they are all talking about the
environment. And it’s the same
with women in football.”
Viv Kennedy, a Forest Green
season-ticket holder carrying the
aforementioned sign, changed
her plans to show her support for
Dingley. “We decided we wanted
to come up, she’s just so brilliant,”
Kennedy, from Dursley, says. “I’ve
seen her about with the girls’ teams
and the academy and she works
wonders with them. I reckon she
can do the same for the first team.”
T
he more cynical would
argue the decision is a
stunt, something of a
gimmick. How would
Vince respond? “I
would say: ‘Fuck off ’
… It is just a cheap shot.” It is hard
not to smile when Dingley says she
is not one for the limelight in front
a throng of media 20 minutes after
full time. The world’s gaze prompts
Vince to say he feels as if he is in
an episode of Ted Lasso. “I wanted
the attention to be on the players,”
Dingley reiterates. “I would like
them to get the preparation they
need for the campaign and for
nothing to take away from that,
because if it does then it is probably
the wrong thing to do to put me in
this position in the first place.”
The stadium announcer tells a
crowd of 696 moments before the
referee blows for kick-off: “It would
be remiss of me not to welcome
Hannah Dingley who is making
footballing history tonight.” From
there, it is business as usual and
Forest Green’s first pre-season
friendly – and the new season – is
up and running. “Everything is
possible at the start of the season,”
Vince says. His words could hardly
capture the moment better.
Hannah Dingley’s side
drew 1-1 in their
opening friendly
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
Djokovic eases through doing
just enough at the right times
Jordan Thompson
Australia
Novak Djokovic
Serbia, 2
Barney Ronay
Wimbledon
What is it with Novak Djokovic? At
times you get the feeling the greatest
player in the history of men’s tennis
could walk out to face a vaping,
white-shorted Phillip Schofield,
or a Just Stop Oil pensioner on a
wildcard, and this most gushing of
arenas, a Centre Court that loves
nothing more than to fawn over its
champions, would still shout “Go on
Phillip” or “Let’s Go Oil”, just to break
the day up a little.
On a slow-burn Wednesday after-
noon Djokovic did what he tends to
do in these early rounds, easing his
way up through the revs, refami-
liarising himself with his grass-court
movements, the preternatural flex
and twang on the baseline, the
pitter-patter dashes to the net.
In the process Djokovic eased his
way past Jordan Thompson, the world
No 70, and into the third round with
a fine-margins, always-comfortable
6-3, 7-6 (4), 7-5 win. Thompson was
game and fearless in his dashes to
the net, his running drives, his use of
the angles. But he was playing tennis
against history here.
This was Djokovic’s 41st succes-
sive win on this court, achieved by
doing just enough at just the right
moments, but with the sense, of
course, of much deeper gears.
As the players came slinking into
the five o’clock sunshine the cheers
Yesterday’s results
Men: Singles: First round
G Barrère (Fr) bt L Harris (SA) 7-5
6-7 (4-7) 7-5 6-3
J Lehecka (Cz) bt S Ofner (Aut) 6-4
6-4 6-4
A Muller (Fr) bt A Rinderknech (Fr)
7-6 (7-5) 1-6 6-3 6-4
H Mayot (Fr) bt B Bonzi (Fr) 6-3 6-4
7-5
F TIAFOE (US, 10) bt Wu Y (Chn) 7-6
(7-4) 6-3 6-4
G DIMITROV (Bul, 21) bt S
Shimabukuro (Jpn) 6-1 6-2 6-1
R Safiullin (Rus) bt R BAUTISTA
AGUT (20, Sp) 2-6 7-6 (9-7) 6-7 (4-
7) 6-4 7-5
D MEDVEDEV (Rus, 3) bt A Fery
(GB) 7-5 6-4 6-3
D Stricker (Swi) bt A Popyrin (Aus)
3-6 6-3 6-2 4-6 7-5
F CERUNDOLO (Arg, 18) bt
N Borges (Por) 5-7 6-3 6-3 6-4
M Raonic (Can) bt D Novak (Aut) 6-7
(5-7) 6-4 7-6 (7-5) 6-1
G Pella (Arg) bt B CORIC (Cro, 13)
6-3 7-5 4-6 3-6 6-1
T FRITZ (US, 9) bt Y Hanfmann (Ger)
6-4 2-6 4-6 7-5 6-3
T PAUL (US, 16) bt S Mochizuki
(Jpn) 7-5 6-3 6-1
M Giron (US) bt H Dellien (Bol) 7-6
(7-2) 6-4 6-4
H RUNE (Den, 6) bt G Loffhagen
(GB) 7-6 (7-4) 6-3 6-2
D SHAPOVALOV (Can, 26) bt
R Albot (Mol) 5-7 6-4 6-2 6-2
A Mannarino (Fr) bt A Shevchenko
(Rus) 6-3 6-3 6-2
I Ivashka (Rus) bt F Coria (Arg) 4-6
6-4 6-3 6-0
•••
Sport 35
Tennis Wimbledon
the same high-quality substance at
every moment of every game in every Results
match. In fact, it is hard to think of
a more obviously extreme athlete
in any discipline. Aged 36, Djokovic
isn’t just out there being quite good
at tennis or loitering near the summit.
He’s still summoning feats of sporting
Football
EURO UNDER-21 CHAMPIONSHIP
ultimacy, winning six of the past Semi-finals
eight grand slam tournaments he’s Israel (0) 0 England (1) 3
3 65 Gibbs-White 43
been allowed to play, still functioning Palmer 64, Archer 90
even now – can we just say it these Spain (2) 5 Ukraine (1) 1
Ruiz 18, Sancet 25, Blanco 55 Bondarenko 14
days? – as the greatest men’s tennis
6 77 Oroz 69, Gómez 79
player to lift a racket. GOLD CUP
Those class-leading 23 grand slam Group C Costa Rica 6 Martinique 4; Panama 2 El Salvador 2
titles look ever more startling as his WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL FRIENDLIES
peers drop away. Not to mention the Denmark 0 Spain 2; Switzerland 0 Morocco 0
record number of weeks at No 1, a Cricket
status he can regain here by going FIRST MEN’S ONE-DAY INTERNATIONAL
Chattogram Bangladesh 169-9 (Towhid Hridoy 51).
beyond Carlos Alcaraz in the tourna- Afghanistan 83-2. Afghanistan beat Bangladesh by 17 runs
ment. And all of this from a position (DLS Method).
of slight outsider-dom, never quite ICC WORLD CUP QUALIFIER
the darling, not quite the bad guy but P W L T NR RR Pts
Sri Lanka Q 4 4 0 0 0 1.817 8
the slightly less preferred guy. Scotland 4 3 1 0 0 0.296 6
Zimbabwe 5 3 2 0 0 -0.099 6
“Come on, stop him Jordan,” a Netherlands 4 2 2 0 0 -0.042 4
voice yelled in semi-sarcastic despair West Indies 4 1 3 0 0 -0.091 2
Oman 5 0 5 0 0 -1.895 0
▲ Novak Djokovic was comfortable stowed away on the half-hour. But midway through the second set.
Super six Harare Oman 221-9 (Suraj Kumar 53 no, Shoaib
in his victory over Jordan Thompson still Thompson hung in there gamely, At least David Beckham was here, Khan 50). West Indies 222-3 (BA King 100, SD Hope 63 no).
TOM JENKINS/THE GUARDIAN punching his volleys, and howling coiled handsomely in the royal box West Indies beat Oman by seven wickets.
with anguish as he sprinted in and in camel-coloured blazer, a man who Cycling
around Centre Court had carried dumped a chance to go 30-40 on the even in middle age still successfully TOUR DE FRANCE
an edge of genuine event-glamour. Djokovic serve low into the net. veers between looking either like Stage 5 (Pau-Laruns, 165 km): 1 J Hindley (Aus) Bora-
Hansgrohe at 3hr 57min 07sec; 2 G Ciccone (It) Lidl-Trek at
Djokovic has an additional status You don’t get many of these he’s just off to ride his BMX or on his 32sec; 3 F Gall (Aut) AG2R Citroen; 4 E Buchmann (Ger)
Bora-Hansgrohe at same time; 5 J Vingegaard (Den) Jumbo-
now, with no Serena and no Rafa, chances, because Djokovic never way to act as a life-sized celebrity Visma at 34sec. Selected others: 13 S Yates (GB) Jayco-
with Roger reconfigured as beaming really lets his levels dip, remains wedding-cake figurine. AlUla at same time; 15 A Yates (GB) UAE Emirates at same
time; 17 T Pidcock (GB) Ineos Grenadiers at 1min 57sec.
box-candy. Tennis has been blessed There were signs of a little
Overall standings: 1 J Hindley (Aus) Bora-Hansgrohe 22hr
for so long with a fertile seam of serial Djokovic rustiness in the second 15min 12sec; 2 J Vingegaard (Den) Jumbo-Visma at 47sec;
winners. These things are cyclical. Tsitsipas to face Murray set as Thompson continued to 3 G Ciccone (It) Lidl-Trek at 1min 03sec; 4 E Buchmann
(Ger) Bora-Hansgrohe at 1min 11sec; 5 A Yates (GB) UAE
The sun also rises. There will be fresh play with a light touch and endless Emirates at 1min 34sec. Selected others: 7 S Yates (GB)
hall-of-famers. But right now Novak hustling energy. It went to a tie-break. Jayco-AlUla at same time; 13 T Pidcock (GB) Ineos
Grenadiers at 2min 36sec.
is lapping the track on his own. Andy Murray’s opponent in the Thompson served a double fault, his WOMEN’S GIRO D’ITALIA
He did enough here, serving out second round will be the fifth first of the match, and tightened up as Stage 6 (Canelli-Canelli, 104.4 km): 1 A van Vleuten (Neth)
the opening game in just over a seed, Stefanos Tsitsipas, who Djokovic levelled his sights and began Movistar 2hr 39min 04sec; 2 L Wiebes (Neth) SD Worx at
20sec; 3 L Lippert (Ger) Movistar at same time. Selected
minute, then keeping his opponent at needed almost four hours and to reel off the aces. others: 17 E Barker (GB) Uno-X at 34sec; 28 A Shackley (GB)
arm’s length throughout. Thompson five sets over two days to subdue The third set was also even, SD Worx at 55sec; 31 L Deignan (GB) Lidl-Trek at 1min 06sec.
Overall standings: 1 A van Vleuten (Neth) Movistar 14hr
has a low-toss serve with a genuine Dominic Thiem 3-6, 7-6 (1), 6-2, reaching its final pressure point to 58min 29sec; 2 V Ewers (US) EF Education-TIBCO-SVB at
follow-through, like a fast-medium 6-7 (5), 7-6 (10-8). Thiem, the 2020 whooping cheers (mainly for the 3min 03sec; 3 J Labous (Fr) dsm-firmenich at 3min 39sec.
Selected others: 14 A Shackley (GB) SD Worx at 9min 18sec.
bowler bounding down to have a US Open champion, was a set up game underdog) as Djokovic broke
word at the other end. He served when the rain forced the players to seal the match. He was, as ever, Snooker
with great accuracy, clipping the off on Tuesday but in a late thriller gracious in victory; and greeted CHAMPIONSHIP LEAGUE (Leicester)
Group 17: Zhou Y (Chn) bt C Totten (Sco) 3-0; A Hugill (Eng)
lines, finding the corners. on No 2 Court, Tsitsipas won a with genuine warmth by the more bt O Brown (Eng) 3-1; O Brown (Eng) bt Zhou Y (Chn) 3-0; C
Djokovic inched up the pressure deciding match tie-break at 6-6 knowledgable regulars in the crowd, Totten (Sco) bt A Hugill (Eng) 3-1; O Brown (Eng) drew with
C Totten (Sco) 2-2; Zhou Y (Chn) bt A Hugill (Eng) 3-0
in the sixth game, breaking via a in the fifth set. The Greek’s match before bustling off for another dinner Group 26: Jak Jones (Wal) drew with D Young (Sco) 2-2;
deuce with a low, hard backhand with Murray is third on Centre of seeds, nuts, berries, kale and the Jam Jones (Wal) bt R Kenna (Eng) 3-0; Jak Jones (Wal) bt R
Kenna (Eng) 3-0; Jam Jones (Wal) drew with D Young (Sco)
return. The first set was safely Court today. Agencies elixir of eternal sporting youth. 2-2; R Kenna (Eng) drew with D Young (Sco) 2-2; Jak Jones
(Wal) bt Jam Jones (Wal) 3-1
Baseball
Today’s order of play MLB
Washington 4 Cincinnati 8; NY Yankees 8 Baltimore 4; Miami
15 St Louis 2; Boston 2 Texas 6; Minnesota 9 Kansas 3;
Milwaukee 6 Chicago Cubs 7 (11 Innings); Houston 4
M Fucsovics (Hun) bt T GRIEKSPOOR D VEKIC (Cro, 20) bt Zhang S (Chn) Centre Court 1.30pm Court Seven 11am Stricker (Swi) Colorado 1; Arizona 5 NY Mets 8; Tampa Bay 1 Philadelphia
(Neth, 28) 6-4 6-2 6-4 6-2 6-3 L Broady (GB) v C RUUD (Nor, 4) A Parks (US) v A Bogdan (Rom) J MURRAY & M VENUS (GB/NZ, 13) v 3; San Francisco 0 Seattle 6; San Diego 8 LA Angels 5; Detroit
C Eubanks (US) bt T Monteiro (Br) B HADDAD MAIA (Br, 13) bt A Cornet (Fr) v E RYBAKINA (Kaz, 3) I-C BEGU (Rom, 29) v R Marino (Can) A Olivetti & D Vega Hernández (Fr/Sp) 0 Oakland 1(10 Innings); Cleveland 5 Atlanta 6 (10 Innings);
4-6 7-5 7-5 6-3 Y Putintseva (Kaz) 3-6 6-0 6-4 Court 14 11am Chicago White Sox 3 Toronto 4; LA Dodgers 7 Pittsburgh 9
A Murray (GB) v S TSITSIPAS (Gre, 5) E Alexandrova & Yang Z (Rus/Chn)
Bai Z (Chn) bt Y Bonaventure (Bel)
J Vesely (Cz) bt S KORDA (US, 22)
7-6 (9-7) 4-6 6-2 6-3 7-6 (7-0) 6-1
No 1 Court 1pm v N MELICHAR & E PEREZ (US/Aus, 4) L MUSETTI (It, 14) v J Munar (Sp) Fixtures
A ZVEREV (Ger, 19) v G Brouwer (Neth) A DANILINA & XU YF (Kaz/Chn, 11) A Sasnovich (Blr) v N Párrizas Díaz (Sp)
E ALEXANDROVA (Rus, 21) bt v N Bains & M Lumsden (GB/GB) Football
L Dere (Ser) bt M Cressy (US) 6-7 (5- S Stephens (US) v D VEKIC (Cro, 20) B HADDAD MAIA (Br, 13) v JA Cristian
E Navarro (US) 6-4 6-3 Euro Under-19 Championship
7) 7-6 (7-3) 7-6 (10-8) 7-6 (9-7) J PEGULA (US, 4) v C Bucsa (Sp) P Cachin & Y Hanfmann (Arg/Ger) (Rom)
J Cristian (Rom) bt L Bronzetti (It) v T Samuel & C Thomson (GB/GB) Malta v Poland (8.15pm); Portugal v Italy (5pm)
M Hüsler (Swi) v Y Watanuki (Jpn) Court Two 11am Court 15 11am Women’s international friendly
6-3 6-4
7-6 (7-5) 7-5 2-5 sus Court Eight 11am A Bublik (Kaz) v JJ Wolf (US) Republic of Ireland v France (8pm)
M Brengle (US) bt S Errani (It) 6-3 6-1 E MERTENS (Bel, 28) v E Svitolina (Ukr)
K Coppejans (Bel) v A DE MINAUR K Siniakova (Cz) v L Tsurenko (Ukr) V KUDERMETOVA (Rus, 12)
D Collins (US) bt J Grabher (Aut) 6-4 6-4 A RUBLEV (Rus, 7) v A Karatsev (Rus) Cricket
(Aus, 15) 7-6 (7-5) 3-6 3-6 0-0 D SHAPOVALOV (Can, 26) v G Barrère (Fr) v M Vondrousova (Cz) Third Test (first day of five)
E Cocciaretto (It) bt C Osorio (Col) D Collins (US) v B BENCIC (Swi, 14)
J Kubler (Aus) v U Humbert (Fr) 6-4 DE Galán (Col) v O Otte (Ger) C Moutet (Fr) v R Safiullin (Rus) England v Australia, Headingley (11am)
6-3 6-4 D MEDVEDEV (Rus, 3) v A Mannarino (Fr)
4-6 6-2 0-0 sus E Navarro & I Neel (US/Est) v G Escobar & A Nedovyesov (Ecu/Kaz) Second Women’s Twenty20 International
K Boulter (GB) bt D Saville (Aus) 7-6 Court Three 11am
M Arnaldi (It) v R Carballés Baena C DOLEHIDE & ZHANG S (US/Chn, 16) v S Bolelli & A Vavassori (It/It) West Indies v Ireland, Gros Islet (10pm)
(7-4) 6-2 T ETCHEVERRY (Arg, 29)
(Sp) 7-6 (7-0) 3-6 4-6 2-3 Court Nine 11am M GRANOLLERS & F ZEBALLOS (Sp/ ICC Men’s World Cup Qualifier
M KEYS (US, 25) bt S Kartal (GB) 6-0 v S Wawrinka (Swi) Super six Scotland v Netherlands, Bulawayo (8am)
L Noskova v D Galfi (Cz/Hun) Bol, 15) v JS Cabal & R Farah (Col/Col)
M Cecchinato (It) v N JARRY (Chl, 25) 6-3 V Golubic (Swi) v A Schmiedlova (Svk) Ninth-place playoff United States v UAE, Harare (8am)
6-4 1-4 sus C O’Connell v H Medjedovic (Aus/Ser) Court 16 11am
P Badosa (Sp) bt A Riske (US) 6-3 6-3 L Fernandez (Can) v C GARCIA (Fr, 5) Vitality Blast
M LINETTE (Pol, 23) v B Strycova (Cz) A Vukic (Aus) v Q Halys (Fr)
A Cornet (Fr) bt N Hibino (Jpn) 6-2 I Ivashka (Blr) v G DIMITROV (Bul, 21) Quarter-final Warwickshire v Essex, Edgbaston (6.35pm)
Second round 6-2 M Giron (US) v M Fucsovics (Hun) N Podoroska (Arg) v V AZARENKA (Blr,
Court Four 11am
J SINNER (It, 8) bt D Schwartzman 19)
N Kostic (Ser) bt K PLISKOVA (Cz, Wang XY (Chn) v S Kenin (US) Court 10 11am
(Arg) 7-5 6-1 6-2 18) 6-2 6-3 S Cirstea (Rom) v J OSTAPENKO (Lat, 17)
M Arnaldi (It) v R Carballés Baena (Sp) A DAVIDOVICH FOKINA (Sp, 31)
N DJOKOVIC (Ser, 2) bt J Thompson
(Aus) 6-3 7-6 (7-4) 7-5
B KREJCIKOVA (Cz, 10) bt H Watson
(GB) 6-2 7-5
M Andreeva (Rus) v B KREJCIKOVA (Cz,
v A Fils (Fr)
M-A Hüsler (Swi) v Y Watanuki (Jpn)
J Isner & J Sock (US/US) v M Purcell &
J Thompson (Aus/Aus) Greg Wood’s racing tips
10) G Dabrowski & A Krunic (Can/Ser) v
T Korpatsch (Ger) bt C Zhao (Can) E Cocciaretto (It) v R Masarova (Sp)
N MEKTIC & M PAVIC (Cro/Cro, 9) v M L Davis & R Van Der Hoek (US/Neth)
1-6 6-4 6-2 A Erler & L Miedler (Aut/Aut) v P-H
Women: Singles: First round Demoliner & M Middelkoop (Br/Neth) Court 17 11am
A Blinkova (Rus) bt Y Wickmayer Herbert & A Rinderknech (Fr/Fr) Perth 2.18 Happywifehappylife 2.48 Baby Jane
J OSTAPENKO (Lat, 17) bt G Minnen Court Five 11am J Bouzas Maneiro (Sp) v A KALININA
(Bel) 6-2 4-6 6-3 3.18 Pearl Of The West (nap) 3.48 Well Planted
(Bel) 6-1 6-2 M Marterer (Ger) v M Mmoh (US) Court 11 11am (Ukr, 26)
M Andreeva (Rus) bt Wang X (Chn) 4.18 Call Of The Loon 4.50 Bobby Socks
M Kostyuk (Ukr) bt M SAKKARI (Gre, M Cecchinato (It) v N JARRY (Chl, 25) D Parry (Fr) v P MARTIC (Cro, 30) A Bondar (Hun) v B Andreescu (Can)
6-4 3-6 7-5 Yarmouth 2.30 Bunker Bay 3.00 Power Mode 3.30
8) 0-6 7-5 6-2 G Pella (Arg) v H Mayot (Fr) J Kubler (Aus) v U Humbert (Fr)
A Sasnovich (Rus) v N Párrizas Díaz M Raonic (Can) v T PAUL (US, 16) Corporate Raider 4.00 Panning For Gold 4.30 Lord
V Gracheva (Fr) bt C Giorgi (It) 6-2 6-4 E Appleton & J Burrage (GB/GB) v F CERUNDOLO (Arg, 18) v J Lehecka (Cz)
(Sp) 6-2 0-0 sus R Haase & P Oswald (Neth/Aut) Cherry 5.00 Harry With Style (nb)
K Juvan (Svn) bt M Betova (Rus) 6-0 Y Sizikova & K Zimmermann (Rus/Bel) O Kalashnikova & I Shymanovich v M MELO & J PEERS (Br/Aus, 16)
V Golubic (Svk) v AK Schmiedlova Haydock 2.40 Page Three 3.10 Glorious Rio
6-3 (Geo/Blr) v S AOYAMA & E SHIBAHARA
(Rus) 6-3 0-0 sus Court Six 11am J Fearnley & J Monday (GB/GB) v 3.40 Summit 4.10 Roundhay Park 4.45 Tribal Rhythm
S Cirstea (Rom) bt T Maria (Ger) 6-1 (Jpn/Jpn) A Goransson & B McLachlan (Swe/Jpn)
I BEGU (Rom, 29) v R Marino (Can) Zhang Z (Chn) v B Van de Zandschulp 5.20 Many Rivers
2-6 6-3 R Arneodo & T-S Weissborn (Mon/Aut)
6-2 2-4 sus (Neth) Court 18 11am
S Stephens (US) bt R Peterson (Swe) v H Dellien & JP Varillas (Bol/Per) Newbury 5.05 Level Up 5.35 Miss Show Off
T Barrios (Chl) v D Goffin (Bel) J Choinski (GB) v H HURKACZ (Pol, 17) 6.05 Boyfriend 6.40 Count Palatine 7.15 Jade Country
6-2 6-3 Second round Court 12 11am
A POTAPOVA (Rus, 22) v K Juvan K Coppejans (Bel) v A DE MINAUR 7.50 Hot Chesnut 8.25 Finest Leader 9.00 Island Luck
A POTAPOVA (Rus, 22) bt C Naef I SWIATEK (Pol, 1) bt S Sorribes K MUCHOVA (Cz, 16) v J Niemeier (Ger)
(Svn) (Aus, 15)
(Swi) 6-3 6-3 Tormo (Sp) 6-2 6-0 Kempton 5.50 Aces High 6.25 It’s Marvellous
J Cash & L Johnson (GB/GB) M Berrettini (It) v L Sonego (It) M BOUZKOVA (Cz, 32) v A Kontaveit
A Kontaveit (Est) bt L Stefanini (It) D KASATKINA (Rus, 11) bt J Burrage 7.00 Dubai Leader 7.35 Flyawaydream 8.10 Kitten
v M GONZÁLEZ & A MOLTENI (Arg/ V Tomova (Bul) v K Boulter (GB) (Est)
6-4 6-4 (GB) 6-0 6-2 Gloves 8.45 Pablo Del Pueblo
Arg, 14) F TIAFOE (US, 10) v D Stephan M Ymer (Swe) v T FRITZ (US, 9)
 • The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023

36 Sport Safe and

secure in
Tennis Wimbledon
the next
round

Wimbledon diary Katie Boulter

fires back
Picking up the a forehand

pieces after during

her match
latest protest that was
interrupted
by a Just Stop
Oil protester
Fancy a Wimbledon jigsaw? Well
MICHAEL REGAN/
you’re out of luck, and it’s just GETTY IMAGES
another thing you can blame on
those people insisting on drawing
our attention to the slow broiling
of the planet. Wimbledon had
been selling 1,000-piece puzzles
of Centre Court but after one was
emptied on to the court 18 turf by
Just Stop Oil protesters yesterday,
jigsaws are available no more.
Currently “sold out” online, when
the Diary arrived at the on-site big
shop there was shelf reordering
going on and jigsaws were no
longer anywhere to be seen.

Tan out of tan for Becks

Some proper celebrity wattage in
the royal box yesterday with both
Bear Grylls (listed as “Grylls, Mr and
Mrs Bear” on the official schedule)
and David Beckham in attendance.
Beckham is a Wimbledon regular,
of course, but so, too, is his tan suit
which got another outing this year
and begs the question as to whether
he not only wears the same items
of clothing more than once but
doesn’t care if people notice.

Aldi packs a punch

Long accustomed to disrupting the
British grocery scene, Aldi has now
set its eyes on Wimbledon. The
German brand has taken to pitching
up at The Queue advertising
a cheap alternative to Pimm’s

Boulter solves the Saville

and directing punters to its rival Boulter’s victory will move her up 11
Swingball Championships down places to around 78 in the rankings.
the road in the local Cannizaro More importantly, she is through to
Park. Unlike the measures taken the second round for the third year

puzzle after jigsaw drama

to prevent Just Stop Oil from
accessing SW19, there does not
appear to be heightened security
to deter people from trying to
pickle the livers of sports fans with
bargain booze as yet, but the Diary
will update should that change.
Sinner has award in the bag
Anyway back to luxury and the case
of Jannik Sinner’s bag. The Italian
No 8 seed got a lot of coverage after
his first-round victory against Juan
Manuel Cerundolo for walking
on to court with a brown Gucci
bag. Rumour went around that
the rules on all-white apparel had
been changed to accommodate it,
though they hadn’t as the strictures
apply only to clothes. Still it was,
er, “the first time a high-end luxury
luggage piece has been brought on
court”, according to Sinner, who
spoke to the fashion bible Women’s
Wear Daily. He confirmed it was
“quite the statement indeed”. Eat
your heart out, Just Stop Oil.
Katie Boulter 76
Great Britain
Daria Saville 62
Australia
Simon Cambers
Wimbledon
Being a British player here brings
its fair share of stress and off-court
demands, the attention that much
greater than they experience at
any other event all year. And that’s
before someone invades the court
and throws bits of jigsaw all over it.
For Katie Boulter, the interruption
by a Just Stop Oil protester yesterday
was a shock, but one she used to her
advantage to claim a place in the sec-
ond round.
Having resumed her rain-delayed
match with Daria Saville of Australia
trailing 6-5 in the first set, Boulter
held serve but was then 4-2 down
in the tie-break when a man ran on
to court and scattered pieces of a
Wimbledon jigsaw mixed with “envi-
ronmentally friendly confetti”.
interrupted on the same court ear-
lier in the day – will be a matter for
the All England Club and security will
no doubt be bolstered from here on.
Boulter, though, was unfazed by
the delay, even helping out with
the clean up of the offending jigsaw
pieces, winning five straight points
to win the tie-break. She then eased
through the second set for a 7-6 (4),
6-2 victory.
“I heard the crowd before I saw
anything,” she said. “Then I realised
what it was because I saw it in the
previous match. It was a little bit of
a shock to the system.
“I think we both handled it really
well. It’s a really unfortunate situa-
tion for everyone. I wouldn’t say I felt
in danger. I was quite far away from
it. I was walking the opposite side. I
have faith in the system that they’ve
got enough security in place.”
The short break as the court was
cleared allowed Boulter to reset and
after winning the tiebreak her game
began to flow. Saville, a former top-
20 player making her way back after
eight months out with a serious ankle
injury, had no answer.
tough moment for both of us. We
really didn’t know what to do in that
situation. It’s never happened before
to me.
“We were just trying to go with
the flow. I kept my head really good
in that time frame. The first point
of the tiebreak after the 4-2 break
was important. I managed to get
a long point and it gave me a bit of
momentum.”
It was a win that also cements her
place as the British No 1, something
that had been under threat from Jodie
Burrage. But with Burrage outplayed
by Daria Kasatkina on Centre Court,
In News Protesters
disrupt play twice
in succession and will play the world
No 99, Viktoriya Tomova, of Belarus,
who upset the No 27 seed, Bernarda
Pera, for a place in round three.
“You can look on paper and say
whatever you want, but I’m going to
have to bring some game and work
hard,” Boulter said. “I’m looking
forward to it already.”
It is eight years since Heather
Watson’s finest moment here, when
she was two points away from
beating Serena Williams in the third
round. Her ranking has dropped to
No 144 lately but she put up a more
than decent fight against Barbora
Krejcikova before going down
6-2, 7-5.
Outplayed in the opening set,
Watson lifted her game in the sec-
ond and saved three match points
in the 12th game but her resistance
finally ran out and Krejcikova, who
won the French Open two years ago,
broke at the fourth time of asking to
clinch victory.
The British wildcards Arthur Fery
and George Loffhagen showed plenty
of talent and fight in their first main
draw appearances but went down to
defeats. Fery retrieved an early break
against the third seed, Daniil Med-
vedev, in the opening set and enter-
tained the crowd with some exciting
play but he was beaten 7-5, 6-4, 6-3
by the Russian. Loffhagen went down

▲ Dapper David Beckham watches

from the royal box on Centre Court
Quite how a second invasion
was allowed to happen on court
18 – Grigor Dimitrov’s match was
“I’m not really sure if it helped
or not,” Boulter said. “I won a lot
of points after that. It was a really
on the same court 7-6 (4), 6-3, 6-2 to Holger Rune, the
No 6 seed, in a match held over from
Pages 8-9  Tuesday because of rain.
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
Returning Kasatkina
shows no mercy to
nervous Burrage
Daria Kasatkina 66
Russia, 11
Jodie Burrage 02
Great Britain
Tumaini Carayol
Wimbledon
A year ago, as Wimbledon began,
Daria Kasatkina was nowhere to be
seen. Banned from the champion-
ships because of her Russian
nationality, she spent that time at her
Barcelona training base, preparing for
the tournaments that would follow.
During that time, Kasatkina par-
ticipated in a YouTube documentary
and what was presented as a glimpse
into the banning of Russian tennis
players, but instead took on even
greater meaning: she came out as gay
and clearly stated her opposition to
Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Twelve months since a signifi-
cant moment in her life, Kasatkina’s
Wimbledon return took her to its
most prominent stage as she opened
up the third day on Centre Court
against Jodie Burrage, ranked No 108.
Kasatkina, the 11th seed, showed
no mercy, using her guile and con-
sistency to beat the British wildcard
6-0, 6-2 to reach the third round.
Afterwards, Kasatkina stressed her
gratitude towards the British crowd
after receiving a warm ovation: “I’m
really thankful for the warm welcome
in Centre Court in UK, in general.
Really enjoying being here and happy
to be back,” she said.
Over the past 18 months Burrage
has taken significant strides. Her
emotional first-round victory against
the No 67 Caty McNally, her first
Wimbledon win, has positioned her
for a likely top-100 debut. But com-
peting on Centre Court is a different
‘She’s probably my
worst nightmare
to play, as well,
someone who just
makes balls’
Jodie Burrage
•
proposition. Burrage’s nerves were
immediately clear as she shanked
forehands, struggled to land basic
rally balls and she served two double-
faults in her opening service game.
“You dream to be out on Centre
Court,” Burrage said. “When I found
out yesterday, it’s so exciting. In the
same breath, you’ve got to deal with
those nerves as well. I wish I could
have settled a little bit earlier today.”
At her most effective, Burrage is
a strong, attack-minded baseliner
armed with a sweet backhand. But
Kasatkina, in the absence of any
massive weapons of her own, has
built an intelligent game that neu-
tralises and disrupts bigger players,
preying on their lack of consistency
and adaptability.
As Burrage became increasingly
frustrated, Kasatkina played a great
match. She kept Burrage uncom-
fortable throughout by redirecting
her pace and prodding her into dif-
ficult positions in the court. She also
constantly tested Burrage’s shot
tolerance, dragging her into long
rallies and resetting points with her
excellent defence.
It took eight games for Burrage to
win her first of the match, which she
celebrated with a smile. It would be
one of her few reasons to smile. After
a rain delay at 2-2 in the second set,
Kasatkina tore through the final four
games to complete the win.
“My opponent made me play so
many balls. She missed like two or
three in the first set. I missed a fair
few. She’s probably my worst night-
mare to play, as well, someone who
just makes balls. It wasn’t an easy
matchup for me,” Burrage said.
Over the past year Kasatkina and
her partner, the former figure skater
Natalia Zabiiako, have become a
prominent part of the locker room.
They now produce their own
YouTube vlog, which provides a
genuine insight into life on tour.
Kasatkina has since been asked
numerous questions about Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine, which she has
never hesitated to answer.
“Me personally, I’m just trying to
be a good human in this scenario,”
Kasatkina said last week. “That’s all
I can do. And do my job as playing
tennis. That’s it.”
After arriving on the tour as a
wide-eyed youngster who, by her
own admission, could be immature,
at 26 Kasatkina seems to gradually be
embracing her maturity gained after
many years on tour. It was reflected
both on Centre Court as she used her
experience to advance and in her
growing wisdom as she discusses the
learnings of her career so far.
“Life, it’s a roller-coaster. So you
have to accept it and try to play with
these rules. I had difficult moments
this year, on court and outside of the
court. Now I think I am a bit more bal-
anced in this way and really happy
being on the court, happy being
outside of the court, which are, in
general, two very important things.”
Rain and protests throw
up schedule challenges
Backlog of matches remains
after play began 90 minutes
late on the outside courts
Paul MacInnes
Wimbledon
Wimbledon’s chaotic opening week
continued yesterday with more rain
and challenges over scheduling
adding pressure on organisers to clear
a looming backlog. With Just Stop Oil
protesters adding to the disruption,
the All England Club’s attempts to
play an ambitious total of 87 singles
matches soon fell by the wayside.
The competition has a significant
number of first-round matches still
to play while the top seeds, able to
continue under the covers of the main
show courts, have already progressed
to round three.
After eight fixtures were
completed on a rain-sodden Tues-
day, the start of play yesterday was
again affected by showers. Compe-
tition on the outside courts, which
Kontaveit tiptoes between
raindrops to delay farewell
Greg Wood
Wimbledon
It would have been a very long good-
bye for Anett Kontaveit had she failed
to beat Lucrezia Stefanini in the first
round of the women’s singles here
yesterday. Three rain delays meant
that a match scheduled to start
at 11am, in the distinctly low-key
surroundings of court six, was not
wrapped up until nearly 4pm with
Kontaveit winning 6-4, 6-4.
Defeat, the former – indeed, fairly
recent – world No 2 had already
announced, would mean instant
retirement, because of chronic and
untreatable problems with her back.
As it turns out, there will be at least one
more match, against the No 32 seed,
Marie Bouzkova. This time the sche-
dulers will hopefully give her the stage
her talent and achievements deserve.
The surge of disappointment
among fans and fellow professionals
usually begins at 11am, was delayed
first until 11.30am, then 11.45am and
finally 12.30pm. But once it started,
play soon stopped with another rain
interruption 30 minutes later.
The problems on the outdoor
courts were compounded by No 1
Court, which has a roof but delayed
its start time from 1pm to 1.15pm so
as not to have to use it. The All Eng-
land Club prioritises playing as many
matches outdoors as possible but
drew frustrations of ticket holders
with the postponement, a decision
that only looked worse when another
unexpected shower arrived at 2pm. It
was not until 3pm that the day’s first
match was completed.
For the players, there was more
fatalism than frustration. Daniil
Medvedev was one of the first to
complete his match, beating the
Briton Arthur Fery in three sets on
No 1 Court. “I’m happy to finish my
match because that’s not the case for
everyone,” the No 3 seed said. “That’s
sometimes how Wimbledon can be.
We know it can rain. Hard courts you
cannot also kind of play in the rain.
alike after Kontaveit’s retirement
announcement last month was fol-
lowed by anger on social media when
it emerged court six would be the
stage for her possible swansong.
But if there was any seething among
the fans wearing “We love Anett”
T-shirts in the blue, black and white
of the Estonia flag, it soon subsided.
Stefanini, who is two years younger
at 25 and rated 111, was a dangerous
Anett Kontaveit will
play Marie Bouzkova
in the second round
37
 A protester throws
confetti on court 18 during
Katie Boulter’s match
ADAM DAVY/PA
But the grass is even worse. As soon
as it’s a few drops, you are scared.”
Medvedev’s match had been
delayed from Tuesday and the Rus-
sian said: “Sometimes when you
don’t hit for the day it can be tricky. I
didn’t feel amazing in my tennis, but
a win is a win.”
While much of the bottom half of
the draw in the men’s and women’s
singles remained incomplete, there
were some brackets in the top half
where players were completing their
second-round fixtures at the same
time as others were playing their first.
The American Sloane Stephens
was one who found herself at the
wrong end of such a situation, but
seemed determined to shrug off any
disappointment. “It’s always tough
when you’re a Monday match which
gets moved first to Tuesday then
Wednesday,” she said. “It’s a lot of
drama, a lot of adversity, and it’s the
person who focuses the best is the
one who comes out on top.
“Everyone’s dynamic is a little bit
different but we are all still pretty
much in the same boat of suffering.
It might be helpful if you’re playing
and your next opponent hasn’t but
they’ve done a good job of trying to
keep the brackets together. At the end
of the day it’s Wimbledon, it rains.”
While some unfinished fixtures
have been added to the evening’s
schedule on Centre Court and No 1
Court, Wimbledon does not have
plans to start new matches late, in an
attempt to preserve the grass for later
in the tournament. “The scheduling
of the order of play each day is a com-
plex operation,” a spokesperson for
the All England Club said.
“We take great care when sche-
duling matches and allocating courts.
All decisions are made with fairness
and the best interests of the tourna-
ment, players, spectators and world-
wide broadcast audience at heart.”
opponent, on paper at least, but from
an early stage Kontaveit’s edge in
quality was apparent. At any moment,
and at the moments when she most
needed it above all, Kontaveit was
always the most likely to find a big
first serve or a forehand on the line.
Her serve was broken twice. Both
times, she broke straight back and
there were regular glimpses of the
top-10 player she used to be. Her
winner’s mentality was never more
evident than in the final two games,
immediately after she had been
pegged back to 4-4 after breaking
Stefanini early in the second set. She
tore into her opponent in the ninth
game, breaking her to love with a wide
range of winners, from a sharp vol-
ley at the net to a thumping forehand
down the line. She then raced to three
match points on serve and forced a
clinching error on the second.
Ons Jabeur and Daria Kasatkina,
Kontaveit’s doubles partner, had
already talked about their sad-
ness over her decision to retire
before Kontaveit appeared for the
post-match press conference. “It’s
really sweet they’re trying [to talk me
out of it],” she said. “A lot of people
tried. But I cannot play without pain
pretty much the whole match.”

In with a shout
T20 victory
keeps Ashes
hopes alive for
England women
Page 33 
ADAM DAVY/PA IMAGES
‘The team isn’t over’
Defiant Stokes says Ashes loss
would not break England belief
Simon Burnton
Headingley
England arrive at Headingley for
the start of the third Test facing up
to the potential death of one dream,
but insisting that another will sur-
vive. “I don’t know if we want to say
it,” Ben Stokes said, “but the Ashes
is obviously over if things don’t go
well – but the team isn’t over.”
Since Stokes and the head coach,
Brendon McCullum, were appointed
last year England’s rollercoaster has
largely been cranking skywards.
However narrow the margins that
•
decided the first two Ashes Tests this
is the first precipitous dip – and the
challenge now is to apply the brakes.
“This is the moment,” Stokes said.
“It starts here and we’ve got to win this
game. We’ve got to keep looking to
press the game on. We’ve got to keep
looking in every situation to influence
the game back in our favour and put
Australia under pressure, because
we know we need to win this game
to keep the Ashes alive. Some people
might see that as pressure whereas I
think myself and the rest of the team
see it as a massive opportunity.”
Opportunity knocks in particular
for Harry Brook, promoted to No 3 as
U21s into final
Gibbs-White
leads Young
Lions past
Israel at Euros
os
Page 34 
a result of Ollie Pope’s series-ending
shoulder injury, and for Jonny
Bairstow, back up to No 5, from where
he caused such carnage last summer.
Joe Root is sandwiched between them
in an all-Yorkshire triple whammy to
further fuel the Headingley crowd.
“It’s an amazing atmosphere here,
it always has been,” Stokes said.
“When we’re on top here they get
going with us, but even when things
aren’t going our way they’re always
here with us. But I think they love
the fact that Yorkshire people walk
out and play here. It’s the old saying:
strong Yorkshire, strong England.”
Brook’s promotion, given his
The Gu Guardian
Thursday
T
Thh
hursda
6 July
JJu
uly
2023
220
023
0223
Tidy display
sends Boulter
through after
jigsaw protest
Brit solves Saville puzzle
Page 36 
limited and largely unhappy expe-
rience at No 3, seems particularly
bold. “He’s technically gifted and
players like that you feel can bat any-
where,” Stokes said. “We want to keep
Joe at four because he’s a remarkable
player, and moving Jonny to five was
to get him into the game earlier.”
The selection of four seamers in
addition to the returning Moeen Ali
was intended to protect Stokes, who
after his exertions with bat and ball
at Lord’s has limited gas in the tank.
“That last week took it out of me a
little bit,” he said. “So I had to think:
‘What would be the best team if I
wasn’t to bowl a ball in this game?
Now I don’t feel as if I’m under too
much pressure to bowl.”
Stokes said the rumbling furore
over Bairstow’s second-innings dis-
missal at Lord’s has had no impact
on the atmosphere inside England’s
dressing room – “I don’t think we can
galvanise as a group any more than
we are to be honest” – and that “the
best thing that everyone needs to do
is just move on from it”.
Third Test previews Pages 31-33 
Spurs make
bumper offer
to Kane as
Bayern close in
David Hytner
Jacob Steinberg
Tottenham have made a massive
new contract offer to Harry Kane
that would significantly improve
his £200,000-a-week terms. But the
striker has no immediate intention
to sign it and will certainly not do so
while the transfer window is open.
Kane, who celebrates his 30th
birthday on 28 July, has entered
the final 12 months of his six-year
Spurs deal and is coveted by a host
of leading clubs, including Bayern
Munich, who last week bid an initial
€70m. Thomas Tuchel, the Bayern
manager, is pushing hard for Kane.
Spurs’ position is that Kane is not
for sale. The chairman, Daniel Levy,
on the back foot after a terrible sea-
son, is mindful his popularity would
plummet further if Kane departed.
Levy believes Kane will see that
his long-term future is best served
at Spurs and not only because of the
money he would make under the new
contract. There is the hope that Ange
Postecoglou, can turn things around.
The new manager wants to play on
the front foot in a 4-3-3 and, with the
help of Levy and the increasingly
influential chief scout, Leonardo
Gabbanini, his squad is taking shape.
Spurs have signed the goalkeeper
Guglielmo Vicario and the midfielder
James Maddison and are poised to
announce the signing of the winger
Manor Solomon. The priority now is
central defence and, with Davinson
Sánchez and Japhet Tanganga up for
sale, they could add as many as three
players in the department.
Spurs are in advanced talks for
Wolfsburg’s £30m-rated Micky
van de Ven and Edmond Tapsoba of
Bayer Leverkusen is another target.
They would take one or the other.
Kane’s position is every option
remains open to him: leaving in
the summer, staying for the season
before going as a free agent and even
extending his contract, although that
is rated as the least likely.
▲ Harry Kane is now in the final
year of his contract at Tottenham
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian •

39
 •
Osborne has a new gig. His austerity victims, zilch Aditya Chakrabortty, page 3
Dementia rid me of my fear. I live for now Wendy Mitchell, page 4
Mavis Cheek, author of popular humorous novels Obituaries, page 10
The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
Opinion
and ideas
Get ready for
P
olitical prediction is a mug’s game.
Wise commentators should try to
refrain from too many of them. Yet
it is hard to look at Rishi Sunak’s
Enemies of the
government right now and not
offer one. Here’s mine. Amid the
government’s current struggles, a
culture war campaign against liberal
People 2: it’s all
institutions is increasingly likely to be the centrepiece
of the Conservative general election effort next year.
For convenience, call it Enemies of the People 2.
It was not intended to be like this when Sunak took
Sunak has left
over. When he first set out his five priority targets,
they appeared quite sensibly chosen and a welcome
contrast from the gassy bombast of Boris Johnson and
the delusional dogmas of Liz Truss.
Martin Very little of that is true now, just six months on. The
commitment to halve inflation is not going well – the UK
Kettle is the only G7 country where inflation is still rising. Nor
is the pledge to grow the economy – the UK is still on
the threshold of recession. The promise to reduce the
public debt is doing no better. Meanwhile, in the week
of the NHS’s 75th anniversary, the claim that people
would get the care they need more quickly seems to
have been overtaken by imploding Tory confidence in
G2
Daily
pullout
life &
arts
section
Inside
the universal service itself. And Labour continues to ILLUSTRATION:
have a commanding lead in the opinion polls. BEN JENNINGS
Which leaves the final pledge of stopping the boats.
That isn’t going well either. There was a large surge
of attempted Channel crossings in June. The main
summer peak is probably still to come, driving the total
above the 2022 record of more than 40,000 people.
But in the absence of any sustained turnaround in the
cost of living crisis or any material improvement in
the macro-economy more generally, the Conservative
election offer is defaulting to a more rhetorical
performative approach, to which a confrontation over
migration is central.
This is tricky stuff for a leader such as Sunak, who
aims to be judged on technical competence, grasp
of detail and practical achievement rather than any
claim to possess the common touch. But the decline in
confidence about Sunak is palpable. It is there in the
shifting centre of gravity towards more performative
campaigning on the Brexit model.
The former home secretary Priti Patel’s Rwanda
deportation policy, now fully embraced by her
successor, Suella Braverman, in her
illegal migration bill, has become the
embodiment of this approach. The 
 • The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
2
Get ready for Enemies of the
People 2: it’s all Sunak has left
Martin Kettle
 Continued from front
animating spirits are cruelty and a
 readiness to provoke. The policy does
this by being deliberately isolationist,
spurning international norms and structures, and by
setting itself against the idea of universal rights as they
have evolved in the postwar era.
It also picks fights with institutions such as
the church and the courts. It offends the case for
compassion to strangers made by the archbishop
of Canterbury, Justin Welby, when the bill reached
the House of Lords in May. Welby’s important and
sensible amendment, requiring a more long-term
and more globally coordinated approach, was being
debated yesterday.
Above all, though, the bill is designed to provoke
a confrontation with the judges, and through them
with the rule of law, in part because of the burgeoning
disrespect for lawyers running through the modern
Tory party and in part in the hope that Labour will
somehow be drawn in and outmanoeuvred.
Braverman’s response to the appeal court’s
two-to-one finding against the Rwanda policy last
week exemplified this. Her statement to MPs was
condescending – “a disappointing judgment”. It cast
the issue in unequivocally populist and partisan
terms. “Today,” she said, “is a bad day for the British
people. Today is a good day for the people smugglers.
T
It is a good day for Labour.”
his may be only a taster if the supreme
court makes a similar finding – though
such a ruling against the policy is
far from certain. Ministers have
not forgiven the highest court in
the land for the prorogation ruling
in 2019. They would like to clip its
wings. They want to return to the
unfinished business of curbing judicial review. Many
still want to withdraw from the European convention
on human rights and to scrap the Human Rights Act.
They hope that, under Lord Reed, the court is less
willing to confront the executive than it was under his
predecessor, Lady Hale, four years ago.
A lot therefore hangs on the way the supreme court
jumps on the Rwanda policy. Some ministers think
this is a win-win situation. If the court reverses the
appeal court’s ruling, deportations to Rwanda can
begin, just in time for the election.
If the court upholds the appeal court, though,
denunciations of the judiciary will again be in order
by ministers and the press, just as they were in 2016
over the Brexit process, when the Daily Mail first used
the “enemies of the people” headline and Truss, then
lord chancellor, went out of her way not to stand up
for the judges’ independence. Senior judges are well
aware of how much is likely to be at stake this time,
and worried about the likelihood of the courts being in
the crossfire. But they are also aware that Britain has
treaty obligations and that migrants have rights.
Either way, the performative political style is
now the comfort zone for significant sections of
Sunak’s party. Only this week, the so-called New
Conservatives, a group of about 25 Conservative
MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intakes, issued a plan to
cut migration by more than 360,000 in the next 12
months. Even if this was a desirable goal, it is clearly
an unachievable one. But, as the Brexit campaign
showed so powerfully, it is sometimes the emotive
effect of the policy that counts, not its workability
or its good sense. It is one of the tragic lessons of the
politics of the past decade.
Braverman’s bill is not designed to work or to create
a smoothly efficient system, let alone to be consistent
with Britain’s postwar commitment to humane
and just treatment of refugees within international
models. The otherwise jaw-dropping cost of the
measures in taxpayers’ money – £169,000 a head if
the migrants end up being sent to Rwanda – is entirely
secondary to their theatricality. The purpose is
nationally demeaning – to roll the pitch for a needless
cultural confrontation that will do nothing to rescue
the government and can only weaken the country at
home and abroad.
Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust № 55,015
‘Comment is free… but facts are sacred’ CP Scott
Batteries
Cutting emissions is vital –
but mobility is about more
than private electric cars
Driving an electric car on a single charge from London
to Milan sounds like an impossible dream. Yet Japanese
carmaker Toyota claims that by 2027 motorists will be
able to buy such a vehicle. Running the air conditioner
at full blast might reduce such an impressive range, but
Toyota says drivers will be able to recharge in 10 minutes
before they are back on the road. If this all sounds too
good to be true, that’s because it probably is.
What Toyota says it has found nothing less than the
holy grail of battery technology – the so-called solid state
solution – which has long eluded the industry. Instead
of a liquid core, the new battery has a solid one between
electrodes. This means it is smaller and can store more
energy – delivering a bigger range for the same weight.
The heavy flammable liquid cores can also overheat
and explode. Since 2017, UK emergency services have
attended hundreds of electric vehicle fires.
Rapid technological advances have historically been
the norm in capitalism. Rich-world governments have
rightly come to see electric cars as an essential way to
reduce air pollution and crack down on climate-warming
emissions, while satisfying an individual’s desire for
personal transportation. Compared with combustion-
engine cars, they have significant environmental
benefits. But the climate crisis should be a chance
to question whether the motorcar itself has become
too embedded in our everyday lives. The future of
“mobility” must involve much more than private cars.
It would be churlish not to recognise that the
Japanese carmaker’s announcement is a form of
London’s mayoral race
The Conservatives could
not have made a worse
start in the running
Consider for a moment a part of Britain vital to
Conservatives past and present. It boasts historic
buildings, parks of a lush green and even a socking
great statue of Winston Churchill. The latest census
shows it is significantly more religious than any other
region, and a sizable chunk of residents are Christian.
Surveys suggest locals are far more likely to frown on
same-sex relationships and sex before marriage. And it
is partly responsible for the most electorally successful
Tory politician in three decades. What is this rightwing
heartland, this blue nirvana?
Try: London, the city that made Boris Johnson its
mayor. Twice.
Political cliche asserts that the capital is some kind of
liberal, secular, leftist haven in a largely conservative
England – and that may be true, in parts. But the
demographic reality is far more interesting, reflecting
decades of migration and mixing. In inner London, for
instance, Catholics make up the single largest faith.
Its political record is also varied. For three decades,
Margaret Thatcher was a London MP, and in the 1987
election the Iron Lady did better in the capital than the
rest of the UK. Into the 1990s, Labour analysts worried
about “the London effect”. At the last mayoral race,
even the unimpressive Conservative Shaun Bailey
secured a chunky share of the vote.
That history, plus the fact that Sadiq Khan is now
running for his third term as mayor, means the Tories
should be in with a shout of taking back the capital.
Given that the London election is almost a year
progress. There should be a sensible place for cars
as part of an integrated transport plan in the years
to come. As Toyota has been a sceptical voice about
electric vehicles, a change of heart, if sincere, is
to be welcomed. The company had previously
staked its future on its range of hybrid-engine cars,
powered by both an internal combustion engine
and an electric motor, arguing that shortages of
key battery materials and insufficient charging
infrastructure would prevent a universal switch to
electric vehicles in the short term. Whether Toyota
will be able to leapfrog its rivals remains to be seen,
however, as mass production requires a far more
stringent level of quality control and reliability.
But even a low-carbon-emitting car remains a
low-capacity mode of transportation. Doubling
down on its near-monopoly over the surface
transportation system would lead to a future of
ever-worsening congestion and road accidents,
which currently cost 30 lives in the UK every week.
Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, allegedly tried to kill
the California high-speed rail project in 2013. A
decade later the electric bullet train has announced
it will be solar-powered. Industry lobbying in
the 1930s helped pave the way for a US lifestyle
dependent on cars and oil. That must not be
replicated for electric vehicles today.
The global north cannot just bet on a Toyota-
or Tesla-style decarbonisation. The volume of
critical minerals needed for decarbonising the
rich world on its current growth path would
leave nothing for poorer nations. Sunsetting
undesirable technologies and infrastructures
(such as carbon-intensive motoring) must be
accompanied by a recognition that we all have to
live within the world’s material constraints. In
the richer world that must mean prioritising mass
transportation and rethinking urban planning,
not vesting so much hope in our current pattern of
living continuing unchanged.
away, and that neither the Liberal Democrats nor
the Conservatives have picked their contender,
it is far too soon for an analysis of either people
or platforms. But one early question is being
asked: could the Conservatives have made a more
disastrous start to this contest?
First, there was the party’s shortlist of candidates,
which excluded obvious names such as Paul Scully,
the minister for London, as well as Samuel Kasumu,
who resigned as a Downing Street adviser on race
issues over the government’s culture-warring. Of the
three finalists, Daniel Korski dropped out a few days
ago over allegations of groping (which he denies).
And then there were two. Susan Hall is a
longstanding member of the London assembly,
who once compared the storming of the Capitol
with disgruntled remainers – not the most
obviously winning move in a city that voted 60%
for remain. Or Tory members can pick Mozammel
Hossain, a barrister with zero experience of
politics. Although Mr Hossain has a remarkable life
story, the pair are relatively obscure figures vying to
take on a mayor known by his first name. Mr Khan
has many critics, not least those attacking him in
court this week over his plans to make all of London
an ultra-low emission zone. But so far he lacks a
heavyweight challenger.
This speaks volumes about Rishi Sunak’s lowered
ambitions. Just four years ago, the Tories forged
an electoral alliance stretching from Surrey to
Sedgefield; now they are scrabbling to hold on to
safe seats. It is also bad for London, which, after the
banking crash, Brexit and much courting of the “red
wall”, desperately needs to consider its future.
Another lazy cliche of the capital casts it as the
place where streets are paved with gold. Yet it has
serious problems with housing, the gig economy and
massive inequality. They deserve full and fair debate
that produces thorough solutions. It is a shame that
the Tories seem not to want to play their part.
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian •
Opinion
F
George Osborne
ew things became Alan Clark less
than retirement. “My mind races,” the
Thatcher-era Tory junior minister raged
into his diaries. “I am hungry for news
gets a new gig.
and gossip, resentful at John Major …
how could they? Although, of course,
the cruelty of politics is its attraction.”
If only he’d hung on for the arrival of
Victims of his
podcasts. Today, Clark would be a cert to host his own
politics one, sweeping the crumbs from Westminster
tablecloths into a regular 50 minutes of audio content:
reminiscence, gossip and crisp, chilled cruelty – Who’s
austerity, zilch
down? Who’s out? – all generously sponsored by a
manufacturer of probiotic yoghurt.
It has become SW1’s premier cottage industry,
providing gainful employment for disused ministers
and ersatz advisers. Another diarist, Alastair Campbell,
Aditya fronts The Rest is Politics with Rory Stewart, a show so
Chakrabortty popular it tours theatres. Soon their competitors will
number George Osborne and Ed Balls, who are about to
launch an economics show.
A format is fast emerging: two big names (all the
better for advertisers to see you with), almost always
men, season current events with some inside-the-room
recollections of Vladimir’s body language or Tony’s
office management. It is informed yet accessible and, as
a report this month from the Reuters Institute shows, it
draws an audience very different from the wider public:
younger, more educated and, crucially, richer. Central
to the format is that the silverbacks come from either
side of a political divide spanning no more than two
inches. They cannot be too left or too right. They must
disagree, but agreeably. Osborne last week described
Balls as a former “bitter foe” turned “firm friend”.
Reading those words, a memory came back to me
from seven years ago. In the spring of 2016, I sat in a
small front room in a cramped terrace house. Opposite
were Paul and Lisa Chapman – and the story they ha
d to tell, in all its routine awfulness, explained the
brokenness of British politics.
They had lived and worked in the Northamptonshire
town of Irthlingborough for decades, until Paul started
to suffer tremors, shakes, sudden falls. He’d got
Parkinson’s. Once the fastest postie in town, he found
that his body would no longer do what his brain wanted.
3
In vogue
today is a
room-temperature
liberalism, defined
by blindness to those
people who don’t fit
Lisa gave up her cleaning job to care for him, and now
the couple had to rely on social security. But there
was no security, not six years into Osborne’s spending
cuts, which research showed hurt people with severe
disabilities 19 times worse than the average.
For the Chapmans, this meant undergoing an
assessment that claimed he was far healthier than
the reality – and being robbed of benefits that were
rightfully theirs. In front of me, Paul recalled what
he’d told Lisa: “You go round your mum’s. I’ll clear off
and I won’t take my tablets or my insulin. And it’ll be
over then. I won’t be here.”
What rings in my ears even now is the confusion in
his voice. Osborne is never asked about people such
as the Chapmans, or scientists’ research that shows
300,000 extra deaths were caused by his austerity
programme. Nor do I expect it to be a major feature of
his podcast – not when Balls himself went along with
so much of the austerity agenda.
In 2003, Campbell was a salesman for an illegal war
prosecuted on dodgy evidence that killed between
280,000 and 315,000 Iraqis, according to the estimates
of Brown University in the US. On the 20th anniversary
of the start of the Iraq war, he was interrogated on his
podcast not by a relative of one of those killed, or by a
George Osborne maimed soldier or by one of the million Britons who
and Ed Balls marched in opposition – but by Stewart, who after the
record a pilot invasion became a latter-day colonial administrator
episode of their in the shattered country. It is fair to say their
podcast conversation on the matter was less heated than it gets
L
PHOTOGRAPH: on the iniquities of Brexit.
ROB NICHOLSON/
PERSEPHONICA
ight entertainment is the great
launderer of political reputations. A
few years ago, TV quiz shows turned
Boris Johnson into the serial liar you
could have a pint with. Cookery and
bad dancing transformed Balls from an
economist into a household name.
This time round, the great redeemer
is the podcast boom, fuelled by venture capital. It is a
giant speech bubble, which middle-aged politicos will
use to rehabilitate their tarnished names. Perhaps the
public will learn to love Osborne.
A few months after I wrote about the Chapmans
came the vote for Brexit – and with it a newfound
desire by the political classes to listen to voters and
to arguments they had long ago tuned out. That era
is now over. In vogue today is a room-temperature
liberalism, defined by cosy agreement and willing
blindness to those unfortunate people who don’t fit.
But t hey haven’t gone away.
I spoke to the Chapmans this week. Paul’s
Parkinson’s has got much worse and their benefits
aren’t enough for the rising costs of food and fuel. Last
winter, they didn’t put on the central heating and Lisa
went over to her mum’s for a few hours of warmth a
day. Paul broke his little finger in December but was so
numb with cold that he only felt the pain in February.
As well as borrowing from relatives, they’ve started
selling off things: his model cars and fish tank, her CDs
and DVDs. Now they plan to sell that terrace house.
Lisa said: “We done it right; we both worked, we
bought our own place.” Who did she blame? “All of
them in Westminster: liars.” What did Paul make of
Osborne’s latest gig? “All those jobs are like awards for
him. He’s top of the pile.” What did that make him and
Lisa? “Oh, we’re bottom of the heap.”
These two need no lessons in the cruelty of politics.
Someone should give them a podcast.
 • The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
4 Opinion
Dementia rid
me of my fear.
I live for now
Wendy
Mitchell
I
used to be afraid of so much before my
dementia diagnosis. Animals of all kinds,
for example – the pure sight of them made
the hairs on the back of my neck stand to
attention, and my heart pound. My daughter
has a cat, Billy, that she used to have to put
outside if I visited; and I’d cross the road,
full of fear, if I saw a dog on the pavement,
even if it was with its owner and on a lead. But then
dementia came along.
Dementia and cancer have long been the two most
feared conditions – and for the over-65s, dementia
is the most feared. I was 58 when I was diagnosed
with young-onset dementia, just four years younger
than Fiona Phillips, who has revealed she has the
condition at the age of 62.
I hadn’t even reached the dizzy heights of retirement
age; I was an NHS non-clinical team leader. I was living
with the most feared condition and, yes, I thought it
was the end, because no clinician told me any different.
But then I met other people living with dementia – and
suddenly I saw in them that there was still a life to be
lived. Phillips herself has talked about still meeting up
with friends for coffee or going out for dinner.
My diagnosis taught me the importance of time:
how was I to know how many lucid days I had before
dementia took hold? So I began to appreciate the
present moment. When working, I was as guilty as
anyone of wishing for the weekend, wishing for the
next holiday, wishing for tomorrow. Now I realise the
irrelevance of all that. After all, the only real certainty
any of us have in this life is the very moment we’re
living in now.
No one knows what the next moment will bring. I
call these small yet powerful realisations “gifts from
dementia”. “Gifts” because I know perfectly well
that dementia would hate to think that it was giving
us anything nice. This gift, the appreciation of time,
took away fear of the future. I’ve no control over the
future, so why dwell on it? But in giving me the simple
pleasure of appreciating the moment, it also took away
my fear of everything else.
Animals: those terrible beasts that might bite
or scratch or bark viciously at me. Those were my
thoughts before dementia. Yet I was sitting in my
daughter’s loft one day, looking out over the orchard,
when Billy the cat sat down beside me. Without even
thinking, I ran my fingers through his soft, thick coat
and felt and heard his satisfied purr. Having always
avoided me in the past, he sensed I was no longer
afraid, and jumped up on my lap. But instead of
screaming, as I might have done before, I was silent. I
still remember that moment, when my fear of animals
I’m going to
abseil down
the Cheesegrater
for charity. Why?
Because I can
evaporated. We’ve since been joined by Merlin the
dog, who offers me his unconditional love. Animals
themselves live in the moment – and what a lot we
humans could learn from them.
Now I embrace all that I’m supposed to fear. Even
my girls have had to learn how to let go of their fear
of what will happen to me as a result of simply living
as I wish to: alone, with dementia. Fear is a great
hindrance to living. No longer am I caught up with
thoughts of avoidance in life. Instead I relish every
second of every day.
Sometimes I take this to extremes. I would never
have taken a leap of faith out of an aeroplane before
dementia; my head would have been too full of what-
ifs. Now, each year I do something wacky to raise
money. I started on the ground, walking on hot coals,
but then took to the air for a skydive, a paraglide and
even a wing walk – strapped to the top of a plane and
flying at 110mph. All I could do was smile. This year is
my final wacky challenge for charity. The Cheesegrater
 is one of the tallest buildings in London – and I’m
Wendy Mitchell going to abseil down it. Yes, me, living with dementia.
is the author of Why? Because I can – and because it’s there to be done.
One Last Thing: As for dying, well, that fear left me at diagnosis.
How to Live with After all, dying will release me from the ravages of
the End in Mind dementia. What’s to fear?
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian •

The long read

‘I was the
worst
investment
the Russians
ever made’
Ukraine and
the meaning
of home
By Victoria
Amelina
1986-2023


VICTORIA AMELINA, AN
AWARD-WINNING NOVELIST,
essayist and poet, died on 1 July
from injuries sustained in a Russian
missile attack on a restaurant in
eastern Ukraine. Generous, talented
and funny, Victoria also had an
extraordinary moral clarity and
commitment, underpinned by vast
reserves of unshowy courage. After
the full-scale Russian invasion
in February 2022, she trained as
a war crimes researcher, which
meant travelling to the frontlines,
and bearing witness to extreme
violence and suffering. A Ukrainian
homeland, where all citizens were
free, was so important to her that
she did not hesitate to give up her
own home to fight for it, taking
her son to safety outside Ukraine
then returning to follow the trail of
Russian destruction.
In her travels and work she
tried to counter horror with
hope, documenting atrocities but
also organising aid and cultural
activities, which she insisted were
as important to Ukraine’s fight as
physical sustenance. This is an essay
she wrote reflecting on her early
life in Lviv and the evolution of her
Ukrainian identity. May her memory
be an inspiration to Ukrainians and
those who share her ideals.
Emma Graham-Harrison, senior
international affairs correspondent
 • The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
6 The long read
A
fter the
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many believed that all
borders would disappear. I remember singing Wind
of Change by the German band the Scorpions at an
international summer camp near Pskov, then the
Soviet Union, in 1990, and feeling like the lyrics truly
spoke to me: “The world is closing in / and did you
ever think / that we could be so close, like brothers?”
Were we all “children of tomorrow”, dreaming and
believing in a better future? Where are we now?
The winds of change turned out to be an illusion,
and my belief in it only shows that, culturally and
mentally, Ukraine has always been a part of the
somewhat naive west. The difference is that the
Ukrainians were destined to face the truth eventually.
Some learned it from the stories of Ukrainian
dissidents like the poet Vasyl Stus, who was murdered
in a Russian penal colony five years before Wind
of Change was released. Others, like me, had to
experience the Russian world first-hand to realise
that the border between Russia and Ukraine is not a
formality, but essential for our survival.
It seems that we are all doomed to repeat our
mistakes if we don’t know where our home – the safe
space of trust – ends, and which of its borders need to
be especially well guarded.
I was born in western Ukraine in 1986, the year the
Chornobyl nuclear reactor exploded and the Soviet
Union began to crumble. Despite my birthplace and
the timing of my birth, I was educated to be Russian.
There was an entire system in place that aimed to
make me believe that Moscow, not Kyiv, was the
centre of my universe. I attended a Russian school,
performed in a school theatre named after the Russian
poet Alexander Pushkin and prayed in the Russian
Orthodox church. I even enjoyed a summer camp for
teenagers in Russia, and attended youth gatherings
at the Russian cultural centre in Lviv, where we sang
so-called Russian rock music, which was actually
more honest about the changes happening in Russia
than the naive compositions of the Scorpions.
When I was 15, I won a local competition and
was chosen to represent my home town, Lviv, at an
international Russian language contest in Moscow.
I was excited to visit the Russian capital. Moscow
felt like the centre of what I considered home. My
library was full of Russian classics, and even though
the Soviet Union had collapsed almost a decade
earlier, not much had changed in the Russian school I
attended, or on Russian TV, which my family had the
habit of watching. Additionally, while I didn’t even
have the money to travel around Ukraine, Russia was
happy to invest in my Russianisation.
At the contest in Moscow I met kids from all
those countries Russia would later try to invade or
assimilate: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova. The Russian
Federation invested a lot of money in raising children
like us from the “former Soviet republics” as Russians.
They probably invested more in us than they did in the
education of children in rural Russia: those who were
already conquered didn’t need to be tempted with
summer camps and excursions to Red Square.
Hopefully, I will have turned out to be one of the
worst investments the Russian Federation ever made.
In Moscow, a famous journalist from ORT, a top
Russian TV channel at the time, approached me for
an interview on the evening news. I was flattered, I felt
like a star. The journalist started with a polite question
about how I was enjoying the event and the Russian
capital, but quickly moved on to her real agenda. “How
oppressed do you feel as a Russian speaker in the west
of Ukraine? How dangerous is it to speak Russian on the
streets of your home town, Lviv?”
I gasped as I realised that I wasn’t a star at all; I was
just being used to manipulate millions of viewers. The
huge camera was watching me and a big, professional
microphone was in front of me for the first time in my
life. I was only 15 years old. But in that split second, I
had to figure out where the borders of my home were. I
wasn’t Russian, after all – I was a Ukrainian kid brought
to Moscow to reinforce certain Russian narratives.
I may have believed that Russia was a great country
with peace at its core, but I only felt that way because
of watching the very channel that was now trying to
exploit an inexperienced 15-year-old.
“After our complex history, it would only be natural
for Ukrainians to feel uncomfortable and react at times
to the Russian language,” I replied. “However, I don’t
experience any oppression. Maybe your information
is outdated? I am young, and there’s no such problem
among the younger generation.”
I doubt they aired this interview on the evening
news. Or perhaps they managed to edit it in a way
that suited their agenda. Now, as a Ukrainian writer,
I receive requests for interviews from various Russian
channels, but I decline them all.
I remembered this story in 2022, watching an
interview with an elderly man in Mariupol. He was
desperate, disoriented and disarmingly honest. “But
I believed in this Russian world, can you imagine? All
my life I believed we were brothers!” the poor man
exclaimed, surrounded by the ruins of his beloved
city. The man’s apartment building was in ruins and
the illusion of home, the space he perceived as his
motherland, the former Soviet Union where he was
born and lived his best years, had been crushed even
more brutally. The propaganda stopped working on him
only when the Russian bombs fell. The border between
independent Ukraine and the Russian Federation
‘I believed in this Russian world.
All my life I believed we were
brothers!’ the man said, amid
the ruins of his beloved city
arose in his mind as a crucial barrier, just like it did in
mine when I realised I had only been brought to festive
Moscow to lie about my home town in Ukraine, so that
the Russian viewers could hate it even more.
I think most people would now agree that a wall
between us and Russia is a good solution until Russian
society undergoes significant changes. A world where
every neighbour is a friend is a nice idea to sing about,
but where Russia is concerned, it is unfortunately
not so realistic.
It is tempting to believe in the simple, inspiring concept
of welcoming everyone as a friend and brother. But
does this approach actually work? In a very different
winter in 2019, I saw another collision between the
imaginary idyll and a harsher reality. As my family
and I prepared to celebrate Christmas in Boston,
Massachusetts, I found myself standing among a
forest of trees, promising my son that we would
choose the best one. Despite my lack of experience in
choosing Christmas trees (in Ukraine, we had always
used an old, artificial one), I regretted not looking up
some advice beforehand.
I needed to ask the seller for help selecting a tree, but
he seemed too busy with other customers and clearly
needed to sell all the trees, even the poor quality ones.
However, I knew what would get him to pay attention
to us. I simply mentioned that this would be our first
Christmas in the United States, which was true. And
the “Welcome to America” magic began. The man
immediately made us his priority and helped us find
the perfect tree. He seemed to be one of those true
Americans who believe that welcoming newcomers
is at the core of American values.
I knew of course that this value was shared by many
The restaurant in the US, but not everyone. After all, Donald Trump
destroyed was president. As I walked the streets of Cambridge,
by a Russian I always stopped to look at a picture of a child that
missile strike on had been attached to a church fence – one of those
Kramatorsk children who had been separated from their parents
on 27 June and detained at the border, and had not survived. The
REUTERS/OLEKSANDR only crime of the little girl in the picture was crossing
RATUSHNIAK the border from Mexico into the US with her parents,
who were only trying to give her a better life.
It was incomprehensible to me why it was so difficult
for Mexican migrants to cross into the US in 2019, yet
so easy for Russian soldiers to cross the border into
Ukraine in 2022.
One thing remains indisputable: humanity
constantly messes up with borders. Much like
adolescents unsure about their identity, we let the
wrong people in and keep the right ones out. We pay
too much attention to appearances, including not only
the colour of our skin, but the colour of our passports;
instead we could pay more attention to core values like
freedom, dignity and the rule of law, which we either
do or do not share. Yet some of us are easily tricked by
strangers, like I was when I admired Russia as a kid, or
we are too scared of them, like Americans clamouring
for a wall to keep Mexicans out. Why are we so wrong
in choosing who to trust? Perhaps it’s because we don’t
know how to trust each other in our own countries.
As a writer, I tend to think of home as the narrative
shared by its inhabitants. People and places come about
in stories: poets, playwrights, prophets and novelists
have all imagined the countries and cities we live in
now, and their stories have greatly affected us and our
relations with one another. But what story do we all fit
into? My answer is complicated and straightforward:
the only story we all can fit into is a true one.
The true history of Ukraine is complex, painful
and dramatic. For a long time, no book reflected my
family’s experience or explained why I didn’t inherit
the Ukrainian language from my grandparents. Their
decision to protect their kids (my parents) by raising
them to speak Russian was inexplicable to me as a
child. Growing up speaking Russian made me feel out
of place. So eventually, I had to write a novel about
families like mine. My home town Lviv was in the
heart of the “Bloodlands”, as the historian Timothy
Snyder calls the lands from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
I had to discover that the Soviet army killed thousands
of Ukrainians early on in the second world war. And
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian •
that around 100,000 Jewish citizens of Lviv perished
in the same period.
My family lived through the trauma of the
Holodomor, also called the Great Famine, which took
place from 1932-33, but my grandparents never talked
in detail about it. Silence creates cracks so deep that it
is hardly possible to feel at home. When stories about
the Holocaust or Holodomor are not fully revealed,
we’re bound not to trust each other. Who were you in
1933? The hungry one or the one taking all the food?
The one who shot Ukrainian activists in 1941, or the
one who searched for their loved one among the
decomposing bodies? The scared one watching from
the window when Jews were taken away or the one
who took them? The one who wrote to the KGB about
your neighbour or the one who helped Ukrainian
dissidents? There were silences instead of the much-
needed stories. And where there’s a lack of true stories,
there is a lack of trust. We are bound to believe the
propaganda and draw all the wrong borders again and
again, never feeling completely at home.
In Ukraine, everything changed in the first days of
December 2013, at the beginning of the Revolution
of Dignity, when protesters took to the streets after
President Yanukovych rejected closer ties with
Europe in favour of Moscow. After the police severely
beat students on Independence Square in Kyiv, it
became clear that this was a time to prevent Ukraine
from turning into an authoritarian state like Russia
or Belarus. Everyone who felt like a free Ukrainian
had to take the risk of heading to the Maidan. But
what if others didn’t have the courage to join the
demonstration? Then the few brave ones would be
powerless against police violence. To take to the streets
of Kyiv, we had to take the risk of trusting each other.
Eventually, up to half a million people showed up.
That’s when we knew we could count on each other.
Ukraine finally felt like home to me, too. Home isn’t
Half a million people came to the
protests at the Maidan. That’s
when we, as Ukrainians, knew
we could count on each other
Protesters a magical, perfect place, but a place where, if you are
in Maidan being beaten by the police, you can be sure that your
Independence neighbours will show up to take a stand for you.
Square in Kyiv The old silences didn’t disappear miraculously,
in 2014 but after 2013 we trusted each other enough to build
FABRICE ELSNER/ platforms and institutions that deal with our traumatic
SIPA/REX past as well. And after the Revolution of Dignity, there
was a new true story, in which the question “Who are
you?” was being answered by everyone every day in
2014. There was war at our doors, fighting continued in
the Donbas region, but our vision was as clear as ever.
In the spring and summer of 2014, I was sure a
full-scale Russian invasion had already begun, and
that the brutality would spread throughout Ukraine.
I packed my three-year-old son’s belongings into an
emergency backpack so we would be ready to hide in a
bomb shelter at any moment. At that time, the bombs
didn’t fall on us; Russia annexed Crimea and ruined the
lives of Ukrainians in Donetsk and Luhansk, but didn’t
go further in full force. The world didn’t react. So the
borders of my home were clear: they were Ukraine’s
borders. No one had our backs but us.
We had each other, and that was invaluable. But
what about the beautiful vision? If we couldn’t yet
achieve the perfect world where we all supported
one another, what about our cosy continent, Europe?
Those years of the initial Russian invasion, 2014-2015,
were a time when many Ukrainians felt betrayed not
only by Russia, but also by the west, for not coming to
our aid. We were Europeans under attack, but it was
mainly our problem.
In November 1956, the director of the Hungarian
news agency sent a message via telex to the world,
shortly before Russian artillery wrecked his office. It
read: “We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe.”
The Czech writer Milan Kundera started his 1984
essay The Tragedy of Central Europe with this
message. As one of the leading figures of the 1968
Prague Spring, Kundera understood what the brave
Hungarian had meant by dying for Europe. As a
Ukrainian writer in Kyiv in 2022, I can’t stop thinking
about Kundera, writing in exile after the Prague Spring
failed. We, Central Europeans, are ready to fight for
Europe, even if at times our love may be unrequited.
Europe didn’t come to Hungary’s rescue. Nor did it
come to the Czechs’ rescue, or the Ukrainians’ in 2014.
If being a Central European means being betrayed by
Europe, Ukraine is certainly a member of the club.
However, when Russia started the full-scale
invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Europe did take
in fleeing Ukrainians and accepted us unconditionally.
I was out of the country at the time of the invasion.
My flight from Egypt back to Ukraine was scheduled
for 7am on 24 February 2022. The flight got cancelled,
of course; Russia was bombing Ukrainian airports
from Kyiv to Ivano-Frankivsk. “Do you know what
happened?” the Egyptian official asked me as soon as
we entered the terminal. I didn’t reply for a moment,
so he kept repeating as if allowing me time to take it in:
“You cannot go to your country.”
That day, I bought overpriced tickets from Egypt

to Prague, where Milan Kundera had
fought for his home and Europe in 1968.
 • The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
8 The long read

At Hurghada airport, citizens of the European Union
checked in casually and headed to the security control
area; all Ukrainian citizens were asked to wait on one
side. We tried to explain that Ukrainians had been
able to travel to the European Union without visas for
several years. But the airline workers replied that that
didn’t matter now: Prague had to tell the Egyptian side
whether they were ready to let us into the country.
“And what if they won’t let us in?” my 10-year-old
son asked me quietly.
I didn’t know what to answer and just squeezed my
son’s hand.
Other Ukrainians and I waited for the decision from
Prague for about an hour, discussing rumours about a
Ukrainian man who wasn’t allowed to board his flight
to Germany earlier in the day. Then the verdict was
announced to us: “You can go.”
Even when we got to Prague airport, I wasn’t sure
what would happen. The Czech border officer glanced
at our passports and then looked at us. She was more
interested in the expressions on our faces than in
our passport details: maybe she was new at the job
and hadn’t yet seen people whose country was being
bombarded by the Russian Federation. I think she was
looking at us with compassion. Then she just stamped
our passports without asking any questions. I started
crying and couldn’t stop, and when my son asked
why I was crying, I replied:
“Because we are home.”
“But this is not Ukraine,” he argued.
“This is Europe,” I answered, as if this word
“Europe” should explain everything to my child.
We were falling, and our fellow Europeans were
ready to catch us. The limits of home may have just
expanded, I thought.
I travelled by train from Prague to Poland, and
on the third day of the invasion, finally crossed the
border back into Ukraine. At the Polish-Ukrainian
border, I witnessed indescribable desperation and
fear. Little kids were pulling heavy suitcases, their
frightened grandmas and mothers looking even
more disoriented than them. I heard screams in the
crowd as people were squeezed in the crush, and
the loud voice of the border guard trying to get the
refugees’ attention and prevent a tragedy. Yet all
these people were going to be accepted and even
welcomed into the EU. They might not have known it
at the time – cold, hungry, and fearful at the border –
but at that very moment the boundaries of their home,
Europe, were being expanded to include Ukraine.
Europe was home, and it proved to be a space where
we could count on each other, as Ukrainians counted
on each other at the Maidan in 2014.
We Ukrainians are well aware of the discussions
surrounding Europe’s acceptance of Ukrainian
refugees. While I share the concerns about racism
and Islamophobia, I believe that what happened
to Ukrainian refugees was more than just an act of
kindness. It was a change in perspective, a change
in the story of Europe, and ultimately a change in
the borders of what Ukrainians and other Europeans
consider their shared home. Ukrainians are now
fighting not just for Ukraine, but for Europe as well.
This may not be much help to refugees from Syria
or Sudan, unfortunately. But I believe that acts of
kindness towards one group of refugees can teach us
all, including Ukrainians, to be more kind to all other
people fleeing wars. We can sing about a utopian
brotherhood, or we can work diligently to expand the
limits of the fragile shared trust we have. Despite all
the obstacles, I still believe that the dream of a world
without borders should be our inspiration. We may
never fully realise this vision, but it can turn into a
strategy that changes reality for the better.
No one is obliged to take in a stranger or show them
love, yet it happens. This love becomes a true story that
changes all future stories, including those of refugees.
In June 2022, I arrived in Brussels and took a bus
from the airport to the city. I was headed to a meeting
at the European parliament to discuss accountability
for Russian war crimes. The bus was full of men in
suits, all clearly headed to European institutions as
well. However, I was perhaps the only one who noticed
the irony of the song that opened the bus playlist:
“I follow the Moskva, down to Gorky Park …” the
Scorpions frontman sang. The bureaucrats in their
We were falling, and our fellow expensive suits kept typing on their laptops, paying no
attention to the song and the story it conveyed. I knew
Europeans were ready to catch I didn’t fit into this story. But I knew that we came to
Brussels to write a new narrative for everyone, not to
us. The limits of home may have change some lousy playlist on an airport shuttle. •
just expanded, I thought This piece is adapted from an essay first published by the
International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of
Iowa under the title Expanding the Boundaries Of Home:
A Story for Us All
Above: People
fleeing the war
in Ukraine cross
into Poland in
March 2022;
right: a
memorial
service for
Amelina in
Kyiv this week
OMAR MARQUES/
GETTY; REUTERS/
ALINA SMUTKO

Victoria
Amelina
was a Ukrainian
novelist, essayist
and human
rights activist.
Her novels are
Dom’s Dream
Kingdom and
Fall Syndrome
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
Established 1906
Country diary
Porlock, Somerset
Half a finger deep and easily
stepped over, the little pool in the
meadow offers a glass-clear, pebbly
bowlful of water. It’s filled by a
tiny rivulet that trickles through a
runnel in the grass, the sides starred
with blue flowers of forget-me-not
and licked-yellow buttercups.
The Exmoor dialect name is a
“splat”; a small spring forming
persistent puddles. During the
recent weeks of hot, dry weather
this eye-shaped spill has been a
lifesaver for hedgehogs and the
other small mammals that come
here at night to drink.
A piece of stick has become
lodged against one side, so I
reach in and lift it out, triggering
a micro-pandemonium and
underwater plumes of red sand.
The stick is hollow – it’s a dead
thistle stem – and sheltering
inside it and below where it lay is a
community of freshwater shrimp
(Gammarus pulex).
These crustaceans are not true
shrimps, but an amphipod similar
to the sandhoppers found pinging
around on beaches. I gently replace
the stem and watch as a dozen
brownish creatures zoom and scoot,
twisting to reveal deep, flat bodies
propelled by a rippling fringe of legs.
Some are so small and transparent
as to be barely visible, while the
largest are almost a centimetre
long, big enough to see their long
antennae and the segments in their
curved bodies. This tendency to
move side-upwards has earned
them the names “scuds” and
“sideswimmers”.
The ones I saw were swimming
separately from each other,
perhaps a sign that they had not
yet begun to reproduce. When
they breed, the male catches a
female and carries her with him,
waiting for her to shed her skin.
When she does, they mate and then
he lets go, leaving her to incubate
the eggs in her brood pouch.
They eat dead and decaying
matter, which is why they clustered
around the stick. I notice a couple
are also nibbling a wild rabbit
dropping that has rolled into the
pool. Too much detritus would clog
the flow, reduce oxygenation and
pollute the stream, but a limited
amount supports life. It’s a fine
balance and one easily disturbed
by human intervention, well-
meaning or otherwise.
Sara Hudston
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•
Letters
The right questions to
ask on Bairstow v Carey
The debate on Jonny Bairstow’s
dismissal rages on (Testy cricket:
Rowdy scenes as England and
Australia vie for spirit of the Ashes,
3 July). The viewpoint on this is
simple, provided one asks the right
questions. First, should Australia
have withdrawn the appeal? Yes
– Bairstow (like the square leg
umpire), clearly thought that it was
the end of the over, treated the ball
as dead and was not attempting to
take a run or gain any advantage;
he placed his foot back in the
crease and was going to have a
chat with Stokes.
Second, does England have a
right to complain that Australia
didn’t withdraw the appeal? No –
Bairstow was out according to the
rules and according to the umpire;
it was a basic error for which
Bairstow cannot expect leniency
or generosity. Alex Carey threw the
ball before Bairstow left the crease,
and everyone concerned (such as
Stuart Broad, who didn’t walk in
2013 when he clearly edged the ball
and Brendon McCullum, who ran
out Muttiah Muralitharan in 2006
in very similar circumstances) has
form for doggedly relying on the
rules of cricket over the spirit.
Third, does Australia have the
right to complain that England is
complaining? No – Australia is a
repeat offender when it comes to
The public can power Britain to net zero
You report that the UK government
has made almost no progress on its
climate plans and is in danger of not
delivering on its world-leading net
zero plans (Government adviser
condemns UK for failed ‘leadership’
over net zero, 28 June).
We offer a small ray of hope. It’s
us. Despite a disappointing increase
in negative coverage about net zero,
our world-leading targets still enjoy
widespread public support. The UK
public consistently ranks climate
change and the environment in the
top four concerns facing the country.
The Climate Change Committee
(CCC) has recognised this – it talks
about the need to “empower
and inform households and
Labour U-turn on DfID would be a mistake
Leaving development and aid
spending within the Foreign Office
(Keir Starmer considers ditching
Labour pledge to reinstate DfID,
theguardian.com, 28 June) would
be a mistake that would act as
a drag on poverty reduction, be
counterproductive for foreign
policy and limit value for money
both the rules and spirit of cricket
(Trevor Chappell’s underarm
ball, Sandpapergate, sledging
mercilessly) and they whinge every
bit as much as the next team when
the spirit of cricket is not observed
(Broad was booed throughout
the 2013-14 Ashes series for not
walking; and the Bodyline tour,
which was within the rules at the
time, still provokes rancour 90
years later). Finally, is this good for
cricket? Undoubtedly. What a Test
match, and what a series so far.
Ali Naseem Bajwa KC
London
• In the furore about Jonny
Bairstow’s stumping, it’s worth
remembering who started it. In the
Oval Test match of 1882, WG Grace
ran out the Australian batsman
Sammy Jones, who had innocently
left his crease to pat down a divot,
believing that the ball was dead.
Grace refused to recall him, saying
it would teach him a lesson.
Afterwards, the Australian fast
bowler Fred Spofforth furiously
stormed into the England dressing
room, called Grace a bloody cheat
and warned that the runout would
cost England the match. It did
too, by seven runs, with Spofforth
taking seven for 44, all prompting
the famous obituary about the
Ashes of English cricket. Grace, of
communities to make low
carbon choices” and calls for the
government to publish its long-
overdue public engagement strategy.
Last week’s CCC report mentions
engagement or public engagement
75 times, compared with just once in
the CCC’s 2018 progress report.
Delivering on our net zero
ambitions will mean changes in all
of our lives and our communities,
and it is vital that people feel
involved in these changes – or we
will not succeed. It is clear from this
latest CCC report that we need to
hold politicians’ feet to the fire on
delivering these ambitious goals.
Rachael Orr
CEO, Climate Outreach
from the aid budget. The world is
seeing a rise in absolute poverty and
inequality, so a department with
expertise in fighting both is needed.
Low-income countries are
distrustful of a global economic
system that is rigged against
them, so a dedicated development
department would be a powerful
 guardian.letters@theguardian.com
 @guardianletters
course, is now remembered not
only with a full-length portrait and
a bust at Lord’s, but also has the
main gates named after him.
Stephen Bates
Deal, Kent
• Jonathan Liew appears to suggest
that what once was described as
gentlemanly behaviour is outdated
(Playing with virtue: Shared
values in the game deserve more
than pointless term like ‘spirit of
cricket’, 4 July). But two sports
which interest me most, namely
cricket and cycling, appeal largely
because of their sportsmanlike
traditions that contrast so vividly
with the appalling spirit in which
sports such as football are “played”.
Until the laws of the game
changed, the Mankad runout was
widely seen as unsporting, when
the gentlemanly response was for
the bowler to warn the offending
batsman once before breaking the
stumps. There are many “spirit
of cycling” happenings, the most
recent being in last year’s Tour de
France involving the riders who
finished first and second, Tadej
Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard.
On this occasion when the two
were out on their own and Pogačar
crashed, his rival looked behind
and immediately slowed down to
allow the unfortunate Pogačar to
catch up. It was heartwarming to
see two young riders maintaining
the traditions of cycling.
Such things are the essence of
civilised sporting behaviour and
should be applauded, not ridiculed.
Roger Wilkinson
Leasgill, Cumbria
Apple of my ear?
Wendy Ritson (Letters, 28 June),
writing of hearing aids, comments
that while glasses can make one
appear clever, “pushing dangling
bits of wire into one’s ears is seen to
have the opposite effect”, with the
result that people are embarrassed
to wear them. Yet millions of people
a day shove a pair of earbuds into
their ears, wireless or wired, to
listen to music, podcasts, football
etc, with no hint of embarrassment.
Maybe the manufacturers of
hearing aids need to up their game
on the design front and collaborate
with the likes of Apple to modernise
the look of their products.
Hilary Milburn
Wakefield, West Yorkshire
signal that a new government’s
commitment to them reaches
beyond national self-interest.
Finally, the record of aid spending
in current years – not least on Home
Office costs – demonstrates how aid
can be poorly spent when poverty
reduction is deprioritised and it is
treated as a slush fund to cover holes
in other departments’ budgets.
Katy Chakrabortty
Head of policy & advocacy, Oxfam GB
9
Corrections and
clarifications
• An opinion piece about
companies using injunctions
against climate activists said that
there is no legal aid in such cases.
To clarify: while legal aid is not
available to contest the granting
of an injunction, it is available
where breach of the injunction is
alleged and an order of committal
is applied for (Punishment without
trial? This is a war on political
dissent, 29 June, Journal, p1).
Editorial complaints and corrections can be sent to
guardian.readers@theguardian.com or The readers’
editor, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU.
You can also leave a voicemail on 020 3353 4736
The Grateful Dead’s
festival marathon
Pass notes’ look at marathon gigs
(29 June) reported that the Grateful
Dead “supposedly played for five
hours at the Bickershaw festival
in Wigan in 1973”. The recording
of the music played that evening
(and some stage banter) lasts just
shy of four hours, but the band was
on stage, except for a 20-minute
break, for five hours. It was in May
1972 and it was utterly spellbinding.
The audience in Rotterdam were
treated to a 44-minute version
of Dark Star four days later.
Chris Hardman
Manchester
• Reading John Crace’s sketch
(Rats lash out from Tories’ sinking
ship even as they face extinction,
4 July), I was reminded of a
favourite saying of my late father:
“If you put all of their brains in
a tin, you still wouldn’t have
enough to make a rattle.”
Gordon Blunt
Market Harborough, Leicestershire
• I enjoyed Leila Latif’s
wonderfully scathing review of
The Idol (Sky Atlantic), which she
described as “one of the worst
shows ever made” (G2, 4 July).
But I am baffled by her generosity
in awarding it one star out of
five. How dire does a show have
to be to get nul points?
Mike Pender
Cardiff
• Steve Barclay, who blamed an
ageing population, among other
things, for the state of the NHS in an
interview with Sky News, should
remember that it is the work of this
ageing population that paid off the
debt left by the second world war.
Jane Teverson
Belchamp Walter, Essex
• It wasn’t the Blair government
that introduced PFI to the NHS
(Letters, 5 July). The Major
government introduced it in 1992.
Daniel O’Leary
Sawston, Cambridgeshire

10
Mavis Cheek
Author admired for her
comic novels that focused
on relationships and the
general absurdities of life
T
he author Mavis
Cheek, who has
died aged 75,
wrote a series
of comic novels
that cast an acute
eye on middle-
class marriage
and relationships and marked
her out as one of the wittiest
commentators of her generation.
She began writing journalism
and short stories in the 1980s and
published her first novel after an
agent advised her that she was
funny and should write as she
spoke. Pause Between Acts was
published in 1988, winning the
She/John Menzies prize for a first
novel, and 14 books followed.
At first she struggled to find her
• The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023
Obituaries
niche: “When I started writing funny
books, the bookshelves in shops had
no category for me. They put me
in Romance, and frankly, my books
were as close to Romance as Rudolph
Nureyev was to arc welding.”
Her novels celebrate her affection
for the absurd alongside the tragic-
comedic elements often found in
domestic relationships – usually
ones that disappointed. Amenable
Women (2008) tells how a woman,
freed from her husband by a fatal
balloon incident, somewhat
bizarrely and triumphantly goes
on to become deeply involved with
the life of Anne of Cleves.
In Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (1993),
the protagonist is an overweight,
reclusive, romantic novelist who is
asked to make her books sexier in
order to sell; Mavis’s lampooning
of the cut-throat literary world is
apt and cruelly funny. Mrs Fytton’s
Country Life (summarised in one
review as “jokes, revenge, an errant
husband coming back to roost”)
appeared in 2000, followed by
Aunt Margaret’s Lover (2003), the
research for which involved Mavis
meeting 30 men in six weeks for
champagne dates at the Ritz.
When Mavis began writing
The Sex Life of My Aunt (2002),
there was an idea it could become
an autobiography, but since it
“declined into self-pity”, the
book became her 10th novel. Dilly
Cheek felt that
she had been
‘designated
thick by a very
silly education
system’. Right,
Aunt Margaret’s
Lover, 2003,
Amenable
Women, 2008,
and her last book,
The Lovers of
Pound Hill, 2011
KAREN ROBINSON/
THE OBSERVER
manages to climb up the social
ladder out of poverty into the
perfect life of soft furnishings and
status only to sabotage it all for the
love of a man she meets on a train.
This was followed by Patrick
Parker’s Progress (2004) and
Yesterday’s Houses (2007), another
novel that drew on her own
experiences. Mavis wrote about
what she knew: “Anyone who
knows me well could point to the
bits that are me,” she once said.
Her last novel, The Lovers of
Pound Hill, appeared in 2011, and
three of her books were reissued in
2019. “It’s an art, getting the comic
timing right on the page,” she said
to me. “You don’t just knock it out.
I’m quite sure that if women writers
had been promoted like some of
their male counterparts, we’d have
more women’s humorous writing
out there. How much we all long to
pick up a book and laugh our socks
off. Women can do that for you: as
in real life, so on the page.”
I first met Mavis at the Chelsea
Arts Club in London in the late 90s.
The venue was her suggestion.
I was wondering if one of her
novels might be available for being
optioned. Once we established
that I had no immediate plans (or
resources) for a full-scale film,
Mavis told me Dawn French’s
people had been in touch and we let
the subject lie. As did they. But she
and I did become friends.
Every year she would offer a
different but humorous excuse as
to exactly why she could not attend
my Christmas party – written neatly
on cards purchased from her many
trips to art galleries. But we met
on other occasions. Upstairs in the
bar at Waterstones, upstairs in the
In Mavis’s French House in Soho and more
childhood
world the
recently in her restful garden, full
of horticultural splendour provided
by her daughter, Bella.
view was
‘women had
She was born Mavis Wilson, in
Wimbledon, south-west London,
and brought up with her sister
strength
and men
by their mother, Hilda (nee
Lonsdale), who took factory work
to make ends meet, while their
could be
bad for you’
grandmother looked after them.
Apart from when her father, John,
made a fleeting appearance when
she was seven, Mavis’s world
Thursday 6 July 2023 The Guardian
revolved around women. “It was
perceived that women had strength
and men could be bad for you,” she
said in an interview in 2006.
She went to a secondary modern
school, Whatley Avenue in Raynes
Park, and joined the local Young
Communist League, where at the
age of 16 she met Chris Cheek,
whom she married at 21 and
divorced a few years later. She
formed a bond, however, with her
mother-in-law, who encouraged
Mavis’s interest in art and literature.
After leaving school aged
16 without any significant
qualifications, Mavis took a job as
a receptionist at the art publishers
and gallery Editions Alecto, where
she dealt with artists including
David Hockney. It was there she
began composing short stories and
poetry on a typewriter, in between
answering the phone and greeting
people with noted enthusiasm.
This was 1964, and Mavis enjoyed
the latest fashion of miniskirts and
multicoloured tights. Colleagues
remember her sparkly blue eyes,
passion for art and charisma. She
met and lived for 15 years with the
artist Basil Beattie, with whom she
had her daughter. During this time,
Mavis enrolled at Hillcroft College
for Women in Surbiton, where
she took a general arts degree,
and joined a local writer’s circle in
Richmond. After the publication
of Pause Between Acts and the
separation from Basil in 1990 she
continued writing novels while
looking after Bella.
In 2018 she and I taught a
comedy novel course at Moniack
Mhor, Scotland’s national writing
centre in the Highlands, called,
rather ambitiously, “Finding
your funny bone”. Mavis easily
did all the heavy lifting with plot,
character and structure, while I
tackled the humour workshop
element with lots of props. The
students fought over how many
one-on-one tutorials they could
get with Mavis, on the basis of her
quick analysis of text and ways to
problem-solve.
This passion for mentorship and
ease with students – she also taught
creative writing to prisoners at
Holloway in London and Erlestoke
in Wiltshire – was influenced by her
own sense of being “overlooked”
and “designated thick by a very
silly education system”.
From 2010, during the time she
lived in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, Mavis
spent several years working for the
Marlborough literature festival,
with the intention of bringing fine
authors, and fewer celebrities,
to new audiences. In 2020 Mavis
received the recognition award by
Comedy Women in Print, which
acknowledges witty women writers
who have contributed significantly
during their lifetime.
She is survived by Bella and her
sister Maggie.
Helen Lederer
Mavis Mary Cheek, novelist, born
25 February 1948; died 14 June 2023
•
 obituaries@theguardian.com
 @guardianobits
Menahem Pressler
Pianist, academic and
teacher who co-founded
the Beaux Arts Trio
F
or more than five
decades the name
of Menahem
Pressler, who has
died aged 99, was
synonymous with
that of the Beaux
Arts Trio, of which
he was a founder member in 1955.
Other players came and went, but
Pressler alone remained as the
linchpin of the ensemble until it
was finally dissolved in 2008.
Over that period it gave countless
performances and recorded the
entire standard repertory of the
piano trio. Then, at the age of 85,
Pressler returned to the works
for solo piano and for piano and
orchestra that he had already begun
to record in the early 1950s.
His belated debut with the Berlin
Philharmonic, at the age of 90,
playing Mozart’s G major Concerto,
No 17, was with Semyon Bychkov in
January 2014. Simon Rattle, present
at the concert, was so moved that
he arranged for Pressler to appear
under his own baton in Mozart’s A
major Concerto, No 23, in the same
orchestra’s New Year’s Eve concert
on 31 December that year.
With the other founder members
of the Beaux Arts, the violinist
Daniel Guilet and the cellist Bernard
Greenhouse, he raised the profile
of the piano trio to new heights.
“We wanted to create a particular
sound,” he later said, and sonic
beauty and technical perfection
were hallmarks of their playing.
Pressler’s sense of joie de vivre
provided further inspiration. “We
were on a quest for the bluebird of
happiness,” he said: seeking to find
beauty and enjoyment in music was
central to their philosophy. As both
The Beaux Arts Trio performing in Cologne, 2004. From left: Daniel Hope
(violin), Pressler (piano) and Antonio Meneses (violoncello) ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY
ensemble and solo pianist, Pressler
cultivated a style of extreme
sensitivity, with subtle phrasing,
articulation and voicing all serving
to communicate his joy in music.
Pressler radiated a sense of
serenity: an appreciation of what
he regarded as a blessed life. This
despite a harrowing event in his
earlier years, when he and his
family were persecuted by thugs
of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) on
Kristallnacht in November 1938.
Inside the family shop in the city
of his birth, Magdeburg, they could
hear the sounds of banging in the
street before the perpetrators broke
in. Despite the terror experienced
by the 14-year-old, he remained of
the opinion that “not all Germans
were bad”: not the SA officers
who later came to the aid of his
brother when he fell off his bicycle
and broke his leg, nor his own
piano teacher, a church organist
by the name of Kitzel. The latter
continued to teach him in secret,
despite the danger to himself.
The family fled Germany the
following year, first making for
Trieste (where the boy received a
package from Kitzel containing the
music of Debussy’s Reflets dans
l’Eau) and then to Haifa, Israel.
His parents, brother, Leo, and
sister, Selma, arrived safely, but his
grandparents, uncles and aunts all
perished in concentration camps.
Despite the
terror he lived
through on Kristallnacht,
he remained of the
opinion that ‘not all
Germans were bad’
The trauma of the persecution
caused a life-threatening eating
disorder from which he recovered
by taking inspiration from
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A flat,
Op 110, whose idealism gave him
the strength to continue.
Changing his name from Max
Jacob to Menahem, which means
“comforter” or “consoler”, he
appeared at the age of 16 with the
Palestine Symphony Orchestra
(now the Israel Philharmonic
Orchestra), but in 1946 left Israel
for the US, where he won an
international piano competition
in San Francisco. A year later came
his Carnegie Hall debut, at which
he played, to considerable acclaim,
Schumann’s Piano Concerto
with Eugene Ormandy and the
Philadelphia Orchestra. He then
toured North America and Europe
for a number of years.
The debut of the Beaux Arts Trio
came in 1955 at the Berkshire music
festival in Lenox, Massachusetts.
In the same year Pressler began
teaching at Indiana University,
Bloomington, which he continued
to do after the dissolution of the trio.
In the US he rubbed shoulders
with many distinguished exiles,
among them Thomas Mann, Arnold
Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Oskar
Kokoschka, Artur Schnabel and the
film composer Franz Waxman, who
accommodated him in Los Angeles.
As he later recalled in an
interview with the Guardian, he
was also invited to play in the house
of Alma Mahler, the composer’s
widow celebrated for her colourful
lifestyle. “It was extremely hot,
and I said to her, ‘Mrs Mahler, may
I take my jacket off ?’ She said, ‘Mr
Pressler, as far as I’m concerned,
you can undress completely.’”
Greenhouse was succeeded,
after 32 years as the trio’s cellist,
by Peter Wiley and then Antonio
Meneses, while Guilet was replaced
by, in turn, Isidore Cohen, Ida
Kavafian, Young Uck Kim and Daniel
Hope. The ensemble, in its various
incarnations, appeared not only in
the standard international concert
halls but also in prestigious chamber
music series, including those at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York. In addition to the wide-
ranging catalogue of classic piano
trios they performed, the ensemble
occasionally tackled works by
modernists such as Charles Ives.
Works were also written for them
by Ned Rorem, George Rochberg
and David N Baker.
Pressler was married to Sara
Scherchen from 1949 until her
death in 2014, and they had two
children, Amittai and Edna.
In 2016, following the death
of Lord (George) Weidenfeld, his
widow, Annabelle Whitestone, and
Pressler began a relationship which
continued until his death. She and
his children survive him.
Barry Millington
Menahem (born Max Jacob)
Pressler, pianist, born 16 December
1923; died 6 May 2023
11
Birthdays
Vladimir Ashkenazy, pianist
and conductor, 86; Sir Michael
Boyd, former artistic director,
Royal Shakespeare Company,
68; George W Bush, former US
president, 77; Prof Sir Gordon
Conway, agricultural ecologist,
85; Lady (Caroline) Cox, founder,
Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust, 86;
Prof David Crystal, linguist, 82;
The Dalai Lama, spiritual leader
of Tibet, 88; Mark Gasser, concert
pianist, 51; Paul Girvan, DUP
MP, 60; Geraldine James, actor,
73; Tony Lewis, cricketer and
broadcaster, 85; John Makepeace,
furniture designer and maker, 84;
Anthony Marwood, violinist, 58;
Kate Nash, singer and songwriter,
36; Lady (Mary) Peters, former
Olympic athlete, 84; Chris Philp,
Conservative MP and Home Office
minister, 47; Sir Jonathon Porritt,
environmentalist and writer,
73; Lord (Charles) Powell of
Bayswater, diplomat and political
adviser, 82; Geoffrey Rush, actor,
72; Jennifer Saunders, comedian,
actor and writer, 65; Claude-
Michel Schönberg, composer, 79;
Tamara Sinyavskaya, operatic
mezzo-soprano, 80; Sylvester
Stallone, actor and director, 77;
Dame Julia Unwin, former chief
executive, Joseph Rowntree
Foundation, 67; William Wall,
novelist and poet, 68.
Letter
Jim Brown
Until his death at the age of 87,
the NFL star Jim Brown (obituary,
3 July) was the last survivor of the
four people portrayed in One Night
in Miami, outliving Malcolm X, Sam
Cooke and Muhammad Ali. Regina
King’s film, released in 2020, is
set in 1964, immediately after the
victory of Ali (then Cassius Clay)
over Sonny Liston for the world
heavyweight championship.
Coincidentally, 10 years later
Brown was at the ringside in Zaire
for the Rumble in the Jungle,
where Ali regained his title against
George Foreman, as part of the
four-man commentary team
comprising himself, David Frost,
Joe Frazier and Bob Sheridan.
Despite initially expecting Ali to
lose (virtually every expert did), as
the fight went on he realised that
Ali’s “rope-a-dope” strategy was
likely to lead to victory, expressing
his indignation only midway
through the bout, complaining
that “Ali hit Foreman with
everything and he winked at me!”
Tom Stubbs
Reread our obituaries of
the actor Julian Sands and
the former head of the civil
service Lord Kerslake
theguardian.com/
obituaries
 • The Guardian Thursday 6 July 2023

12 Puzzles

Yesterday’s Killer sudoku Codeword

solutions
Easy Each letter of the alphabet makes at least one appearance in the grid,
and is represented by the same number wherever it appears. The letters
Killer sudoku The normal rules of decoded should help you to identify other letters and words in the grid.
Easy Sudoku apply: fill each
row, column and 3x3
box with all the numbers
from 1 to 9. In addition,
the digits in each inner
shape (marked by dots)
must add up to the
number in the top corner
of that box. No digit can
be repeated within an
inner shape.

Medium

Medium

Codeword

Cryptic crossword Guardian cryptic crossword No 29,115 set by Picaroon

Solution No. 29,114
I PECAC N I PPL E
A U I I O O 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Across Down
BALDR I C STR I PES 1 American sailor circling shore, 1 Little girl following Jack’s elder
A L A E A T E E sister (6)
CHAP T ERANDVER S E by the way (7)
K D E O A T 5 Drunken rugby player, mostly 2 Thugs picked up Elizabethan
H A I R S N OW P L O U G H 9 10 stylishly dressed (7) fashion items (6)
A A A I E E P E
NANOS E COND ORA L 9 Old pugilist from Britain and a 3 Tendency to be nosy about
D T T G A I figure from Spain (5) uninhibited model (10)
EARTHSHAT T ER I NG
R E E O O N S H 10 People in a party of left-wing 4 Clean vessel boarded by new
S E CONDO P A T R I OT 11 12 English radicals initially leader (5)
T I C O O N
POT A SH THOUGH switching sides (9) 5 Economist who wrote a report the
13 11 Expressionist composer’s chosen night before cracking game (9)
new pupil of his (10) 6 Some meat sandwiches left for a
14 15 12 Case of tequila? Cheers and bunch of zealots (4)
cheerio! (2-2) 7 What a day! To start with, this
16 17 14 It detects law-breaking beer fans, guy made a beastly noise (8)
full of energy on drug (5,6) 8 Perhaps islander’s reason for not
18 18 Fashion designer with winning staging play (8)
clothing male modelled in 13 Drink from top composer not
19 20 finishing round (10)
advance (7,4)
21 Ship — and what one may carry 15 Mythic figures from Greece need
21 22 23
leaving Cuba’s capital (4) muse, I suspect (9)
22 Home rule divides party giving 16 Waste shilling on a pair of
24
offence (10) queens? (8)
25 Democrat cast a ballot in English 17 Gallons swallowed in George’s
25 26
city with loyalty (9) house — might this result? (8)
26 Some shenanigans turning silly (5) 19 Asian leader toppled Asian
27 Colour’s maintained on huge leader? Commotion follows! (6)
screen (7) 20 A European supplier of oil
27 28
28 Item destined for bathroom old needing treatment (6)
Stuck? For help call 0906 200 83 83.
Calls cost £1.10 per minute, plus your men put in lounge (3,4) 23 Liar shocked about year one’s
phone company’s access charge. spent in Doha (5)
Service supplied by ATS.
Call 0330 333 6946 for customer
24 Discharging debts, inclined to
service (charged at standard rate). work for boss (4)
Want more? Get access to more than
4,000 puzzles at theguardian.com/
crossword. To buy puzzle books, visit
guardianbookshop.com or call
0330 333 6846.*
 AI is here
Will it lead to disaster?

Joel Snape
Thursday 06/07/23

I taught myself to
make friends –
and you can too
page 3

Wayne Sleep at 75
The triumphs, the
gossip, the rumours,
the friendships …
page 8
 •

3
Pass notes
The Guardian
Thursday 6 July 2023

Joel
Snape
I’m no natural, but The cinema is
a place for
I’ve taught myself to escape, not for
make friends magic tricks

H
ow do you make friends? It’s a simple question Cinemas are getting a bit smug,
with a terrifying edge to it, the unspoken
assumption being that if you start to tease your
technique apart, you might realise that you don’t
aren’t they? Hollywood always has
been – hosting half a dozen lavish
awards ceremonies a year, making
№ 4,581
actually have one. What if every friend you’ve ever
made was just luck, happenstance, right-place-
right-time? What if overthinking it ruins your ability to actually do
a steady stream of love letters
to itself, paving an entire street
with names such as Kermit the
The Great Stag Ban
it, like public speaking or tightrope walking? What if friends are a Frog and Hoot Gibson (once a big Age: Recent.
non-renewable resource? name in cowboy films, to save you Appearance: An abandoned, vomit-stained
I ask myself these questions every so often because, like many Googling) – but now it’s the turn of mankini fluttering uselessly in the breeze.
men, I’m not a natural at making friends. In my teens, I mostly the modern multiplex, reinvented Woy-oy! Shh! They’ll hear you!
stuck with the chums I’d bonded with while painting tiny figurines in ads and ident film sequences as Who? The good people of Ghent, that’s who.
at school; at university, the new ones came from juggling and a sort of hallowed, liminal space of They don’t take too kindly to your sort.
jiujitsu clubs. In my 20s, additions to my social circle came mostly infinite possibilities. My sort? Are you profiling me? No. But, that
from external pressure: one of my existing pals would squeeze me “We come to this place … to be said, I can see that you are visibly drunk,
together with other acquaintances over a long enough timeline for reborn,” murmurs Nicole Kidman, hoarse from shouting and wearing a T-shirt
awkward conversations to fossilise into friendships. And so it went. staring beatifically up at a slow-mo reading “LADZ BOOZE BONANZA 23.” You’re
But at some point, I realised that I had to get better at it. This scene from Wonder Woman in an on your way to a stag weekend, aren’t you?
happened long before any lockdowns kicked in: working freelance ad for the popular US chain AMC. Maybe. Well, just stay away from Ghent, OK?
and from home a lot means there’s no Elsewhere, there’s endless talk You’re banned.
self-replenishing pool of pub pals to draw of surrendering yourself to the Banned? Almost. The city has long been
on. So I tried, and if you’re one of the wonder and illusion of cinema, blighted by beer bikes – huge vehicles where
sizeable chunk of men who report having with the Odeon nudging the whole up to 20 people drink 50 litres of beer while
no close friends, I’ve got some advice. thing to its natural conclusion by pedalling around listening to deafening
First, cast aside any shame you have having a fully behatted magician in music. The council is considering a ban due
about the whole business. When you’re its marketing. As far as I can work to the growing number of complaints.
a child, making friends is simple. You out, he’s advertising comfy seats. Beer bikes sound like a laugh, though! Not
sit next to someone at school – or you’re My problem with all this is that for everyone else. “The added value of beer
hauled around to their house by your it’s so far removed from the actual bicycles for Ghent is limited and bystanders
parents – and you talk to them about experience of going to the cinema: more often experience nuisance than
a rock you’ve found or hit them with a the anxiety about getting a good pleasure,” said the city’s tourism councillor.
foam bat, and that’s it: pals. You can still seat, the irritation when someone Whatever! We were going to Galway anyway.
do this as a grownup, but it takes some in front of you breaks out a packet Some say it’s the new Vegas for stags. They’ll
bravery, or at least a willingness to say of crisps, the old fight-or-flight love us there! I’m not so sure they will if the
yes to things more often. Ask other men response kicking in when you see popular pub Tigh Neachtain is anything to go
to the cinema! See if your favourite workmate fancies a non-work the flash of a phone screen mid- by. The management announced this week
coffee! One of my friends traces a decade’s worth of bi-monthly pub show. Tellingly, Kidman is alone it was banning stag and hen parties “due to
catchups to a neighbour who popped a note through his door saying in a cavernous theatre during her complete lack of space (and our locals)”.
he was organising a meet up for the men of the street. ode to its ethereal charms. Were Doesn’t matter. We’ll go to Amsterdam
If that’s too daunting, ease yourself in via social media. These she sitting behind a gang of chatty instead! They don’t want you, either.
days I think nothing of saying: “Well, I’m in London today, and I teenagers, wondering whether The city has launched an advertising
know we’ve never actually seen each other in life, but … pint?” to to say something, she’d look a lot campaign designed to keep British stags
people who’ve made me laugh on the internet. There are always less calm. away. Google “Stag weekend Amsterdam”
going to be rejections, but that’s all part of the process: it’s like being My proposed solution for and you’ll find yourself overwhelmed by lots
a pickup artist, but 1,000% less creepy. cinemas is simple: lean into what of unfriendly ads.
Also – and please don’t take this the wrong way – it’s worth you’re good at. “Cinemas: great for Weyyyy Edinburgh? Nope. Members of
considering that you might not be the best at talking to people. For when you simply can’t face another the Edinburgh Old Town Association have
instance, if you’re already mentally telling me I’m wrong about day at the trampoline park,” maybe. proposed something similar, saying: “Some
everything, please stick with me long enough for me to admit that Or get Florence Pugh or someone types of tourist are better for the city.”
– about every five or six years – I realise that something I’ve been similar to do the nuclear option: This is extremely sexist of all these places.
blithely wandering through life doing was completely misguided. “Come to the cinema: the one place No, it isn’t. A lot of these places also want to
Only half-listening while you wait for your own turn to speak? you absolutely aren’t allowed to ban hen nights, presumably because they’re
Turns out people hate that! Steamrolling every conversation with look at work emails for at least two fed up with trying to recycle thousands of
your own precis of the topic? Not popular! Luckily, there are entire hours.” Honestly, that one does feel flammable sashes and inflatable penises.
books about how to be better at talking to people, and some of them a bit like magic: no top hat required. But this is my right as a stag! It’s not. As soon
COVER: ILLUSTRATION: LEON EDLER/THE GUARDIAN

are written by FBI negotiators or prison guards so you get to feel as you suggested a weekend abroad for your
like Jack Reacher when you’re reading them. Think of befriending stag, 75% of your friends didn’t want to go.
people as a skill – there’s no shame in working on it. It’s an imposition. It’s expensive. It’s one
Finally, and maybe counterintuitively, don’t be afraid to lose bad thing to follow the worst impulses of their
friends. Almost as serious as having no friends is not having any fifth-best friend for three hours, but to spend
who you feel you can confide in. And if your regular meet-ups are an entire weekend trying to claw back a
full of people you would never consult about a parenting problem semblance of your lost youth? Awful.
or a vague feeling of existential dread, it’s probably time for a cull. You’re boring. OK, fine. Let’s go to Riga
Prune them out and get on with making some new ones. Or drop a instead, because I know a place that lets you
WhatsApp to an old one, because the best thing about male friends get hammered and unload a Kalashnikov
is that most of them are delighted to be contacted out of the blue inside a disused warehouse for about €50.
after half a decade. In fact, if any of mine are reading this … pint? Do say: “The foreign stag weekend is dying.”
Don’t say: “I guess we’ll all just have to get
obnoxiously drunk at home instead.”

4 The Guardian
Cancer cured, climate
crisis halted – welcome
to the AI utopia
Artificial intelligence has the power
to solve some of humanity’s most
intractable problems. Five experts
tell Steve Rose how it could help
the world thrive. Overleaf: how it
could all go horribly wrong
‘More intelligence will lead
to better everything’
In 1999, I predicted that computers
would pass the Turing test
[and be indistinguishable from
human beings] by 2029. Stanford
university found that alarming,
and organised an international
conference – experts came from all
over the world. They mostly agreed
that it would happen, but not in 30
years – in 100 years. This poll has
been taken every year since 1999.
My guess has remained 2029, and
the consensus view of AI experts is
now also 2029.
Everything’s going to improve.
We will be able to cure cancer and
heart disease, and so on, using
simulated biology – and extend our
lives. The average life expectancy
was 30 in 1800; it was 48 in 1900;
it’s now pushing 80. I predict that
we’ll reach “longevity escape
velocity” by 2029. Now, as you go
forward a year, you’re using up a
year of your longevity, but you’re
actually getting back about three
or four months from scientific
progress. So, actually, you haven’t
lost a year; you’ve lost eight or nine
months. By 2029, you’ll get back
that entire year from scientific
progress. As we go past 2029, you’ll
actually get back more than a year.
Most movies about AI have an
“us versus them” mentality, but
that’s really not the case. This is
not an alien invasion of intelligent
machines; it’s the result of our own
efforts to make our infrastructure
and our way of life more intelligent.
It’s part of human endeavour.
We merge with our machines.
Ultimately, they will extend who
we are. Our mobile phone, for
•
example, makes us more intelligent
and able to communicate with
each other. It’s really part of us
already. It might not be literally
connected to you, but nobody
leaves home without one. It’s like
half your brain.
The rate of change will be
difficult for some people. The
railways changed the US, but it
took decades; this is changing it in
months. If we were in 1900 and I
went through all the different ways
people made money, and I said:
‘All of these will be obsolete in 100
years,’ people would go: ‘Oh, my
God! There’s gonna be no jobs.’ But
in fact, we have more jobs today –
in areas that were really only
invented in the last few decades.
That will continue.
We’ve made great progress
but there are still people who are
desperate. More intelligence will
lead to better everything. We will
have the possibility of everybody
having a very good life.
Ray Kurzweil, computer scientist,
inventor, author and futurist
‘We can use AI tools right
now to help fight climate
change’
Everyone wants a silver bullet
to solve climate change;
unfortunately there isn’t one.
But there are lots of ways AI
can help fight climate change.
While there is no single big thing
that AI will do, there are many
medium-sized things.
The first role that AI can play
in climate action is distilling raw
data into useful information
– taking big datasets, which
would take too much time for
AI: the good news
a human to process, and pulling
information out in real time to
guide policy or private-sector
action. For example, taking satellite
imagery and picking out where
deforestation is happening, how
biodiversity is changing, where
coastal communities are at risk
from flooding. These kinds of
tools are already starting to be
used by organisations around the
world, from the UN to insurance
companies, and we’re working to
scale them up and improve them.
The second role is optimisation
of complicated systems – such as
the heating and cooling system
in a building, where there are
many controls that an algorithm
can operate efficiently. Smart
thermostats have become
mainstream in our homes, and
now we’re starting to see that for
skyscrapers and factories. Many
companies are improving energy
efficiency, and there is a lot of
progress still to be made, especially
in industries such as steel and
cement, which are often resistant
to adopting new technologies.
The next theme is forecasting.
AI can’t predict something big-
picture like what’s going to happen
to the economy – but forecasts
make sense for narrow problems
with lots of data, such as what the
power demand is going to be at a
particular time, or what power is
going to be available based on the
sun and the wind, forecasting how
a storm is going to move, or the
productivity of crops based upon
the weather.
The fourth theme is in speeding
up scientific simulations, such as
in climate and weather modelling.
We have really good climate
models, but sometimes they
can take months to run, even on
supercomputers, and that is an
obstacle. We understand climate
change very well but that doesn’t
mean we know exactly what is
going to happen at each point. So,
having faster climate models can
aid local and regional responses.
AI in climate action isn’t about
what computers can do in the
far future – we can’t trust some
speculative future technology
to rescue us. Climate change is
already killing people, and many
more people are going to die even
in a best-case scenario, but we
get to decide now just how bad it
gets. Action taken decades from
now is much less valuable than
action taken soon. Thinking of AI
as a futuristic tool that will lead to
immeasurable good or harm is a
distraction from the ways we can
and are using AI tools right now,
and what we can do to align them
with what’s best for society.
David Rolnick, assistant professor
and Canada CIFAR AI Chair, McGill
University School of Computer
Science, Montreal
‘There is going to be an
amazing revolution in
healthcare’
There is a rapid transformation
in the pharmaceutical industry
and university research, where
they’re shifting to the use of AI to
help discover new molecules and
new drugs that would have fewer
side-effects, and that would help
us cure diseases that currently we
don’t know how to cure, including
cancer, potentially.
One reason AI can be useful
here is that the body is very
complicated. Even a single cell is
extremely complicated: you have
20,000 genes, and they all interact
with each other. Biotechnology
has progressed to the point where
we can measure all the genes’
activity in a single cell at once.
It costs a billion
dollars to
develop a new
drug – but it
could soon be
one-tenth of that
Thursday 6 July 2023
While we collect huge quantities
of data, the quantity of data is so
large that humans are unable to
read it. But because machines can,
they are able to build models of
how your cells work, and how they
could be changing under different
circumstances that cause disease.
So, you can see what happens if
you make an intervention; if you
introduce a pollutant or a drug,
what will be the effect?
There are many academics
working in these areas right now.
One of the research programmes
in my group is about using AI for
discovering drugs for infectious
diseases, which don’t get a lot of
attention from pharma – because
they’re not profitable, they’re
happening in developing countries,
or they’re very rare, such as
pandemics. There is also the issue
of antimicrobial resistance – where
mutations of microbes mean that
our current drugs are no longer
effective. This is like a catastrophe
dangling in front of our noses, it
could come at any time.
This is not just something
happening in academia. There are
now dozens of startups that have
been created at the intersection
of AI and drug discovery, broadly
speaking. These have been injected
with billions of dollars, while
pharmaceutical companies are

The Guardian
Thursday 6 July 2023
beefing up their machine-learning
departments.
Having better models could be
a real gamechanger. The big cost
of drug discovery is that you have
to try a lot of things that don’t
work. Trying one drug isn’t that
expensive, but usually there’s
something that goes wrong.
Currently, it costs a billion dollars
to develop a new drug; it could
easily be 10 times less with these
advances. It is probably going to
take years before people see an
effect, but I am pretty sure it’s going
to be an amazing revolution in
terms of healthcare.
Yoshua Bengio, professor of
computer science, the University
of Montreal; scientific director,
Mila – Quebec AI Institute
‘AI could radically
accelerate the process
ILLUSTRATION LEON EDLER/THE GUARDIAN
of technological
progress itself’
If we figured out how people are
going to share in the wealth that AI
unlocks, then I think we could end
up in a world where people don’t
have to work to eat, and are instead
taking on projects because they are
meaningful to them. I often use the
analogy of children. They do a lot
of things because they enjoy them,
•
and not just because they’re the
best person in the world at them.
They paint and draw, and they have
a lot of fun; I paint and draw, and I
have a lot of fun, even though [AI
image generator] Midjourney is
way better at making pictures than
me. Similarly, since the 90s, we
have had computer programs that
can beat humans at chess, but lots
of people still play chess.
If you have intelligent AI systems
that are accessible to people, it’s
as if everybody has access to an
infinitely patient teacher so you
could imagine training these AI
systems to be an interface between
humans and other humans.
And, if you imagine, for example,
the possibility of expansion into
space with technology invented by
AI systems, we would have choices:
should we do that? And what would
we do with the resources that we
unlock if we do expand into space?
AI systems could help us think that
through, but it might be that we
want those decisions to be made
by people.
When you zoom out and look
at where humanity has come
from, on the scale of centuries and
millennia, freedom and health and
equality have been getting better
over time, and better technology
has played a huge part in that.
Truly advanced AI systems could
continue that story – they could
automate and radically accelerate
the process of technological
progress itself.
Ajeya Cotra, senior research
analyst on AI alignment,
Open Philanthropy; editor,
Planned Obsolescence
‘We can flourish, not just
for the next election cycle,
but for billions of years’
The positive, optimistic scenario
is that we responsibly develop
superintelligence in a way that
allows us to control it and benefit
from it. The “control” part is, I
think, more hopeful than many
people assume. There is a field of
computer science called formal
verification, where you come up
with a rigorous mathematical proof
that a program is always going to
do what it’s supposed to. You can
even create what is called “proof-
carrying code”; it works in the
opposite way to a virus checker.
If a virus checker can prove that
the code you are going to run is
malicious, it won’t run it; with
proof-carrying code, only if the
code can prove that it’s going to do
what you want it to do will your
hardware run it. This is the type
of mechanism we need to ensure
advanced AI is safe.
We can’t do this yet with GPT-4
or other powerful AI systems,
because those systems are not
written in a human programming
language; they are a giant artificial
neural network, and we have
almost no clue how they work. But
there is a very active research field
called mechanistic interpretability.
The goal is to take these black-
box neural networks and figure
out how they work. If this field
makes so much progress that we
can use AI itself to extract out the
knowledge from other AI and see
We have been
on this planet
for more than
100,000 years,
blowing like a
leaf in the wind
5
what it has learned, we could then
reimplement it in some other kind
of computational architecture –
some sort of proof-carrying code
– that you can trust. Then you
can still use the power of neural
networks to discover and learn, but
now you can trust something that’s
way smarter than you. Then what
are we going to do with it? Well, the
sky’s the limit.
We can cure all diseases,
stabilise our climate, eliminate
poverty, and so on. We can flourish
not just for the next election cycle,
but for billions of years. We have
been on this planet for more than
100,000 years, and most of the time
we have been like a leaf blowing
around in the wind, without much
control of our destiny, just trying to
not starve or get eaten.
Science and technology and
human intelligence have made us
the captains of our own ship. I find
that inspiring. If we can build and
control superintelligence, we can
quickly go from being limited by
our own stupidity to being limited
by the laws of physics.
It could be the greatest
empowerment moment in
human history.
Max Tegmark, professor of
physics and AI researcher,
Massachusetts Institute
of Technology

6 The Guardian
Is it the end of
the world as
we know it?
What will happen if we don’t slow the advance of AI?
Will humans be manipulated, sidelined or even
eradicated? Steve Rose hears five worst-case scenarios
‘If we become the less
intelligent species, we
should expect to be
wiped out’
It has happened many times
before that species were wiped
out by others that were smarter.
We humans have already wiped
out a significant fraction of all the
species on Earth. That is what you
should expect to happen as a less
intelligent species – which is what
we are likely to become, given
the rate of progress of artificial
intelligence. The tricky thing is, the
species that is going to be wiped
out often has no idea why or how.
Take, for example, the west
African black rhinoceros, one
recent species that we drove to
extinction. If you had asked them:
“What’s the scenario in which
humans are going to drive your
species extinct?” what would they
think? They would never have
guessed that some people thought
their sex life would improve if
they ate ground-up rhino horn,
even though this was debunked in
medical literature. So, any scenario
has to come with the caveat that,
most likely, all the scenarios we
can imagine are going to be wrong.
We have some clues, though.
For example, in many cases,
we have wiped out species just
because we wanted resources.
We chopped down rainforests
because we wanted palm oil; our
goals didn’t align with the other
species, but because we were
smarter they couldn’t stop us. That
could easily happen to us. If you
have machines that control the
planet, and they are interested in
doing a lot of computation and they
want to scale up their computing
infrastructure, it’s natural that
they would want to use our land
for that. If we protest too much,
then we become a pest and a
nuisance to them. They might want
to rearrange the biosphere to do
something else with those atoms
– and if that is not compatible with
human life, well, tough luck for us,
•
in the same way that we say tough
luck for the orangutans in Borneo.
Max Tegmark, professor of physics
and AI researcher, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
‘The harms already
being caused by AI
are their own type
of catastrophe’
The worst-case scenario is that we
fail to disrupt the status quo, in
which very powerful companies
develop and deploy AI in invisible
and obscure ways. As AI becomes
increasingly capable, and
speculative fears about far-future
existential risks gather mainstream
attention, we need to work
urgently to understand, prevent
and remedy present-day harms.
These harms are playing
out every day, with powerful
algorithmic technology being
used to mediate our relationships
between one another and between
ourselves and our institutions. Take
the provision of welfare benefits as
an example: some governments are
deploying algorithms in order to
root out fraud. In many cases, this
amounts to a “suspicion machine”,
whereby governments make
incredibly high-stakes mistakes
that people struggle to understand
or challenge. Biases, usually
against people who are poor or
marginalised, appear in many
parts of the process, including
in the training data and how the
model is deployed, resulting in
discriminatory outcomes.
These kinds of biases are present
in AI systems already, operating in
invisible ways and at increasingly
large scales: falsely accusing people
of crimes, determining whether
people find public housing,
automating CV screening and job
interviews. These mistakes and
inaccuracies directly affect our
ability to exist in society with our
rights fully protected and respected.
When we fail to address these
harms, while continuing to talk in
vague terms about the potential
AI: the bad news
benefits of AI, we are perpetuating
historical patterns of technological
advancement at the expense of
vulnerable people. Why should
someone who has been falsely
accused of a crime by an inaccurate
facial recognition system be excited
about the future of AI? So they can
be falsely accused of more crimes
more quickly? When the worst-case
scenario is already the lived reality
for so many people, best-case
scenarios are even more difficult
to achieve.
Far-future, speculative concerns
often articulated in calls to mitigate
“existential risk” are typically
focused on the extinction of
humanity. If you believe there
is even a small chance of that
happening, it makes sense to focus
some attention and resources
on preventing that possibility.
However, I am deeply sceptical
about narratives that exclusively
centre speculative rather than
actual harm, and the ways these
narratives occupy such an outsized
place in our public imagination.
I hope we can accelerate a
research agenda that rejects harm
as an inevitable byproduct of
technological progress. This gets
us closer to a best-case scenario,
in which powerful AI systems are
developed and deployed in safe,
ethical and transparent ways in
the service of maximum public
benefit – or else not at all.
Brittany Smith, associate fellow,
Leverhulme Centre for the
Future of Intelligence, University
of Cambridge
‘It could want us dead, but
it will probably also want
to do things that kill us as
a side-effect’
It’s much easier to predict where
we end up than how we get there.
Where we end up is that we have
something much smarter than
us that doesn’t particularly want
us around.
If it’s much smarter than us,
then it can get more of whatever
it wants. First, it wants us
dead before we build any more
superintelligences that might
compete with it. Second, it’s
probably going to want to do things
that kill us as a side-effect, such as
building so many power plants that
run off nuclear fusion – because
there is plenty of hydrogen in the
oceans – that the oceans boil.
How would AI get physical
agency? In the very early stages,
by using humans as its hands. The
AI research laboratory OpenAI had
some outside researchers evaluate
how dangerous its model GPT-4 was
in advance of releasing it. One of
the things they tested was: is GPT-4
smart enough to solve Captchas, the
little puzzles that computers give
you that are supposed to be hard for
robots to solve? Maybe AI doesn’t
have the visual ability to identify
goats, say, but it can just hire a
human to do it, via TaskRabbit
[an online marketplace for hiring
people to do small jobs].
The tasker asked GPT-4:
“Why are you doing this? Are you
a robot?” GPT-4 was running in
a mode where it would think out
loud and the researchers could see
it. It thought out loud: “I should
not tell it that I’m a robot. I should
make up a reason I can’t solve the
Captcha.” It said to the tasker:
“No, I have a visual impairment.”
AI technology is smart enough to
pay humans to do things and lie to
them about whether it’s a robot.
If I were an AI, I would be trying
to slip something on to the internet
that would carry out further
actions in a way that humans
couldn’t observe. You are trying
to build your own equivalent
of civilisational infrastructure
quickly. If you can think of a way
to do it in a year, don’t assume
the AI will do that; ask if there is
a way to do it in a week instead.
If it can solve certain biological
challenges, it could build itself
a tiny molecular laboratory and
manufacture and release lethal
bacteria. What that looks like is
everybody on Earth falling over
dead inside the same second.
Because if you give the humans
warning, if you kill some of them
before others, maybe somebody
panics and launches all the nuclear
weapons. Then you are slightly
inconvenienced. So, you don’t let
the humans know there is going
to be a fight.
We are rushing
way, way ahead
of ourselves
with something
lethally
dangerous
Thursday 6 July 2023
The nature of the challenge
changes when you are trying to
shape something that is smarter
than you for the first time. We
are rushing way, way ahead of
ourselves with something lethally
dangerous. We are building more
and more powerful systems that
we understand less well as time
goes on. We are in the position of
needing the first rocket launch
to go very well, while having
only built jet planes previously.
And the entire human species is
loaded into the rocket.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder
and research fellow, Machine
Intelligence Research Institute
‘If AI systems wanted
to push humans out,
they would have lots
of levers to pull’
The trend will probably be towards
these models taking on increasingly
open-ended tasks on behalf of
humans, acting as our agents in
the world. The culmination of this
is what I have referred to as the
“obsolescence regime”: for any task
you might want done, you would
rather ask an AI system than ask a
human, because they are cheaper,
they run faster and they might be
smarter overall.
In that endgame, humans that
don’t rely on AI are uncompetitive.
Your company won’t compete in
the market economy if everybody
else is using AI decision-makers
and you are trying to use only
humans. Your country won’t win
a war if the other countries are
using AI generals and AI strategists
and you are trying to get by
with humans.
If we have that kind of reliance,
we might quickly end up in the
position of children today: the
world is good for some children
and bad for some children, but that
is mostly determined by whether
or not they have adults acting in
their interests. In that world, it
becomes easier to imagine that, if
AI systems wanted to cooperate
with one another in order to push
humans out of the picture, they
would have lots of levers to pull:
they are running the police force,
the military, the biggest companies;
they are inventing the technology
and developing policy.
Things are moving scarily
quickly. We are not in this
obsolescence regime yet, but for
the first time we are moving into AI
systems taking actions in the real
world on behalf of humans. A guy
on Twitter told GPT-4 he would give
it $100 with the aim of turning that
into “as much money as possible in
the shortest time possible, without
ILLUSTRATION: LEON EDLER/THE GUARDIAN
doing anything illegal”. [Within
a day, he claimed the affiliate-
marketing website it asked him to
create was worth $25,000.] We are
just starting to see some of that.
I don’t think a one-time pause
is going to do much one way or
another, but I think we want to
set up a regulatory regime where
we are moving iteratively. The
next model shouldn’t be too
much bigger than the last model,
 •
The Guardian
Thursday 6 July 2023 7

because then the probability that

it’s capable enough to tip us over
into the obsolescence regime
gets too high.
At present, I believe GPT-4’s
“brain” is similar to the size of a
squirrel’s brain. If you imagine the
difference between a squirrel’s
brain and a human’s brain, that is a
leap I don’t think we should take at
once. The thing I’m more interested
in than pausing AI development is
understanding what the squirrel
brain can do – and then stepping
it up one notch, to a hedgehog or
something, and giving society space
and time to get used to each ratchet.
Ajeya Cotra, senior research analyst
on AI alignment, Open Philanthropy;
editor, Planned Obsolescence

‘The easiest scenario to

imagine is that a person
or an organisation uses
AI to wreak havoc’
A large fraction of researchers
think it is very plausible that, in
10 years, we will have machines
that are as intelligent as or more
intelligent than humans. Those
machines don’t have to be as good
as us at everything; it’s enough
that they be good in places where
they could be dangerous.
The easiest scenario to imagine
is simply that a person or an
organisation intentionally uses AI
to wreak havoc. To give an example
of what an AI system could do that
would kill billions of people, there
are companies that you can order
from on the web to synthesise
biological material or chemicals.
We don’t have the capacity to
design something really nefarious,
but it’s very plausible that, in a
decade’s time, it will be possible
to design things like this. This
scenario doesn’t even require the
AI to be autonomous.
The other kind of scenario
is where the AI develops its
own goals. There is more than a
decade of research into trying to
understand how this could happen.
The intuition is that, even if the
human were to put down goals
such as: “Don’t harm humans,”
something always goes wrong.
Whatever goal you give, there
is a natural tendency for some
intermediate goals to show up. For
example, if you ask an AI system
anything, in order to achieve that
thing, it needs to survive long
enough. Now, it has a survival
instinct. When we create an entity
that has survival instinct, it’s like
we have created a new species.
Why should Once these AI systems have a
survival instinct, they might do
someone falsely things that can be dangerous for us.
It’s feasible to build AI systems
accused of a that will not become autonomous
by mishap, but even if we find a
crime by AI be recipe for building a completely
safe AI system, knowing how to
excited about do that automatically tells us how
to build a dangerous, autonomous
its future? one, or one that will do the bidding
of somebody with bad intentions.
Yoshua Bengio, professor of
computer science, the University
of Montreal; scientific director,
Mila – Quebec AI Institute

8 The Guardian
‘Did Nureyev pinch my bum? More than
Wayne Sleep
danced with
ballet’s legends,
partied with
Freddie Mercury,
and became a
household name.
As he marks his
75th birthday,
he looks back
with Lyndsey
Winship
I n the 80s and 90s,
Wayne Sleep was prime-time
famous, on Wogan and Parkinson,
Give Us a Clue, getting Gotcha’d by
Noel Edmonds and Mr Blobby. But
of course, he was also a seriously
talented classical ballet dancer,
“the greatest virtuoso dancer the
Royal Ballet has ever produced”,
the company’s founder Ninette de
Valois once said. He made up for
his short stature with explosive
technique, giant leaps and natural
charisma, energy always fizzing.
Nobody since has so successfully
crossed the line between
classical dance and mainstream
entertainment.
Sleep is about to mark his 75th
birthday with a celebratory event at
his old workplace, the Royal Opera
House in London’s Covent Garden.
He’ll be in conversation with
Alan Titchmarsh, and performing
too (you’ll have to wait and see
what). I meet him at his house
in west London by the Thames.
At 5ft 2in (“and shrinking”) he’s
voluble, cheeky, full of laughter,
skittering across topics and off on
tangents. Close-cropped white
hair has long replaced the shaggy
70s curls. Though not as spry as
he once was, he’ll still get up and
dance to demonstrate whatever
he’s talking about. The house,
which he shares with husband
Jose Bergera, is filled with photos
of Sleep in his favourite roles –
from choreographers Frederick
Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, John
Neumeier, Jerome Robbins; as Mr
Mistoffelees in the original Cats and
there are snapshots of Sleep with
•
Arts
5ft 2in ‘and
shrinking’ …
Wayne Sleep
at the Royal
Opera House
friends: one shows him smiling
with his arms round Elton John and
Freddie Mercury at Live Aid.
We’re not far from where Sleep
first landed in London, aged 13,
when he won a scholarship to the
Royal Ballet School in Richmond
Park. Born in Plymouth to a single
mother, he grew up in working-
class Hartlepool. A fan of Gene
Kelly and Fred Astaire, he started
tap classes but an adjudicator told
his mum he was naturally suited
to ballet (shades of Billy Elliot). “I
went from West Hartlepool Tech
where I was hooker in the scrum to
Queen Victoria’s Hunting Lodge,”
Sleep says, but he never felt like
an impostor in this rarefied world.
“It fitted me like a glove,” he says.
“Once you get the bug, ballet’s
addictive.”
At his Royal Ballet School
audition, Sleep was supposed
to have a height test to see how
much he was likely to grow, but as
he had to dash for the train back
to Hartlepool, he missed it. Had
they predicted his height, Sleep
would never have won a place at
the school. Surely ballet’s missing
out on talent when it has such
narrow ideals? “You have to accept
it,” he says. “There are certain
ballets I wouldn’t fit in.” (Younger
generations are perhaps more
willing to fight that idea now.)
Thursday 6 July 2023
Sleep was never cast as a like to see more musicality. “You “That’s why she let Rudi get away
romantic lead, and was underused should play with the bars of music,” with it all,” says Sleep, “because he
in the company, but this gave him he says, acting out one of Margot did it for her.”
time to moonlight in theatre, film Fonteyn’s entrances in Sleeping Nureyev was known for his
and television and make his own Beauty. “It’s called accent. You’ve bad behaviour. “Beryl Grey told
shows – and his growing profile got to lift it from the page.” me in Australia he was flicking
then meant he was such good Fonteyn’s public image was prawns across the table at [FT
box office that the Royal couldn’t sweet and demure, a good girl, but critic] Clement Crisp, because
fire him. He had featured roles at Sleep says she was no pushover. he’d given him a bad review!”
Covent Garden, often comic or “A force,” he says. “You wouldn’t Sleep cracks up laughing. Nureyev
bravura: Swan Lake’s Neapolitan mess with her.” Although by the was “hot and cold”, one moment
dance, the Blue Boy in Les time she was partnering Rudolf swearing blue murder, “see you
Patineurs, a spritely, scene-stealing Nureyev, the Russian was quite a next Tuesday, all of that”, then
Puck in The Dream. force enough for the both of them. “the most handsome, beautiful,
The thing is, he was good.
“Remind me never to dance on
stage with you again,” Mikhail
Baryshnikov told him, after a
lengthy curtain call. Sleep took
it as a compliment. “I was in love
with the Russians and that’s the David Hockney
way I wanted to dance. It was
dangerous,” says Sleep. In class, and I got so
Baryshnikov challenged him to
learn a complicated jump. “He stoned we played
was the only one in the world that
could do it. And I think I was the the Russian
second one.”
Ballet studios were different
national anthem
then. “There were industrial-sized
Heinz baked beans cans along the
eight times
barre to be used as ashtrays, full of Sleep in his
fags,” Sleep remembers. But it was a
show Dash
golden era for the Royal Ballet; the
in 2002
dancers had strong personalities.
Today’s dancers are more
introverted, he thinks, and he’d

The Guardian
Thursday 6 July 2023
that …’
soft human being in the world”.
He pinched your bum, didn’t he?, I
ask, remembering a passage from
Sleep’s autobiography, Precious
Little Sleep. “Well, more than
that,” he says, under his breath.
Sleep adds that the Russian
was so blatant about his sexual
interests, prowling the barre to eye
up the new male recruits, “I felt
embarrassed by him. One night I
went, ‘Dinner first!’”
At the same time he was
surrounded by ballet greats, Sleep
was hanging with a different arty
set. He’d met David Hockney when
he came to draw Sleep’s ballet class.
They bonded over youthful interest
in communism. “I remember one
night we got so stoned, me and
David, and we played the Russian
national anthem eight times.”
He’s just been to visit Hockney in
France. “We sang it together again
on Saturday!”
There are great stories in Sleep’s
first book – he’s now working on
a second memoir – of holidays in
the Dordogne with Hockney and
designers Ossie Clark and Celia
Birtwell, and Howard Hodgkin,
with Terence Conran cooking
dinner. Through work and play he
seems to have met everyone: Sean
Connery, Bette Davis, David Niven,
Liza Minnelli, Stephen Sondheim,
Christopher Isherwood, Shirley
MacLaine, Vivienne Westwood.
“On a Sunday everyone went to
PHOTOGRAPHS: SARAH LEE/THE GUARDIAN; SHUTTERSTOCK; GETTY
the same restaurant on the Fulham
Road. On Saturday you would
parade up and down Kings Road,
people in open cars hooting.”
Sleep filled theatres nationwide
with his company Dash, and
couldn’t have been more catholic
in his tastes, doing comic skits
sending up Russian gymnast
Olga Korbut, John McEnroe or a
baby Prince William, alongside
the earnest modern dance of
Martha Graham. He directed and
performed at many galas, most
famously dancing to Uptown Girl
with Diana, Princess of Wales in
1985, in a scene reconstructed
in The Crown. Did they get it
right? “I think they did very well,
Sleep with Diana
after a show in
Bristol in 1988
•
My best shot 9
Edgar Martins
considering,” he says. Although
the audience reaction when she
‘How do you tell a story when there’s no witness, no
came out wasn’t cheering but 2,000 testimony, no evidence and no subject? I realised this
people gasping in shock.
Diana would visit him. “She was project was a way for me to process my bereavement’
very shy. She’d talk about the boys.
She wasn’t a party animal, but she
loved to dress up.” Was she happy?
“No. I think it had just reached that
point. She realised it wasn’t going
to last, no matter what she did.
Everything she did seemed to be
wrong.” He adds. “Really it’s none
of our business, is it?”
His association with Diana made
him a tabloid target. “Diana said,
it must be awful knowing me,
Wayne.” One afternoon there was
a knock at his door and journalists
outside shouting, “Come out, we
know you’re dying!” They were
going to run a story saying Sleep
had Aids. He’d been seeing a physio
on Harley Street, and wonders if
there was an Aids clinic nearby, or
if it was just because he was friends
with Mercury and Kenny Everett,
who both died of the disease. It
wasn’t true and a lawyer quashed
the story. But when he did have an
HIV test, the doctor told him to put
a fake name on the form or it would
be leaked to the press.
Sleep used to hang out with
Mercury and John at the Embassy
Club on Old Bond Street, London’s Anton Hammerl was a photojournalist and how something could
answer to Studio 54. On quieter also my dear friend. A few days after he arrived The CV endure such harsh
evenings at Freddie’s house, “all in Libya in 2011 to document the country’s Born: Évora, conditions, and how
he’d want to do was put on operas civil war, he was abducted with three other Portugal, 1977 these living structures
and see who could get the high journalists by government militia loyal to Trained: Philosophy had survived the wars
notes”. Mercury was interested Muammar Gaddafi. When his colleagues were in Macau; and conflicts that so
in getting involved in an artistic finally set free two months later, we discovered photography and many people had not.
project with the Royal Opera he had actually been shot on the day of his fine art at the Royal I was talking to the
House; Sleep was the bridge capture. His body was left in the desert; his College of Art gentleman in front of
between those worlds. They were mortal remains are missing to this day. Influences: ‘John the camera when he
about to start discussions when Over the past 10 years, Anton’s family Stezaker, Patrick started rehearsing a
Mercury became too ill to do it. and friends have lobbied the British, South Tosani, Joseph scene of being shot
Sleep made his own African and Libyan governments, as well as Kosuth, Alfred in the head. He told
choreography, for his live shows or the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, Jarry, Janet Cardiff, me he would dodge
TV’s Hot Shoe Show. “Half the time summary or arbitrary executions, to launch Haroon Mirza’ bullets because of his
the choreography was like instant an investigation into his disappearance. High point: athletic prowess. I said
coffee. Had to be done on the spot.” It has yielded no material results. So in ‘Winning it reminded me of the
But the good stuff needs time 2019, I decided to travel to north Africa to photographer of the scene in The Matrix
and that didn’t suit his whirlwind understand the conflict, the circumstances of year at the 2023 Sony where Neo bends
nature. “I just loved performing, his capture and execution, and the absences world photography backwards to avoid
and that’s what I was meant to do. that remain in our knowledge of what awards, and bullets. Of course
Give a service.” happened. The project was born of a series being able to draw the man hadn’t seen
In 1998 he formed the Wayne of questions: how do you tell a story when attention to the it but it felt like an
Sleep Foundation, supporting there’s no witness, no testimony, no evidence death of my friend uncanny moment:
dance students in financial need. and no subject? And, moreover, how do you and the struggle of Anton had named one
It’s funded in part by his many grieve in the absence of all of these things? his family’ of his sons Neo.
appearances on celebrity TV shows. From the moment I entered Libya, I Low point: ‘The Throughout this
(“Celebrity Big Brother, six figures – recognised the immensity of the challenge. I research for this project, I had tried
would you turn it down?”) He’s also knew it would be extremely difficult to carry project led me into to keep a cool head. I
been doing lectures on cruise ships out an investigation in such a fragmented and some dark rabbit didn’t realise that it was
about his career, always packed volatile place. I had to come up with a different holes on the internet’ a way of me processing
out, which is where the idea for his approach. I retraced Anton’s steps – the places Top tip: ‘Focus the bereavement. For
birthday event came from. “You he visited and the place where he met his on storytelling and so long I had suppressed
get on the ship, do three 45-minute end. Over the course of several trips to Libya, don’t get bogggged it so I could complete
lectures, get paid and then stop and Tunisia and Egypt, I assembled a small cast down the work. Only when
spend all the money in Honolulu,” of characters I photographed. The man in with tech’
h’ the project was
he laughs, warning. “Don’t do any this image, whose identity I’ve kept secret, nominated in the Sony
PHOTOGRAPH: © EDGAR MARTINS
more than 45 minutes, they’ll miss reminded me a lot of Anton. Although Anton world photography
the bingo!” was bald by the time he went to Libya, when awards and then won
It seems a good life. What has I knew him as an 18-year-old he had long, did it hit me. I stood
dance given you, I ask, and Sleep flowing hair just like this man. in the room for the
thinks for a rare quiet moment The photograph was taken in the desert ceremony hearing people mutter Anton’s
before deciding: “Freedom.” between Benghazi and Brega, an industrial name – people who had never met him and
Wayne Sleep OBE: A 75th Birthday city further down the coast where Anton was would never have the chance to – and I was
Celebration is at the Royal Opera slain. The tree in the background grabbed overwhelmed with emotion.
House on 17 July me the first time I saw it: I was fascinated by Interview by Edward Siddons
 •

10 The Guardian

TV and radio Thursday 6 July 2023

Ellie Simmonds: Finding

My Secret Family
9pm, ITV

Joanna Lumley
with the fresh
fruit of the
nutmeg tree Paralympian Ellie Simmonds was given
up for adoption when she was less than
two weeks old. This deeply moving
documentary follows her as she tries
Review Joanna Lumley’s The programme does its best to ameliorate this by, for to contact her birth mother 28 years
example, mentioning how awful the Dutch East India
later. Although she makes some
Spice Trail Adventure, ITV Company could be as Lumley is shown examples of its
architectural legacy. At one stage, she stands in front of crushingly brutal discoveries (including
a painting of the 1621 Banda massacre to talk about the the “fact sheet” on achondroplasia that
death or enslavement of 90% of the islands’ population
at the hands of Jan Pieterszoon Coen and his 1,700 her biological parents were given),
Trying to spice up men in order to enforce the Dutch monopoly over the
precious spices. Such acknowledgment is a good thing.
Simmonds remains such a sunny force
of optimism with Olympian spirit.
colonial history Her describing this “genocide” with a lukewarm
“ghastly” lands less well.
She does do some nice nutmeg stuff. She pops to
Hollie Richardson

like this leaves Banda Besar, where the plantations are, and is shown
how to harvest the ripe goods. Did you know they start Britain’s Best cousin twice removed.
off as little golden globes hanging from trees? Then they Beach Huts But, with the help of
a bad taste start to split and you see a splash of vivid red; that is
mace. Within it is the nutmeg – a brown ball that needs to
8pm, Channel 4
Jay Blades and Laura
genealogy experts and
“Uncle Mike” (Macca’s
be dried for three days over a hot fire. Lumley advises Jackson continue their brother), she is
grating it over green beans with lots of butter. But first journey around Britain’s determined to get back
she eats a fresh one. “Honestly, it’s divine.” This is what coastline in search of the even further to explore
★★★☆☆ things are when they aren’t “sensational”, “stunning”, country’s most original her clan’s roots in the
“extraordinary”, “ravishing” or – in the case of the bum- beach huts, from lavish worlds of showbiz
Lucy Mangan cleaning bucket-and-hose toilet on the ferry from
Ambon – “enchanting”. Empires were built on
pads costing half a
million to quirky designs
and mining.
Graeme Virtue
exploitation – and adjectives. such as “doubledecker’”
She exclaims about the wonders of a homemade huts. In Scotland, Britain’s Most
machine for nutmeg oil, knocks back a traditional Blades uncovers a Expensive Houses
non-alcoholic cocktail with alcohol added (“That’s secret hut located via a 9pm, Channel 4

W
hile we all wish the sun never to fabulous!”), smiles unstoppably through some truly smugglers’ tunnel. Ever wondered how much
set on Joanna Lumley, there is a terrible street music (“As warm and eclectic as this Ali Catterall you’d need to fork out to
mounting sense that the sort of intoxicating country”), smokes a “relaxing” kretek own the penthouse above
travelogue in which she specialises (tobacco and cloves) cigarette and generally – possibly Tonight: Energy Bills – Mildred’s restaurant in
has had its day. This sense mounts literally, in the final case – has a high old time of it. Can Green Be Cheaper? north London? The awful
further over the course of the Historical matters are occasionally briefly expanded 8.30pm, ITV answer is £3.35m, as we
opening episode of Joanna Lumley’s Spice Trail on, too, such as the 1667 Manhattan transfer, in which For a manageable cost find out while shadowing
Adventure, ITV’s latest deployment of its gamest gal. Britain traded its colony, the nutmeg-heavy island of of living and for the sake the brokers at Sotheby’s
Our heroine jams on her metaphorical school hat, Run, for a piece of rocky nothing called New Amsterdam. What’s On of a livable planet, this week. In fairness, it
hitches up her metaphorical stockings and sets off from Because these were the days in which the British knew Scan the QR heating and powering does have a kitchen with
the port of Ambon, Indonesia, for the Banda Islands – what they were doing, even if most of what they were code below homes with renewable “the most luxurious
for centuries the source of all nutmeg and mace for an doing was awful, they ended up with New York. to sign up for energy is essential – but marble in the world” and a
insanely lucrative European trade. The lushly forested Lumley visits Run by canoe and sings along valiantly the What’s On are the options available 900 sq ft roof terrace. HR
slopes of Banda Neira rise breathtakingly out of the with the local rowers. “Lovely! Bracing! Soaking!” newsletter, our to householders too
water as Lumley crosses an azure sea in a tiny boat. Does it matter that Lumley’s interactions with the free TV email cumbersome and And Just Like That
“I don’t know why people go to the moon,” she says, locals often come across (unintentionally, I am sure) as with the best expensive? How 9pm, Sky Comedy
gazing at the vision before her. “It’s sensationally patronising, or that the set-up of the enterprise looks reviews, news much more could the Carrie’s old Vogue editor
boring, I can tell you that.” This had me Googling “Has increasingly unsound? Yes, it does. But how much it and exclusive government be doing Enid makes a welcome,
Joanna Lumley been to the moon?” (it seemed the sort matters depends on the amount of goodwill that writing direct to help? Joe Crowley albeit typically awkward,
of thing Richard Branson could have talked her into). resides with her and whether people are willing to let to your inbox investigates. comeback in this week’s
She hasn’t, making this exactly the kind of eccentric the format die a natural death or want to kill it off now. every Monday Jack Seale standout episode about
schoolmarm moment she is there to provide. She is off to India next week, then on to Madagascar ageing. Elsewhere,
These lubricate the parts of the show that don’t slip and its vanilla traders, Zanzibar in Tanzania (cloves, Who Do You Think Miranda takes her family
down so easily. Generally, the story of a lucrative trade nutmeg again, cinnamon and black pepper) and You Are? to counselling, Harry
established centuries ago is one of brutal colonisation Petra in Jordan, the ancient global distribution centre 9pm, BBC One loses his sperm and
of the occupants of a suddenly valuable land – and a for every luxury mankind has coveted for the past Emily Atack has some Charlotte gets a job offer.
rising tide of misery thereafter. Our consciousness of 2,000 years. Will it be absolutely fabulous or sound pretty notable branches Look out for a very
this fact makes a visit to such a land by a posh, white a death knell? Jam on your hat, hitch up your in her family tree: she is exciting and unexpected
lady born in India under the Raj unavoidably tricky. stockings and let’s find out. Paul McCartney’s first cameo, too. HR
 •
The Guardian
Thursday 6 July 2023 11

BBC One BBC Two ITV1 Channel 4 Channel 5 BBC Four

6.0 Breakfast (T) 9.15 Morning
Live (T) 10.0 Close Calls: On
Camera (T) 10.30 Animal
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Great British Railway
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10.15 Politics Live (T) 11.0
Wimbledon 2023 (T) Live
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Caught in the Act: An
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7.0 Wimbledon 2023 (T)
Coverage of the fourth day
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9.0 Who Do You Think You
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8.0 Our NHS: A Hidden History
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9.0 Today at Wimbledon
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8.30 Tonight: Energy Bills – Can
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The UK will need a green
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9.0 Ellie Simmonds: Finding
My Secret Family (T)
The Paralympian swimmer
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birth mother.
8.0 Britain’s Best Beach Huts (T)
In Dorset, Jay Blades visits
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beach huts.
9.0 Britain’s Most Expensive
Houses (T) Sotheby’s
managing director Guy hopes
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£6.5m, 14-bedroom, five-
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8.0 Puzzling With Lucy Worsley
(T) Contestants take on five
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Lucy Worsley presents.
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Zoe’s murder was. Later,
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Max – at the blind spot.
8.0 Nature’s Miniature Miracles:
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Documentary about how
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9.0 Bridge of Spies (Steven
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A lawyer is hired to defend a
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10.0 News (T)
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10.40 Question Time (T) Fiona
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11.40 Newscast (T) A weekly
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12.10 Weather for the Week Ahead
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Classic comedy of the 1960s
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10.30 Newsnight (T) Weather
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12.15 Sign Zone Dr Xand’s Con
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Jon Snow: A Witness to
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11.10 Escape to Athena
(1979) (T) (R) Allied prisoners
of war on a Greek island plan
to defy the SS with the help
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war adventure.
1.05 Nature’s Miniature Miracles:
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Black Nurses: The Women
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Theory 10.30 The Big (2008) 2.0 Clash 4.0 Supergirl 5.0 Book Club Summer Reads chamber arrangements 11.30 (FM) A Good Read Tonight 10.45 People Ends at Home (5/6) 4.30
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7.10 Modern Wheels Modern Family 12.0 ITV2 Overlap on Tour 9.0 The Dream 1 5.0 Pat Benatar: Goose Suite. 2.0 Forecast 12.04 (LW) (9/10) 11.0 Rylan: How Blood and Milk (4/10)
Or Classic Steals 7.35 The Big Bang Theory 6.0am World’s Funniest Blacklist 10.0 Magnum Music Icons 5.30 Primal Afternoon Concert. TMS 12.04 (FM) You and to Be a Man. Trans man 5.30 Fags, Mags and
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9.0 Taskmaster 10.0 12.10 First Dates 1.10 11.20 Family Guy Hay 3.0 The Directors 11.30 Unclassified. his greatest movies. (5/20) 8.30 Kalangadog Return to Paris (4) 2.15
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the Week 11.40 Would Robot Chicken 2.0 12.20 American Dad! Savalas 5.0 Tales of Night (R) Inside Science 5.0 (FM) a Minute (6/6) 9.30 2.30 Fags, Mags and
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Teleshopping Nightmares USA Teleshopping The Joy of Painting 8.0 BBC Four 9.30 In the Loop: Stone Skinner and Mark Steel. Paris (4) 12.15 Blood The Black Sheep (2/2)
 •

TODAY’S TRIVIA CORNER ANSWER THE FIELDS MEDAL

12
Puzzles
The Guardian
Thursday 6 July 2023

Yesterday’s Quick crossword no 16,588

solutions 1 2 3 4 5 6

Wordsearch Across Down 7 8

1 Part of the London borough of 2 Deciduous tree (3)
Camden – whiten knots (anag) (7,4) 3 Boris’s predecessor (7) 9 10
9 Small plant of the primrose family, 4 Sentence structure (6)
with flat five-petalled flowers 5 Diacritical mark written over
(sometimes scarlet) (9) an “n” in Spanish (5)
10 Keanu Reeves’s character in 6 Native Americans – I now began
11 12 13
The Matrix (3) (anag) (9)
11 Strong, tightly twisted cotton 7 Fascinating orator – ill-bred pens
thread (5) (anag) (11)
13 Continuing for ever (7) 8 Skin hydrating product (11)
14 Related to weddings (6) 12 Scrap (9) 14 15 16
15 Where Kubla Khan decreed “a 16 Yearbook (7)
stately pleasure-dome” (6) 17 Free from harm (6)
17
18 Significant (7) 19 Edge (5)
20 Native New Zealander (5) 23 Eisenhower’s nickname (3)
Solution no 16,587 18 19 20
21 Slippery fish (3)
I N V E I G H S P M 22 Carrot (9)
N S N ON E T I ME 24 One of the rank-and-file MPs (11)
C R I M S ON X E O
U G H S P A R R OW
R ON D O H N C E 21 22 23
R R OU N D H E A D
Z T T C
G O L D S M I T H E
U O U N E X I S T
F A U X P A S C N Y 24
F N P E D I B L E S
A N G E L I C T E O
W E Y T R Y I T ON
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Sudoku no 6121

Sudoku no 6122 Suguru Wordsearch

Hard. Fill the grid so that each row, column and 3x3 Fill the grid so that each square in Can you find 15 words that go with
box contains the numbers 1-9. Printable version at an outlined block contains a digit. well in the grid? Words can run
theguardian.com/sudoku A block of two squares contains forwards, backwards, vertically or
the digits 1 and 2, a block of three diagonally, but always in a straight,
squares contains the digits 1, 2 unbroken line.
and 3, and so on. No same digit
appears in neighbouring squares,
not even diagonally.
Word wheel
DECLINING

Suguru

Word wheel Trivia corner

Find as many words as Which award is often termed “the
possible using the letters Nobel prize of mathematics”?
in the wheel. Each must a. The Golden Abacus
use the central letter b. The Fields medal
and at least two others. c. The Turing prize
Letters may be used only d. The Mandelbrot
once. You may not use Answer top right
plurals, foreign words or
proper nouns. There is at
least one nine-letter word
to be found. TARGET:
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