In 1979 Anthony Blunt was revealed

to be a Soviet double agent. Shocking

new evidence suggests he was also
handing secrets to the Nazis
 Everton’s squad scrubs

THIS WEEK IN up well outside the Hotel

Victoria in London on April
29, 1933. The team were

1933
staying in the capital ahead
of their FA Cup final against
Manchester City at Wembley
Stadium, which they won
3-0. The club has won the
trophy five times in its history
— but not since 1995.

treacherous double agent in 32 Gone fishing 46 Health and fitness

28.04.2024
5 Matt Rudd
history? By Robert Verkaik

20 BBC BFFs
Rosamund Urwin meets Justin
The life in pictures of a 1980s
fishing village in the northeast
of England. By Chris Killip
The happiness diet. Plus,
seven realistic fitness goals

50 Driving
My week as a house husband Webb and Jeremy Bowen — 39 Table Talk How to max the miles in
BERTRAM WILSON / TIMES NEWSPAPERS LTD

6 Relative Values
The James frontman Tim Booth
and his wife, Kate Shela,
a shamanic healer
8 COVER Deadly secrets
Was the Cambridge spy
Anthony Blunt the most
who started at the Beeb on
the same day 40 years ago
26 Sophie Grégoire Trudeau
Canada’s former first lady on
her split from Justin, being
pals with Michelle Obama and
her reinvention as a wellness
guru. By Louise Callaghan
Mark Diacono‘s dukkah dishes,
Charlotte Ivers dines with the
one per cent in Copenhagen,
Will Lyons recommends rosés,
plus the best salad dressing
44 Farmer Clarkson
Planting, ploughing and
a plague of slugs
your EV. By Nick Rufford
58 A Life in the Day
The politician Sayeeda Warsi
© Times Media Ltd, 2024. Published and
licensed by Times Media Ltd, 1 London
Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF (020 7782
5000). Printed at Walstead Bicester Limited,
Oxfordshire. Not to be sold separately

The Sunday Times Magazine • 3

 MAT T
My week as a house husband?
I had to just suck it up
S
till think you’d be happier as a house
husband?” That was the question and Harriet
had obviously been waiting for years to ask it.
It was late on Friday afternoon and I’d been
house husbanding all day. I’d done the
cooking and the cleaning and the tidying and
the washing, all without complaint, hardly
ever muttering to myself, “Is a man’s work
never done?” Almost every day I’d had dinner
ready for when she got in and, almost always,
that dinner wasn’t just five microwaved tikka
masalas and a naan. Move over, Nigella. There’s a new
domestic goddess in town.
Until that Friday afternoon. I was just unpulling my
apron strings and looking forward to taking the weight
off my feet for the first time all day. House done. Dinner
on. Finished. Then I discovered a perfect set of muddy
footprints across a carpet I’d only just hoovered.
Then Child A asked if I’d washed the rugby kit he’ll
need in the morning. Then I found a half-finished
bowl of yesterday’s cornflakes behind a potted
plant. That’s when I said, “For goodness sake,” and
Harriet, walking through the front door, smiled
knowingly and asked her question.
A confession first. Once, a very long time ago,
I expressed a vague desire to be a stay-at-home
dad. I might even have said that I’d gladly swap
my fortnight of paternity leave for Harriet’s
nine months of maternity leave. Because, I’d
reasoned after a difficult week at work, being
the primary parent isn’t necessarily as stressful
as being the primary earner.
Obviously that was very stupid and wrong. I’d
escaped the depths of exhaustion Harriet endured
in those early years because I could sleep in the office
and have a G&T on the commute. I never had to get
my cracked nipples out on a bus. Not once. How
dare I even suggest that her grass was greener?
It’s something baby group dads might whisper to
each other in pubs but never ever actually mean.
Now, though? When the kids are toilet-
trained and almost self-sufficient? That’s a
different question. Last week we were “on
holiday” and we didn’t go anywhere. Unable
CHARLIE CLIFT, ALAMY, GETTY IMAGES
On the topic of equality, the
GOOD UK’s gender pay gap has fallen
to 11.6 per cent, its lowest level
NEWS! on record. On average, women
now earn 88p for every pound
R UDD
to decide between a cripplingly expensive villa,
a cripplingly expensive cottage and a cripplingly
miserable tent, we inadvertently settled on a fourth
option. A holiday at home. And because Harriet
has friends and hobbies, she immediately filled her
non-holiday holiday with a level of social activity
that would frighten a Kardashian. No problem,
I said heroically. I’ll stay at home and run things.
I don’t want to brag but I got off to an excellent
start. On Monday I painted the shed. On Tuesday
I cleaned the mould off the back of the bathroom
blinds. On Wednesday I hoovered the cutlery
drawer. On Thursday I superglued Child C’s
school shoes back together.
On Friday I looked back over my domestic
endeavours with pride. Sure, the kids had spent most
of the past 120 hours on screens eating crisps, but
I can’t be expected to do full-on parenting and
full-on house husbanding, can I? There just aren’t
enough hours in the day. But I’d done all the usual
housework and quite a lot of the housework
neither of us has time to do when we’re working.
The house looked like an estate agent description.
So I said “Yes, actually” when Harriet asked.
“I would be very happy as a house husband.”
And then, with a big smile, I got the vacuum
cleaner out of the cupboard I’d just put it back into.
Don’t tell her, but I was lying. A week later we’re
both back at work and juggling. Shockingly, the house
is a tip again. There are crumbs in the cutlery drawer
and Child C’s shoes have come unstuck again. The
clothes I washed last week need washing this week.
Unbelievable. At least Sisyphus got a view when he
reached the top of the hill.
The simple and easy solution for families starting
out: one week on, one week off. House husband one
week, housewife the next. I’ll admit there are some
stumbling blocks. Because it now takes two salaries
to pay a mortgage, you’d need both your employers
to agree to 26 alternating weeks of annual leave on
full pay. Assuming they are absolutely fine with that,
though, think of the benefits. No one’s grass is greener
because it’s all the same grass. A change is as good as
a rest. And no, it’s your week to do the washing-up n
that a man makes. It’s still earnings, this figure was
12p too little — though seven
years ago, when it became
12.8 per cent, so it’s progress.
PwC (96p v £1) and Greggs
mandatory for employers
to report the disparity in
(97p v £1) are close to closing
the gap for good.
The Sunday Times Magazine • 5
 R E L ATI V E
Tim Booth and Kate Shela
The James singer and his wife, a shamanic healer, on cheating death and love at first sight
Tim
In 1994 I had a call from my friend Gabrielle Roth, a
dance teacher in LA. She simply said, “Tim, I see you
in this room. You’re meant to be here.” I was living in
the UK but I trusted Gabrielle and, some weeks later,
I flew out to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.
I walked in and there was Kate. She was sitting on
her own, so I decided to say hello. She’d been living in
America for a few years and had never heard of James,
never heard of Madchester or Britpop. No idea that
we’d been around since 1982 or that Sit Down had been
a big hit all over Europe. We started talking and, within
a minute, Kate was in floods of tears. We’d barely said
50 words, but somehow we’d worked out we were
meant to be with each other.
Although neither of us said anything about the future
and we were both in other relationships, we kept in
touch. A year later I moved to LA to be with the girl
I was with at the time. She was a clairvoyant and as we
met at the airport, she said, “We shouldn’t be together.”
I told her she was being ridiculous. We went to a dance
class that night and there was Kate. I had no idea she
was in LA. The next morning, my girlfriend dropped
me off at another dance class and the only person in
the car park was Kate. My girlfriend walked over to her
and said, “This is Tim. Look after him.” Kate and I went
for breakfast and I told her I was in love with her.
Kate and I could both feel the synchronicity. But she
was also scared; she held me at arm’s length for a long
time. I was madly in love and the idea of losing her was
devastating. There was this one day when we went for
a drive and I could sense her distance. The Beatles’
Across the Universe came on the radio and something
in the words made me think, “You have to let go. Let go
of your intensity.” So I did. The song finished and Kate
pulled over to the side of the road. She said, “What am
I doing? I am meant to be with you!”
Kate knew that I had a son, Ben, from a previous
relationship. Ben met Kate and they were instantly in
love. Kate came to live with us in Brighton and became
an amazing stepmum. Ben’s now 35 and we have our
own son, Luka, who’s 19. Kate’s the one who taught
me how to be a dad. She helped me relax with the boys:
just love them, that’s the secret.
These days my heart is always open, whether I meet
someone on the street or I’m singing to 10,000 people
at Wembley Arena. I feel at peace. As a teenager, there
wasn’t much peace. I hated boarding at Shrewsbury
School, I didn’t have a great relationship with my father
and undiagnosed liver disease convinced me I was
going mad. Aged 21 I was taken to hospital and I died
— I stopped breathing. I felt myself slipping down and
6 • The Sunday Times Magazine
VA LU E S
it felt wonderful. When the nurse forced me to start
breathing again, I was quite pissed off.
But that experience affected me. I challenged myself
to find a purpose in life or I was going to check out early.
I started meditating, gave up alcohol, drugs, sex; I lived
like a monk. Lots happened around that time — James
became very successful, I became a father, I went wild.
And then I met Kate. I guess that was the final part of
the story. The purpose in life became a clear picture.
Our story doesn’t surprise me. Kate is a healer and a
shaman. She’s developed her own theory of body and
mind work, the 360 Experience. People come from
around the globe to learn. In Kate’s world, she’s the big
cheese. And I’m not Tim Booth, I’m Kate’s husband.
Some people will assume that we are “spiritual”, but
I hate that word. It sounds wanky and elitist. We dance
and we mediate to stay sane in an insane world. There
are days when I think, “F*** this!” But with Kate at my
side, I’m able to break through those patterns. When it
seems like humanity is going to hell in a handcart, she
helps me stay connected to the healing world.
Kate
I can’t even remember Tim’s first words to me, but
there was something about them and the resonance of
Dad had made a living will that
stipulated that Tim had to sing
Sit Down to him on his death bed
Main: Tim, 64,
and Kate, 53, sit
down in a rehearsal
studio in south
London. Inset: on
their wedding day in
September 2005

his voice. We were both in relationships, but that initial
spark was the beginning of a 28-year love story. The
STRANGE
gods had a plan for us. HABITS
Some months later I was in Malibu and I struck
up a friendship with an English make-up artist. We Tim on Kate
were having a beer one night and she said, “You really Her indigenous
remind me of someone I know. It’s a man, I hope name in our
you’re not offended. His name’s Tim Booth.” I just family is She
screamed. The next day I was in the shopping mall Who Turns the
and James’s music came on the radio. It was ridiculous. Lights Out. She’ll
I’m from a middle-class north London Jewish family; come into a
Mum and Dad dreamt of me marrying an accountant room and dim
or a doctor. Although my work had taken me away from the lights to
that orthodox path, the idea of marriage scared the hell near darkness
out of me. But I was fighting a losing battle. I’m turned no matter what
on by a man’s brain and Tim is a secret boffin. Whether is happening
it’s poetry, maths, quantum mechanics or Leeds United,
he is passionate. He was my sacred appointment. Kate on Tim
Right from the start we both understood that being He drinks
together would also mean being apart. Tim was in a kukicha tea and
band, always touring, and I had my work, which took eats two boiled
me all over the world. We’re just about to enter a eggs every
summer where we won’t really see each other for over single day
six months. But there’s also an intrinsic resilience built
into our relationship that allows us to say goodbye.
PORTRAIT BY MICHAEL CLEMENT
When my parents first met him, they weren’t keen.
He was a rock star — rock stars take drugs! — he was
older than me. But within weeks my dad became the
world’s biggest James fan. He knew the words to every
song, was always in the mosh pit at the gigs. He and
Tim loved each other dearly.
Sadly, Dad died during the Covid pandemic. Tim and
I were stuck in LA, Mum was in London and Dad was
in hospital in Watford. That was awful. But an amazing
nurse FaceTimed us and Mum while Dad was on the
ventilator, so we were all able to say goodbye. Dad had
made a living will and stipulated that Tim had to sing
his favourite James song, Sit Down: “I’ll sing myself to
sleep/ A song from the darkest hour”. It was a beautiful
moment, but it was hard. Dad died 15 minutes later.
Losing him changed something for us. We started to
really think about the idea of “home”. We’ve always
lived a nomadic existence, but the realisation that
home is within gave us a new sense of purpose. There
may be a time when we’ll want to settle down. When?
I don’t know. For now, we’ll just follow life’s compass n
Interviews by Danny Scott.
The new James album, Yummy, is out now. They tour
the UK from May 29. For more about Kate Shela’s
work, visit the360emergence.com
The Sunday Times Magazine • 7
The traitor of Arnhem

A 1963 portrait of the Soviet spy

Anthony Blunt, when he was
surveyor of the Queen’s
pictures, by Lord Snowdon
After a disastrous Allied operation in the Netherlands, British
intelligence became convinced that a highly placed double
agent had passed secrets to the Nazis. Robert Verkaik, who
spent years on the archive trail, unmasks the prime suspect

Allied paratroopers over the

Netherlands during Operation Market
Garden, September 1944. Their
mission was betrayed to the Germans
 T
his is not the story I intended
to tell. I set out to write a book
about a distant relative, Eddy
Verkaik, who had fought in
the Dutch resistance during
the Second World War.
Eddy had helped alert the British to the
treachery of a fellow Dutch resistance
fighter — a terrifying giant of a man known
as “King Kong”: Christiaan Lindemans.
Lindemans had betrayed Operation
Market Garden, the ambitious and ill-fated
Allied airborne mission that dropped
thousands of paratroopers into the
Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the 80th
anniversary of which falls this September.
Had it succeeded, it would have kicked open
the door to the heart of Germany and
brought the conflict to a speedy end. In the
event the Allies lost more than 17,000 men
in what was to be their final defeat of the war.
But one day in the archive everything
changed. I discovered a second double agent
had betrayed Operation Market Garden to
the Germans — a spy codenamed Josephine,
whom history had all but forgotten and
whose identity has never been revealed.
As I started to pull on that thread, who
should pop out but Anthony Blunt, one
of the Cambridge spies — the group of
upper-class double agents who, for years
during the Second World War and the Cold
War, passed British and American secrets
to their communist masters in Russia.
For decades Blunt has widely been
regarded as one of the more harmless of
that group. But my research would suggest
he was perhaps the most devastatingly
treacherous — and without realising it
I had uncovered one of the greatest spy
mysteries of the 20th century, a story with
ramifications that are still felt to this day.
Of all the Cambridge spies, the privileged
sons of the British establishment recruited by
Stalin in the 1930s, Blunt remains the most
elusive. He was a polymath, a multilingual
mathematician, world-famous art historian,
surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, knight
of the realm. Rumours had swirled about
his loyalty for years. In 1964 he secretly
“confessed” to being a Russian spy — but
WAR AND TREACHERY
1930 1940 1941
1930s 1940
While a fellow of Trinity After a year in the
College, Cambridge, Anthony British Army, Blunt
Blunt joins a circle of joins MI5 and quickly
disaffected young men, later rises to the top of
known as the Cambridge Five, British intelligence
who become involved in
spying for the Soviet Union
September 1939
Germany invades
Poland, starting
the Second July-October 1940
World War Battle of Britain
1930 1940 1941
Anthony Blunt, left, with fellow extraordinarily was allowed to keep his job
students at Cambridge, 1929. in the royal household.
Below: Blunt is exposed as a So when, in 1979, he was named publicly
Soviet spy and stripped of his as a double agent by the prime minister,
knighthood in November 1979, Margaret Thatcher, the establishment of
after years in the royal household the day went into a frenzy of damage
limitation. Blunt lost his knighthood, but
otherwise survived remarkably unscathed.
Most of the Cambridge spies had
defected to Russia: Guy Burgess and Donald
Maclean fled there in 1951 and 12 years later
they would be joined by Kim Philby. While
they were drinking themselves to death in
their dingy Moscow flats, Blunt continued
to bask in the approval of rich and powerful
friends who were all at pains to point out
that he had passed secrets to the Soviets
only while they were our allies during the
war. That wasn’t treachery, they said,
it was misplaced idealism. Nothing like the
others, who were busy passing on nuclear
secrets and betraying agents in the field at
the height of the Cold War.
That, to a large extent, is still the general
view of Blunt, who died of a heart attack at
his home in Highgate, north London, in
1983, aged 75: the most benign of the group
in terms of the damage done and the
betrayal wrought; notable as much for
1942 1943 1944
1943 June 1944
A traitor, codenamed “Josephine”, As D-Day approaches,
who is passing information to Josephine’s activity
Karl Heinz Kraemer, a German mysteriously resumes,
spymaster, is identified by the US. at first passing
Blunt is tasked to investigate and disinformation to
names the Swedish diplomat Frank the Nazis
Cervell as the mole
September
June 1941 1944
Germany December 1941 Operation
invades the USA enters June 1944 Market
Soviet Union the conflict D-Day Garden
1942 1943 1944
 An MI5 report on Christiaan
Lindemans, codenamed “King Kong”,
a Dutch double agent blamed for the
betrayal of Operation Market Garden

cropping up in the Netflix show The Crown,

played by Samuel West, as anything else.
But his story never really made much
sense. The son of a well-connected
Hampshire vicar and a distant cousin of the
Queen, Blunt had got to Cambridge on
a maths scholarship but took a first in
modern languages and then almost
single-handedly created art history as an
academic discipline in the UK. He was an
intellectual with a global reputation.
After a brief stint in army intelligence
Blunt joined MI5, the UK’s domestic
counterintelligence and security agency, in
1940, by which time he was already working
for the Russians. Once he got his foot in the
door his career grew wings. During the Blitz
he was the personal assistant to the head of
counterintelligence; by the end of the war
he was writing Churchill’s personal security
briefings with a pivotal role at the heart of
Allied intelligence. As the spy writer Nigel
West put it, “Few spies in history could ever
PREVIOUS PAGES: SNOWDON / TRUNK ARCHIVE, GETTY IMAGES. THESE PAGES: GETTY IMAGES, MIRRORPIX

have been presented with such a spectacular

opportunity.” Given such a unique position,
could he have really done so little with it?
What I would go on to discover was that
his betrayals had directly and intentionally
aided the Nazi war machine and caused
the deaths of thousands of soldiers and
civilians. I would come to realise that the
establishment version of Blunt as a
high-minded, unworldly figure somehow
removed from the grubby realities of his
treachery was not just a myth but that he
was truly monstrous, far more so than any 40,000 paratroopers were dropped to a hero of the Dutch resistance, had been
of the other Cambridge spies. capture key bridges and pave the way for passing secrets to the Germans. After the
Allied tanks. Had it succeeded, the road to D-Day landings in 1944, when Allied victory
The King Kong problem Berlin would have been opened. The war was all but inevitable, he mystified the
Operation Market Garden (see panel could have been over by Christmas, with Germans by volunteering to continue to
overleaf ) retains a romantic hold on the hundreds of thousands of lives saved. spy for them. Lindemans would cross and
national imagination that puts it alongside I was deep into my research of the biggest recross the front lines, bringing intelligence
Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. Despite German counterintelligence coup of the to his Nazi paymasters and in particular
its failure, it is still regarded as the greatest war, Englandspiel — the England Game, and warn them — several times, in increasing
airborne operation in history, in which how Christiaan “King Kong” Lindemans, detail — of the vast airborne attack. ➤

1945 1946 1950 1960 1970 1980

September 1944 May 1945 October 1945 1964 1979

Operation Market Garden is Kraemer is captured and Blunt retires After being offered Blunt’s status
thwarted by the Germans, who interrogated. Blunt investigates. from MI5 and is immunity from as a double
receive tip-offs from two MI5 declares Kraemer an made surveyor prosecution, Blunt agent is
double agents, Josephine “inveterate liar” who had of the King’s secretly confesses to revealed
and “King Kong” fabricated Josephine pictures having been a spy for publicly. He is
the Soviet Union stripped of his
April 1945 knighthood
Russian soldiers enter the heart
of Berlin and hoist the Red May 1945
Flag on top of the Reichstag, Victory in
October 1944 completing Stalin’s victory Europe.
Soviet troops cross and staking his territorial Germany March 1947 March 1962
into Germany claim to eastern Europe surrenders Cold War begins Cuban missile crisis

1945 1946 1950 1960 1970 1980

New Crunchy Hazelnut Chocolate Spread

Tasty

Tastier

Tastiest

Spread deliciousness
 In truth, Lindemans’s story is far from
unknown, although experts disagree on
how important a figure he was. In the UK
most military historians have little regard
for the impact of his treachery. The story is
very different in the Netherlands, whose
people suffered so terribly, and certainly in
the immediate aftermath of Market Garden
there were many senior figures who
regarded his betrayal as crucial. The point
everyone can agree on is that the Germans
did an unexpectedly brilliant job of
improvising a defence.
After a couple of years of following the
archival trail, I found a secret report in
the National Archives in Kew dating from
1946 about a meeting between a British
intelligence officer and Lindemans at the
prison in the Hague where he was being
held on treason charges. According to the
files, the officer discovered that Lindemans
and his wife were working for the Russians.
Lindemans then named leading communist
agents operating in key positions in the
West. Within days Lindemans was dead,
supposedly by suicide — although there is
strong evidence he was the victim of a
poisoning. (The Kremlin playbook hasn’t
changed very much over the years.)
The second spy: who was “Josephine”?
The Russian link was an unexpected twist
that led me to a separate file in Amsterdam,
and a reference to another warning that
the Germans had received about Market
Garden. This second briefing was sent to
Berlin the day before the Allied airborne
assault by a spy codenamed Josephine.
What was even more puzzling was that
it was clear that the accuracy of this
second warning was far greater than the
intelligence passed on by Lindemans.
If I was surprised, the reaction from
British intelligence and Allied military
planners at the time was something close
to panic. Who on earth was Josephine? It
turned out that because of a bureaucratic
error the warning didn’t reach the German
generals until the armada of Allied aircraft,
carrying the first lift of paratroopers, had
already crossed the Dutch border and so
those historians who were even aware of
it have dismissed its significance. Yet this
intelligence included a detailed order of
battle and strategic objectives.
Josephine even neutralised MI5’s own
double agents who had been sending
deceptive messages to the Germans saying
that any airborne attack in the Netherlands
would be a dummy run and the real target
was Scandinavia. On September 17 the
German high command issued a briefing
to field commanders warning them of this.
The view from the British intelligence
establishment at the time was far from
sanguine. MI5 had assured the cabinet that
there was not a single Nazi spy on British
shores who hadn’t been exposed and
ALAMY
arrested or turned. Now it appeared the
OPERATION MARKET GARDEN
The D-Day landings in June 1944
brought the Allies to the brink of
victory. One final blow and the whole
Nazi carapace would come crashing
down. That blow was meant to be
Operation Market Garden, the largest
airborne operation in history: 40,000
paratroopers and glider troops (Market)
were to be dropped in the Netherlands
to secure six bridges over the Rhine,
clearing a path for the tanks of XXX
Corps (Garden) to push into Germany.
The brainchild of Field Marshal
Bernard Montgomery, it was a huge
gamble. The marshy terrain of the
polders made for treacherous going.
Above all, the air drop was at the limit
of operational range and on a scale
never attempted before. British tanks
would have 48 hours to cover 64 miles
and link up with the 1st British Airborne
Division, who were to land by glider
and parachute around the town of
Arnhem and secure the last bridge over
the Rhine — immortalised in the 1977
film A Bridge Too Far.
At 2.30pm on Sunday, September 17,
the tanks of the Irish Guards started
their advance towards Eindhoven. After
Nazis had a mole at the heart of the war
effort. The British codebreakers of Bletchley
Park, alerted by the American Office of
Strategic Services, the forerunner to the
CIA, had been monitoring Agent Josephine
for more than a year, since mid-1943, when
an MI5 officer described her reports as “the
best illicit intelligence derived by the enemy
from this country which I have seen”.
By late summer 1943 British intelligence
had identified the German spymaster
running Josephine as Karl Heinz Kraemer,
a lawyer operating out of the German
embassy in Stockholm. Kraemer’s reports
British troops are
taken prisoner
by the Germans
during the Battle
of Arnhem —
the Allies’ final
defeat of the war
just half an hour, the antitank guns of
Kampfgruppe Walther, a unit cobbled
together by the German commanders,
ripped into the British column.
Sixty miles away, 20,000 British and
American paratroopers had landed and
marched to Arnhem and Nijmegen.
They too ran into unexpected
resistance from the improvised 9th and
10th SS Panzer Divisions.
German reinforcements flooded in.
Bitter fighting ensued for three days,
until the last paras at Arnhem
surrendered with the tanks of XXX
Corps just ten miles away. The losses
were devastating: Allied casualties
amounted to more than 17,000.
It was the last Allied defeat of the war
and ensured that it would not be over
by Christmas. It was to be the Russians
who would win the race to Berlin,
redrawing the map of Europe and
paving the way for the Iron Curtain.
At Arnhem the Allies had expected
little resistance, but were met by a
German force that was resilient and
prepared. Was that just because they
were battle-hardened veterans or had
Market Garden been betrayed?
were so trusted that they were read
verbatim by Hitler himself. Alfred Jodl,
the German chief of staff, and Walter
Schellenberg, the head of the Nazi secret
service, also regarded Josephine as their top
source of Allied intelligence.
The threat from Josephine was all too
real and MI5 handed the job of tracking her
down to one of their top men, a rising star
who was already tipped to be director
general — none other than Anthony Blunt.
Blunt’s investigations in 1943 were
supported by a cast of sub-agents, many of
whom were his former lovers. Blunt, who ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 13
 BRITISH
INTELLIGENCE
Peter Falk In the Second World
MI6 spy in War MI5 was the
WHO’S Stockholm.
Raided the safe
domestic intelligence
service and MI6 the
WHO? of Josephine’s
handler, Kraemer,
agency responsible for
espionage abroad
and warned Blunt
The Second World War of a Russian link
spies at the heart of the
“Josephine” mystery

Anthony Blunt Juan Pujol

One of the Garcia “Garbo”
Cambridge spies Spanish MI5
recruited by double agent who
Boris Kreshin Russia. Rose to the deceived the Nazis Karl Heinz
Blunt’s NKVD top of MI5 during about the location Kraemer
handler in London the war Agent Josephine of the D-Day German spy based
in 1944/45 who Highly placed landings in Stockholm.
met the British mole who sent The conduit for
agent once a week Allied battle plans Josephine whose
at venues across for Arnhem to reports were read
London Kraemer. Blunt by Adolf Hitler
claimed she
didn’t exist
RUSSIAN GERMAN
INTELLIGENCE INTELLIGENCE
The NKVD, forerunner Abwehr, the German
to the KGB. Before the military intelligence,
Second World War it ran agents across
established stations in Europe and sent spies
the capitals of Europe to the UK, the majority
and recruited the of whom were arrested
Cambridge spies and turned

Walter Schellenberg
Kraemer’s boss. He
received Josephine’s
Arnhem warning
late, but said it
helped Germany
understand the
Allies’ intentions

was gay, recruited them independently and
ran them outside of MI5. He and his team
chased a succession of leads that led
nowhere. But then at the end of the year
there was an apparent breakthrough by
MI6, the intelligence agency that runs
a network of spies overseas.
As luck would have it, MI6’s man in
Stockholm, Peter Falk, had befriended
Kraemer’s housekeeper earlier that year and
persuaded her to pass on intelligence. As
well as copying documents that she found
in his office, she managed to press the key to
Kraemer’s personal safe into a pat of butter.
From the impression it made, Falk was able
to send measurements to London. By some
miracle the key they sent back fitted perfectly,
giving London a line deep into the mystery of
Josephine. The problem was Kraemer himself
didn’t appear at all sure who Josephine was,
or where her information came from.
One tranche of papers was deemed so
sensitive that Falk decided to fly back to
London to deliver the information in person.
On December 23, 1943, he met Blunt for
The German spy handler Karl
Heinz Kraemer in prison in
England after his arrest in
Germany in May 1945
dinner at the Reform Club and passed
across the table documents that seemed
to suggest a Russian link to Josephine. Falk
records in his unpublished memoir that
Blunt became uncharacteristically angry,
insisting that there could be no such
connection, before gathering up the papers,
warning Falk to say nothing and promising
to investigate. There is no record that Blunt
did any such thing, nor that he made any
report of what he had been told.
Shortly afterwards Blunt was to identify
Josephine as a loose-lipped Swedish
diplomat called Frank Cervell, to whom he
had been able to feed false intelligence: sure
enough, the flow of Josephine’s accurate
and damaging material was stemmed. It
looked as if Blunt had got his man. But then
a strange thing happened. As preparations
began in earnest for the D-Day landings of
June 1944, Josephine piped up again.
The D-Day deception
D-Day, the British and American invasion
of Nazi-occupied Europe, was one of the ➤

The Sunday Times Magazine • 15

 VERANDAS • GLASS ROOMS • PATIO AWNINGS • CANOPIES
SUPPLIED AND INSTALLED THROUGHOUT THE UK

CALL 0808 134 2118 OR VISIT LANAIOUTDOOR.CO.UK

GIVING YOU THE SPACE TO

LIVE, WORK AND PLAY
SPRING SALE NOW ON – SAVE UP TO 30%

Solar panels can be Convert your terrace into a more

added to the roof blades. flexible outdoor space with a
remote controlled roof.

FIND MORE INSPIRATION AT

LANAIOUTDOOR.CO.UK
greatest intelligence coups of this or any
war. British intelligence (it was a joint
MI5/MI6 operation) had an agent in Spain,
one Juan Pujol Garcia, codenamed Garbo,
masquerading as a fanatical Nazi who
passed information to the Germans and
deceived them into believing that any
attack in Normandy was a feint and that
the real attack would come around Calais.
It was stunningly successful; the Germans
held back vital Panzer tank reinforcements
for days in anticipation of an attack that
never came. Despite the fact that he had
got it so wrong, Pujol was even awarded
the Iron Cross for his services to the Reich.
Garbo was one of the most closely
guarded secrets of the war, known only to
a tiny number of intelligence officers — one
of whom was Anthony Blunt — and yet it
transpired that Josephine had been passing
on the same disinformation to the Germans.
When this fact emerged after the war,
Lieutenant Colonel Roger Fleetwood
Hesketh, who had been a key member of
the D-Day deception team, was baffled and
dismayed to discover that “Josephine had
been playing with our toys”. After the war,
Jodl, the chief of the German staff, was
adamant it was Josephine’s intelligence
that had been the most significant reason
for Hitler holding back reinforcements.
After D-Day, Josephine’s tactics changed:
she now began to pass on worryingly
accurate information about the Allied
war effort, culminating (but not ending
in) the hugely detailed Market Garden
intelligence, which, at the time it was sent
to Kraemer, was still known by only a
handful of senior Allied officers.
Clearly Blunt had got the wrong man. And
it was at this point that I began to seriously
wonder what he had been up to. It was as if
he was deliberately looking the wrong way.
Could it be that Blunt was Josephine and
had been tasked with investigating himself ?
How could that make any sense? After all,
Blunt was a Russian spy not a German one.
The race to Berlin
Of course in 1944, after the success of
D-Day, it was unthinkable that a senior
British figure could be passing secrets to
the Nazis. Apart from anything else, who
would be willing to risk execution for
treason in pursuit of a losing cause?
However, thwarting Operation Market
Garden was of strategic importance not just
to the Nazis but to Russia too. Stalin had
wanted D-Day to succeed because it would
open up a second front in Europe and draw
German troops away from the Russian
front. But if Market Garden was successful
the Americans and British would arrive in
Berlin first, while Stalin’s troops remained
stranded hundreds of miles to the east. As
Vladimir Putin recently reminded us, Stalin
was less concerned about the struggle
against fascism than winning the “great
patriotic war”. It was about advancing
Juan Pujol Garcia, codenamed
Garbo, fed disinformation to the
Germans to divert troops from
the D-Day landings at Normandy
Russian interests and, above all, that meant
getting to Berlin and dominating eastern
Europe. Without that victory, there would
have been no Berlin Wall and the Iron
Curtain, the line of communist rule that cut
Europe in half at the war’s end, would have
extended barely beyond the borders of
Russia. Josephine’s leaks align with Stalin’s
strategic goals to a remarkable degree.
On May 12, 1945, a British special forces
unit based in Denmark captured Kraemer,
the German spymaster who was the conduit
for Josephine’s intelligence, in an office at
Flensburg, a town in the north of Germany
that was serving as the country’s foreign
office. Five days after being roused from
the bed he was sharing with his secretary,
Kraemer arrived in England for interrogation.
Leading the investigation was Anthony Blunt.
MI6 continued to insist that Kraemer
was being fed intelligence by a source in
London and asked Blunt to investigate links
to Moscow, following reports that Kraemer
was working for the Russians. According to
one of the MI5 memos, Blunt responded by
saying this line of questioning was “flogging
a dead horse” and that he strongly believed
Kraemer was mostly telling the truth about
his contacts, who he said were Japanese
diplomats and Hungarian agents operating
from the Iberian peninsula.
MI6 insisted Kraemer
had a source in London.
Blunt said this line of
questioning was
“flogging a dead horse”
By now many of Kraemer’s colleagues
from German intelligence had also fallen
into Allied hands. One of them was his boss,
Walter Schellenberg, who was certain that
Josephine had helped the Germans by
providing a detailed description of Allied
battle plans around the Dutch town of
Arnhem, near the German border —
a critical point in Operation Market Garden.
At 3pm on September 17, just two hours
after Allied paratrooper and glider landings
had begun, two SS Panzer Divisions, the 9th
and 10th, were sent immediately to engage
the enemy at Arnhem and nearby Nijmegen,
an order that is credited with playing a
decisive role in securing the German victory.
There is a strong case to be made that the
speed of their deployment was as a result of
the intelligence the Germans had received.
MI6 continued to faithfully pass on
the Arnhem information to the MI5
interrogators, but none of these allegations
were ever put to Kraemer. Instead, just as
the year before, a succession of false leads
were followed and went nowhere until, on
Blunt’s orders, the case was quietly dropped
and Kraemer was sent back to Germany on
October 26, 1945.
He was declared by the British to be an
“inveterate liar”, a justification that MI5
used as the reason for refusing to share its
reports on Kraemer’s interrogation with
the Americans. Given that it was American
intelligence that had first alerted the British
to the existence of a high-level Nazi agent
codenamed Josephine, this must have
seemed an act of extraordinary hypocrisy.
It was one of Blunt’s last official duties
as an MI5 officer. He spent much of early
1946 in Germany, where, among other
things, he recovered Edward VIII’s deeply
compromising fan letters to Hitler. It seems
likely there were numerous other royals to
be disentangled from their enthusiasm for
the Nazi cause, as well as royal art to track
down, and that all this was to provide him
with a healthy store of kompromat against
the royal family that was to protect him for
the rest of his life, as well as get him his job
as surveyor of the King’s pictures.
The elusive “Major Blunt”
The official story of Josephine is told in
a 300-page report commissioned by the
British secret services in the 1970s. Written
by the retired intelligence officer Patricia
McCallum, it calls itself, simply enough,
a report into “the Kraemer (or Josephine)
case”. No explanation is given as to why,
thirty-odd years after the event, MI5 were
still scratching their heads.
The report was declassified in 2003 when
MI5 quietly released it into the National
Archives. It painstakingly examines how
Kraemer had received the Arnhem report
from Josephine on the eve of Market
Garden, and presents in great detail how
MI5 and MI6 had mounted a forlorn hunt
to establish the mole’s identity. ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 17
 McCallum noted that MI6 and MI5 had
bitterly disagreed over the provenance of the
intelligence. MI6 were convinced Josephine
was a real agent working out of London. MI5,
guided by Blunt, had come to deny her very
existence and said Kraemer had invented
her to hide from Berlin the fact he didn’t
have any real agents. Certainly Kraemer
never met Josephine and had no idea who
or what she was. He merely received her
intelligence from a variety of sources and
passed it on to his masters in Berlin.
McCallum notes how odd it is that no
investigation into the Arnhem betrayal
had taken place immediately after it came
to light. Thirty-plus years later, having
been asked to conduct her inquiries, she
concludes that it is impossible to discover
who had given away the Arnhem
intelligence. She writes: “Finally, it must be
admitted that the Kraemer case is and will
always remain something of a mystery.”
Yet there is one name at the heart of the
Josephine inquiry that raises questions the
report doesn’t even begin to address.
A certain “Maj. Blunt” strolls in and out of its
pages without the author once mentioning
that this is that Major Blunt, the Russian
double agent. When McCallum came to
write her report, Blunt had admitted his
treachery a decade earlier. So why wasn’t
his double agent status taken into account?
It is surely worth a mention if one is looking
into how vital operational intelligence came
to be passed to Britain’s enemies?
Why was Blunt being treated as if he was
just another bona fide intelligence officer?
Why was it that McCallum makes no
reference to the fact that Blunt had also led
the 1943-44 investigation into the identity
of Josephine? McCallum refers to the
earlier investigation often, but without ever
mentioning Blunt. The oddities mount up,
but perhaps the most startling is the
moment when, in reference to the D-Day
deception, she writes cheerfully: “One
thing is certain. Had Josephine been a real
agent, she would have had to be a member
of the deception staff !’’ Anthony Blunt was
a member of the deception staff.
The reality is that just as Christiaan
Lindemans’s treachery only really makes
sense when seen through a Russian lens, so
it is that Josephine only really makes sense
as Blunt. The alternatives are either that
there really was a fervent Nazi at the heart
of the Allied war effort who operated in
secret and then disappeared from view
having fooled every single intelligence
agency in the world, or that Kraemer was
such an inspired liar that he was able to
invent Allied battle plans with startling
accuracy. Neither alternative stacks up.
The cover-up: Kim Philby steps in
REX, GETTY IMAGES
A smoking gun, if there is one, is hidden
in the files of either the British or Russian
secret services and there it will for ever
remain. But Anthony Blunt had motive,
means and opportunity in spades. He
could also rely on a highly organised and
well-resourced network of Russian agents
and British traitors working out of London
and Stockholm. Russian intelligence had
a large official presence in London from
1941. It was all too easy for him to pass on
at least 1,700 secret documents to Moscow
and, if he was Josephine, then he was the
apex of a well-oiled Russian disinformation
machine cherry-picking what to feed back
to the Germans.
By 1944 Blunt was writing Churchill’s
security briefings; he was the liaison for
intelligence sharing between MI5 and MI6;
he had an oversight role on the deception
committee. He was also in charge of the
Triplex operation, still secret today, that
intercepted every single diplomatic bag
from Allies and neutral countries with
embassies in London. It was this role that
gave him the most likely means to pass on
intelligence to the Nazis. The Arnhem
warning was delivered directly to Kraemer
by diplomatic mail. If that failed there were
regular commercial flights to Stockholm
from Scotland and he even had the
extensive Iberian spy network of his fellow
Cambridge spy Kim Philby to call on.
The day after the Arnhem betrayal an
emotional Blunt contacted his Russian
The day after the
Arnhem betrayal an
emotional Blunt
contacted his Russian
handler to try to quit
Left: Blunt grants an interview
to The Times after going into
hiding in 1979. Above: his fellow
spy Kim Philby, right, in 1955
handler to say that he was quitting. The
Russians responded by love-bombing their
agent and at the end of September 1944
Blunt met his handler, Boris Kreshin, in
London. The Russians wanted to pass on to
Blunt how delighted they were with their
English spy and Kreshin took great pride
in reading out a commendation from the
Kremlin. It was accompanied with a £100
payment, worth about £6,000 today. Until
then Blunt had always been careful not to
accept money from the Russians as he
maintained his treachery was motivated by
political ideology. This time he gratefully
accepted the cash.
Tellingly, it was Philby — then in charge of
anticommunism as head of MI6’s Section
IX — who oversaw the handling of the
Kraemer case after Blunt’s retirement from
the secret services in 1945, at the age of 38.
And it was Philby who kept the Americans
at bay when they began asking tricky
questions about Josephine and Kraemer.
Philby would become the most famous of
the Cambridge spies. But if Blunt really was
Josephine then that not only places him as
the most important member of the group,
but arguably the most influential spy in
history. His actions contributed to the deaths
of tens of thousands of Allied servicemen
and women and countless civilians who
perished as a result of a prolonged war. The
million or more German women who were
raped by the Russians in the aftermath of
their victory can also be laid at his door, as
well as the decades of brutal oppression
under the Soviet yoke suffered by millions
more citizens of eastern Europe. His actions
shaped the history of the 20th century and
continue to shape the world today n
The Traitor of Arnhem by Robert Verkaik
(Headline £20) is published by Headline
on May 9. To order a copy go to
timesbookshop.co.uk. Discount available
for Times+ members
The Sunday Times Magazine • 19
 40 YEARS
OF FLAK

Jeremy Bowen and Justin Webb

met on their first day at the BBC in
1984. They tell Rosamund Urwin
how they’ve survived real bullets
and the barbs of the culture war

Above: Jeremy Bowen

PORTRAIT BY and Justin Webb as BBC
trainees. Right: outside
DEAN BELCHER Broadcasting House

20 • The Sunday Times Magazine

The Sunday Times Magazine • 21
 ustin Webb and Jeremy Bowen
J
are like an old married couple.
The two BBC lifers — Webb is
the longest-serving presenter
on Radio 4’s Today programme
while Bowen is international
editor — have heard each
other’s anecdotes so often they
remember the punchlines, and
while they speak over and mock
each other, their teasing is
infused with affection.
The pair have been friends
since they met in 1984 on their
first day as graduate trainees at
the BBC, have whiled away
evenings together in the pubs of
W1A, live a road apart in south
London and Bowen even played accidental
matchmaker to Webb, introducing him to
his wife three decades ago.
The journalists are celebrating 40 years
at the corporation this month. Webb is 63
now, Bowen 64, but they still have an
appetite for entering hostile territory: the
former with culture wars and the latter with
actual wars. In fact, BBC bosses seem so
nervous about potential controversy —
whether on trans issues or Gaza — that a
press officer is sent to supervise us. “Do
they really need a chaperone?” I ask her. She
laughs nervously. I think that means “yes”.
We’re chatting in a café round the corner
from Broadcasting House in Fitzrovia,
central London. Neither has grown jaded.
Bowen still talks about the “privilege” of
reporting, while Webb has retained his
sense of mischief — and he still sounds
bouncy at 6am. “I’m paid to sound cheerful
[while] Jeremy is paid to crawl under barbed
wire and be shot at,” he says. “That’s how
our careers have diverged.”
When they started at the BBC they were
in a group of eight trainees. Bowen recalls
looking around the room and deciding that
Webb was the one he most wanted to have
a drink with; Webb says he was just glad
there was someone else who hadn’t been to
Oxbridge. Webb had studied at LSE, where
he wrote for the student newspaper The
Beaver, while Bowen, whose father Gareth
had been an editor for BBC Radio Wales,
had read history at UCL, where he
industriously avoided student journalism
to spend more time in the pub.
Bowen recalls later being told by a
manager that he was — in modern parlance
— a nepo baby. “He said, ‘We thought we
would take a look at you because you were
Gareth’s boy, but we didn’t think you would
have a chance.’”
For Webb, his interview for his BBC
traineeship was the only serious job
application he has done. “They asked me
how I got briefed [on the news] in the
morning and I said I listened to the
headlines at the end of the World at One,”
he says. “I’m not sure that would be the
right answer now, but given they were all
22 • The Sunday Times Magazine
drunk in those days I think a relaxed
approach to the news was good.”
Newsroom culture has changed during
their careers. “I can remember someone
chucking a typewriter at a colleague,” Webb
recalls. “People smoked the whole time and
were drunk most afternoons.” That boozy
culture ended in the 1990s, Bowen says,
pointing across the road to the Crown &
Sceptre, a favourite BBC haunt. “It was
packed with everybody from the radio
newsroom at lunch, after the 6pm bulletin
and after the 10pm. Some people would go
to the pub three times a day. ”
Webb was a reporter on Today in the late
1980s and recalls cabinet ministers and
bishops alike drinking whiskies in the green
room with John Humphrys and Brian
Redhead when they came off air at 9am. He
also once filed a piece after midnight and
remembers showing it to the night editors:
“As it played, they all toppled over sideways. breakfast TV presenter in history”) and
They were so pissed they couldn’t get to Bowen as co-host with Sophie Raworth of
the end of a three-and-a-half-minute piece.” BBC Breakfast from 2000 to 2002 (videos
Those bosses and editors had mostly on YouTube show he looks happier being
worked their way up from local papers; shot at). “Sophie used to kick me under the
Bowen and Webb were among the first desk when it was my turn to speak,” he says.
wave of BBC journalists who had all been It did allow him a welcome break from
to university. “It’s funny there are these chasing stories, though: “They [the
schemes to get people into the BBC who producers] think of you as an inflatable
aren’t graduates now, as it used to be the presenter doll that they can roll up and put
other way,” Bowen says. Webb adds: “That in a cupboard. They don’t give a damn what
was the generation of people we were you’re doing, as long as you turn up on
working under — they were extremely time.” Webb smiles in agreement: “If I ring
good at their jobs but [mostly] hadn’t gone up on my day off from Today, you can almost
to university. The greatest of them I worked hear the horror: ‘Why’s he calling us?’”
with.” He means Humphrys. Both want The answer, really, is that they are work
more non-graduates at the BBC, with Webb obsessives. Webb has no hobbies and
arguing that Today should again have a Bowen says that, while he likes wine and
presenter who hasn’t been to university. cooking, his life is his job and his family.
The pair rose quickly through the ranks. Luckily both their partners work in similar
Bowen’s first job overseas was as a radio fields: Bowen’s partner, Julia Williams —
correspondent in Geneva and he started with whom he has a daughter and son,
covering conflicts in 1989. After a stint as Mattie, 23, and Jack, 20 — was also a BBC
a foreign correspondent, Webb became a journalist, while Webb’s wife, Sarah Gordon,
BBC News presenter in London. Both had is in advertising. They have three adult
unhappy forays into breakfast TV: Webb as children: twins Martha and Sam, and Clara.
the main presenter on Breakfast News from The families live a street away from each
1992 to 1997 (“I’m probably the worst other in Camberwell, southeast London. It
 “I’M PAID TO SOUND
CHEERFUL, JEREMY
IS PAID TO CRAWL
UNDER BARBED WIRE
AND BE SHOT AT. THAT
IS HOW OUR CAREERS
HAVE DIVERGED”
Top left: Jeremy Bowen Top right: Justin Webb
with Kurdish peshmerga presented Breakfast
soldiers during the 1991 News from 1992 to 1997
uprisings in Iraq with Sophie Raworth

Left: he was shot in the Right: Raworth also

head in Egypt in 2013 — worked with Bowen
but managed to do his for two years on BBC
news bulletin at 10pm Breakfast from 2000

was at Bowen’s leaving party, when he was

heading to Jerusalem, that Webb met Sarah.
She lived in the flat below Bowen.
When presenting Today, Webb goes to
bed at 8pm in a room at the bottom of the
garden to avoid disturbing his family, as he
has to get up at 3.30am. “When I started the
kids were really young and I just didn’t
sleep,” he says. “I remember Humphrys
saying, ‘Don’t mind all these briefings — I Webb feels in awe of Barnett, 39. “If you one, with a knife and blood” — so bad things
never read them — the only important thing have two young children, as she does, it’s can happen anywhere.
is to sleep.’ We all have different ways of just a magnitude more difficult. And frankly Webb had a difficult childhood. He
coping. [The former Today presenter] Evan it’s more difficult as a mother because revealed in 2011 that he was born as the
Davis used to listen to the sound of dolphins. babies usually look to Mum in the night. result of an affair between his mother,
PREVIOUS PAGES: DEAN BELCHER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. THESE PAGES: BAS SOLANKI, BBC, REX

My trick is being knackered as hell.”
Today is becoming less formal and stuffy
— in part due to competition from news
podcasts, Webb says, but also due to
a generational shift in presenters, with
Amol Rajan joining in 2021 and the former
Woman’s Hour host Emma Barnett the
latest addition to the roster.
Rajan and Webb initially had a “friendly
disagreement” about how to speak on air,
with Rajan saying that Webb’s “received
pronunciation” was overused on Radio 4
and Webb arguing that it is vital to be clear
to be understood. “Amol doesn’t even like
saying ‘good morning’ — he likes to say
‘hello’ — and people come up to me and
say, ‘I do like you on Today — you speak
properly,’” Webb says. “But Amol actually
won this argument — it’s important that
we have a range of voices. Mishal [Husain]
and I speak the same way, but it’s not how
most people do. I was being overly sensitive
and we have now kissed and made up.”
So hats off to any woman who does it.”
Bowen remembers those days too: “I still
have nightmares about the 3am starts.
People die at that time of the day.”
It is strange to hear a war correspondent
fearing death in his sleep. I ask if Bowen’s
children have ever been scared of him
covering war. “I don’t think they are unduly
worried because quite rightly they are always
confident I will come home,” he replies, but
then he starts talking about being shot in
the head and leg in Cairo in 2013: “The
bloke next to me had the back of his head
blown off. I had to have surgery to get the
bullets out, so I called up Julia and said, ‘I’m
OK.’ I did the ten [news bulletin] that night,
as I thought I’d had a bit of a tough day,
I might as well have something to show for
it.” Jack was 10 and Mattie 12 at the time and
Julia tried to make light of it. “Apparently
they said, ‘Why are you joking about this?’”
He adds later that he once suffered a
mugging in Camberwell — “a violent
Gloria, and Peter Woods, the BBC
newsreader. Woods visited him just once,
when Webb was a baby. In his recent
memoir, The Gift of a Radio, he wrote about
his stepfather’s mental illness and the
horrors of the Quaker boarding school that
he went to at 11 where, at the time he
attended, there was no hot water and where
he says children were “tortured” by other
pupils. Yet some assume — with his perfect,
posh pronunciation — that he is the
embodiment of “white male privilege”.
“I’m not a great fan of self-analysis or the
narcissism of the modern age. I think you
have to deal with the cards you get and lots
of my cards were great, including my lovely
mother,” he says. “But I think people are
more complex than the sight of them and
the sound of their voices might suggest.”
Both have moments when they think that
they can’t carry on. For Bowen, it’s when he
sets out on yet another trip to a war zone:
“I’ll be getting an early taxi, going down ➤

The Sunday Times Magazine • 23

the Embankment when the sun’s coming
up, and I think to myself, ‘Why the f*** am
I still doing this?’” For Webb, it’s when he
sees the toll early starts are taking on his
face: “I look in the mirror and I see my
father — those baggy eyes and a slightly
dazed look — that is Peter Woods. I always
feel jet-lagged even though I never travel.”
O
n October 7 Bowen was in Ukraine,
but he left almost immediately for
Israel and has spent most of the
past six months there. He has only
been into Gaza once in that time,
in an armoured personnel carrier
with the Israeli army. “This was
only halfway through November,
but even then northern Gaza was
a wasteland,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of
destroyed towns but it was right up there
with Aleppo after the Russians carpet-
bombed it. But they did that in a couple of
years; this had been done in a couple of
weeks.” He accuses both the Israelis and the
Egyptians of “news management” by not
letting journalists in: “It is very hard to
report on a story fairly when you don’t have
access to a big part of it.”
In the past Bowen has faced complaints
of bias against Israel in his coverage of the
Middle East. Every word he utters about the
conflict is scrutinised, but social media has
added an extra dimension. Danny Cohen,
24 • The Sunday Times Magazine
the former controller of BBC1, recently
accused Bowen of “institutional arrogance”
after Bowen admitted that some of the
BBC’s coverage of the explosion at the
al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City had been
wrong, but that he didn’t regret it. Bowen
had said the hospital was flattened, which
it had not been, while one of his colleagues
speculated that an Israeli airstrike was
responsible when the most likely cause was
an errant rocket launch from Gaza. “I have
reported extensively from the Middle East
for years, so I’m very experienced in the
region,” he responds. “I’ve written books
about it. So I don’t mean to sound arrogant
but I’m confident in my journalism. This
story is extra hard to cover partly because of
the way that people twist what you say and
[a lack of ] access.” He adds that the BBC
was quick to correct the idea that the attack
may have been carried out by Israel.
“It’s predictable how people who don’t
like what we do seize on things like that,” he
says. “People don’t want impartial reporting
— they want support, acknowledgment
of their victimhood and cheerleading. We
don’t do that. For me, impartial means
truthful. It doesn’t mean ‘on the one hand,
on the other hand, therefore the truth lies
somewhere in between.’”
Webb is also hyper-aware of nastiness
online now. “We are much more available to
be harangued than when we were starting
out,” he says. “For both of us in our different
areas: Jeremy with his flak jacket, which I
regard as minor league compared with the
culture wars in which I’m on the front line
with no flak jacket.” There is no respite from
culture wars. Webb may have won an army
of fans among middle-aged women at the
BBC for his probing on transgender issues,
but the corporation upheld a complaint
against him earlier this year after he said
“trans women, in other words males” in a
debate on Today. About an hour before we
meet, the director-general, Tim Davie, said
in Westminster that Webb’s wording was
a “foot fault” and that the BBC has a duty
to be “nice” on this issue. This rap on the
knuckles has put Webb in diplomatic form.
“The director-general has spoken, so I don’t
need to,” he says. “There are people who
feel very strongly on both sides. We need to
be able to tell the truth but, as the director-
general told MPs, we also need to be kind to
people and note that we are caught in the
middle of shifting sands.”
Although Webb and Bowen may get in
occasional trouble, they remain loyal to the
BBC. They both find people increasingly
ask, “What have they told you to say?” as
though “shadowy figures” at the top of the
corporation are taking a red pen to their
scripts. “No one tells me what to report,”
Bowen says, adding that only once in his
career has an editor tried to change his

DEAN BELCHER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
script — about 15 years ago, when he
described the Israeli military occupation of
Gaza as “brutal”. He bristles at the memory:
“He said he’d rather I didn’t call it brutal.
I said I’m not going to change my script;
I thought, ‘Screw him!’ And then it went out
and they had snipped the word ‘brutal’ out.”
Webb finds this idea an affront too.
“We’re not told what to say, but also people
have no idea how shambolic Today is,” he
says, meaning that the programme is too
off-the-cuff and chaotic to be manipulated.
“You seriously think I’ve thought much
about who this person is? And the BBC isn’t
monolithic with its own worldview. There
are so many people [managers] with ideas
about how things should be covered.”
Many of their contemporaries became
managers, jobs that had no appeal for them.
“They’re all now retired, enjoying their
Webb and Bowen outside the BBC
headquarters in Portland Place, London
pensions, yachting in the Isle of Wight,”
Webb says, laughing. (Not that they are
poorly paid: Webb earns about £280,000
a year, Bowen about £230,000; they are
both in the top 40 highest-paid BBC stars.)
The pair have both had health scares:
Webb had heart surgery in 2012 after his
left coronary artery became blocked, which
he thinks was “probably due to stress from
the job”, while Bowen was diagnosed with
stage 3 bowel cancer in 2019. His friend and
colleague George Alagiah died from the
disease last year at 67 and Bowen is keen to
reduce the stigma. “People are embarrassed
to talk about poo and it is all about poo,” he
says. “I was fortunate because it was about
the last point where it could still be caught
and cured. Colonoscopies for life, but I don’t
mind that because you get the best sleep
you will ever have from fentanyl.” Webb
giggles: “I hope that’s not the headline.”
Despite this, retirement remains a dirty
word. “No thanks,” Bowen says. “I’d get
bored and also I’m only 64. John Simpson
is still going and he’ll be 80 this year. I fully
intend to keep on working for now.” Webb
laughs: “I think we’re just coming into our
prime, actually.” Then they both say, almost
in unison: “The best days lie ahead.” n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 25
 It’s not a
break-up.
It’s une
évolution
amoureuse
The end of Justin and Sophie Trudeau’s
picture-perfect marriage shocked Canada.
What does a former first lady do next? Reinvent
herself as a wellness and relationship guru, obviously

INTERVIEW BY
LOUISE CALLAGHAN

PORTRAIT BY
SASHA ONYSHCHENKO

26 • The Sunday Times Magazine

The Sunday Times Magazine • 27

T
he most startling political earthquake to
have hit Canada in nearly a decade came on
August 2 last year in the form of matching
Instagram stories from the prime minister,
the tousle-haired Justin Trudeau, and his
wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau.
For eight years, since Trudeau came to
power in 2015, they had been the shiniest
political couple in the western world —
absurdly good-looking, absurdly in love,
with three beautiful children, a gender-
equal cabinet and liberal, feminist policies.
Though they had both spoken out about
navigating ups and downs in their
relationship, their united, glossy front
seemed immutable.
Now that fairytale was ending after 18
years of marriage. “As always, we remain
a close family with deep love and respect for
each other and for everything we have built
and will continue to build,” the two wrote.
In his post, Trudeau, 52, said they had
separated after “many meaningful and
difficult conversations”. Soon, the media
reported that Grégoire Trudeau, 49, was
in a relationship with an extremely
dashing paediatric surgeon.
When I meet her in Ottawa on a spring
morning at a restaurant called Arlo, where
she had her 48th birthday party (there was
dancing) and where the owner’s daughter
calls her “Auntie Sophie”, I am expecting
a gaggle of publicists primed to stop me
asking about the collapse of her marriage.
Instead I find her sitting on a bar stool,
chatting to the make-up artist. She gives
me a hug and within ten minutes has fixed
my cricked neck by standing behind me
28 • The Sunday Times Magazine
“I’M PROUD OF
HOW JUSTIN AND
I ARE NAVIGATING
THIS. WHEN WE’RE
TOGETHER AND
WE LOOK AT EACH
OTHER, THAT’S
WHAT COUNTS”
and pulling up at the base of my skull.
She is remarkably happy to talk about
most matters. We discuss meditation,
lip liner and steamed hotdogs (they sound
revolting: she craved them during one of
her pregnancies). Though when I bring
up the “break-up”, she winces.
“You used the word break-up, right?
I don’t feel that way.”
“A conscious uncoupling?” I offer.
“That’s the only expression that exists
that’s close enough,” she says. “I wish
I could come up with a new, a new …” She
thinks for a bit. “We don’t have to dramatise,
end abruptly, break relationships in order
to restructure our lives and our minds. And
something changed, yes, something broke;
I am not sure that’s how I mean it.”
I ask if there was a sudden change in
the relationship.
“Non, non, non, non, non,” she says in her
warm, throaty voice, which carries a slight
French-Canadian inflection. “You know,
in some ways it’s boring for some people
because we’ve always been truthful to each
other. We don’t hold secrets … That’s not
the dynamic we have. And let me be honest:
in some ways I’m very proud of how we —
not how the world thinks of us — how we
navigate this. When we’re together and
we look at each other, that’s what counts.”
To make that work, she says, she has had
to concentrate on ignoring what others
think and considering what is best for them
as a family; making hard decisions rather
than just muddling on.
“It’s not one abrupt change — it’s been
years,” she says.
Clearly a new term is needed to describe
this elastic, re-forming, definitely-not-a-
break-up temporal and physical marital
change. I ask whether — given that we
agree such a term sounds better in
French — évolution might be better than
conscious uncoupling.
“L’évolution amoureuse?” Grégoire
Trudeau suggests.
Perfect. Yet while she and Trudeau are,
publicly at least, handling their separation
with considerable magnanimity, it has been
the source of relentless intrigue in Canada
and for the couple’s fans across the world.
Many will, no doubt, be thrilled that she is
now publishing a book, written before the
separation, called — incredibly — Closer
Together. It is a memoir-cum-self-help work
about the necessity of deep connection
that mixes reflections on her own life —
 including her struggle with an eating
disorder as a teenager — and interviews
with psychologists, therapists and people
who have overcome adversity (including a
banking executive who came out as trans).
And it is packed with anecdotes about her
relationship with Trudeau. In what must
have been a late-stage addition she writes:
“Though we are no longer a couple, I know
our shared sense of humour will always
help us weather the storms.”
Hillary Clinton called it “candid and
enlightening”, while Arianna Huffington
said that “all of us can learn from Sophie
Grégoire Trudeau’s commitment to
PREVIOUS PAGES: SASHA ONYSHCHENKO FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. MAKE-UP: SHANNON RANGER
collective growth”. Clearly, it’s Grégoire
Trudeau’s slice of the Goop pie, a launchpad
out of the life of an unofficial first lady (the
title doesn’t exist in Canada) and into the
WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO ARLO RESTAURANT OTTAWA. THESE PAGES: GETTY IMAGES, REX
multibillion-pound wellness universe
where she can deliver insights about how
“as much as we are thinking beings, we are
feeling and sensing beings at our core”, and
use a solar eclipse to lead yoga classes that
promise to bring attendees “closer together
as Mother Nature will show us the beauty
of darkness”.
S
o what is life outside the
prime ministerial bubble
like? Over a citrus salad
and a shrimp cocktail, she
cheerfully explains that
while she no longer has
a protection detail nor
governmental duties, her
life hasn’t really changed that much since
the separation. She lives in a “little” flat not
Above: Sophie Grégoire Trudeau with Justin
Trudeau in 2021, and with the Obamas in
2016. Below left: the family’s outfits were
mocked on a tour of India in 2018
far from the current prime ministerial
residence, the 22-room Rideau Cottage.
Her and Trudeau’s three children — Xavier,
16, Ella-Grace, 15, and Hadrien, 10 — come
and go between the two houses at will. And,
despite those rumours about the surgeon
(on which she will not be drawn), she and
Trudeau seem to be very close.
“We are still all hanging out together: we
love each other, we spend time together. It’s
organic — you know, the kids all sleeping
together one night, that’s fine. And I have a
little space for me and sometimes the kids
come there, and we’re just so close to each
other that we do it organically,” she says.
“And it feels good, it feels natural. It doesn’t
feel forced. It feels heartwarming.”
The couple have signed a formal
separation agreement and, given that
Trudeau is constantly working and
travelling (he has to call an election before
October 2025) the majority of childcare
presumably falls on her. Now, for the
first time since quitting her job as a TV
journalist when her children were young,
she is going back to work — hosting yoga
retreats, continuing her mental health
activism and promoting her book.
If anything, her schedule is ramping
up. Canada is not the United States and
traditionally the role of the prime minister’s
spouse isn’t the all-consuming endeavour
that it is there. Grégoire Trudeau was
always trying to do more. Her biggest
scandal during her near-decade at the
centre of power was in 2016, six months
after her husband was elected, when she
said in an interview with a French magazine
that, though she had nannies and an
assistant, she needed more staff because
she wanted to do more charity work. The
hashtag “PrayForSophie” went viral and the
prevailing attitude among many Canadians
was that, well, she wasn’t elected, so why
should they fund her office?
Today, she shrugs off that criticism. Then,
as now, she insists, she lives a fairly normal
life: zipping around town on her surfskate
(a kind of longboard) or her Vespa. I ask
whether people recognise her at home in
Ottawa. “There’s not even a double-take,”
she says, deadpan. In her telling, she has
tried to give their children a normal and
as private a life as possible.
But what about the glossy Instagram
posts with her perfect hair, glowing skin
and adorable offspring?
“First of all, no life is perfect,” she says.
“People may have a perception of one’s life
and we have to be very careful about how
we think we know public personalities. And
I don’t see myself as a public personality,
just that there’s a public aspect to my life.
But I’m not raising my kids under the
spotlight. We go to the park and I’m in my
sweatpants, we run errands and we roll in
the grass. And that’s my life. Then there is
this other little part that’s quite unique.”
And another part, where she’s out
promoting a book that goes into personal ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 29
detail about her relationship with Trudeau.
An example: in a quiz about “attachment
styles” that she has filled out in the book,
Trudeau ticked the box showing that she
“often worries” that her partner will stop
loving her and that when her partner is
away she “is afraid” they might become
interested in someone else. She also
apparently tends to “get very quickly
attached to a romantic partner”. If a partner
were to break up with her, she notes, she’d
try her best to show them what they’re
missing: “A little jealousy can’t hurt.”
Ahead of an interview with a relationship
therapist she writes that her marriage,
despite its dreamy origins, has not been
“all smooth sailing”, and that therapy has
helped her work through her issues.
G
régoire Trudeau has
never exactly been
intensely private. As an
only child growing up
in a wealthy French-
speaking family in
Montreal (her father,
Jean Grégoire, was a
stockbroker, her mother, Estelle, a nurse),
she desperately wanted to be seen and
appreciated by her parents and to make
friends. A mention of her childhood is
enough to bring her to the brink of tears.
“I remember as a child — and it makes
me emotional — I remember being so close
to life that I … [would always think] I want
to know more. Let me smell you, let me
taste you, let me feel you, let me see what
I can know about myself when I’m with
you,” she says. “It’s a deep need, a longing
that I’ve felt for ever.”
Though she was close to her parents,
she worried about their (at times stormy)
relationship and felt lonely. As a teenager,
she developed bulimia. When she finally
asked for help, she had therapy and began
to recover. After university in Montreal,
where she studied communications, she
worked her way up as a TV journalist,
writing the ticker tapes that go at the
bottom of the screen before becoming a
presenter on eTalk, a Canadian channel.
Then one day when Grégoire Trudeau
was 27, she went to at a fundraising event in
Montreal and reconnected with her future
husband, who was studying engineering at
the time. She had known him as a child
through her friendship with his younger
brother, Michel, a school friend who died
in an avalanche when he was 23.
Now, as adults, she and Justin flirted
with a “sense of tender familiarity in the
air”. At least, that’s how it felt for her.
The next day she emailed him, and was
disappointed when he didn’t get back to
her. When they bumped into each other
on the street in Montreal later that year,
she was still annoyed enough that when
he asked for her number, she said that if
he really wanted it, he could find it.
30 • The Sunday Times Magazine
He did. On their first date, they went
out for dinner, then ice cream and karaoke
(Elton John’s Your Song was on the playlist)
before going back to his place. As he was
getting ready to drive her home in his rusty
Ford Bronco truck, he said: “I’m 31 years
old. I’ve been waiting for you for 31 years.
Should we skip the girlfriend phase and
start with fiancée?” They married in 2005.
In 2013 Trudeau won the leadership of
the Liberal Party and two years later led
them to victory in national elections.
Their lives, now as parents of three young
children, were thrown open for public
scrutiny. The duo appeared at rallies, went
on a series of well-publicised trips abroad
— including one to India, where they were
roasted for wearing outfits of the kind
mostly seen in Bollywood dance numbers
— and took part in a Vogue photoshoot
where they looked as if they were on the
Grégoire Trudeau with her father c 1978.
Below: showing off her yoga moves
edge of ripping each other’s clothes off.
(Grégoire Trudeau later said that they’d
learnt to stare into each other’s eyes that
way in couples therapy.)
All that time on the yoga mat and in deep
conversation with mental health experts
has now left her with a laser focus and a
quivering intensity. When I ask her what
she does every day she locks into my gaze
and says: “I’m a mom. I co-ordinate, I love
life, I take it in, I give, I try harder, I doubt.
I think I just … I just … I love aliveness.
I want to give more.”
How did she handle the diplomatic
small talk among world leaders? “Some
of them have a wicked sense of humour,”
she says, later adding: “There’s good
people out there.”
Among these is the former first lady
Michelle Obama, who described Grégoire
Trudeau as her “soulmate”. They met
on official engagements and were
photographed laughing on the White
House lawn, as well as going out for
lunch and shopping in Toronto.
“She’s funny. She has a great sense of
humour and also very deep values that
I respect,” Grégoire Trudeau says.
As well as the pressures of being
married to a head of state, there was the
additional life wrinkle of half the women
in the world thirsting after her husband.
Trudeau was dubbed a “smoking-hot
syrupy fox” by E! Online and “so hot”
by the American actress Alyssa Milano.
Photographs of him topless set the
internet reaching for fans.
I ask Grégoire Trudeau about it,
expecting a diatribe about knowing
yourself. Instead she just screws up her
nose. “I think it’s ridiculous,” she says.
“It makes me laugh. I didn’t pay attention
to it for more than half a second.”
In recent years, the couple hadn’t been
seen out together so much and Trudeau
played less on his image as a family man. In
his 2014 memoir he wrote: “Our marriage
isn’t perfect, and we have had difficult ups
and downs.”
His own parents had met when his father,
Pierre, was 47 and his mother, Margaret,
was 18. Pierre served two terms as prime
minister in Canada and had a famously
awful divorce in his final months in office.
Margaret — who was eventually diagnosed
with bipolar disorder — later wrote that
she’d had a number of affairs, including
with Jack Nicholson.
Still, she was at her ex-husband’s
deathbed when he passed away in 2000.
She later said: “Just because our marriage
ended didn’t mean the love stopped.”
Trudeau Junior’s split is playing out under
a stronger spotlight. Everyone I speak to in
Ottawa has an opinion on it, particularly
on the rumours that Grégoire Trudeau had
started dating the aforementioned surgeon
some time before the split was announced.
In February she was pictured going out for
 dinner with Marcos Bettolli, an Argentinian
paediatrician, and her children. His ex-wife
claimed in divorce papers filed last spring
that Betolli had “repartnered” with a
“high-profile individual”, named by Canada’s
National Post as Grégoire Trudeau.
The fact is, the power of Brand Trudeau
was waning long before this. After nine
years in power, many liberals have been
disappointed by what they see as the
prime minister’s failure to live up to his
progressive promises. More conservative
voters were angered by his crackdown on
personal freedoms during Covid-19, when
the government froze the bank accounts
of more than 200 anti-lockdown and anti-
vaccine protesters who had congregated at
the capital as part of a “freedom convoy”.
Now Trudeau is battling for a fourth
term, but Pierre Poilievre — the
Conservative leader — is beating him
squarely in the polls.
There is a sense that cheery old Canada,
so long seen in Europe as America’s sane
northern cousin, is actually quite a
miserable place. Homelessness has risen
dramatically in the last few years and there
is a serious lack of affordable housing. To
many ordinary people who are struggling
to get by, the vagaries of the rich and
glamorous Trudeau dynasty are a bit much.
In this environment, the évolution of the
SASHA ONYSHCHENKO FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. MAKE-UP: SHANNON RANGER. INSTAGRAM / SOPHIE GRÉGOIRE TRUDEAU, FACEBOOK / SOPHIE GRÉGOIRE TRUDEAU

Trudeau marriage is a matter of national

significance, given that any damage to the
family image could put off voters. All of
which makes it even more remarkable that
Grégoire Trudeau has not only come out
with a book that deals in relationships and
her own with her husband, but that she’s when, with a quiet yelp, she realises that
talking about their separation so publicly.
After an hour with her, I don’t think she THE PUBLIC she’s almost out of time on her parking
meter. She’s got a flight to catch and says
could do it any other way. As she keeps
telling me, she craves authenticity and
genuine connection above all else. I can
INTEREST IN she has to go. I say she can’t, because I’ve
still got questions left to ask her.
“Shall we go in the car and do the
only imagine that whoever is in charge
of communications for the Canadian
government swiftly gave up on all attempts
JUSTIN’S LOOKS interview there?” she asks, so we jump
into her large olive-green 4x4 and she
offers to drop me off at the house I’m
to make her stick to beige talking points.
“I seek depth: I want more intimate, WAS “RIDICULOUS staying at in the suburbs of Ottawa.
I throw my final questions at her (about
truthful conversations, ways of expressing
our stories, our thoughts, sharing, coming
close together,” she says at one point.
— I DIDN’T PAY that rumoured new boyfriend) while
directing her through a complicated
junction. I say that all the multi-tasking
She loves a wellness-jargon soundbite
and is nothing but devoted to her yoga, ATTENTION TO IT we’re doing is like the game where you pat
your head and rub your stomach at the
therapy and meditation, but she’s also got
a mischievous edge, which makes her
very endearing.
FOR MORE THAN same time. At which point, in the middle
of three lanes of traffic, Sophie Grégoire
Trudeau lets go of the steering wheel and
Despite the polished public appearances,
the Trudeaus don’t seem to take themselves
too seriously. At home she plays pranks
HALF A SECOND” starts doing it, staring right into my eyes,
both of us laughing hysterically, while I
worry mildly about dying a fiery death on
on her kids, hiding and jumping out at the side of a highway in Ottawa with the
them. Meanwhile they roll their eyes former(ish) first lady. The G7 will be a lot
when she talks to them about meditation more boring without her n
and yoga, she says. It seems to me that,
after a genuinely very difficult teenage Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves,
period of bulimia, she has thought deeply Loving Each Other by Sophie Grégoire
about how to be happy and uncovered Trudeau (Random House Canada £26.99).
a way that works for her. Order a copy at timesbookshop.co.uk.
We’ve been talking for nearly an hour Discount for Times+ members

The Sunday Times Magazine • 31

The fishermen
Toothie, centre,
and Bever prepare
their lobster pots
while their friend
Whippet clutches
his new punk LP

When
the boat
comes in
In the 1980s Chris Killip began
photographing the young men
of Skinningrove, a fishing village
near Middlesbrough. Four
years after his death, the full
collection is being published
32 • The Sunday Times Magazine
The Sunday Times Magazine • 33
W
hen the photographer
Chris Killip first pitched up in
Skinningrove, a remote fishing
village in northeast England
between Middlesbrough and
Whitby, in 1982, he didn’t get
the warmest of welcomes.
“Like a lot of tight-knit fishing
communities, it could be hostile
to strangers,” he recalled.
Killip, who had grown up
on the Isle of Man, gained
the locals’ trust after befriending
a young fisherman called Leslie
Holliday, or “Leso”. “Leso and
I never talked about what I was
doing there, but when someone
questioned my presence, he
would intercede and vouch for
me with, ‘He’s OK.’ ” In 1986
Leso drowned at sea, aged 26.
The images Killip took of the
fishermen between 1982 and
1984 helped seal his reputation
as one of Britain’s greatest
documentary photographers.
In 1994 he became a professor
of photography at Harvard
University and was department
chairman from 1994 to 1998.
Before he died aged 74 in
2020, Killip returned to
Skinningrove for the first time
in 30 years. “I was shocked by
how it had changed, as only one
boat was still fishing. The place
seemed like a pale reflection of
its former self,” he said n

Skinningrove by Chris Killip

is published in May (Stanley/
Barker £50)

34 • The Sunday Times Magazine

Far left: a group of
Skinningrove men
— Leso, Blackie,
Bever, Toothie,
Richard and
Whippet — hang
out in the village.
Leso and Richard
would later drown
at sea in separate
incidents

Left: Bever and

Stephan take their
boat out. Both
went on to survive
the tragedy that
killed Leso in 1986

Far left: “You can’t

see the village
from the main
road,” Killip said.
“It’s fiercely
independent
and fiercely
protective”

Left: a mother
with her baby in
a pram looks out
to sea beside a
cartful of crabs

The Sunday Times Magazine • 35

 THE FARCE
AWAKENS
AW
WAKENSS

TIM SSHIPMAN RETURNS

WITH THE UNMISSABLE NEXT INSTALMENT
OF HIS NO.1 BESTSELLING BREXIT SAGA
 Whippet chats
to a boy on his
Chopper bike
while walking
his dogs on
the seafront

Bever, standing,
basks in the early
morning sunlight
after a run-in with
police following
a fight in a pub

The Sunday Times Magazine • 37


LAURA ASHLEY AT NEXT SPRING EDIT
The natural choice
Timeless prints and botanical motifs – awaken your inner
romantic with this dreamy spring homeware collection
“
F
lorals? For spring?
Groundbreaking.”
When The Devil
Wears Prada’s
commander-in-chief Miranda
Priestly uttered, with chilling
composure, these four little
words during a Runway meeting,
real-life section editors sat up
and took note. In a case of life
imitating art, this classic pairing
was abandoned in favour of an
edgier approach to heralding the
changing of the seasons.
Eighteen years later, florals
for spring are firmly back in
business, with beloved British
brand Laura Ashley leading the
revival in all things cottagecore.
The heritage company’s latest
spring-summer homewares
collection, available at Next,
reflects the treasures of its
archive with timeless prints. It
is unashamedly romantic, with
wallpapers, throws and curtains
in a range of botanical motifs and
soft natural tones. An updated
palette of lavender, sage, dusky
pink and forget-me-not blue –
basically, your quintessential
SPONSORED CONTENT
Spring
charms
HIDE AND CHIC
Lynden sofa in Bronington
Leather Tan, £2,550
IN THE PINK
Lynden chaise longue in
Edwin Chenille Blush, £1,125
English country garden – will Green living: bring
invigorate tired decor, while country garden
bedding in the classic Mosedale tones and prints
Posy print is sure to encourage a into your home
dreamy night’s sleep.
Of course, there’s more
to the collection than flower
power – beautiful fabrics and
stripes offer a modern take
on the timeless Laura Ashley
aesthetic. For those after more
than a simple refresh, there are
elegant new upholstery pieces
– including sofa, armchair and PILE IN
chaise longue designs to choose Rosanna pleated velvet cushion
from – all of which are made in Steel Grey, £35
to order in the UK.
The new sofa fabrics,
including the Witham, are A palette See Laura Ashley’s latest home
available in opulent colourways
including Dark Hedgerow,
of lavender, collection available at Next in
selected stores and online at
Natural and Mulberry Purple.
For those looking for a calming
sage, dusky next.co.uk/laura-ashley
and ultra-feminine feel, the pink and
new Lyme Regis Stripe fabric is
available in Sugared Grey, Dove forget-me-
Grey, Duck Egg and Seaspray.
Whatever your romance
not blue
style, let Laura Ashley put a
spring in your step with its
invigorate
collection available at Next. tired decor
TABLE TALK
kah
duk
with
o do
at t
Wh

Mark Diacono’s asparagus,

boiled eggs and dukkah

PLUS Will Lyons’s rosé-tinted picks ● Charlotte Ivers’s £800 dinner

in Copenhagen ● Ranked: honey and mustard dressing
The Sunday Times Magazine • 39
MAR K
DIACONO

n earthy Egyptian

A
spice blend, dukkah
is an elevating friend
to have to hand if you
want to bring instant
character and texture
to a dish. Making your
own is easy. Dry-fry
100g hazelnuts,
2 tablespoons of
coriander seeds,
2 tablespoons of cumin seeds,
3 tablespoons of sesame seeds
and a pinch of fennel seeds for
2-3 min, shaking the pan once
in a while until just fragrant.
Use a pestle and mortar or food
processor to reduce to a coarse
mix, then season. It is brilliantly
adaptable: try adding 1 teaspoon
of nigella, upping the fennel to
2 tablespoons, stirring in
1 tablespoon of dried oregano,
or adding chilli flakes. Swapping
the hazelnuts for walnuts or
pistachios makes it differently • Salt and black pepper dukkah and serve with the • 1 litre vegetable stock
delicious. It will stay fresh in a • 4 eggs, at room temperature eggs, a little extra dukkah • A good sprig of fresh
sealed container for 7-10 days. • 4 tbsp dukkah and salt and pepper. thyme, leaves only
• 4 tbsp dukkah
Asparagus, boiled eggs 1 Heat the oven to 200C fan/ Celeriac and leek soup • 100ml double cream,
and dukkah gas 7 and bring a pan of This is one of my favourite plus a little to serve
As much as I love boiled eggs water to the boil. soups for winter and spring, • 2 tsp chilli oil (optional)
and soldiers, in spring I want beautifully embellished by • Nutmeg
asparagus in place of the toast. 2 Mix the asparagus with dukkah’s welcome texture. It
Either way, a dash of dukkah the olive oil to lightly coat also doubles up the sweetness 1 In a large, heavy-bottomed
works wonders. The extra each stalk and sprinkle with of the leeks and the celeriac’s pan over a low/moderate
nuttiness that roasting gives salt and pepper. earthiness. By all means try heat, cook the onion and
the asparagus is so good, but making this with the same leeks in the olive oil for
you can simmer it for a few 3 Place in a single layer on weight of parsnips, Jerusalem 10-15 min until softened,
minutes in the egg water if a roasting tray and roast for artichokes or potatoes in stirring occasionally.
you prefer. Usually with about 10 min, until tender. place of the celeriac.
asparagus, I gently bend 2 Add the celeriac, garlic
the base until the tough 4 While the asparagus is Ingredients and ½ teaspoon salt, cook for
end snaps off, but here I use cooking, lower the eggs (Serves 4) 5 min, then add the stock and
the base as the handle so into the water and simmer • 1 onion, sliced thyme and simmer for 15-20
I can dip into the yolk easily. for 4-5 min to give a runny • 2 leeks, thinly sliced min, stirring occasionally,
yolk. Lift from the water • 3 tbsp olive oil until the celeriac is tender.
Ingredients and place in eggcups. • 400g celeriac, peeled
(Serves 2) and cut into 2cm pieces 3 Blend until smooth, adding
• 20 asparagus spears 5 Remove the asparagus from • 3 garlic cloves, chopped the cream as well as salt and
• 2 tbsp olive oil the oven, sprinkle with half the • Salt and black pepper pepper to taste.

40 • The Sunday Times Magazine


4 Serve scattered with
dukkah, swirled with a
little cream and chilli oil
and dusted with a generous
scratch of nutmeg.
Dukkah fudge
This may be my favourite
fudge, with the spices and
salt at least trying to keep the
richness and sweetness in
check. Three elements are
crucial: the temperatures;
stirring vigorously to ensure
a beautifully smooth texture;
and allowing the fudge to
completely cool out of the
fridge as this prevents it
becoming tacky. If you don’t
eat it all in a weekend, this
will keep for a fortnight in
a sealed container and at
least twice that in the fridge.
MARK DIACONO
• 450g caster sugar
• 2 tbsp golden syrup
• 90g butter
• 330ml double cream
• Sea salt
• 5 tbsp dukkah, plus a little
extra to serve
• Chilli flakes (optional)
1 Line a baking dish (about
20cm x 18cm) with baking
parchment. Warm the sugar,
golden syrup, butter and
cream in a medium-sized
pan — it should be no more
than a third full — over a low
heat, stirring frequently to
dissolve the sugar.
2 Turn the heat up to
medium-high and bring
to the boil. Put a sugar
thermometer in the pan. Keep
the mix bubbling, stirring
occasionally to ensure the
sugar doesn’t catch. The
moment the mixture reaches
115C, turn off the heat and
allow it to rest for 5-10 min,
until the temperature is
below 110C.
3 Add a very generous pinch
of salt to the fudge and beat
with a wooden spoon as
quickly as you can: it will cool
and thicken, and will gradually
come away from the pan. At
this point, stir in the dukkah.
4 Spoon the fudge into the
baking dish and smooth with
a palette knife as best you can.
5 After an hour or so, cut it
into squares but don’t lift the
pieces out: leave it for at least
3 hours to set properly. When
set, lift it out and scatter with
more sea salt, chilli flakes and
a little dukkah if you fancy n
For more recipes, go to
markdiacono.substack.com
Tasted! The best
supermarket
HONEY AND
MUSTARD
DRESSING
OUR
PICK
Briannas
Ocado, 355ml, £4.60
Almost as good as
my own! This is well
balanced but packed
with honey and mustard
flavour. Bravo 5/5
Pizza Express
Tesco, 235ml, £2.50
Has a slightly peppery
spice to it — the honey
comes afterwards. Very
thick, would drown a
salad, but I’d love it
with flatbread 4/5
Mary Berry’s
Ocado, 235ml, £3.30
No mustard here —
this is Mary’s hybrid
dressing, made with
white wine vinegar. It
needs a good shake 3/5
Waitrose
150ml, £1.30 Very thin,
very vinegary and I can’t
really taste mustard or
honey. Careful when you
pour — it rushes out 2/5
Sainsbury’s
150ml, £1.20 Bright
yellow owing to the
addition of turmeric.
The sharpness hits the
back of your throat 2/5
M&S
Ocado, 235ml, £2.30
Thick and gloopy — a
sign of added stabilisers
and gum. Has a garlic
kick but I still wouldn’t
put it on my salad 2/5
Hannah Evans
 R E S T A U R A N T S Charlotte Ivers l

A simple supper at the new

Noma — for £800 a head

GERANIUM
COPENHAGEN

ou are not to think

Y
you’re anyone special,
or that you’re better
than others. That’s the
first rule for a happy
life in Denmark. It’s
a concept they call
Janteloven: the idea
that a good Danish
citizen shouldn’t
flaunt too much
individuality, wealth or success.
This, naturally, inspires two
thoughts in the mind of the
honest Brit. 1) Oh, you Scandis
think you’re better than me,
do you, with your humility and
generous welfare state? And 2)
OK. Then why are there so many
restaurants in Copenhagen
where you won’t escape for
less than £500 a head? and are back on the plane by springy potato waffle that you
Well, primarily it’s Noma’s evening, as a waiter here tells ************************************** smear with sour cream and
fault. Twenty years of having the me one table did. Try to get a
THE DAMAGE pickled walnut leaves. As you rip
**************************************
world’s best restaurant in town table at Geranium and you’ll into the thing, you could almost
Spring universe menu £481
pulls other top chefs in. But fast be disabused of any notion be breaking bread with your
according to the jet-set set, that Scandi cooking is losing Wine and juice pairing £263 socialist brothers, but for the
Noma is now past its prime. its supremacy. The global fact you’re spooning a fat pot of
Service charge
Plus it’s about to reinvent itself super-rich are still flooding in. gold caviar on top.
(optional) £75
as an even more po-faced food Yet there’s an element of “Some places want to make
laboratory. Everyone who is Scandinavian understatement ************************************** a carrot taste like a radish,” the
anyone — or at least whose bank here. That might seem like a Total per person £819 co-owner Soren Ledet, who
account says they might be — deranged thing to say when used to work at Noma, tells me.
is going to Geranium instead. your only option is an 18-course “We want to make it taste like
Which brings me to the tasting menu for £481, but it’s the best carrot you ever ate.”
second factor at play: these true: the place named best beige and pale wood. To a He’s done it: a carrot sorbet
restaurants aren’t for locals. On restaurant in the world in 2022 British eye, there’s something with a white chocolate panna
the night I eat there, only two of is located on the top floor of of the regional hotel conference cotta-type cream, an intricate
the twelve tables are populated an innocuous office block, room about it. crystallised carrot cutout
by Danes. The locals I speak to dumped in the middle of a grey For some courses they have perched on top like a stained-
laugh at the very idea of going. car park, sandwiched alongside you eating with your hands. glass window. Eating it makes
No, these places are for the the national football stadium A spongy buttermilk bread me want to cry, which is also
type of people who fly in from like a pie and mash shop. Inside, pancake with a film of truffle a deranged thing to say. But
Taiwan, eat lunch at Geranium it’s sleek and modern, a sea of and foraged wild garlic. Or a eating at Geranium seems to

42 • The Sunday Times Magazine

 make you want to come out
with a lot of deranged things.
Here’s another: this tastes
like simple food, as if each
ingredient has just become
more of itself. It’s not. As Dolly
Parton once said: “It costs a lot
of money to look this cheap.”
Well, it takes a lot of talent to
make a menu that tastes this
simple. Glance at the open
kitchen and you’ll count at least
five pairs of tweezers in use.
“Boiled beetroot” here means
tiny, millimetre-thin, glowing,
flower-shaped cutouts of the
stuff, dusted in cherry powder
and swimming in savoury-sweet
horseradish foam. “Sorry, did
you say this is just boiled?”
I asked a chef in disbelief. She
smiled sheepishly: “Ah, sort of.
It’s a complicated process.”
I’ll bet. Everyone working
here is an obsessive: young
people brought in from all over
the world the way 16-year-old
prodigies are sold to the
Premier League. In the open
kitchen, there’s none of the
shouting and clanging of the
Gordon Ramsay school — or
indeed of the Noma school,
where the head chef, René
Redzepi, admitted to bullying
staff in the past, and started
paying interns after one claimed
all she got to do for three months
was make beetles out of jam.
Here, the chefs work in
silence, moving instinctively
around each other like particles
in Brownian motion.
ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX GREEN / FOLIO ART FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. SANE SEVEN, JASON ALDEN
Could any dinner be worth
this cost? Well, yes. It could. But
only if you’re into umami. Wild
mushroom soup with dark beer,
almost meaty in its richness.
Roasted celeriac in a sauce of
yeast flakes. Chunky walnuts,
cauliflower mousse and
sauerkraut foam. Imagine a miso
soup you’d be willing to pay a
month’s rent for: most of the
tasting menu tastes like that.
Among the besuited super-
rich, I spotted one man with
long scruffy hair and a denim
jacket. He had to be the richest
person in the room to have the
confidence to be that casual.
There’s a metaphor there for
what Geranium is doing.
“You’re not to think you’re
anything special” is the rule.
These guys are special n
W I N E Will Lyons l
Ready the rosé for the
first blush of summer
he choice of rosés gets more
T
bewildering every year. As we head
towards the May bank holiday all
we’re looking for is a refreshing
wine that will hit the spot with
bright citrus acidity and can be
enjoyed straight from the fridge.
Yet we are confronted by rows of
pink bottles online or on the shelf.
How to choose? It’s not easy to
select by country when virtually
every wine producer from England to
New Zealand offers some kind of rosé. By
colour? Provence has cornered the market
in strikingly pale pinks, but I feel we have
reached peak Provençal rosé. At the top end
they still offer good value, such as the silky,
elegant 2022 Whispering Angel from Caves
d’Esclans (Majestic, £23.99); and producers
such as Domaines Ott, Domaine Ray-Jane
and Miraval are worth tracking down. But
many don’t provide enough complexity for
the price and are becoming lighter in style.
Darker-coloured rosé, produced in the
southern Rhône appellation of Tavel and
often using the garnacha grape in Spain,
has more structure and bite and pairs
beautifully with food, particularly heavy
dishes with rich, garlicky flavours. These
are good options for the beginning and
end of summer. I like the juicy, tangy 2022
Arbousset Tavel Rosé (Tesco, £12.50).
Alternatively, should you choose by grape
variety? This is complicated when many
rosés are blends. Cabernet franc always
imparts structure but I favour grenache —
often combined with cinsault or syrah. It’s
by far the best grape for rosé as when fully
ripe it imparts an agreeable fleshy
definition. There is still a lot of
value to be found in France in
regions outside Provence such
as the Loire, even Bordeaux —
try the full-bodied 2022
Clarendelle Inspired
by Haut-Brion
Rosé (Laithwaites,
£17.99). And don’t
overlook the
perennial wealth
of bargains from
the Languedoc n
2022 Mezquiriz Navarra Rosé
Spain (12.5%) Lidl, £5.49
A smooth rosado from Navarra,
to the east of Rioja, this has
fresh notes of raspberry and
cranberry, with a savoury kick.
2023 Señorio de Sarria
Rosado Navarra Spain (14%)
The Wine Society, £7.95
This dark-hued garnacha
imparts bold strawberry flavour,
with a light, balanced finish.
La Vieille Ferme Rosé France
(12.5%) Waitrose, £8.50
Very pale with a gentle pink
blush, this top-seller is fruity,
aromatic and easy-drinking,
with refreshing hints of citrus.
Taste the Difference
Bordeaux Rosé France
(12.5%) Sainsbury’s, £8.50
A no-nonsense, salmon-pink
example using only merlot,
with bite and a crisp mouthfeel.
2022 Sancerre Rosé France
(13%) Asda, £15.50 It’s unusual
to find a sancerre rosé in the
supermarket, but here’s a
perky, structured pinot noir
with delicate floral aromas.
2022 Rosé La Dame Rousse
Domaine de la Mordorée
France (14%) Lea & Sandeman,
£26.75 A blend of grenache,
clairette and syrah, this tavel
has lovely notes of redcurrant.
Bargain of the week
2020 M&S Classics Chianti
Reserva Italy (13.5%) £9.50
A sumptuous chianti with
smoky hints of spice, dark
cherry and the signature
racy acidity of sangiovese.
The Sunday Times Magazine • 43
 F A R M I N G Jeremy Clarkson
My harvest hymn — with
added Chinese chemicals
any of us will
M
remember that
Mungo Jerry song
featuring the line,
“Have a drink, have
a drive. Go out and
see what you can
find.” And of course
we all realise you
can’t even think
that any more. And
nor, really, is it considered
acceptable to follow up with:
“If her daddy’s rich, take her
out for a meal. If her daddy’s
poor, just do what you feel.”
Times have moved on.
Of course lots of lyrics now
feel as if they’re from another
aeon. Clair by Gilbert O’Sullivan
especially. But you might think
it’s impossible for the lyrics in a
harvest festival hymn to become
out of date. “We plough the
●
fields and scatter. The good
seed on the land. But it is fed
and watered by God’s almighty
hand.” Absolute timelessness.
It was true ten thousand years
ago and it’s true now.
No, it isn’t. God doesn’t
water the land any more. The
coal-fired Chinese power
stations do that. And he doesn’t
feed it either. That’s handled
by CF Industries, which makes
all the chemical fertiliser that
farmers use on their fields.
We don’t even scatter seeds
any more, because that’s
wasteful onanism. We drill
them into the ground, at precise
intervals and at a precise depth
using a computer-controlled,
£40,000 seed drill. That’s towed
behind a £250,000 Case tractor,
which was built in the factory
where they used to make Tiger
tanks. Not much Goddishness
going on in any of that.
There isn’t even any
ploughing any more. In the
olden days farmers would turn
the top layer of soil over using
a plough so that the weeds were
buried. And because they were
deprived of sunlight they
died. It was a lovely, natural,
rosy-cheeked way of creating
the perfect seedbed for the
following year’s crop.
But then along came Little
Miss Thunberg and her merry
band of Packhamites, who
decided that 1,500 billion
tonnes of carbon is stored in
the planet’s soil. And that if you
turn this soil over with a plough,
all of it will be released into the
upper atmosphere in the form
of carbon dioxide. Which is bad.
So the lovely, natural method of

killing weeds had to stop. And
instead farmers had to use
chemical sorcery from
Monsanto, BASF and the
Zhejiang Xinan Chemical
Industrial Group.
Farmers didn’t mind, if I’m
honest, because ploughing is
extremely expensive. You
simply would not believe how
much diesel is needed to drag a
two-tonne land anchor through
a muddy field. Using weedkiller
instead is much cheaper.
Or rather it was. But
weedkiller prices have gone
up dramatically in recent years.
And from where I’m sitting it
doesn’t really seem to work any
more. Every year Kaleb goes into
the fields like a rural Terminator,
hosing down the weeds with his
ungodly chemical sorcery and
then, a few weeks later, Cheerful
Charlie walks me through the
same fields, pointing out the
brome and the black-grass,
which is easy to spot because it’s
purple and green and completely
immune to anything the world’s
ILLUSTRATIONS BY BEN CHALLENOR
chemists can throw at it.
So this year Charlie said we
should become medieval and
plough the fields instead.
Selfish? Well, yes, this will
shoot a tonne of CO2 into the
troposphere and that’s obviously
bad. And I’ll use four times
more diesel than I would if I
used weedkiller. So that’s not
good for the environment
either. But here’s the kicker:
I wouldn’t be pumping any
chemicals into the soil.
So that’s the choice — soil or
sky? You have to hurt one of
them if you want to eat. I went
for the sky and rented a plough.
I settled on an eight-furrow
monster for two good reasons.
Number one: the bigger the
plough, the faster you get the
job done. And number two:
none of Kaleb’s tractors would
be powerful enough to pull it,
so we’d have to use my 270bhp
Lamborghini. Which would
annoy him. Even admitting that
it’s better than his tractors gives
him a hot flush. Sometimes
he vibrates with fury when he
goes near it.
The only drawback to this
cleverly wrought large plough
plan was that, because Kaleb
refuses to drive my tractor,
I’d have to do the ploughing.
Do you want healthy soil or a healthy
sky? Bees or orangutans? These are
the questions I’m facing every day
This is something I’ve done
before. It was on Top Gear about
200 years ago and I did very
well. Partly this was because my
competitors in the ploughing
competition were James May
and Richard Hammond. And
partly because one of the two
judges was a really good friend
of my mum.
In real life, though, things
were different. I couldn’t hitch
the plough to the tractor
without help. I couldn’t do a
three-point turn when it was
attached. And I couldn’t make
the tractor move when the
furrows were in the sodden
soil. All four wheels just sort
of spun. So I had to lift the
plough slightly, which meant
I wasn’t ploughing. Or wiggle
the steering wheel, which
made big holes and, when
it worked, caused me to set
off in a new direction. It began
to look as if a drunk, blind
man with no arms was doing
the ploughing.
All the time I was watching
the fuel gauge plummet like
the depth gauge in a holed
submarine, and wondering if
it might be cheaper, easier and
kinder to the environment to
use chemical weedkiller instead.
This is farming. Only last
week I discovered that
approximately 18 billion slugs
have come to live in the fields
where I’ve planted spring
barley. If I adopt a live-and-let-
live rewilding attitude and do
nothing they will eat the lot
and, next year, there will be no
Hawkstone lager. As that makes
no sense, I therefore have to
pepper the field with slug
pellets, which will kill them.
Great. But these pellets will
also kill all the worms. So what’s
the answer? There isn’t one.
Similarly, I have signed up to
the government’s eco-friendly
grant scheme and will be
planting things that aren’t food
in three fields. They’re good for
the soil and they’re good for my
bank balance. But it means I’m
not growing stuff people can
eat. I know one chap who has
taken 60 per cent of his farm
out of food production and
he’s not alone. So yippee. All
that stored carbon and all of
that fixed-in nitrogen.
But what if you want some
bread? You’ll have to get a loaf
made from wheat that was
grown abroad. And how’s that
good for global warming? And
will it have been grown under
the same stringent rules that
we have here? Or will it have
been fertilised with human
faeces? You face a choice then.
Do you want net zero in the
UK? Or do you want to eat
a Mexican’s turd?
Do you want lager or worms?
Do you want healthy soil or a
healthy sky? Do you want bees
or orangutans? These are the
questions I’m facing every
single day. It’s a multiple-choice
world of no right answers.
Which brings us back to
another harvest festival hymn.
All things bright and
beautiful. All birds that must
be plucked. No matter what
we choose to do, we’re well
and truly … n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 45

“Nutritional psychiatry” says we can eat our way to better mental health. By Giulia Crouch
oes what you eat
D
affect your mood?
Obviously, devouring
a bowl of chocolate
ice cream or sinking
your teeth into a thick
slice of lavishly
buttered toast feels
good in the moment,
but can your diet
provide more than a
quick hit of happiness? Could
your food — and how you eat it
— have lasting effects on your
mental wellbeing? Scientists
are beginning to think so.
This is a relatively new area of
research known as “nutritional
psychiatry” and is part of the
reason experts now refer to
the gut as our “second brain”.
There are more than 100
trillion microbes — bacteria,
fungi and other microorganisms
— living inside our intestines,
in an ecosystem that’s referred
to as the gut microbiome. These
minuscule critters play a critical
role in everything from helping
your immune system to
function correctly, to whether
we develop certain allergies.
That means our gut health can
have a big impact on our
physical health.
But mounting evidence
shows your gut microbes could
affect your mental health too.
How? Well, the gut and the
brain are in communication
with each other via something
called the gut-brain axis. This
communication runs both ways
— and scientists believe that,
in the same way that nerves
before a big event can make
your stomach squirm, what you
eat can trigger brain chemicals
that influence your mood.
“Nutrients from food
serve as building blocks for
neurotransmitters, the
46 • The Sunday Times Magazine
H E A LT H
The happiness diet
chemicals that transmit signals
in the brain,” the nutritionist
Rhiannon Lambert explains.
“For example, serotonin,
often called the ‘feelgood’
neurotransmitter, is derived
from the amino acid
tryptophan.” Meaning that if
you eat more tryptophan-rich
foods such as poultry, dairy,
wholegrains and legumes,
you could feel happier.
Lambert continues: “The
balance of omega-3 and omega-6
fatty acids, antioxidants and
other nutrients in the diet also
helps to regulate inflammation,
which is linked to mood
disorders.” This means that
adding foods rich in omega-3
and omega-6 fatty acids —
vegetable oils, nuts, seeds and
oily fish — to your diet could
reduce inflammation, and in
turn help improve your mood.
A positive change in diet has
also been shown to improve
symptoms of depression. In a
randomised controlled trial at
the University of Melbourne in
2017, participants with clinically
diagnosed depression were
split into two groups. The first,
with the help of a nutritionist,
adopted a Mediterranean-style
diet — known for its emphasis
on plants and olive oil.
Meanwhile, the second group
stuck to their normal diet.
After three months, the
group on the Mediterranean
diet experienced a much
greater reduction in their
depressive symptoms than
the group who stuck to their
regular diet, with a third of
the participants meeting the
criteria for remission, compared
with 8 per cent in the group
who didn’t change their diet.
Other studies have also
demonstrated this link between
what we eat and how we feel.
Research recently published
in the British Medical Journal
found that people who
consumed higher amounts
of ultra-processed foods
such as ready meals, sugary
cereals and fizzy drinks were
about 50 per cent more
likely to develop anxiety and
20 per cent more likely to
experience depression.
It seems that if we look after
our gut, it will look after us.
With that in mind, what do
the experts recommend we
put on the menu?
Add some fizz
Kefir is a sour and sometimes
fizzy fermented milk drink
that’s full of good bacteria. It
is prepared by inoculating the
milk of cows, goats or sheep
with kefir grains, to produce
a thin yoghurt.
“Drinking two glasses of kefir
a day has been shown to change
parts of the brain that handle
emotions, and the participants
were better able to pick up
on the emotions of others,”
says Dr Emily Leeming, a
microbiome scientist whose
book, Genius Gut, is out in July.
She adds: “Eating plenty
of fermented foods may also
help with anxiety too. One
study compared the anxiety
levels of anxious people who
ate fermented foods with
those who didn’t. Those
who ate fermented foods
felt less anxious.”
Other fermented foods
include kimchi, yoghurt,
cheese, sauerkraut and
kombucha, which also
support a healthy gut.
Go (leafy) green
All vegetables are good for your
gut but the dark leafy greens
seem to be particularly potent
when it comes to wellbeing.
“They are great for brain
health and mood,” Leeming
says. “They contain folate,
fibre, plenty of polyphenols
and are linked to lower odds of
depression. Eating just over a
cup of cooked dark green leafy
veggies a day could keep your
brain up to 11 years younger.”
You should cocoa
It’s no great surprise that
chocolate can make you happy,
but it turns out that feeling can
last beyond your final bite —
though the higher the cocoa
content the better.
“Just two squares of 85 per
cent dark chocolate a day was
found to improve participants’
mood and their diversity of
gut bacteria,” Leeming says.
“Researchers found links
between their mood and certain
bacteria types, suggesting that
part of chocolate’s influence on
your mood could be through
your gut microbiome. Dark
chocolate is surprisingly high
in both fibre and a group of
antioxidants called polyphenols,
both of which feed your gut
bacteria.” Time to reach for the
expensive stuff.
 Fibre, fibre and more fibre
We often worry about how
much protein we’re getting
but data shows we tend to have
that covered. In fact, we should
really be focusing on our fibre
intake — most Brits eat about
20g a day, but the guidelines
recommend 30g and some
experts say an aim of 50g would
be most beneficial for gut
health. Fibre feeds our good
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROB FLOWERS FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
gut microbes, helping them to
do their job in maintaining our
health. But it can do more than
that. “For every 5g of fibre,
there’s a 5 per cent associated
decrease in the risk of
depression,” Leeming says.
Dr Rupy Aujla, who’s behind
the podcast The Doctor’s
Kitchen, lives life by this mantra.
“I call it BBGS — beans, berries,
greens and seeds, and I try to
get them into my diet every 24
hours. They’re nutrient-dense
ingredients that provide
Evidence shows that what you
eat can trigger brain chemicals
Ŋü¾ŊϰÿěŽŏãěÙãϰũĢŏľϰęĢĢß
building blocks for hormones
such as serotonin as well as
different types of fibre that are
beneficial for our gut microbes.”
Legumes — soybeans,
chickpeas, peanuts and lentils
— are one of the highest
sources of dietary fibre and
a delicious way to support
your gut microbiome.
Fat is good
Need another reason to eat
more oily fish? “Omega-3 fatty
acids play a role in the structure
and function of cell membranes
in the brain,” the nutritionist
Rhiannon Lambert says.
“They are involved in the
production and signalling of
neurotransmitters, such as
serotonin and dopamine, which
are critical for mood regulation.”
Sources include walnuts, chia
seeds, salmon and mackerel.
And breathe
Your gut is impacted not just by
what you eat but by how you eat
it. Lisa Macfarlane, co-founder
of the health company The Gut
Stuff, explains: “Something we
advocate for, beyond diet, is
putting your body in ‘rest and
digest’ mode instead of eating
on the go. Try taking three deep
breaths before you eat — it’s
proven that digestion happens
more effectively when eating
in a relaxed and calm state.”
All oiled up
As well as having anti-
inflammatory properties —
which help to protect us
against disease — olive oil may
also have the ability to lift our
mood, studies suggest, perhaps
due to its high concentration
of polyphenols. Just make sure
to add extra virgin to your
salad or cooking, as refined
olive oil is stripped of its
beneficial components.
Join the fast crowd
A recent study by King’s
College London found that
eating within a ten-hour
window, and therefore fasting
for fourteen hours each day,
is associated with better
mood, better sleep, more
energy and less hunger. This
is easier than it sounds:
it would mean, for example,
having your first bite at 9am
and your last by 7pm n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 47
 He was absolutely perfect.
Until he left…

‘Wonderful’
MARIAN
KEYES

‘So warm
and kind’
FERN
BRITTON

‘Compelling
family drama’
VERONICA
HENRY

The uplifting new story of fresh starts and second chances

from the Sunday Times bestselling author

Subject to availability. Selected stores only.

 F I TNE S S

Seven realistic fitness goals

No need to aim for Adonis — this is how to be just fit enough, by Tom Ward

quick browse of the

A
#FitTok hashtag
reveals couples lifting
one another overhead,
mums sprinting with
pushchairs in tow
and influencers so
bereft of body fat that
it’s a wonder they
make it from one
room to another
without needing to sit down.
Our obsession with
maximum fitness can make the
average gymgoer feel hopeless.
It doesn’t have to be all or
nothing, however. Try these
achievable fitness goals.

Find a diet that works

Trendy diets are often extreme,
but that’s not going to help
you sustain a healthy lifestyle.
“As a general benchmark
your diet should consist of
20-30 per cent fat, 40-50 per
cent carbs and 25-30 per cent
protein,” says Farren Morgan,
a military fitness coach and
founder of the Tactical Athlete
training programme. Get this
right, and drink three litres
of water a day, and your body
should adapt quickly. You
needn’t be draconian — 80:20
is a good ratio for healthy foods
versus indulgent ones.
Start squatting
Squats help to strengthen your
back and core, and will torch
calories. “Stand with your feet
shoulder-width apart, toes
pointed forward,” Morgan
advises. “Bend your knees,
sinking into your hips as if
you’re sitting on an invisible
box. Keep your chest and
chin up, back straight. Go as
GETTY IMAGES
It needn’t be all or nothing. You
don’t have to do a Russ Cook
and run the length of Africa
guide your body back to the
starting position.”
Master the deadlift
This is a compound move,
meaning it engages multiple
muscle groups, builds muscle
and burns fat, and serves as a
useful marker for general fitness.
How to begin? “Pick a barbell
weight you can lift easily while
keeping your back straight, then
stand with your feet shoulder-
width apart, the barbell laid out
in front of you,” says Rowan
Clift, training specialist at the
Freeletics workout app. “Bend
at the hips and take a shoulder-
width grip on the bar. Push your
heels into the mat as you hinge
at the hips to stand, keeping
your chest up and your arms
like you’re closing a car door
with your bum as you slowly
lower the barbell to the ground.”
Banish back pain
“Spending all day at a desk
can lead to tight hips, which
may then lead to pain in the
lower back and shoulders,”
Clift says. “Yoga and Pilates
can help, as well as taking
regular breaks or investing
in a standing desk.”
You can also try the knee
twist. Lie on your back and
bring your knees up to your
chest, before slowly lowering
them to the left and to the
right while keeping your
back flat on the floor.
Run a 5k
ParkRun — a weekly group
5k — is a great place to start.
“Aim for three 20-minute
training runs a week,” says
Fran Bungay, a triathlete and
head coach at the Training
Today fitness app. “Alternating
a minute running with a minute
walking is fine to begin with.
Once you can run for 20
minutes, try to push for 30.”
Make the gym a habit
Studies have found that activity
trackers can help people
develop healthy routines over
the long term — and that it
takes about 66 days to form
a lasting habit. Morgan
recommends the TrueCoach
app to track your goals and
receive personalised feedback.
Beat fitness-class anxiety
Terrified to try that HIIT
session? Use the ClassPass app
to book fitness classes without
having to commit to a full
membership. Spin classes are

low as you can, keeping your and back straight to avoid injury. You don’t have to do a Russ a good place to start: no one
thighs parallel to the ground. Squeeze your stomach at the Cook and run the length of knows how low or high you’ve
Push through your heels to top, then push your hips back Africa. Training for your local set your resistance n

The Sunday Times Magazine • 49


Bare feet and no braking: how
to max the miles in your EV
REVIEW
SKODA ENYAQ
t’s a sunny morning and
I
I’m bowling along the M25
with a bootful of clobber
including folding chairs
and a tent, plus three
passengers. I’m also driving
in bare feet. I’m not on
my way to a hippy festival,
but I am trying to prove
that green is good by
“hypermiling” my way to
the south coast — squeezing the
most possible miles out of a
single charge of an electric car.
I’ve taken some tips from
Wayne Gerdes, the world
champion hypermiler, who
50 • The Sunday Times Magazine
D R I V I N G Nick Rufford l
knows better than anyone how
to get most spark for your buck.
Gerdes, from Tennessee,
recently set a new record by
driving 2,835 miles from coast
to coast across America in a
battery-powered Porsche and
stopping for only two and a half
hours in total to charge it. The
journey cost him just £56 in
electricity. Proof, he says, that
electric cars can handle long
distances if driven correctly.
I have chosen a day when
the temperature is 10C, the
UK annual average, to avoid
swaying the outcome of the
experiment (batteries are
temperature-sensitive). For
extra thrift I’ve chosen a
cut-price car — a Skoda Enyaq
iV 80. With plenty of room for
front and backseat passengers
and a boot large enough for a
mountain of beach gear, the
Enyaq is a big-value family bus.
My coupé version has a slightly
more slippery shape than the
SUV Enyaq, giving it improved
aerodynamics and a few extra
miles of range from the 82kWh
battery, bringing the official
total up to 339. On the basis of
past experience with electric
cars, I reckon the true range is
about two thirds of this, or 226
miles. I need to cover 274 to get
me to Bournemouth and back.
I’ve been driving electric cars
on and off for a while now, and
one mistake I’ve been making,
according to Gerdes, is to use
maximum regen (regeneration
is the amount of energy an
electric car recovers when it
slows down). The common
perception is that selecting
the highest level of regen saves
energy. This, Gerdes says, is
true only when you’re stopping
The Enyaq’s
dashboard shows
its active cruise
control, which
keeps it a set
distance from the
car in front to avoid
energy-sapping
braking and
acceleration
and starting — during city
driving, for example. When
you’re cruising it drains the
batteries faster. This is because
each time you lift off the
throttle the car slows down
sharply and needs a wasteful
shove to get it back up to speed.
“It’s great that electric cars
have regenerative braking,”
says Gerdes, 61. “It’s bad that
people think it’s the be all and
end all of fuel saving, as it’s not.”
I therefore switched out of
B mode — highest recuperation
— into D mode and selected
the lowest level.
Gerdes advises using
something called active cruise
control on the motorway.
This is a system by which the
car detects its distance from
other traffic and adjusts its
speed to avoid energy-sapping
acceleration and braking. On
Five tips from 1 Use active cruise noticeable increase in 4 Use a “little but
control to stay a consumption, whether often” approach to
the king of steady distance from it’s petrol, diesel, charging. Batteries
COLLECTORS’
hypermilers the vehicle ahead. hydrogen or electric.” charge best between CLASSICS
“There are usually about 5 and 35 per
three or four 3 Anticipate rather cent, so keep within Fiat X1/9
Wayne Gerdes, settings: choose the than brake so you that sweet spot when
a nuclear engineer softest acceleration slow down gradually. you can. If that’s too
turned fuel-economy and deceleration,” “Mechanical braking time-consuming, try
guru, coined the term Gerdes says. loses kinetic energy to keep to 50 per cent.
“hypermiling” in 2004 as heat. Regenerative
to describe driving 2 Limit your top braking also loses 5 Heat the battery
to cover the most speed. “Speed kills energy by turning it and cabin while the
miles for the least fuel economy, and the from kinetic to car is plugged into
amount of fuel. He increase in electricity chemical (in the the mains at home
holds six Guinness or fuel consumption is battery) then back before you set off. By
World Records for fuel not a straight line — again. Learn to glide warming the battery Before the X1/9, Italian
economy, including it’s more geometric. and make use of to its ideal operating sports cars were driven by
crossing the US on the Between 60 and aerodynamic drag temperature you’ll get people on their way to the
shortest charge time. 70mph there is a from the tyres.” more miles of range. beach or the bistro. Only
the jet set could afford the
likes of the Lamborghini
Miura and Ferrari Dino.
top of this he recommends range-o-meter is showing 160 applied, of course, had I been Then Fiat breezed into
limiting the top speed to reduce miles used when in fact I’ve driving an ICE car. the 1976 Earls Court Motor
friction. I stay within what covered only 137 — a 17 per cent I arrived home with 47 miles Show with a car that
seems like a reasonable 65mph. discrepancy. This is in spite of in the “tank” — proof, I hope, changed everything. Its
The bare feet thing may be my careful driving. that without the top-up I would cuneiform contours took
Gerdes being eccentric. He I park at the beach, noting have completed the journey. inspiration from the
insists that driving without that, even if I had wanted one, Gerdes’s advice had undoubtedly powerboats that cruised
shoes or socks gives better there is no charger in the improved my driving — and the Italian lakes. It had
sensitivity and pedal control. beach car park. Chargers saved money. The cost of the pop-up headlights and
The morning wears on and the seldom seem to be where you return trip in electricity was a detachable roof. Yet it
traffic is kind. Then suddenly it’s need them. So it was buckets less than £20, including the cost less than £3,000.
not. As three lanes merge into and spades and a day on the motorway “splash and dash” With a 1.3-litre engine and
two where the M27 meets the windy beach until a minor — a third or less than what I’d four-speed gearbox, the
A31, there’s an enormous sandstorm sends us scurrying have spent on petrol or diesel. X1/9 was hardly brimming
tailback. My heart sinks, but back to the car. In their defence, electric cars with power, but weighing
that’s a dread instilled from Mysteriously, while it was have advanced hugely in a in at about 900kg it was
a lifetime of driving internal stationary, the range dropped relatively short time. It’s only 12 a hoot to drive. The key to
combustion engine (ICE) cars, to 149 miles, leaving only the years since Elon Musk launched its excellent handling was
which once guzzled fuel slimmest of margins to get his Tesla Model S, which fired that Fiat’s engineers had
whether you were moving or home. Would a lower maximum the starting gun for the modern positioned the transverse
not. Jams are still irksome in an speed help conserve energy? electric car era. Since then their (sideways-mounted) engine
electric car but at least the It did. I stuck rigidly to 55mph, range and capability has come in the centre of the vehicle,
charge meter wasn’t dropping. ignoring complaints from on in leaps and bounds. It’s also giving it ideal weight
As I creep along I ponder the the passenger seats, and, true to say that recently the pace distribution. This also
two most common complaints thankfully, the range-o-meter of development has slowed. created space to store the
from readers about electric ticked down to match almost Manufacturers have found they hard top under the bonnet
cars: first their price — at least exactly the miles covered. are reaching the upper limits — although if you were in
of present battery technology. Milton Keynes, not Milan,
Skoda’s newest version of the there was little point trying
I reckon my car’s true range is Enyaq, priced from £44,485,
can manage 15 miles more than
to get a Mediterranean tan.
Sadly in 1982 Fiat decided
226 miles. I need to cover 274 to the older version I was driving. there was no place in its
That’s an improvement but no sensible line-up for the
get to Bournemouth and back game-changer. bohemian X1/9, and handed
These diminishing returns production to Bertone, the
offer one consolation: used design company that made
a fifth more than their ICE I might have made it — just electric cars are becoming the car’s body. Bertone
equivalents, and second their — but in the end range anxiety outdated less quickly and are continued to make X1/9s for
range, as measured by the got the better of me. I stopped starting to find a market. Enyaqs seven more years. Fiat’s
Worldwide Harmonised Light for a 15-minute charge, adding with perfectly respectable loss: our pick is the
Vehicle Test Procedure (WLTP). exactly 40 miles at a motorway range such as the one I drove Bertone-badged VS edition
Manufacturers defend these service station. Call me chicken are now available for less than with two-tone paint and
official figures saying that, by but no one wants to risk £25,000. For a family bus alloy wheels. Expect to pay
driving with care, it’s possible running out, especially on a that isn’t too shabby. At least from £5,000 to £15,000 n
to go the distance. But by the smart motorway with no hard electric motoring is getting By Nick Rufford
time I reach the south coast the shoulder. The same would have more affordable n

The Sunday Times Magazine • 51

 SPRING
20% OFF
P LU S F R E E G I F T S SALE
ENDS TODAY

B E S T PR I CE S O N

ANDSOTOBED.CO.UK | 0808 144 4343


A L I F E
Politician and podcaster, 53
arsi was born in
W
Dewsbury, West
Yorkshire. One of five
daughters of Pakistani
immigrants, she
studied law at Leeds
University. The first Muslim
woman to be selected as
a Conservative candidate,
in 2005 she failed to win
the Dewsbury seat at the
general election, but was
created a life peer, Baroness
Warsi, enabling her to
become a shadow minister.
In 2014 she resigned from
government over its policy
on the Israel-Gaza conflict.
She has a daughter from a
previous relationship and
four stepchildren through her
marriage to the businessman
Iftikhar Azam. She and Azam
live in Wakefield.
My plan was to semi-retire in
2024 and spend more time
with my husband, who runs a
food-manufacturing company.
I’m busier than ever, staying too
many days in London at the
House of Lords and not enough
with him in Yorkshire. If I wake
up at home our breakfast is
usually Greek yoghurt, berries
and granola, or scrambled eggs.
Iftikhar was at the same
school as me. He was that really
awkward prefect who would
report me to the headmaster
and put me in detention. What
I didn’t know as a 16-year-old
is that he would become a
wonderful human being, my
second husband and the man
who would make me the
happiest I have ever been.
In 1990 I had an arranged
marriage and, over time, became
miserable. We weren’t well
suited but back then you were
expected to get on with it. After
58 • The Sunday Times Magazine
I N THE
Sayeeda Warsi
we divorced I was reintroduced
to Iftikhar via a friend.
I wasn’t sure we’d be a good
match at first. From school I
thought he was uptight, and he
thought I argued all the time
and got into fights. But I agreed
to meet because I wanted to
show him I was successful and
a baroness, he had just been a
smug prefect with a tight tie. It
turned into something special.
Our blended family of five
children ranges from 25 to 33.
We have four grandchildren as
well. All the kids have left home,
so mealtimes are a lot quieter.
Lunch might be smoked
salmon, sushi or a sandwich.
I didn’t speak English when
I first went to primary school.
We were a poor family and Dad
D AY
WORDS OF WISDOM
Best advice I was given
Stress and worry all you
want but if it’s meant to
be, it will happen
Advice I’d give
If you want to be a politician,
understand why first
What I wish I’d known
Bad times will pass and you
will get through it
worked as both a bus and taxi
driver before setting up on his
own at home, making furniture.
His success taught me the
importance of hard work. Baba
only retired last year, aged 84.
We speak every day and he’s
still as sharp as a razor.
If I’m not sitting in the Lords
or writing, I’ll prepare for my
new podcast with David
Baddiel. Right now I’m also
interviewed a lot about racism
and Islamophobia, which seems
to have paralysed government.
It has become headlines again
because of the situation in the
Middle East, but Michael Gove,
who recently announced a new
unit to gather intelligence and
identify extremist groups,
seems to have a genuine issue
with certain beliefs. I have
worked beside him in
government and I know what
he has proposed is dangerous
and divisive. He seems to find
it hard to say Gaza is occupied,
or even the word Palestine.
Unfortunately we have a weak
prime minister. Rishi [Sunak]
is trying to survive but if he
doesn’t have the strength to
lead, he should call an election.
Leave with a level of dignity
and some principles intact.
I always receive more
Islamophobic messages from
trolls on social media when
moments like this happen. The
only positive of the current
situation is that the issue is now
at the centre of public debate.
Whoever arrives home first
throws something together for
supper. Chicken masala is a
favourite. When I do get to sit
down with Iftikhar in the
evening we talk about where
we might go on holiday. Last
year we discovered an amazing
island in the Maldives. I only
learnt to swim just in time to try
scuba diving. After the general
election, whenever that is, we
want to visit New Zealand.
When you have experienced
financial hardship, a loveless
relationship and no security in
life, when they finally do appear
you value them. I feel incredibly
grateful every day n
Interview by Jeremy Taylor.
Warsi co-presents the
podcast A Muslim & a Jew
Go There with David Baddiel