the spectator 22 august 2015

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22 august 2015 £4.00 www.spectator.co.uk est. 1828

The cleanfood cult

John Steinbeck ‘With Your Wings’

Isabel Hardman and Lara Prendergast on the rise of a dangerous fad

Exclusive: Hislost short story

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the spectator | 22 august 2015 | www.spectator.co.uk 5

established 1828

O ver the past week, the government has finally made a decisive move to kickstart a fracking industry in Brit-

ain. Licences have been issued for shale gas exploration and the planning process stream-lined so that in future, if local councils fail to make decisions within 16 weeks, the commu-nities secretary will step in and adjudicate.

It’s excellent news that the years of pre-varication over shale seem finally to have come to a close, and greatly to the credit of our Climate Change Secretary, Amber Rudd, and Communities Secretary, Greg Clark. But the dismally slow speed at which our much-vaunted ‘shale revolution’ has taken place will end up costing this country.

The coalition liked to talk up fracking, but the truth is that they failed to make the legislative changes which were necessary to allow it to happen. In one sense, the coalition actually made things worse: by abolishing the Infrastructure Planning Commission that Labour had set up to make decisions about projects of national importance.

The folly of failing to give fracking full-hearted support became clear last month when councillors in Lancashire rejected two planning applications for fracking sites, both on the parochial grounds that they would increase lorry traffic and lead to urbanisation of a rural or semi-rural area. The Lancashire

decisions were cheered by residents, and anti-fracking groups proclaimed a ‘victory for localism’. So it was. It was also a perfect example of how the creed of localism can be deeply misguided. It’s all very well to allow residents a say on the design of new housing or the size of extensions, but there’s no sense in allowing them to veto matters of national importance. To make a responsible decision about whether to sink a fracking well means balancing the economic benefit with the dis-ruption to the local environment.

Judged on a national scale, there is a very strong case for enabling fracking. If the indus-try here follows the lead given by the US, it will lead to sharply reduced energy bills for homes and businesses as well as a dramat-ic cut in carbon emissions as coal power is replaced by gas, which, kilowatt-hour for kil-owatt-hour, emits half as much carbon. The potential damage done by fracking is, on the other hand, mostly minor: a rise in lorry traf-fic and the erection of unsightly drilling rigs. The hazards constantly invoked by the anti-fracking lobby — of earthquake and contam-inated water — are extremely low risks.

Yet it is too much to expect residents fac-ing the prospect of fracking in their neigh-bourhood to see things objectively. For them, the benefits will not necessarily outweigh the costs. Leaving local communities to rule on fracking therefore means a complete block on the industry, which nationally is in the interests of only a few.

It is to be hoped that with the Lib Dems gone, this decisive move on fracking will be followed by a more rational energy policy overall. As things stand, Britain remains com-mitted to unilateral carbon reduction targets, which were arrived at without any thought for the cost to the economy. In the end, these cuts to carbon emissions achieve nothing but to shift emissions from British industries to ones based abroad. Faced with the prospect of losing much of our manufacturing indus-try to Asia, where energy taxes are lower, George Osborne has allowed some compen-sation to energy-intensive industry but the government has failed to tackle the underly-ing problem: the Climate Change Act.

If Amber Rudd is minded to address this issue, as well as the fracking problem, she should go on to become one of this govern-ment’s high-achievers. It is right that the gov-ernment should have a clean energy policy. But it will ultimately achieve nothing if it isn’t also an affordable energy policy.

Get fracking

Thank youF or years now it has been assumed that

the days of magazines are numbered. The readers of The Spectator are challenging that assumption. In the first half of this year, the magazine sold an average 62,718 copies a week — the highest figure in our 187-year history. And while our digital edition is popu-

lar, especially among subscribers in parts of the world badly served by post offices, it’s sales of the print edition that are doing par-ticularly well.

For this we have to thank our writers: for their independence of opinion, elegance of expression and originality of thought. But

even more than them, our readers: the best-read, best-humoured people on the planet.

You, the readers, have ensured that, despite all predictions to the contrary, the 21st century now looks like being The Spectator’s most successful.

Thank you.

Leaving local communities to rule on fracking means a

complete block on the industry

6 the spectator | 22 august 2015 | www.spectator.co.uk

BOOKS & ARTS5 Leading articles

9 Portrait of the Week

11 Diary Corbyn and Catalonia Andrew Marr

12 Politics The coming coup Isabel Hardman

13 The Spectator’s Notes Labour’s woman problem Charles Moore

16 Barometer Asexuals; EU cash; pipe bands; baby names

17 Matthew Parris The welcome return of the valedictory dispatch

21 Ancient and modern Tacitus on Edward Heath

23 From the archive Field studies

28 Hugo Rifkind Bisexuals are everywhere (and nowhere)

29 Letters VJ Day, the Dodecanese, Sussex wines and Ravel’s affairs

33 Any other business Brilliant Bromptons; top pay; graduate jobs

Martin Vander Weyer

14 The clean food cult Food fads aren’t just silly. They can be dangerous, too Isabel Hardman and Lara Prendergast

15 Polly Walshe ‘Hills’: a poem

16 Ugly attitudes It’s the worst-looking men

who are meanest about women Julie Burchill

18 Iowa notebook The fun of the State Fair with

Donald Trump and his fans Paul Wood

20 Capitalism’s worst enemies The far left can’t win — unless aided

by a callous, complacent right Tim Montgomerie

22 Don’t act white, act migrant Role models for black British boys

Tony Sewell

24 Peer review How to fix the House of Lords

William Astor

27 ‘With Your Wings’ A lost short story

by John Steinbeck

BOOKS34 Alexander Masters

The Universe in Your Hand, by Christophe Galfard

36 Jonathan Mirsky China Under Mao, by Andrew G. Walder

Matilda Bathurst The Dog, by Jack Livings; Lucky Alan and Other Stories, by Jonathan Lethem; Jellyfish, by Janice Galloway

37 Marcus Berkmann Electric Shock, by Peter Doggett

Daniel Swift Latest Readings. by Clive James

38 Sara Wheeler Circling the Square, by Wendell Steavenson

39 Anna Aslayan Nabokov in America, by Robert Roper

William Wootton ‘Elysium’: a poem

40 Carey Schofield An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education, by Tony Little

41 Rachel Redford on Samuel Pepys Diaries, read by Leighton Pugh (Naxos Audio Books)

THE WEEK

Rod Liddle and James Forsyth are away. Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, Steph von Reiswitz, Kipper Williams, RGJ, Bernie, Adam Singleton, Geoff Thompson, Grizelda, Steve Way, Cluff, Z, K.J. Lamb and Tony Husband. www.spectator.co.uk To subscribe to The Spectator for £104 a year, turn to page 29 Editorial and advertising The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: [email protected] (editorial); [email protected] (for publication); [email protected] (advertising); Advertising enquiries: 020 7961 0222 Subscription and delivery queries Spectator Subscriptions Dept., 800 Guillat Avenue, Kent Science Park, Sittingbourne ME9 8GU; Tel: 01795 592886 Fax: 0870 220 0290; Email: [email protected] Newsagent queries Spectator Circulation Dept, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: [email protected] Distributor COMAG Specialist, Tavistock Works, Tavistock Road, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 7QX Vol 328; no 9756 © The Spectator (1828) Ltd. ISSN 0038-6952 The Spectator is published weekly by The Spectator (1828) Ltd at 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP Editor: Fraser Nelson

A pork chop on a stick (and Donald Trump), p18

The prehistory of pop, p37

Cook before eating, p55


ARTS43 Interview Robert Lepage

Matt Trueman

44 Music Damian Thompson

45 Exhibitions Sickert in Dieppe Martin Gayford

46 Theatre Edinburgh round-up Lloyd Evans

Opera The Rake’s Progress; Le Nozze di Figaro Richard Bratby

47 Cinema Gemma Bovery Deborah Ross

48 Television James Delingpole Radio Kate Chisholm

49 The Heckler Ai Weiwei Niru Ratnam

LIFE53 High life Taki Low life Jeremy Clarke

54 Real life Melissa Kite

55 Long life Alexander Chancellor

56 The turf Robin Oakley

57 Bridge Janet de Botton Wine club Jonathan Ray

AND FINALLY . . .50 Notes on… Antigua

Harry Mount

58 Chess Raymond Keene Competition Lucy Vickery

59 Crossword Columba

60 Status anxiety Toby Young Battle for Britain Michael Heath

61 Sport Roger Alton Your problems solved

Mary Killen

62 Food Tanya Gold Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

LIFE

His lost story, p27

Sickert’s Dieppe, p45

Andrew Marr, whose diary is on p. 11, is a former editor of the Independent and political editor of the BBC and the Scotsman. His second novel, Children of the Master, is out next month.

Julie Burchill’s books include Ambition, I Knew I was Right and Unchosen: Memoirs of a Philo-Semite. She writes about the misogyny of ugly men on p. 16.

William Astor is the fourth Viscount Astor and sits in the House of Lords as an elected Conservative hereditary peer. He is also David Cameron’s stepfather-in-law. He assesses Lords reform ideas on p. 24.

Alexander Masters is the author of The Genius in My Basement, a biography of the mathematician Simon P. Norton. He considers the strangeness of physicists on p. 34.

Carey Schofield was until recently head of Langlands School and College in Chitral, Pakistan; she reviews a former Eton headmaster’s guide to education on p. 40.

CONTRIBUTORS

In the past year, 53 girls were named Khaleesi after the fictional title from Game of Thrones, and four boys MessiPortrait of the Week, p9

If today’s Labour selectorate knows the meaning of the word chivalry at all, it is only to denounce itCharles Moore, p13

The mallard is the only duck that actually quacks. I wonder why I never knew that beforeAlexander Chancellor, p55

Getting Pepys taped, p41

Free 10 yearguarantee


Khaleesi from Game of Thrones and four boys Messi.

The Queen was not blown up by the Islamic State, as Sky News had

predicted she might be, but, with the Duke of Edinburgh, attended a service at St Martin-in-the-Fields to mark the 70th anniversary of VJ Day. E-cigarettes could be prescribed on the NHS to help people give up smoking, a report for Public Health England said. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence said that doctors who prescribed antibiotics unnecessarily could be referred to the General Medical Council. Lord Coe became president of the International Association of Athletics Federations. More than 300,000 households in Lancashire continued to boil water as United Utilities checked 2,500 miles of pipes for cryptosporidium, a parasitic protozoan.

Abroad

In the Libyan city of Sirte, mostly controlled by Islamic State forces, armed

civilians loyal to a rival Salafist movement died in fighting. When 320 migrants were rescued by the Italian navy from a fishing boat off Libya, another 40 were found dead in the hold. A Syrian government air raid on a market in Douma, a rebel-held area of Damascus, killed at least 96 people. The Eleftherios Venizelos car ferry was sent by the Greek government to Kos to act as a registration centre and perhaps a detention centre for hundreds of Syrian refugees. In the first seven months of the year about 124,000 migrants had reached Greece by

sea. The number of migrants trying to get into the Eurotunnel terminal near Calais was reported to have fallen to about 150 a night. In Ottawa a drone playing recorded wolf howls frightened away geese that had been plaguing the city with their droppings.

A bomb at the Erawan Hindu shrine in Bangkok, much visited by tourists,

killed at least 20. Three men, including a British citizen, were arrested by police in Bangladesh investigating the murders of two secularist bloggers, Avijit Roy and Ananta Bijoy Das. President Salva Kiir of South Sudan continued to delay signing a peace agreement intended to end the civil war in his country. At least nine people died in artillery fire between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine near Mariupol. Ahmet Davutoglu, the prime minister of Turkey, said that he had exhausted all possibilities of forming a coalition government. An Indian spacecraft, Mangalyaan, sent back photographs of a chasm on Mars.

Huge explosions at warehouses storing dangerous chemicals, including

hundreds of tons of sodium cyanide, killed more than 100 people in Tianjin, the Chinese port. About 70 firemen were missing; more than 6,000 people were made homeless and 17,000 homes damaged. From Washington state to California, wild fires raged after a four-year drought. Shell was granted a permit to drill for oil below the ocean floor in the Arctic, where it has begun work in Alaska. In Ecuador, Cotopaxi erupted, threatening 325,000 people living south of Quito. CSH

Home

A ndrew Burnham described calls from Yvette Cooper, a rival candidate for

the Labour leadership, for him to withdraw from the contest as ‘quite strange’. The problem was how to prevent Jeremy Corbyn, a left-winger, from being elected by the alternative vote system by 610,000 party members and registered supporters. Gordon Brown, the former disastrous Labour prime minister, contributed by making a 50-minute speech in a small room at the Royal Festival Hall, during which he paced up and down continuously for an estimated 1 mile 1 furlong 5 chains and did not mention Mr Corbyn’s name. Kezia Dugdale, a Member of the Scottish Parliament, was elected leader of the Scottish Labour party; the party has only one seat in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Moffat in Dumfries and Galloway announced it would host the World Gold Panning Championships in 2017.

The annual rate of inflation as measured by the Consumer Prices Index rose to

0.1 per cent, from nothing in June, but the rate measured by the Retail Prices Index remained at 1 per cent. This determined the 1 per cent by which regulated rail fares will rise in January. HM Revenue and Customs earmarked £43 billion in provisions and contingent liabilities in case a series of law suits it is fighting go against it. The busy Mancunian Way, south of Manchester city centre, was closed after a sink hole opened up and continued to grow. A survey of babies’ names in the past year by the Office for National Statistics showed that 53 girls had been called by the fictional title


Andrew Marr

“THERE’S NOWHERE ELSE LIKE LONDON.

NOTHING AT ALL, ANYWHERE”Vivienne Westwood

ST. ERMIN’S - IN THE HEART OF LONDON

www.sterminshotel.co.uk

This is the Corbyn summer. From the perspective of a short holiday, my

overwhelming feeling is one of despair at my own semi-trade — the political commentariat, the natterati, the salaried yacketting classes. Who among us, really, predicted that Jeremy Corbyn would be romping ahead like this? Where were the post-election columns pointing out that David Cameron’s victory would lead to a resurgent quasi-Marxist left?

And that’s just the beginning: how many of the well-connected, sophisticated, numerate political writers expected Labour to be slaughtered in the general election? Not me, that’s for sure. Going further back, how many people in 1992 told us John Major was an election winner? That Parris, I vaguely recall, but anyone else? It’s jolly lucky that we don’t have an Of-Burble to regulate us.

I’m not saying that nobody successfully predicts anything; that would be bizarre. But I exclude all those throwaway on-the-other-hand remarks merely designed to cover the commentator’s backside. I’m talking about full-on, nuts-on-the-table predictions about the stuff that really matters. Most writers, scrabbling around, can find things that show them to be wise before the event. But when it comes to confident, open-throated pre-election or referendum stargazing, except where the situation is blindingly obvious to everyone, the record is dismal.

So I think a certain amount of Corbyn caution is appropriate. Most

arguments against him boil down to this: he has a beard and an excessive quantity of cheap vests, and hangs about with angry, bearded Palestinians and is therefore plainly unelectable in genteel, politically tepid England. It seems unlikely, I grant you. But in the dimly far-off, remarkable circumstances of 2020, and after the Scottish tsunami, are we all so absolutely sure?

I’ve been thinking particularly about commentators’ curse because I have another political novel due out in the next few weeks, this time based on a Labour leadership struggle. Children of the Master features a desperate move by the right to seize back control of the party after a leftwards swerve. So far, so good. There’s dirty dealings, ruthless skulduggery and a Blairite woman with

sharpish elbows — ditto. I daresay some current politicians may think they recognise themselves. On the other hand, I have a working-class Scottish Labour MP, which seems on the verge of fanciful these days. And a sixty-something leftist in a raw cotton shirt, triumphant…? Er, nope.

We have been holidaying in Catalonia, and the discovery of the year — you

may know it — is Girona, a small northern Spanish city famous for its long Jewish

heritage. It’s a place of ancient walls, deep shadows, winding, vertiginous alleyways and many bookshops. It reminded me, despite the intense heat, of Scotland. It even has a dead ringer for the great Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the radical architect and designer Rafael Maso. And a footbridge by Gustave Eiffel. And of course, the other obvious Scottish parallel is the nationalism of a small country. Every second balcony (Girona’s a city of balconies) has a red-and-yellow Catalan flag fluttering from it. It’s important to remember that what’s going on in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee is a Europe-wide phenomenon.

Crossing the border into France, Collioure seems as intensely Catalan

as northern Spain. There are as many tricolours flying here as Union flags in Aberdeenshire. But the Catalans, who applauded David Cameron for allowing the Scottish referendum, have the extra problem, like the Basques and Kurds, of sprawling across international frontiers. It’s as if the SNP had to negotiate not only with London, but Oslo or Stockholm as well.

We had come to Collioure because I wanted to see where Matisse

and Derain invented fauvism together (though Charles Rennie M was here as well). Everywhere there are metal frames to look through so you can see exactly the views they painted. The streets are seething, friendly and international. When gawky, lanky Derain arrived in his white suit, just demobilised, in 1905, the locals viewed him and his bespectacled friend Matisse as harmless lunatics. Now most of Collioure’s fishing has disappeared, it’s those cheerful paintings that underpin the entire local economy.

Derain is also interesting as an example of a great artist who lost his nerve. For five or six years he was one of the most exciting painters in the world; and then he somehow shrank and produced, for the rest of his life, rather grey-brown, dull and conventional pictures. Can readers think of other examples? Music might offer Prokofiev, or even Stravinsky but painting’s harder. ‘Losing it’ is an artistic story that hasn’t been, so far as I know, properly studied.

In politics, on the other hand…


POLITICS | ISABEL HARDMAN

One modernising MP says rather hopeful-ly: ‘I think he’ll step down at some point anyway.’ Maybe so. But the left will soon find a replacement with the same political leanings.

It is odd that so many Labour figures are confident about their ability to topple Cor-byn, given that the party has never got rid of a leader in its postwar history. The Conserv-atives can defenestrate a bad leader over a wet weekend, and even the Liberal Demo-crats have been getting quite good at it. But Labour — as a party — likes unity, even when it’s the unity of lemmings. It could end

up sailing into the 2020 election with Corbyn as leader because it has never worked out how to answer Benn’s ‘How do we get rid of you?’ question.

The fact that bookmakers and opinion polls are united in predicting a Jeremy Cor-byn victory shouldn’t tell us much; it wasn’t so long ago that David Cameron was being given a 0.2 per cent chance of winning the general election. But even if Corbyn doesn’t win, he’ll have left Labour in an almighty mess.

This contest has pitted its MPs against each other in open warfare, and some of them have been stunned to be denounced as ‘fucking Tories’ by their own members, when they’ve served their party for years. Unpleasant rumours about candidates’ per-sonal lives are swirling.

Only the summer recess has stopped the fights being more dramatic: if they

had all been buzzing about in Parliament, there could have been shouting match-es in the bars and tantrums on the terrace. This has been a far more vicious, personal and brutal contest than that five years ago — the wounds are deeper and it will take much longer for the scars to heal. Whoev-er becomes leader has to work out how to reunite the party to stop schism and disin-tegration.

Andy Burnham thinks he has healing powers because he says he hasn’t insulted Corbyn in the way that Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall have. He believes he has, if any-thing, been conciliatory. He plans to offer Corbyn a job that uses his skills at pulling in crowds: the Labour equivalent of Boris Johnson’s campaigning role for the Tories in the 2015 election. Not everyone on Team Andy likes that idea. ‘You don’t have to make someone a senior cabinet minister to keep pulling people to rallies,’ says a Burn-ham source. ‘There are cleverer ways of doing this.’

But some frontbenchers warn that snug-gling up to Corbyn will make it more diffi-cult — almost impossible — to manage the party. One says: ‘On one hand, Andy will have the Corbynistas who he has been suck-ing up to and then on the other hand he’s going to have the Parliamentary Labour Party, who don’t suffer fools gladly.’ Yvette Cooper will also have a lot of work to do mollifying the MPs who have been victim of her team’s Gordon Brown-style char-acter assassinations. The moderate candi-dates have been so busy fighting each other that they have not worked together to stop Corbyn.

Whatever happens, the Labour party conference at the end of next month should be more entertaining than usual. Labour seems to be settling down to a long, pas-sionate and rather vicious debate about its future — a debate that has not really hap-pened in the course of this long, bizarre contest. One Labourite suggests that the party needs to go through a year of fighting before it can deal with its splits, rather than simply papering over them again in an Mili-bandesque pretence at unity.

At some point, though, it will have to answer a question Tony Benn never posed, which is ‘How do we all get on again?’

SPECTATOR.CO.UK/COFFEEHOUSE Analysis from Westminster and beyond.

Jeremy Corbyn’s close friend Tony Benn had five questions he always asked of those in power: ‘What power have you

got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how do we get rid of you?’ Labour’s leadership election has a month left to run, but most of those involved think Corbyn will triumph. So they’ve already started working out how they’ll get rid of him.

John McTernan, a former Blair adviser, recommends deposing him immediately. As he said on The Spectator’s podcast: ‘I can’t see any case for letting him have two min-utes in office, let alone two years, because of the damage that will be done.’ Most think an immediate coup unfeasible, but some would still like an urgent inquiry into the way the different types of leadership contest voters — 300,000 members, 121,000 ‘regis-tered supporters’ and 190,000 trades union-affiliated supporters — voted in the general election. They suspect that such an inquiry would undermine Corbyn by exposing the scale of entryism in the party. The plan then would be to overhaul the voting rules and stage the contest again.

Some Labour MPs say they would refuse to recognise Corbyn’s authority. The joke is that they’ll follow Corbyn’s approach to loyalty on key policies and votes (he defied his party whip more than any other Labour MP). One MP says: ‘He says he rebels because he’s got principles. Well, so do I, and I’m not voting for what he stands for.’

Such rebellions would evolve into seri-ous pressure for Corbyn to step down — perhaps after the poor results in next May’s local elections, which members of the ‘Resistance’ movement set up by Tristram Hunt and Chuka Umunna expect to be the first sign that voters don’t like Corbyn as much as Labour members do. But this wait-for-the-implosion theory has a flaw: it assumes that Corbyn would fare worse than Ed Miliband did. What if he doesn’t?

As one key figure in the stop-Corbyn movement admits: ‘On some of the tests which people will set up he may actually do quite well: I could imagine people being interested in him and what he says and him seeming a breath of fresh air compared to some of the others. Then in next year’s local elections, Labour does quite well and so by those tests he may pass — but it won’t make a jot of difference to our overall direction.’

Labour MPs’ next choice: which leadership coup to back

Only Parliament’s summer recess has calmed the fights. There could have been tantrums on the terrace

‘Don’t even think about it.’

Charles MooreCharles Moore


party members, who make the selection, wouldn’t. They are still so 20th-century that they prefer a man with a dull beard.

I f the man with the dull beard does win, where will Labour stand in

the European Union referendum? Jeremy Corbyn, being a hard leftist, is theoretically against the EU, but eurosceptic Labour friends tell me that he is not to be relied on when the going gets tough. I expect he will adopt the conventional ‘anti-austerity’ position, which is to assail the European elites while not doing anything which might risk the loss of the subsidies they provide and the regulations they pour forth. If so, that will, on balance, be good for the ‘get out’ side. A Corbyn-led campaign for a No vote would drive lots of Tory waverers right back to David Cameron.

A t the funeral last week of my much-loved godfather, Professor Evelyn

Ebsworth, I met staff of The Leys, the Cambridge public school of whose governing trust Evelyn was chairman. The funeral was shortly before the 70th anniversary of VJ Day. I was interested to learn that, early in the 20th century, The Leys established close links with Japan. Several Leysians were members of the imperial cabinet which took Japan to war, and in the 1930s, the school magazine was alive with letters from some of them defending their nationalist polices, countered by others, from Old Leysian missionaries to China, complaining about Japanese atrocities. Unfortunately, this exchange of views between old chums did not calm things down. Mr Chips, created by the Old Leysian James Hilton, is supposed to be based on W.H. Balgarnie, a master at the school from 1900 to 1932, yet Pearl Harbor happened all the same. The incidence of British-educated leaders running other countries would make an interesting study. (By the way, the present kings of Bahrain and Tonga both went to The Leys.) Did it/does it help them? Did it/does it help us?

A paradox of nowadays: the fact that this year’s A-level results are worse

is strong evidence that educational standards are at last getting better.

W atching the very pleasant Liz Kendall on television this week,

I was struck by how extraordinary it is that more than 40 years have now passed since the Conservatives selected a woman leader and still the Labour party cannot bring itself to do so. (Although, come to think of it, it took Labour 142 years to catch up with the Conservatives in selecting a Jew, so perhaps we have another century to wait.) I am not necessarily saying that Ms Kendall is the answer — she seems able, but inexperienced — but there does appear to be a serious barrier to women at the very top of the Labour party.

I suspect this is due less to old-fashioned misogyny than to the sexual politics which feature so largely in the ideology of the left. Margaret Thatcher benefited greatly from the fact that Tory MPs — the only electorate for her party’s leadership at that time — had never given the slightest thought to such questions. They had always assumed that a man would lead, but when a brave woman popped up, they were exasperated by Ted Heath and simply said, ‘Let’s give her a go.’ In the Labour party, it is so much more complicated. Who, for the party, is the right sort of woman? Should she be married or not, childless or not, heterosexual or not? Should she take a strong stand on lots of ‘women’s subjects’ — work/life balance, abortion, sexism, rape, quotas, child-care, FGM? Should she be in favour of the veil as the authentic expression of an anti-western oppressed minority, or against it because it oppresses her sex?

There is no answer to many of these questions which party members can agree on. So every woman candidate gets mired in controversy on such points, or, like Yvette Cooper, avoids them only by blandness and seeming insincerity. It is extremely hard for a woman potential Labour leader to find her voice without deeply annoying significant numbers of her brothers and sisters (especially her sisters) in the movement. The woman who drones on about women’s issues has an honoured place in the modern Labour party — look at Harriet Harman — but by doing so enters a ghetto which prevents her from becoming No. 1. Yet

Mrs Thatcher’s brilliant perception that the best way for women to win the sex war was to shut up about it and get to the top is not open to Labour hopefuls in the 21st century.

T here is also the question of looks. A hidden reason for Mrs Thatcher’s

victory in 1975 was that lots of older Tory backbenchers fancied her. She was 49 and made the best of it without obvious strain. She was not disturbingly sexy, and she behaved with absolute propriety throughout, thus preventing any filthy old wretch from taking liberties, but she appealed to the chivalrous instincts of the knights of the shires. If today’s Labour selectorate knows the meaning of the word chivalry at all, it is only to denounce it. On the other hand, there is an understanding that no leader — especially, despite the age of equality, a woman — can look grotesque on television and win a general election.

So what are the right looks? Possibly Ms Cooper has them — there is something quite appealing about her slightly French crop and black and white dresses, especially when she is being so boring that one looks rather than listens. But she is so contrived and cautious that there is no touch of appealing vulnerability. Ms Kendall looks like a nice person, but not in a distinctive way. I sense that the right woman leader to win a general election for Labour today would conform to one of two physical types. She would either be a more lower-middle-class version of Clare Balding — reassuring, competent, well-rounded, possibly lesbian — or more provocative and sassy, like the wonderful one with a strong northern accent whose name I have forgotten who talks about money and business on BBC Breakfast. Her feminism would be of the ‘Show, don’t tell’ variety. The public would like that, but of course Labour


The dangerous food fadThe ‘clean eating’ revolution is more likely to make you ill than healthy

ISABEL HARDMAN AND LARA PRENDERGAST

and ‘clean eating’ could, in the long-term, make you unwell. ‘Often, these people have found that an approach works for them, and that’s great,’ says Porter. ‘But it doesn’t mean that it will work for anyone else.’

The Hemsley sisters write on their site that gluten ‘breaks down the microvilli in your small intestine, eventually letting par-ticles of your food leach into your blood-stream, which is referred to as “leaky gut syndrome”’. This can be the case, but only for those suffering from coeliac disease. It is not the case for those who do not have this

autoimmune condition. Ian Marber, a nutrition expert who is a coeliac, says that many of the wellness gurus have ‘little understanding of the responsi-bility that comes with discussing food. Everyone eats, so everyone thinks they are an expert, but these people are injecting an unwelcome degree of paranoia into society, without any sci-entific backing.’ If you drank too much wine and have a hangover, he says, you blame too much alcohol. ‘But if people eat too much bread, they would rather say they have some sort of intolerance than admit they over-indulged.’

It’s not entirely clear why ‘eating clean’, by avoiding gluten and certain carbohydrates, would keep people healthy. As the British Dietetic Asso-ciation puts it, carbohydrates are cru-cial; they represent the body’s main energy supply and should make up half of each meal. They are not inher-ently fattening; any unneeded energy ‘will be converted into fat no matter what the source’. Those low-carb diets?

Research suggests they ‘don’t seem to help people lose weight and keep it off’. But the overwhelming message from the plethora of people urging us to eat cauliflower couscous and gluten-free loaves is a simple one: carbs are bad.

The fear of gluten, milk and other newly unfashionable foods could also damage chil-dren whose parents foist their fads on the whole family. ‘Muesli-belt malnutrition’ was first identified by doctors in the late 1990s, when they found children were suffering as a result of the excessively restrictive diets that their health-conscious middle-class par-ents had developed. Now, with the internet so readily at hand to offer quick diagnoses,

The supermarket aisle has become a confusing place. It used to be full of recognisable items like cheese and

butter; now you find yourself bamboozled by all manner of odd alternatives such as ‘raw’ hummus, wheat-free bread and murky juices. You have to stay pretty alert to make sure you pick up a pint of proper milk, rath-er than a soy-based alternative or one free from lactose. Supermarkets have become shrines to ‘clean eating’, a faith that prom-ises happiness, healthiness and energy. Food is to be worshipped — and feared.

As with all growing religions, you know it by its disciples. On The Great British Bake Off, one contestant, Ugne British Bake OffBritish Bake OffBubnaityte, has denounced cake as a ‘nutritional sin’ and she hopes to win with low-fat, vegan and gluten-free recipes. Commercially, she’s on to a winner: the market for gluten-free food is soaring and is forecast to grow by 46 per cent, to £560 million, with-in two years. For those who can’t wait, there’s always the NHS, which wrote 211,200 prescriptions for low-protein or gluten-free food last year (including cakes and pizza). As Dr James Cave, editor of the Drugs & Therapeutics Bulletin, puts it, the NHS is ‘acting as bakers and grocers’.

The high priestesses of this new reli-gion are a group of young, attractive women who amass hundreds of thou-sands of followers online as more and more people turn to them for guidance. Essentially recipe bloggers, they are becoming revered for telling us what to eat and what not to eat. In an age of confusion, they seem to offer a path.

There’s 25-year-old Madeleine Shaw, a ‘holistic nutritional health coach’ who believes in ‘enlivening the hottest, happi-est and healthiest you’ and offers a ‘chia seed egg substitute’ to use in recipes. Ella Woodward, 23, bounced back from a rare illness after adopting a new plant-based diet and entices her followers with sweet potato brownies. Tess Ward, 23, has written a cookbook called The Naked Diet which The Naked DietThe Naked Dietreplaces the conventional chapter head-ings — ‘Breakfasts’, ‘Starters’, ‘Mains’, ‘Puddings’ —with ‘Pure’, ‘Raw’, ‘Stripped’, ‘Clean’ and ‘Detox’. And there’s the Hems-ley sisters, Jasmine and Melissa, whose best-

selling cookbook The Art of Eating Well contains no recipes with grains, gluten or refined sugar.

Woodward recommends raw, rather than pasteurised, coconut water, which is tinted pink ‘because of all those antioxidants’ and warns about the dangers of dairy. Milk, she says, ‘can actually cause calcium loss in our bones! This is because milk causes the pH of our bodies to become acidic which triggers a natural reaction in our bodies to bring the pH of our blood back to neutral’. When we drink milk, she says, calcium is drawn from

our bones in order to rebalance the acidity it causes, which can result in a calcium deficit.

This is news to nutritionists. Milk can, if consumed in absurdly excessive quantities, lead to a condition called milk-alkali syn-drome — but this is more commonly caused by over-consumption of calcium supple-ments than by guzzling milk. More common is calcium deficiency, which the NHS says can be caused by cutting out dairy products.

Sian Porter, a consultant dietitian, warns that ‘if people do not plan really carefully for substitutes for food groups then you can end up malnourishing yourself.’ So these diets are not simply a silly fad that might leave you a little skinnier. The pursuit of wellness


ber of pro-anorexia websites, there are dis-cussions about many of the topics favoured by the wellness brigade. On a popular clean eating website, one girl writes that the ‘spring rolls are easy to take to work and look like you’re actually eating proper food, lol’. On a thread devoted to the topic of chia seeds, a user comments that they are ‘really helping with hunger’ because ‘when they get into your stomach they absorb the water and expand, making you feel full’.

While the wellness gurus deliberately avoid any discussion of eating disor-

ders and diets, their attitude to food is often worrying. Madeleine Shaw admits that she ‘wasn’t always this healthy’ and that as a young girl she had ‘quite a torturous rela-tionship with food and my body’. She suf-fered cycles of ‘depriving and bingeing’, which led to her hair falling out and her peri-ods stopping. At one point, she reportedly ate only rice cakes and fruit. She is careful not to refer explicitly to an eating disor-

the new obsession seems to be with allergies and intolerances, and cutting out all sorts of foods in order to deal with them.

It ties into a similar mantra espoused by those who pursue wellness — that you can heal yourself — and your family — by cut-ting out entire food groups. Earlier this year, the charity Sense About Science warned that parents were risking leaving their chil-dren malnourished by restricting their diets in order to deal with perceived health prob-lems. A decade ago, a study of 969 children in the Isle of Wight found that a third of them were thought by their parents to have food allergies; in fact, only 5 per cent did.

It’s not often that science intrudes into the world of ‘wellness’ fads. To become a clean eating guru, a cheery demeanour seems to matter far more than proper quali-fications. Ella Woodward, Madeleine Shaw and Tess Ward all studied History of Art. The latter two then studied an online course with the Institute for Integrative Nutri-tion. This course, based in America, claims to be a ‘movement’ working to reverse the health crisis by promoting the concept of ‘bio- individuality’ — a concept coined by its founder Joshua Rosenthal (who eats a glu-ten-free diet). It hinges on the idea that one person’s food is another person’s poison.

The institute claims that the qualifica-tion it offers is ‘rooted in science’ — a claim which puzzles Dr Max Pemberton, Spectator Health editor and an eating disorders spe-cialist. ‘The minute you scratch beneath the surface,’ he says, ‘you realise it isn’t.’

It is certainly rooted in commercial logic: the surging demand for wellness gurus means that those brandishing credentials are welcomed by an audience often mis-trustful of mainstream medicine. The insti-tute is happy to boast about this on its website, quoting a student who says that ‘with the ability to see clients before gradu-ation, my education was paid for before it was completed’.

Successful gurus are cashing in: the Hemsley sisters sell their own brand of ‘spi-raliser’, a gadget for turning courgettes into ‘courgetti’, a gluten-free pasta substitute. Supermarket sales of courgettes are soar-ing thanks to health-conscious consumers embracing the vegetable, which is presented as having near-miraculous powers.

The avocado, once considered an enemy because of its high fat content, has been for-given; and in America, where many of these trends originate, sales of the fruit have quad-rupled since 2000. It is a good time to grow avocados, a bad time to herd cows.

The pursuit of wellness is a dream, and every dream has a darker side. On a num-

‘When did we stop getting the yogurt with friendly bacteria?’

To become a clean eating guru, a cheery demeanour seems to matter far more than proper qualifications

der, but it certainly sounds as if she had a disordered way of eating. Phrases used by devotees of the religion, such as ‘eat clean’ or ‘it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle’, feature fre-quently on pro-anorexia chat rooms. In a blog on the Anorexic Angels website, which has since been taken down, ‘Ima_Be_Thin’ referred to gluten-free as the ‘best diet trick ever’ because ‘it’s just such a common allergy no one 2nd guesses me’. Dr Bijal Chheda- Varma, a consultant at the Nightin-gale Hospital in London who specialises in eating disorders, says that she is seeing more and more patients who have eschewed cer-tain food groups based on advice they have read online. ‘Clean eating’ is a term she is used to hearing as a way of justifying a par-ticular diet. ‘Apps and social media do not necessarily cause obsessive behaviour, but can increase obsession over food,’ she says.

Social media websites are wary about being associated with eating disorders; Insta-gram’s privacy and safety centre has a whole section dedicated to the topic. A search for the phrase ‘anorexia’ brings up a warning about ‘graphic content’. But type in ‘ortho-rexia’ — the term associated with obses-sive healthy eating — and no such warning appears. More than 80,000 images pop up, tagged with those increasingly familiar incantations: #wellness #eatclean # nourish.

The sentiment underlying this new cult isn’t a bad one. Most of us would like to be healthier. But we can’t expect the supermar-kets to let us know what healthy is — their job is to flog us food, and they do it very well. The overwhelming advice from the people who know a lot about nutrition and dietary health doesn’t seem to have changed much over the years: everything in moderation.

Hills

As soon as you stop and rest you see more hills ahead,Great chains of hills to some improbable horizon.Will it always be like this? you ask yourself.

Don’t let the hills tower over you,Don’t let their shadows creep before mid-afternoonAnd when they come, savour the blue.

Enjoy the flatness of the land you’re on, lend it your weightAnd don’t look up too high;Ideally don’t lift your head at all, look straight.

Remember, you are not being cowardly or slack,You have worked and now deserve to rest.Just think: no hills, no flat,Or, if you prefer, regard them as clouds, those hills,Great bubbling folds of gentle gas. Leave it at that.

—Polly Walshe


Mirror, mirrorThe uglier the man, the more he demeans women

JULIE BURCHILL

Body dysmorphia, the unfortunate med-ical condition whereby a perfectly pleasant/slender person believes them-

selves to be ugly/fat, is a strange and sad thing. I’d always presumed it to be (like anorexia and bulimia) a primarily female problem, so much more importance being placed on the appearance of women than men. Respectable medical surveys indicate otherwise.

Nevertheless, women tend to see them-selves as less attractive than they are. A size-able number of men, on the other hand, suffer from the opposite delusion. I call them Magic Mirror men, because they seem to possess an inner looking-glass which tells them that they are, indeed, the fairest of them all.

Why else do ugly men not feel ridicu-lous passing judgment on the attractive-ness, or otherwise, of women? He may be a politician or a businessman, or one of those half-witted fat American men who insist on wearing T-shirts bearing the legend NO FAT CHICKS. But he will have no doubt that all women between the ages of 16 and 61 are waiting in an agony of exquisite anticipation to find out if he thinks them attractive.

This being the case, he acts the cad when assessing the physical appeal of women he encounters. The very presentable Linda McDougall (wife of Labour MP Austin Mitchell) claimed that the barely human-looking John Prescott pushed her against a wall and put his hand up her skirt in 1978, when such behaviour ‘was very common for men at that time…I just rebuffed him, he shrugged and winked and we all carried on.’ The lardy lord brought it up in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, after declining to attend Mitchell’s retirement party: ‘Have you seen his wife? Built like a bloody barn door. If I threw her against the wall, the fucking house would fall down!’ This is rich from someone who had his lavatory seat repaired twice in two years at taxpayers’ expense.

Then there is Donald Trump, a prepos-terously unappetising specimen with an almost Tourettish compulsion to pick holes in the appearance of women. Apparently the bewigged bell-end thought he ‘had a shot’ with the Sainted Diana. He bombarded her with massive bouquets. Not surprisingly, Trump also gave Diana ‘the creeps’, accord-ing to her confidante Selina Scott.

Hollywood has done all it can to per-petuate this surreal double standard — see

Jack Nicholson recoiling with horror at an unclothed Diane Keaton in that film no one remembers the name of. The opposite would be unthinkable, despite the fact that a naked Nicholson would surely make most even half-sighted people heave.

How did men become so self-deluded? Women are not blameless, though until very recently it was impossible for them to earn a living without skivvying or prostituting them-selves. Otherwise, they used their beauty to make a marriage to a man who could support them financially. Women convinced them-selves that a man with fiscal appeal was a bet-ter bet than one with physical appeal and, as no one wants to be a meal ticket, unattractive but economically viable men convinced them-

selves that they had ‘something’ that young, lovely women craved, beyond the size of their pocket-book. ‘Power is the ultimate aphrodis-iac,’ smarmed the charmless Henry Kissinger.

Times are changing and men and women are coming to terms with the nasty things that happen to their souls when beauty is sold to the highest bidder. When asked what he would have been if not a fantastically rich footballer, Peter Crouch answered, ‘A virgin.’ A book by Holly Madison, the American real-ity TV star and ex-‘chief girlfriend’ of Hugh Hefner, details exactly what a modern gold-digger can expect; habitually drugging oneself in order to be able to submit one’s 23-year-old body to the arthritic caresses of a 90-year-old, 9 p.m. curfews, bestiality porn to put one in the mood for love, and carpets reeking of urine from the Boss’s posse of dogs.

Madison writes of her shock at first wit-nessing the Hefner’s behaviour in a disco, when he gets up to boogie; ‘I was genuinely mortified for him…had no one told him how silly he looked?’ Of course not — and his Magic Mirror had probably told him that he was the greatest dancer, as well as lover.

No matter how men judge women’s looks, it must remain a mystery to them that the plainest woman can get sex any time she wants, while even decent-looking men are reduced to masturbating and/or paying for it. Maybe the Magic Mirror is more of a comfort blanket, after all?

He will have no doubt that all women are waiting in exquisite anticipation to

fi nd out if he thinks them attractive

No sex, please

Several friends of the late Sir Edward Heath asserted that he could not be guilty of sexually assaulting children because he was asexual. How many adults do not experience sexual attraction?— A 2004 study by Anthony F. Bogaert, of Brock University, Ontario, Canada, analysed responses to a British questionnaire ten years earlier. Of 18,000 respondents, 195, or just over 1% , had agreed with the statement ‘I have never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all’. — A 1983 study by a student at the University of Michigan classifi ed 5% of males and 10% of females as asexual.

Unaccountable spending

The EU declined to offer a breakdown of the £86m spent by staff on EU credit cards. What are the most error-strewn and corrupt areas of EU spending, according to the EU Court of Auditors? % of spending found irregular in 2013Regional policy, energy and transport 6.9%Rural development, energy and transport 6.7%Research; other internal policies 4.6%Agriculture — direct support 3.6%European development funds 3.4%Employment and social affairs 3.1%External relations, aid and enlargement 2.6%

Minority report

The World Pipe Band Championships, held in Glasgow, attracted an audience of 40,000. Some other events, thought of as appealing to a minority, which attract surprisingly large audiences:402,413 attended a weekend of Champ Car racing — an American version of Formula 1 — in Mexico City in 2003.165,000 attended the Badminton Horse Trials over four days in 2005.

Naming names

The Offi ce for National Statistics published its annual survey of babies’ names. Do the risers and fallers tell us anything about birth rates among socio-economic groups?

biggest risers in boys’ namesKian +41 placesTeddy +20Theodore +19Elijah +16Freddie/Albert +15

biggest fallers in boys’ namesJamie -20 placesRyan -18Riley -14Kai -13Finlay -12

BAROMETER


MATTHEW PARRIS

The welcome return of the valedictory dispatch

consultancy. He described the whole thing as ‘bullshit bingo’. The valedictory leaked, choice parts appearing in the Sunday Times. The Permanent Secretary was not happy.

And you can see why. The Diplomatic Ser-vice ethos was changing; diplomacy was brisk-er, brusquer and more businesslike; there was less time or appreciation for fine prose. And — here we journalists have to accept some responsibility — it was less possible to keep communications confidential.

A few years later, using the Freedom of Information Act and the more cumbersome but surprisingly fruitful method of simply going along to the Public Records Office at Kew and asking, a BBC producer, Andrew Bryson, and I published Parting Shots, and

later The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase: two anthologies of some of the best British diplo-matic dispatches. Mostly (I think) the Office took a favourable view of our endeavours, but our then ambassador in Bangkok was forced to press-release his disavowal of a predeces-sor’s view that the Thais were bereft of a seri-ous culture of their own. Had that dispatch leaked at the time, it would have been dyna-mite. Today, it very well might leak. William Hague told me, as Foreign Secretary, that he had asked his officials whether Mrs Beckett’s ruling might be reversed, but they had been clear there was no way the valedictory could be given special protection against FoI.

So the Foreign Office are to be congratu-

lated for allowing Mr Fletcher’s blogged let-ter to Lebanon (‘So Yalla ... Bye’) to appear on an official FCO website. There’s enough in it that, if published as HMG’s official view, would be seen as embarrassing; no thin-lipped official would find difficulty in fram-ing reasons to suppress it. ‘When we think we’ve hit bottom we hear a faint knocking sound below’ is less than complimentary about Lebanese politics; the revelation that HM ambassador was offered a free buttock-lift (‘its value exceeded our £140 gift limit, so that daunting task is left undone’) is hardly dignified; and ‘There are eight stages of life as an ambassador here. Seduction. Frustra-tion. Exhilaration. Exhaustion. Disaffection. Infatuation. Addiction. Resignation. I knew them all, often simultaneously’ is more honest than it is respectful. Yet our former ambassa-dor manages to communicate a passion that few intelligent Lebanese citizens could fail to warm to — and that’s good for Britain, too.

So I wonder whether Fletcher and the FCO may have stumbled upon a compro-mise future for the valedictory? Were it to become understood as a British custom that a departing ambassador is invited to express a thoughtful but candid personal view in a blog of his own which is expressly not his govern-ment’s view and which has not been vetted in advance — and that from time to time the Office might wish to publish some of these on its own website, again as a personal not offi-cial view — then might we perhaps establish a safe house for valedictory thoughts? The idea is worth testing: perhaps not so much as a sponsored pilot project, as by its becoming clear that there is no official discouragement from the practice being emulated by others.

The FCO is a competitive place. Diplo-mats do like to show off. Doubtless Fletcher has inspired a little office jealousy by his showy style, his crafted one-liners, his ener-getic phrase-making and his confessional prose. There will surely be others ready to show him how it could be done even better. And it’s always open to the Foreign Secretary to tut-tut but insist this has nothing to do with ministers, ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’, etc.

And thus, and tentatively, valedictories might rise again — maybe even getting a wider audience than they ever used to. I hope so. Something was lost in 2006.

‘A ll I ever tried to do was hold a mir-ror up and show you how beautiful you really are. Shine on, you crazy

diamond.’I have just read one of the finest ambassa-

dors’ ‘valedictory’ dispatches ever composed, except it isn’t one: it had to be posted on the internet, and was, last month. What was essen-tially a sometimes-exasperated love letter to Lebanon will never see the Foreign and Com-monwealth Office’s printers. The valedictory died in 2006. So Tom Fletcher, who after four years as ambassador in Beirut had come to the end of his posting (‘Unlike your politi-cians,’ he tells Lebanon, ‘I can’t extend my own term’) had to write his loving, infuriated, despairing and hopeful tribute to the country as a personal blogpost.

It must have been around the turn of the century that here in The Spectator I first mentioned the valedictory. This had become a kind of Foreign Office institution. Ambas-sadors departing their post abroad would write a candid but carefully considered and (typically) polished formal dispatch about the country they were leaving. It could be whim-sical, anguished, informative, affectionate or scornful. The quality of FCO prose was such that some were minor masterpieces, eagerly awaited by the foreign secretaries to whom all, nominally, were addressed. The letter (usually classified under the Official Secrets Act) would be formally printed and circu-lated as widely as discretion allowed within the Office, and sometimes as far afield as the Bank of England and Buckingham Palace.

In the Daily Telegraph on 6 August Sir Christopher Meyer, a former British ambas-sador in Washington — drawn, like me, to Tom Fletcher’s blog — offered a lively obitu-ary of the institution with a link to Mr Fletch-er’s blog, but (in mourning, like me, for the valedictory’s demise) is perhaps a little hard on the poor old FCO.

It was Margaret Beckett who signed the tradition’s death warrant. Briefly Foreign Secretary, she abolished the custom in 2006. I expect she was put up to it by her senior officials, and they had a reason. The last straw had been Sir Ivor Roberts’s valedictory on departing Rome. He was retiring; his knight-hood was safe; so Sir Ivor lamented the FCO’s capture by the mentality of management

Doubtless the ambassador has inspired jealousy. Others will wish to show that it can be done even better


Paul WoodIOWA NOTEBOOK

The Iowa State Fair

‘D onnnaaallldd!!! Donnnaaaaallldd!!!’ Donald Trump was surrounded

by fans. He looked happy. He took a bite out of a pork chop on a stick — eating one is a campaign ritual for every politician visiting the Iowa State Fair — and raised his arm in salute. ‘We love you,’ a woman shouted. Someone else yelled: ‘Save our country! Save America!’ No other Republican candidate visiting the fair — no candidate from either party — has generated such crowds and such excitement. ‘I touched him,’ said one woman running over to her friends. ‘I got a selfie.’

N othing of substance was being discussed in the eye of this storm,

marked by Trump’s red baseball cap embroidered with the words ‘Make America Great Again’. This was as much like the visit of a TV celebrity — which Trump is — as that of a politician running for office. But on the fringe of the crowd, a knot of men were having a debate. ‘I’m a Trump supporter,’ said 68-year-old John Wood, bow-legged in his shorts. ‘I spent 27 months in Vietnam and I hate what’s goin’ on in this country… he says things that maybe aren’t popular but we’ve been in trouble for a long time by tryin’ to be politically correct. We need to say: that’s the way it is, plain and simple.’ I asked the group what they liked most about Trump’s platform. ‘The wall,’ said one: ‘Keep out the Mexicans and al-Qaeda.’

The Donald, as the billionaire property magnate is known, had descended in

a helicopter a couple of hours earlier. Two dozen supporters were waiting to see him land. I asked them about the incendiary language he used about women and about immigrants. After the Republican primary debate, Mr Trump famously declared that his questioner, Fox’s Megyn Kelly, had ‘blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her, wherever’. People I spoke to generally hoped he would tone it down when he got the Oval Office. But on his main issue, immigration, they agreed with him that those coming to the US illegally from Mexico were predominantly ‘criminals, drug dealers, rapists’.

‘I want to feel safe in my own country,’ said Patty Davies, waiting to give

her twin daughters a ride on the helicopter, ‘and the way things are going, it’s getting less and less safe.’ Jeb Brien, an athletic 61-year-old in a ‘Team Trump’ T-shirt, said: ‘Mexico’s smart. They’re sending the people they don’t want up to here and we’re takin’ ’em.’ For Mr Brien, as for others, the other big issue was the economy: high taxes, the national debt, and the export of American jobs overseas. ‘I was raised as a Democrat, worked two jobs. You know we were stable. People worked. People were proud of Iowa. I’ve got kids… the thing that scares me, we’re not going to have a country for them, or their kids.’

M r Trump stepped down from his helicopter in cream slacks, a blue

blazer and white golf shoes. He gave a press conference. Apart from agreeing that he was prepared to spend a billion dollars of his own money to get elected, there was nothing new. The answers were nearly identical to those in the previous three or four appearances I’d seen online. But he took question after question, while the children he was giving helicopter rides to waited in the blistering heat. He seemed to crave attention more than any professional politician I’ve seen. Trump has been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder by one author (in all seriousness, not as a term of political abuse). He has a habit of dropping little boasts into the middle of whatever argument he happens to be making. From this press conference alone, we had: ‘I understand psychology’ [on Jeb Bush’s relationship with his brother]; ‘Nobody played the game better than I did.’ [lobbying]; ‘Nobody has more experience dealing with politicians than I’; ‘Trump builds walls. I build walls’; ‘I’ve had great relationships’ [with foreign

leaders]; ‘I’m leading in every poll: the little ones, the big ones’ [true]; ‘I’m all over the world. I’m building in China’; ‘I have some of the great assets, Turnberry in Scotland, Doral in Miami [both hotels]. Trump Tower, 57th and Fifth [in New York]’; and ‘I make $400 million a year.’

His opponents say his presidential bid is an extension of his reality TV

career, which he must know will not last. But Trump is building a serious ground game in Iowa (the state that is first to choose the delegates who nominate presidential candidates). The co-chair of his Iowa campaign is Tana Goertz, a finalist in his TV show The Apprentice ten years ago. She was getting ‘400 emails a day’ from people who wanted to volunteer in the campaign, she said. ‘I’m doing Apprentice-like challenges to find out who’s the best of the best of these volunteers.’

Tana was the No. 1 saleswoman for Mary Kay cosmetics out of a staff

of 6,000. She won her place on The Apprentice with an audition tape showing her cold-calling men working in car showrooms and selling them gift baskets of make-up. ‘I’m using my business skills, my marketing skills, my promotional skills to market the product, which is Donald Trump,’ she told me. ‘I’m selling him as a brilliant man, as a leader, as a businessman, as a negotiator. People love his toughness, his strength.’

Some of those I met wearing Trump T-shirts confessed, when asked,

that they hadn’t really made up their minds which way they would vote. They were just there for the spectacle. But The Donald has tapped into a deep well of anger about Washington, distrust of conventional politicians, and fear about the future. His poll lead seems incredibly durable. As Republicans know, the Democratic party won the popular vote in five out of the last six presidential elections. If the Republicans are going to win this time, they need a Hispanic strategy and a strategy for women. The question is whether either of those can be viable if the Donald show continues much longer.

Paul Wood is a BBC correspondent.

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Capitalism’s true enemiesThe far left can’t win – unless it has

the aid of a callous and complacent right

TIM MONTGOMERIE

tion. The past few decades have seen global poverty fall by more than half — but hav-ing been fed a relentless bad news diet by broadcasters and international aid charities, a majority of voters have incorrectly con-cluded that hunger and poverty are up.

Many in advanced nations such as Brit-ain and America could be forgiven for being gloomy. The downsides for those at the bot-tom have been real. Even before the bail-outs and austerity there was unemployment for people replaced by machines and stag-nant wages for others. There was widening inequality and extraordinary house price

inflation. The cycles of capitalism have always been tough for people.

Ensuring that the public retains faith in the capitalist system will depend upon at least two ingredients. The first is a belief that we’re all moving forward in some way or other. Not necessarily all at the same pace but at least in roughly the same direction. The second is that there aren’t some people enjoying a special protected status. There needs to be a belief that the poor can get richer and, often forgotten, that the rich can get poorer.

For all of the failures of the anti-capi-talists, neither of those two conditions are being met adequately at the moment and that makes the system vulnerable. Many people feel they are moving backwards. There is a belief that some super-sized

F riends of capitalism feared that the events since 2007 — the financial col-lapses, bailouts, deficits and auster-

ity — would produce a massive swing to the left, but it hasn’t happened. Voters have consistently chosen sensible, middle-of-the-road parties that undertook to steady the ship rather than sail in completely different directions. In reacting to the biggest crisis to engulf the free enterprise system for dec-ades we’ve learnt that the spirit of the anti-capitalists is willing but their flesh is weak — and also that they’re simply aren’t enough of them.

They can’t even read the books that they buy. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time did have the dubious honour of being the most unread book of recent times but then came Thomas Piketty; the French econ-omist and unlikely rock-star thinker of the global equality movement. The Occupy Wall Street crowd bought his book in large num-bers but guesstimates derived from Ama-zon suggest that the average reader may not have got much past page 26 of the 685-page tome. Capital in the 21st Century became a global bestseller but only 3.8 per cent of the pristine-looking book that sits ostenta-tiously on the coffee table, next to the latest works of Naomi Klein and Paul Mason, may have actually been read.

‘They started but couldn’t quite climax’ is set to be the epitaph of the anti-capitalist movement. With Jeremy Corbyn they may take over the Labour party but they won’t get into Downing Street. With the social-ist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, they’ll give Hillary Clinton a bloody nose in the primaries but they won’t prevent her winning the Democratic party’s nomination. Even in Greece, where the angries did win power, there was a lot of huffing and puff-ing but eventually they surrendered and agreed to enact more Thatcherite reforms in ten days than the Iron Lady managed in ten years.

I’m glad the anti-capitalist movements are failing. For all of its faults, the spread of free enterprise across our planet has been a huge source of progress. The past 30 years have been correctly described as the great-est economic event in global history. Bigger than Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. Bigger than the industrial revolu-

If you behave badly enough, even the inadequacies of the anti-capitalist

movement won’t save you

‘I’m having second thoughts about our leadership selection process.’

banks, well-connected companies and very rich individuals are insulated from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

If a humanitarian concern to ensure capi-talism does deliver something for everyone isn’t enough to instigate reform, perhaps the recent experience of the Canadian right should provide sufficient motivation. There, the Progressive Conservatives had run the oil-rich province of Alberta for 44 years until May of this year, and they had begun to act as if they owned the place. They’d seen protest movements of the kind I’ve already described come and go. They’d become complacent. But everything changed three months ago. Alberta had seen its deficit explode because of the oil-price collapse. The ruling Conservatives told voters to look in the mirror if they wanted to know who was responsible for this mess and they announced 59 tax and fee increases. The only people spared from looking into the mirror were the oil companies and corpo-rates. No tax rises for them.

Voters were angry at this appeasement of big business, and they got angrier as they learnt that all tax relief for charities was to be axed — except the tax relief for politi-cal donations. Issues like the ex-Conserva-tive premier’s $45,000 airline trip to attend Nelson Mandela’s funeral became ‘unfor-gotten’. Voters became so angry that in May they elected the New Democrats (NDP) to office — a party with a leader who wears a Che Guevara wristwatch, is married to a controversial union executive and leads a caucus that includes a defender of the late Hugo Chavez. As the Canadian commenta-tor Ezra Levant observed, the NDP didn’t win because voters wanted a hammer and sickle. They won because voters wanted a broom. Canada will have a general election in October, and the NDP are now leading the opinion polls nationally. Stephen Harp-er’s nine-year-old Conservative government is again on the ropes over ethics questions and it looks a bit tired. The NDP are on course for victory again — despite, rather than because of, their left-wing politics.

America is the other great capital-ist country most vulnerable to an Alberta experience. Of the many outrageous things that Donald Trump has said in recent weeks, I was most struck by his honest answer to


why this man standing for the Republican nomination had once donated to the Demo-crats. ‘When they call, I give,’ he said. ‘I said “be at my wedding” to Hillary Clinton and she came to my wedding… She didn’t have a choice because I gave.’ What other than wedding guests do big money US donors get in return for their cash? Many believe that big banks got a regulatory regime that contributed to the crash.

Money might not be such a big problem in British politics, but an estimated

half of the Tory party’s healthy bank account comes from the financial sector. This might help to explain why the party has done so lit-tle to reduce the UK economy’s dependence on financial services. And what about the fact that chief executives earn 183 times as much as the average worker — as we learnt this week? Is this the free market working as it should or are we witnessing a massive failure of corporate governance? And what about the dirty money flowing into Lon-don’s property market at the same time that millions of young people can’t get on the housing ladder? Where is the action rather than the rhetoric to fix that?

Alberta provides a warning to all parties that support the free enterprise system. If you behave badly enough, not even the inad-equacies of the anti-capitalist movement will be enough to save you. Capitalism’s big-gest enemies aren’t the Corbyns, Sanders or Pikettys. They are the apologists within capi-talism and within capitalist-friendly parties who are complacent and do nothing do com-bat cronyism, corporate greed and inequal-ity. They, not the revolutionaries, could yet bring the system to breaking point.

Tim Montgomerie is currently producing a report for the Legatum Institute on the reform of capitalism.

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ON YOUR BEHALF

The press and police have been condemned for the way they fall on mere rumour and plaster it across the headlines, Sir Edward Heath’s ‘paedophilia’ being the latest example. The Roman historian Tacitus (c. ad 56–118) well understood the phenomenon.

‘Rumour is not always wrong; it is sometimes correct,’ Tacitus asserts, well aware that the occasional accurate rumour reinforced the potential credibility of the many false ones; and he understood why they played such a part in the world of the emperors, ‘where men’s throats were slit with a whisper’ (Juvenal).

His historical point was the contrast between the freedom of information that he believed Romans enjoyed under the republic, and the deprivation of information and liberty that prevailed in the closed,

secretive courts of the emperors. Since, under those conditions, people had to rely on rumour to understand events, he was simply describing accurately what life was like in imperial Rome. Some rumours, it is true, Tacitus reported only to refute, at once or later; but others he left hanging, creating the sense of a murky, unstable world, in which appearance and reality were difficult to tell apart.

But rumour served another purpose. Ancient historians believed that it was human motives and intentions that drove affairs.

So whether the rumours were true or false was in a sense irrelevant; as long as rumours existed, they had an influence on the mindset, and therefore the actions, of those affected by them. One has only to read Tacitus’ portrayal of the hag-ridden emperor Tiberius (d. ad 37) to understand why he ended up a paranoid wreck.

We like to believe we live in an open society, where things are not swept under the carpet. So when rumour suggests they have been, the press inevitably reacts as it does; for we feel about these matters as Tacitus did. By the same token, mere rumour puts the police in a difficult situation: react, to invite public evidence, and they are sensation-mongers; refuse to react, or do so secretly, and they are part of the cover-up. All very Tacitean.

— Peter Jones

ANCIENT AND MODERN

Tacitus on Edward Heath


middle-class behaviours, the more you are perceived as ‘acting white’ and having betrayed your roots. You are a ‘coconut’ or an ‘Oreo cookie’.

Among poor black school-age children, particularly boys, anxiety about being seen to be acting white is a huge barrier to get-

ting on. In the US, much work has been done on why pupils fear being seen to be acting white. As long ago as 2004, Barack Obama, then a senator, warned that ‘Children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradi-cate the slander that says a black youth with a book is “acting white”.’

The ‘W’ word is directed at boys and girls who dare to speak in standard Eng-lish, answer in class or involve themselves in after-school activities. This attitude can do real damage to the lives of black children — and increasingly of white children, too. It is a drag on their progress. Those who make it to university find that their professors expect them to be experts on the sociology of black life, rather than, say, Bach or ballet.

At least in America the problem is talked about and efforts are being made to coun-ter it. In the UK we are nervous about being seen to be racist if we single out particular minority groups as struggling to get on.

The latest work by the Oxford research-er Steve Strand shows that, among groups with low socio-economic status, black Caribbean boys are performing least well. What is significant is that black boys from

A black head teacher told me a story of his early days at a failing inner-city school. The job was a thankless

one and everybody was waiting anxiously for the arrival of the new ‘super-head’ (the school had gone through three leaders in two years). In the playground it was leaked that the new head was an old-school type from Jamaica.

During his first encounter with the stu-dents, they asked him how many children he had. He told them he had one and that she lived with him and his wife.

‘No sir, how many do you have in Jamai-ca?’ they asked. He replied: ‘None.’ They jeered, ‘Oh sir you’re not a yard man, not a real Jamaican — you’re acting white.’

This, I’m afraid, is typical. For black fami-lies in Britain and United States there has long been a dilemma: the more you adopt

Don’t act white, act migrantBlack British boys are being held back by fear of betraying their background.

Immigrant children know how to deal with that

TONY SEWELL

Nigerian immigrants tell their children: study hard, or

we’ll send you back to Lagos


immigrant West African backgrounds do much better.

The Oxford study found that children with English as a second language were educationally behind all groups at the age of 11 — but at 16, having learnt English, they would rush past their peers. Kids who have English as a second language have a hunger to do well.

I put this down to the immigrant men-tality. Recent immigrants from West Africa are more likely to have someone who went to university or who had a middle-class pro-fession in their family than black Caribbean families who have lived in the UK for two or three generations. Nigerians, for exam-ple, insist that children devote themselves to their studies. If the children don’t listen, they are told: we’ll send you back to Lagos.

It is also significant that families from West Africa are more likely to have two parents

than British Caribbean families. Accord-ing to the Runnymede Trust, 59 per cent of black Caribbean children grow up in single-parent families, as opposed to 44 per cent of black African children. Family stability is a major factor in school success.

Recent migrant families also under-stand that to do well you have to be able to ‘code-switch’ — to adapt your behav-iour depending on whether you are at home

and among family or in the office and at school among others. One of the things that I see holding black Caribbean pupils back is a reluctance to modify their behav-iour and language. What is fine with friends after school isn’t fine in a university or job interview. Migrant groups understand this because they are already outsiders. The chil-dren of migrants have a knack for adapt-

ing — they avoid the language of the streets when talking to teachers, and learn to tell lies to their peers about reading certain books or participating in uncool extracurric-ular activities. No one wants to be a goody-two-shoes.

At my charity Generating Genius, we try to get boys to take on a ‘migrant’ mentality. Too many initiatives aimed at under performing boys pander to lowest-common-denominator interests: football, boxing or rap. We focus on Shakespeare, science and classical music. We get fantas-tic results with our dirt-poor students. We don’t tell the kids that they can be rappers or sportsmen, but that they should aspire to go to university — how very middle-class.

One boy told me that he liked being in Generating Genius because it was like being in a gang — but a gang that wanted him to get into Oxbridge. I have to fight their per-ception that ‘Oxford is full of posh people who don’t speak like me.’ The boys are pet-rified of being out of place in predominant-ly white circles. But it is the ‘acting white’ charge that prevents our poorest pupils from reading, doing their homework and think-ing beyond the dole. We should instead tell pupils: ‘Act migrant.’

Dr Tony Sewell is chief executive of the charity Generating Genius.

From ‘Education and the War’, The Spectator, 21 August 1915: War is a time in which a shortage of labourers can least be borne with. The land must not go untilled, the seed must not remain unsown, or the crops unharvested. Many of these services can be rendered by children whose schooling is not yet over. Care must be taken that the teachers do not lose sight of them, and that days, or parts of days, shall still be spent in the old way. But if this is secured, the child of twelve will not be wholly a loser by the change. He will gain in health by being more in the open air, and in skill by being early taught the elements of the industry by which in most cases he will eventually have to live.

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Field studies


ber, which is not very popular with their own peers. It is entertaining to recall how Labour politicians such as Prescott and Hattersley, who were loudest in deriding the place as out of date, now feel most comfortable on the red benches.

What is to be done? If the House of Lords is to survive it has to come up with its own solution, but one that is acceptable to the Commons and the main political parties. Above all, it must, in time, reduce to about the same numbers as the Commons. The

Blair reform of the Lords cut the number of members to 690; that has now crept up to 789, with more to join shortly. One could impose a retirement age of 75, the same as High Court judges, or make it 80, to be slightly more generous. Or one could impose a lifetime attendance limit of 30 years. Wher-ever one draws the line, there are always going to be a few whose contribution would be sorely missed.

One suggestion mooted was to remove peers who have not spoken. What a ghastly thought. It would mean every peer trying to

speak on every issue to retain their seat. I would much rather get rid of the few peers who never stop speaking.

Perhaps the Prime Minister could agree to only appoint one new peer whenever two retire and so, over a period, cut numbers? To make a difference, we would have to persuade many more to retire than do now. A lot will depend on the behaviour of the opposition parties. Not having a majority is not necessarily unworkable. During the Wilson and Callahan years, Labour were outnumbered in the upper house. But the Conservatives, who had a theoretical 484 peers, more than double the 193 Labour peers, were careful never to push too hard, abiding by the Salisbury convention not to vote down manifesto commitments and flag-ship bills.

The test will come this autumn, when important government legislation starts arriving in the Lords. Will Labour behave? Will the Lib Dem peers try to make up for their lack of clout in the Commons and join Labour to defeat the government, thereby forcing the Prime Minister to consider cre-ating yet more peers? We will see the alter-native is either a mass creation of peers or more likely total abolition. Many MPs don’t see the need for any second chamber, a view that may be shared by many of their con-stituents.

Whatever happens, I would rather keep an appointed second chamber. We don’t need yet another type of elected repre-sentative diminishing the role of MPs in the Commons. We do need a second chamber to scrutinise legislation and ask MPs to think again when necessary.

A retirement age of 75 would give me another 12 years in the Lords. A 30-year term or the removal of the last 92 heredi-tary peers would see me chucked out.

Whatever happens, I’ve had a good run. Manny was only half right.

W hen I took my seat in the Lords as a very nervous 21-year-old, Manny Shinwell, the redoubt-

able Labour peer, welcomed me with the words ‘I knew your grandmother Nancy. She was a rebel like me. Enjoy yourself. You won’t be here long before they chuck you out.’ Forty-two years later I am still here — perhaps past my sell-by date. The House of Lords is bursting at the seams. The numbers must come down. And yet David Cameron must appoint more peers in the forthcom-ing honours list.

Every Prime Minister in history, from Harold Wilson with his ‘lavender list’ to Tony Blair with his cronies, has caused controversy when creating peerages. Cam-eron’s new peers will probably be no differ-ent, however carefully the names are chosen then vetted by the Lords Appointments Commission.

Even so, he has a problem, which is that Lords is so stacked against the Conserva-tives that to achieve anything like a work-ing majority he would have to appoint far too many peers to an already overcrowded second chamber. Peers now overflow into what were visitor seats. Question time is only for those who can bellow the loudest. The House of Lords is second in size to only the Chinese People’s Congress and is the only parliamentary second chamber in the Commonwealth that is larger than the first. It cries out to be reformed.

The Lords has made some reforms. Peers convicted of a criminal offence can be thrown out, as can those who act inap-propriately in their parliamentary duties. I did once, slightly tongue in cheek, try to argue that we should welcome them back to rehabilitate them into society. I was round-ly attacked by the Lib Dems, who I thought were the caring party.

The coalition government in the last ses-sion of Parliament tried to implement the Clegg plan: a bizarre mixture of elected and appointed, with different classes of peers receiving different remuneration, but it was quite rightly thrown out by the Commons before it reached the Lords. It is respectable to argue for either an elected or an appoint-ed second chamber, but Clegg’s plan fell between the two and satisfied no one.

Labour want an elected second cham-

Peer reviewSomething needs to be done about the overstuffed House of Lords

WILLIAM ASTOR

The House of Lords is second in size to only the

Chinese People’s Congress

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‘With Your Wings’A lost short story by John Steinbeck

At each house, they watched him pass, and then the families walked solemnly down the steps into the lane and followed him like people going to church… Men and women and children in their best clothes. He could see them in the sun-cracked rear view mir-ror, moving into the lane behind him.

His own folks were standing on the porch waiting for him… his father in white shirt and black string tie and dark church clothes, his lean chin held high; his mother in her blue-and-white print dress, each hand in front of her, holding the other to keep it from escaping; his grown sister pretty and breathless, her lips a little open; his young brother with eyes so wide that his forehead wrinkled up.

Second Lieutenant William Thatcher stopped his car, and got out slowly, and moved slowly toward the porch, and the gathering neighbours came up behind him.

He had planned how it would be. He would treat the whole thing casually as though it was nothing at all. He had planned to say, ‘Hello Pa’; to kiss his mother and sis-

ter; to pick up his little brother and tousle his kinky hair.

But it wasn’t like that at all. It wasn’t nothing — it was something.

He walked slowly toward the porch and stood looking up at his father. He could hear the rustle as the neighbours moved silently near and formed a half circle behind him. It was as though his own people were sitting in judgment on him.

The sun was warm on the porch and on the roses against the porch and the sun was hot on his golden shoulder bars. He could see them shine from the corners of his eyes. He had thought to come home in triumph and it wasn’t that at all. He took off his cap with the gold eagle on it and held it in his hand. He saw his tall father lick his lips. And then his father said softly,

‘Son — every black man in the world is going to fly with your wings.’

And then he knew. His breath caught sharply against his throat. He climbed the steps and went blindly past them and into the house and into the bedroom where he had grown up.

Lieutenant William Thatcher lay down on the white bed. His heart was pounding. He could hear a little quiet murmur of voic-es in front of the house. He knew they were going to sing in a moment. And he knew now what he was to them.

John Steinbeck’s ‘With Your Wings’ was first heard in July 1944, when Orson Welles read it aloud at the end of one of his radio broadcasts, but was not then printed. This is its first UK publication.

H e know most of all that he want-ed to go home — that there was something at home he had to get,

and he didn’t even know what it was. Dur-ing the long, hard training, there had not been time to think of himself nor to want anything.

The ceremony at the end was unreal. He stood with sixteen others — all of them rigid as cypress logs, and the silver wings were pinned to his blouse over his heart. There was a speech by the Colonel, and half of his mind heard it… the other half was going home.

He walked to his Model-A Ford, got in, and slammed the door.

From the corners of his eyes, he could see the gold bars on his shoulders. The silver wings were heavy over his heart.

He started the clattering open roadster,

listened for a moment to the slapping pis-tons, and drove away in the sunny golden afternoon. The front wheels waggled loose-ly, and he let the steering wheel slip back and forth in his hands.

A training plane flew over and banked. He glanced up and knew that the pilot was not going home. Now he was frightened of his success. He tilted his cap a little and sat very straight behind the wheels.

And then he turned off the highway and into the rutted lane. The meadow lark flew ahead from fence post to fence post, singing his coming like a herald. The young cotton was strong and dark and clean in the fields.

The porches of the cottage were crowd-ed as he drove by… Children washed and dressed in their best and starchiest clothes… hair bursting with ribbons… and the older people standing behind on the porches.

Illustrated by Steph von Reiswitz

At each house, they watched him pass, and then the families walked

solemnly down the steps into the lane

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HUGO RIFKIND

Bisexuality is now everywhere (and nowhere)

of compulsion. As in, if you spend a while dating blondes and brunettes, nobody ever suggests that this leaves you predisposed to cheat on your brunette wife because you so badly miss the blonde thing.

What seems to be changing, though, is the urge to make a fuss about all this, even in the painfully right-on fashion of the likes of me. According to a story in the Times earli-er this week, YouGov has found that almost half of young people (18 to 24) today con-sider themselves to be neither heterosexual nor homosexual, but something in between.

Almost half. That’s a lot. Not a trendy fringe like my lot in the 1990s, but almost a new normal. It made me think of a scene in the film 21 Jump Street where two policeman feign youth to infiltrate a high-school drug gang, try to fit in by punching somebody for being a geek, and then end up being ostra-cised by their new classmates because he turns out to be gay, too.

The point is, though, they probably wouldn’t actively call themselves bisexual, either. In the most recent census, the figure

claiming that among the same age group was a mere 2.6 per cent. Which may mean, I suppose, that they’re all either lying to the census, or lying to YouGov.

Only I’m not sure it does. Rather, I think this is what progress looks like. An absence of fuss. Sexuality, 20 years on, is less about what you are and more about simply what you do. Although what people actually do, I’d bet, will carry on being much the same as what they always did.

The Corbyn crowd

People keep asking me if I think Jeremy Corbyn is anti-Semitic. I don’t. Or at least I think it’s vanishingly unlikely. Why would he be? For all his political unorthodoxy in vari-ous directions, his antipathy towards bigotry seems wholly genuine. Indeed, it seems the whole point. I don’t see how it could have such a big blind spot.

If the question gets asked, however, and angrily, I don’t think he’s blameless. My own political awakening came with the pending Iraq war in 2003. I was against it, noisily. I remember quite clearly the first anti-war march I attended, probably in late 2002. Everybody had the same placard, handed out by the organisers. ‘Don’t Attack Iraq’, it said. And then underneath: ‘Justice For Pal-estine.’

I didn’t understand why. I still don’t. It’s not that I’m against justice for Palestine, but that wasn’t what I’d gone to march about. The connection between Israel and the Iraq war was so tenuous as to be nonexistent, but a strong streak of the Stop the War move-ment always wished it was stronger. When issues weren’t about Israel — and believe it or not, many aren’t — they always transpar-ently wished they were.

This, for two decades, has been Jere-my Corbyn’s political hinterland. From it sprang all the strange associations he is now accused of having, with all those strange people who think such troublesome things. He could have called it out 20 years ago, had he wished. He didn’t wish. This is what you get.

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.

I ’m not aware of knowing many bisexu-al people. Or indeed, off the top of my head, any bisexual people. Which is odd,

really, because back in my student days you couldn’t move for them. Being bisexual was quite the thing. Or, at least, claiming to be was. The girls really dug it.

This was back in the mid-1990s, not long after the lead singer of a band called Suede, who is a man called Brett Anderson (mar-ried to a lady now; two kids) had declared himself ‘a bisexual man who has never had a homosexual experience’. That, at the time, was very much the sort of sexual identi-ty that a trendy, bohemian young chap, of the sort I very much wanted to be, was sup-posed to be aspiring towards. Or, as Irvine Welsh had Renton put it in Trainspotting, ‘One thousand years from now, there won’t be any guys and there won’t be any girls, just wankers. Sounds all right to me.’

It wasn’t easy, though. For one thing, I wasn’t at all sure which men to pretend to fancy. Normally people overcompensate wildly in this sort of situation — as with closeted young men who put up posters of Pamela Anderson and suchlike — but if I’d claimed lust for, say, Sylvester Stallone, I’m not sure anybody would have believed me. The safe option was Johnny Depp. Every-body fancied Johnny Depp. He had big beautiful eyes and long hair and perfect cheekbones, although I wasn’t really sure what I’d actually want to do with him. It would have been so much easier if he’d had a vagina.

Obviously though, I do actually almost certainly still know quite a lot of bisexual people. Everybody does. Depending, that is, on what the word means. I will know peo-ple now in straight relationships who want to have occasional flings with people of their own sex, and perhaps even do, and I prob-ably know gay people who do the opposite. And if they no longer choose to identify themselves in that sort of way, well, no won-der. When you marry or settle down, making a song and dance about all the other people you faintly want to sleep with is simply churl-ish. One of the strangest and softest bigot-ries about ‘alternative’ sexual orientations is the notion that they must entail a sense

When you settle down, making a song and dance about which other people you’d want to sleep with is churlish

‘Due to some unwise financial investments, you’re no longer a rich bastard, I’m afraid.’


LETTERS

In praise of Sussex wines Sir: I cannot let Charles Moore’s slighting remark on Sussex wine (Notes, 15 August) pass unnoticed. There are at least six reputable winemakers in Sussex producing award-winning reds, whites and rosés. East and West Sussex vineyards also have sparkling wines that regularly beat what Champagne can offer, due to having the same chalky subsoil.Peter BrownLondon SW15

The magic of Annes Grove Sir: In contrast to Prue Leith’s unfortunate experience at Annes Grove (Diary, 8 August), we were welcomed by one of the Annesley family three years ago with the loan of gum boots and brollies. Annes Grove, like Ninfa, must be one of the most magical gardens in Europe. Wait till the winter damage is repaired, then go! M.E. BrocklebankStoke by Nayland, Suffolk

Ravel, closet heterosexual Sir: Michael Tanner is not alone in being taken in by Robert Craft’s claim that Ravel and Stravinsky had an on-off affair for several years (Arts, 15 August). Stravinsky’s biographer Stephen Walsh concurs with me that there is no evidence whatever for this claim. Such evidence as we have from Ravel’s side indicates strongly that he was a heterosexual, albeit a closet one. The conductor Inghelbrecht, who had known the composer from before 1905, later stated, as did Ravel’s friend and pupil Manuel Rosenthal, that he consorted with ‘filles de joie’; Vaughan Williams strongly implied that in 1908, after a lunch with Ravel’s publisher, both of them were included in the latter’s invitation to ‘go see some jolly tarts’; and in an unpublished letter of 1895 Ravel offered a young lady his ‘hommages les plus respectueux’, while admitting that ‘inwardly, my thoughts are quite different’.Roger NicholsKington, Herefordshire

Girl talk Sir: Mark Mason isn’t alone (‘Old boys’ network’, 15 August). I still call myself and friends ‘girls’, and I haven’t decided what to do when I grow up. (I was born in 1934.)Celia CameronEdinburgh

WRITE TO US The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP; [email protected]

The morality of the A bomb Sir: In questioning whether we should celebrate VJ Day (Diary, 15 August), A.N. Wilson is confusing ‘why’ with ‘how’. The debate on the rights or wrongs of the nuclear attack will continue probably until long after the grandchildren of the last survivors have passed on. What should not be forgotten is the necessity to defeat the cruel, expansionist, militaristic regime that arose in Japan between the wars.

Something happened to Japan during that period. The treatment of Allied prisoners of war and the atrocities in China during the second world war are well documented. What is less well known is the Japanese treatment of prisoners of war during the first world war. The German garrison of Tsingtao, captured by the Japanese after a short campaign in 1914, reported on their repatriation in 1919 about how well they had been treated during four years of captivity in Japan. Whatever that ‘something’ was, it needed to be stopped.N.J. RidoutLt Col (Rtd), Ingham, Lincs

Dodecanese solution Sir: Taki is of course right when he says that ‘poor, craggy’ islands in the eastern Aegean, the Dodecanese, cannot possibly deal with the influx of migrants from Turkey (High life, 15 August) . But things are made worse by their anomalous situation. The islands’ natural hinterland is Anatolia, but they are part of ‘Europe’ and Schengen, and therefore a natural target for migrants who can paddle to them by boat. The islands are, in any event, expensive, because they get their water, electricity (and tax privileges) from the mainland, not Turkey; and then there is the ‘defence’ expenditure (for what?). The Turks now have money, but face tiresome visa restrictions. Would it not make sense for these islands, with Chios and Lesbos, to be declared a special zone, exempt from Schengen, where Turkish tourism and investment could be encouraged? One of the islands, maybe Karpathos, could even be used as a holding camp for the migrants while they are sorted out, and prevented from swamping Europe. Greek nationalists might wail about surrender to, as Taki puts it, ‘vile’ Turkey (does he really mean that?). But even they might see that a higher national interest is involved. Norman StoneBilkent University, Ankara

Poor treatment Sir: I think your leader may be out of date (‘Stop health tourism’, 15 August). In March,

I ran up a bill in a French hospital for €186. I later claimed on my European Health Insurance card and was told that it would take four months to process and that the French would decide how much I should be reimbursed. In July, I received £13.08. I think this is a worrying tale for UK residents who thought they were covered by the card.Peter CullinanPadstow, Cornwall

Shame on Hugh Sir: Hugh Anderson (Commander RN (Rtd)) doth protest too much when he claims to favour scrapping the RAF (Letters, 15 August). His mother brought him into this world in a wonderful RAF hospital in Cyprus and he lived very happily with us there and in RAF houses for several years. He loved watching the planes on many RAF airfields and only in his late teens did he decide the Royal Navy was for him — and he did well. As his father, I still wonder how much better he might have done had he joined the RAF.Roger Anderson Squadron Leader RAF (Rtd), Chagford, Devon

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ANY OTHER BUSINESS| MARTIN VANDER WEYER

Come on, prime minister: a peerage for our peerless folding bike designer

and Intertek, plus flurries of opposition at Centrica, HSBC and a few others. The aver-age shareholder vote against board pay is a negligible 6 per cent. If owners won’t shake their own corporate trees — and George Osborne clearly has no inclination to do so — one thing’s for sure: the continuing scan-dal of unjustifiable executive pay will be a golden propaganda tool for the resurgent Corbynite left.

Careers unlocked

‘August is the season for conversation about career choices,’ I wrote last year, and prob-ably the year before. Sure enough, I’ve been catching up in France and elsewhere with many of the youngsters — graduate off-spring of my own cohort — whose progress I try to follow. The loafers are still loafing, but the upturn of the economy has eased most of the others into the world of salaried work. One veteran of innumerable unpaid intern-ships is now on track to become a human-rights lawyer; a former student eco-warrior is ‘advising the government of Gambia on renewable energy’. Financial PR — follow-ing my previous aspersions on it — seems to have gone out of fashion as a career choice, to be replaced by ‘political risk analysis’ for insurance companies and anything under the heading of ‘wealth management’.

I was particularly impressed by a young man last seen lurking on the fringes of the rock music scene, who told me, ‘I’m work-ing in the City… like, Lombard Street.’ ‘Congratulations,’ I enthused, ‘Historic heart of the money market, site of the gold-smiths who founded Barclays and the origi-nal Lloyd’s coffee house… So what’s your financial niche?’ He looked sheepish. ‘It’s called Escape Hunt. People pay big money every night to be locked in a basement. I dress up as Sherlock Holmes and give them clues how to get out… It’s, like, a gamer thing.’ No need to be embarrassed, I tell him: a job’s a job, and that sounds a less risky proposition than many that have parted City punters from their cash down the centuries.

Asked to name Britain’s greatest liv-ing industrial designer, most peo-ple might cite Sir Jony Ive of Apple

or Sir James Dyson of the bagless vacu-um cleaner. I’d certainly shortlist Ive, but I traded in my unreliable Dyson for a brutal-ly efficient German machine called a Sebo and I’ve always thought Sir James was over-hyped. I might also mention Dumfries-born Ian Callum, the director of design for Jag-uar cars responsible for the sleek F-Type. But surely the top prize must go to Andrew Ritchie, the former landscape gardener whose one perfect product, the Brompton folding bicycle, first sketched in his South Kensington flat 40 years ago, has never been bettered or even precisely replicated by any other manufacturer around the world.

Having bought myself a Brompton a dec-ade ago, I called on Ritchie at his Brentford works and found him ‘wearing navy-blue shorts and brown leather lace-up shoes, dragging on a thin roll-up, hunched over a desk strewn with cogs, chains and oily-fingerprinted invoices’: the archetype of the British backroom boffin. He was hop-ing to produce 14,000 bikes that year, hav-ing passed the 10,000 mark in 2002. It was all a bit homespun, but under the man-aging directorship of Will Butler-Adams since 2008 (with the perfectionist Ritchie in a role that suits him better, as technical director) the privately owned business has gone from strength to strength. It produced 45,000 bikes last year, 80 per cent of them for export, clocking up a £3.4 million profit; and this week it announced a move to a new factory at Greenford big enough to break through 100,000 units in five years’ time.

Brompton is already by some distance the UK’s biggest bike-maker, Raleigh having long ago ceased production at Nottingham. Dyson moved his factory to Malaysia; Jag-uar Land Rover has just announced a new assembly plant in Slovakia. But Brompton, with a workforce of 240, remains committed to manufacturing here. Andrew Ritchie told me in 2005 that his bikes ‘are best built by people who ride to work on them through

west London every day’, and evidently that maxim still applies. David Cameron should cross a party hack off his much-anticipated list for the Upper House, and find space for Lord Ritchie of Brompton.

Shareholders don’t care

The late Sir John Buchanan, a former finance director of BP who went on to chair two FTSE100 companies (Smith & Nephew and ARM Holdings) and hold directorships of four more, was a rare voice in the boardroom world against the explosion in executive pay. ‘Most of the jobs I’ve done,’ he observed, ‘I would have done for half as much compen-sation.’ I wonder how many others in the top bracket today would secretly make that admission, and can barely believe their luck.

Latest figures from the High Pay Centre think-tank show average FTSE100 chiefs’ pay last year at a fraction below £5 million. That average is boosted by a £43 million package for Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP — who should really count in a special catego-ry, as an entrepreneur-founder rather than a hired manager — and the underlying trend, adjusted for inflation, is slightly down com-pared with 2013: but only slightly, and still up by a million or so since 2010.

The enormous relative rise in rewards for a few thousand people at the top of the corporate heap, especially during the reces-sion, is widely seen as unfair — by the left because it suggests top executives (to quote the Independent) are worth ‘183 nurses or 127 police officers’, and by the moderate right because it has rarely been matched by improved rewards for shareholders. Yet it seems impossible to change the tide. Coali-tion business secretary Vince Cable adopted the posture of Canute by giving sharehold-ers a binding vote on pay policies every three years and an ‘advisory’ vote every year. But results so far show just how lit-tle shareholders care about this issue: there have been no binding votes against pay proposals in FTSE100 companies and only two majority advisory votes, at Burberry


BOOKS & ARTS

BOOKS

In the sky with diamondsThe beliefs of physicists are infinitely kookier

than anything in the Bible, says Alexander Masters

The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time and Beyondby Christophe Galfard Macmillan, £14.99, pp. 436, ISBN 9781447284086Spectator Bookshop, £12.99

Physicists have a nerve. I know one (I’ll call him Mark) who berates every religious per-son he meets, yet honestly thinks there exist parallel universes, exactly like our own, in which we all have two noses. He refuses to give any credit to Old Testament creation myths and of course sneers at the idea of transubstantiation. But, without any sense of shame, he insists in the same breath that humans are made from the fallout of exploded stars; that it is theoretically possi-ble for a person to decompose on one side of a black hole and recompose on the other, and that there are diamonds in the sky the size of the moon.

The Universe in Your Hand by Chris-tophe Galfard, a young French theoreti-cal physicist and former student of Steven Hawking, is subtitled ‘A Journey Through Space, Time and Beyond’. It could just as well have been called a journey through common sense into preposterousness. ‘A popular science book that aims to explain Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity, String Theory and Parallel Realities using storytelling instead of graphs and equa-tions,’ declares the blurb. Since I last studied physics, as an undergraduate in the 1980s, the subject has lost all pretence of good behaviour: it is now much kookier than any-thing in the Bible. It took me a week to read The Universe in Your Hand and two weeks to recover from my outrage. My friend Mark’s hypocrisy is immeasurably deeper than I’d realised.

The book opens with a Doom. Picture yourself lying on a beach, begins Galfard, ‘on a faraway volcanic island on a warm cloudless summer night’ — ‘the surrounding ocean is as still as a lake’ and ‘you remem-ber questions you had as a child: what are they, these stars? Why do they flicker? Why should we care?’

For a page and a quarter Galfard lilts along in this soothing tone. ‘Your friends will soon be joining you for a drink.’ ‘A tiny shooting star gently streaks across the sky’. Suddenly, boom!, the next thing you know, you are no longer on the beach but in outer space, floating through emptiness…. A few hundred thousand miles ahead, a ball is flying against a background of tiny distant stars. It is a liquefied planet.

Our sun is about to burst. The liquefied planet is us. Galfard’s style becomes cine-matic, staccato, informative, thrilling, poet-ic. We are going to witness ‘one of the most violent events the universe can provide’, a thing ‘of monstrous beauty’. As the sun swells, ‘huge filaments of million-degree hot plasma blast through space’ and the lique-fied planet, ‘pounded by energies beyond its strength, is blown into nothingness’. The sun ‘does not even notice and then, quite sud-denly, it explodes, firing all the matter it was made of into outer space.’ The entire event is silent, ‘for sound does not spread in the vacuum of space’.

In the foreword to his book, Galfard writes: ‘Before we start, there are two things I would like to share with you. The first is a promise, the second is an ambi-tion.’ His promise is ‘never to use any other equation apart from E=mc2.’ His ambition is that ‘in this book I will not leave any readers behind’. He honours both; with-out mathematics, he manages to make his

mathematical subjects feel possible for ordinary readers to think about in non-trivial ways; without trivialising, he is clear and never gets entangled (as so many other popular physics books do) in frenetic pas-sages of jargon and big numbers.

After our first ‘journey’, to witness the dying sun, Galfard returns us with a thud to our tropical beach and adopts his pastoral cooing tone again, like a dove in the church eaves. We must learn about the universe

if we’re going to survive this catastrophe, which means going on more guided journeys through spacetime with Dr Galfard. We’d better hurry. We’ve got only 420 pages and five billion years to go.

The rest of Part I of The Universe in Your Hand (there are six parts in all, each cover-ing different aspects of either quantum phys-ics, relativity theory or cosmology) takes us through the cosmos and beyond the Milky Way until we have reached what Galfard calls ‘the First Wall at the End of the Uni-verse’, 13.5 billion light years from earth, ‘a place that is not for light to travel through’. Part II, ‘Making Sense of Outer Space’, intro-duces general relativity and explains what the First Wall tells us about the origin and growth of the universe. It is in Part III, ‘A Dive into the Quantum World’, that Galfard starts to lose his sanity.

If the fundamentalists of the American Midwest want to advance exegesis, they should send their preachers to MIT. Parallel worlds; entire universes smaller than the size of a subatomic particle; the fact that there is real, visible evidence that all possible exist-ences (some of which would have led to the

My physicist friend believes in a parallel universe, exactly like our

own, in which we all have two noses


The Ant Nebula, located a mere 3,000–6,000 light years from Earth in the southern constellation Norma

worlds of two noses) were at one stage fro-zen in time, and that this evidence comes from looking up at the sky when sitting on a sunlounger in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; that there are universes inside uni-verses inside universes, encased like bubbles … all this, says Galfard, ‘may (and should) sound completely crazy to you (it does to me, but I like it)’; yet there are sound and con-sistent arguments, each built out of the basic ideas of GCSE physics, to justify every word.

Quantum fields are not unlike agricul-tural ones: they are continuous landscapes in which crops can spring up anywhere. Just as different fields of the countryside grow different produce — steep fields for sheep, drained fields for wheat — different quantum fields grow different particles. The electro-magnetic field grows electrons and photons. The strong nuclear force field grows quarks and gluons. One critical difference between agricultural fields and quantum ones is pleni-tude. Whereas Britain supports several mil-lion fields, the universe supports four. All this is well established, repeatedly proved by long equations and backed up by multi- b i l l ion dol lar exper iments in the

subterranean particle-smashing tubes at Cern. Gravity is another field and, since there’s no point having a field unless you can produce something on it, gravitational fields grow gravitons.

Only they don’t. No matter how hard the theoretical farm-

ers of mathematics try, they cannot make gravity produce gravitons without sending

the whole of quantum theory into oblivion. Experimentalists have also never spotted a graviton. Places such as Cern are the Defra of physics. Their job is to confirm what parti-cles are growing in which fields, and the grav-itational field is looking increasingly like a Brussels subsidy scam.

Hemmed in by inconsistencies, badg-ered by paradoxes, aware that soon some-thing somewhere must give and result in a new theoretical evangelism, physicists have proposed extraordinary ideas. Galfard

guides us around many of them with calm-ness and good humour. His style is occasion-ally annoying. Now and then he overdoes the gently guiding, avuncular-vicar tone and sounds more like a physics graduate trying to chat you up in the pub; but, somehow, against all my desire to be grumpy about it, it even-tually works.

On the last ‘journey’, Galfard takes us outside the universe in the company of a small talking robot. Exiting our universe is allowable, according to the latest, and cur-rently most successful, attempt to unite gravitation with quantum fields — String Theory. Strings are vibrations of nothing-ness, ‘like the blur of a guitar string with-out the string itself’. A billion billion billion times smaller than the width of a human hair, each string is capable of giving rise to a universe. String theorists call these universes ‘branes’. Out of nothing comes everything, and our universe is a brane.

If my friend Mark emits a peep of com-plaint about the modest idea of a god or the myths of Genesis the next we meet, I’m going to be down on him like a ton of exploding suns.

THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE/GETTY IMAGES

A billlion billlion billlion times smaller than a human hair, each string is capable of giving rise to a universe


BOOKS & ARTS

Monster of misrule Jonathan MirskyChina under Maoby Andrew G. Walder Harvard University Press, £35, pp. 413, ISBN 9780674058156Spectator Bookshop, £28

Mao Zedong, once the Helmsman, Great Teacher and Red Red Sun in Our Hearts, and still the Chairman, died in 1976. Even today his giant portrait gazes down over Tiananmen Square, where in 1989 his suc-cessors massacred hundreds of students and workers. After so many years and books and articles, can anything new be said about him? Although Andrew Walder, a Stanford sociologist and leading China scholar, writes that his comprehensive and deadly analysis is primarily for non- specialists, he has made me think.

President Xi Jinping, who will make a state visit to London in October, speaks highly of Mao. Such praise, concludes Walder, requires ‘highly selective histori-cal memory and a great deal of forgetting’. What has been erased in many memories is that Mao was a monster (not a word used by Walder), responsible for count-less Chinese deaths, not least the 30 mil-lion, between 1958 and 1961, who starved during a famine that owed everything to his manias (and the co-operation of cronies like Zhou Enlai). Millions more were executed during various drives start-ing in the decades before the Communist victory in 1949, in some of which Mao was encouraged to kill even more by Deng Xiaoping.

Harvard’s Roderick MacFarquhar, one of the most productive scholars of the Mao period, has observed that ‘the mark of Cain’ lay on Mao’s most spectacular disaster, the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976. But it is clear from Walder’s book (as from Mac-Farquhar’s several volumes) that this mark disfigured Mao’s entire career. Indeed, a Harvard conference on Mao received a short message from Li Rui, one of his former sec-retaries, stating that ‘Mao liked to kill.’

Walder does not explore Mao’s early life, especially his angry relationship with his father, but he is right to emphasise that, of all Mao’s ‘core ideas’, the oldest was that ‘only violent conflict could bring about genuine social change’. He held that ‘criti-cisms of “red terror” were part of a plot by imperialists to sow dissension among China’s revolutionary forces’.

Walder recognises that despite Mao’s depredations there were some successes in his time. Public heath improved greatly, the infant mortality rate diminished, as did organised crime and the drug trade, and prostitution was brought to an end.

There are those in China and abroad

who allege that equality of livelihood was also a significant Maoist success. But the opposite was true — and Wal-der convincingly shows that the effect of Maoist inequalities sti l l distorts China today. Fascinatingly, in a world where the words ‘China miracle’ are commonplace, Walder notes that while ‘income inequality skyrocketed in post-Mao China’, in the Maoist years ‘grind-ing rural poverty was still widespread’. Foreign visitors to China, he recalls — this was my experience in 1972 — were besieged by pleas from Chinese acquaint-ances to buy them goods from the special ‘friendship’ shops for foreigners. He men-tions, too, the comparatively luxurious lives of many officials — including Mao, of course — a scandal much resented today.

In short, ‘The Mao era was a long and tumultuous struggle over many years that succeeded in producing outcomes that were far from revolutionary.’ In what will be a mind-opening book for many (and is a depressing reminder for others) Andrew Walder shows that in the decades after Mao, ‘China began the long pro-cess of recovering from the damage of his misrule.’

Short and surreal Matilda Bathurst

The Dogby Jack Livings Penguin, £8.99, pp. 240, ISBN 9780241970126Spectator Bookshop, £8.54

Lucky Alan and Other Storiesby Jonathan Lethem Cape, £16.99, pp. 176, ISBN 9780224101479 Spectator Bookshop, £14.99

Jellyfishby Janice Galloway Freight Books, £12.99, pp. 240, ISBN 9781908754950Spectator Bookshop, £11.69

‘I just wanted the damn story to ask the right questions,’ sighs a disaffected jour-nalist in Jack Livings’s debut collection of short stories, The Dog. Two other new short

story collections, Lucky Alan by Jonathan Lethem and Jellyfish by Janice Galloway, are less interested in asking the right ques-tions than in the opportunities for missing the point.

Livings draws upon his experience as a student in Beijing to create a compelling vision of China from the Cultural Revo-lution to the present day. Though inclined to excessive lyricism (a thief is ‘waste- water wrung from the sponge of the world’), Livings has a keen eye for detail and a knack for dialogue. Stories range from a portrait of a gangster in Beijing’s Uighur community to that of a couple who resolve to eat their champion racing dog. The collection’s centrepiece is an account of the pains taken to create a crystal sarcophagus for Mao Zedong. These are essentially para-bles about ‘the party’s ability to whip citizens into a storm that could flatten everything in its path’: we watch Livings’s characters as they struggle to fit their private conscienc-es to the state’s slippery definition of good citizenship.

The ‘oblivious solid citizens’ and ‘good-egg sleazeballs’ of Jonathan Lethem’s Lucky Alan are equally well-meaning. In ‘Their Back Pages’, a highfalutin theatre critic aspires to a society ‘bounded by the strict gutters and panels of decency’ and in ‘Proce-dure in Plain-Air’, the protagonist, Stevick, is congratulated for his altruism. But it’s hard to trust the judgment of a critic stranded on a volcanic island with a cast of comic-book characters; and Stevick has just spent hours standing over a manhole with an umbrella — a misguided effort to protect the person trapped inside from the rain. Don’t hope for logical plots. Lethem’s verbal flashiness is the true lifeforce of the book. When the comic-book characters run out of food they resort to eating their speech bubbles, ‘edges gently browned’.

Janice Galloway, too, knows the allure of the surreal. Her characters wallow in a semi-waking state often compared to being underwater. ‘This is a deep sea tank,’ she tells us. ‘You are at the bottom.’ But the collection as a whole is anchored by a preoccupation with motherhood. In the title story a mother berates herself for being too soft, like the jellyfish she finds stranded on the beach, stamped on by human feet. In another a newly single mother picks up her child, ‘making his leg flop, like something fil-leted’. In the final story a mother escapes her family altogether, horrified by the sight of her son’s blood. Each strives to do the best for her child, but regresses into childishness.

In an afterword to Jellyfish, Gallo-way claims that publishers are shy of short stories ‘like people are shy of three-legged puppies’. These three short story collec-tions are mongrel forms, often savage to their characters and suffering the occasional amputation when it comes to an ending. But they are steady on their feet.

All books reviewed here can be bought at a discounted reader price at www.spectatorbookshop.co.uk

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Music for the masses Marcus BerkmannElectric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone— 125 Years of Pop Musicby Peter Doggett The Bodley Head, £25, pp. 692, ISBN 9781847922182Spectator Bookshop, £20

As pop music drifts away from many peo-ple’s lives, so its literature grows ever more serious and weighty, as though aware that this is an art form approaching the end of its time. Having had the pleasure of open-ing the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s planned three-volume history of the Beatles and then fallen into a deep sleep attempting to read it, I feel only a sense of impending doom when presented with yet another vast tome of unimpeachable scholarship into the ephemeral. Peter Dog-gett, a long-serving toiler at the pop coalface, has produced a whopper here, a near-700-page history of pop’s 125 years, with the accent on the popular. What music did peo-ple like? Why did they like it? What did it bring to their lives?

Doggett has previously written books about Bowie, the Beatles and 1960s counterculture, all with very long titles that suggest deep learning and limited readabil-ity. I’m not sure I have read him before, but

he is actually rather good: an enthusiast and a think-er who seems to have heard everything, and has something new to say about a lot of it. He came to this project, he admits, with a bad case of rock critic snobbery:

My first task in writing this book was to throw away dec-ades of prejudice, however well argued and intelligently phrased. That is how I found myself, for the first time in my life, hearing (to seize some names at random) Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller, Manto-vani, Queen, Kylie Minogue and Metallica with genuine appreciation, rather than closing my mind as soon as I saw their names.

But while we give thanks for such humility, we may also feel intimi-dated by the sheer scale of his project. Doggett knew where his book would end — now, here, today — but where should it start? The more he thought about it, the clearer it became that ‘the two most revo-

lutionary moments in the life of 20th-cen-tury music actually pre-dated that century.’ They were the creation of recorded sound that you could buy, and the birth of ragtime, both of which took place in the 1890s. Thus begins a book of admirable ambition that you feel could, and indeed should, have been much shorter.

Themes are hard to find in all this, other than the record industry’s unending quest to make a fast buck. Doggett’s history twists and turns and veers here, there and every-where. But the randomness of creative endeavour is well represented: the long- evity of certain strong, focused, driven musicians, contrasted with the fragility of so many others, destroyed by circumstance or simply bad luck. And the book is rich in

incidental detail. Jazz, as the Daily Express explained a few days after the Armistice was signed in 1918, was ‘The New Noise That Makes People Gay.’ In 1955, a psychi-atrist declared that rock’n’roll was ‘a com-municable disease’. Contrary to ancient rumour, no high court judge has ever asked, ‘Who are the Beatles?’ but in the 1920s one did ask, ‘What is a saxophone?’ And what do you think was the first punk hit in Amer-ica? Something by the Ramones, maybe?

The Clash? The Sex Pistols? No, it was ‘Ca Plane Pour Moi’ by Plastic Bertrand.

In 1961, the Swedish Music Academy warned that it was illegal to release pop interpretations of melodies by Edvard Grieg. Any piece of music that used a Grieg tune would be marked in Swedish radio archives with a death’s head stamp, to make sure it was never broadcast.

This isn’t a book you would necessarily read from cover to cover. If you’re not inter-ested in a particular era or a particular type of music, you won’t be much interested in what Doggett has to say about it. But he can be very acute. Here he is on Michael Jack-son, after Thriller:

Having designed an album of cutting-edge black music that could be enjoyed by anyone, regardless of age or race, Jackson was unable to progress in any field apart from fame... He believed himself to be beyond all petty human boundaries of finance, morality and sanity, and came closer than any entertain-er to illustrating the madness of unchecked wealth.

I think that’s pretty good. Winners of The X Factor seem to be ‘doomed to live out their often fleeting fame within the limited param-eters of [Simon] Cowell’s imagination’. Noel Gallagher ‘could pen melodies so accessi-ble that they sounded immediately familiar (and sometimes dangerously familiar)’. But unlike their heroes the Beatles,

who enacted constant musical revolution over seven frantic years, Oasis refused to move for-ward: their only development was to make their records longer and more layered, as if excess was the same as progress.

That’s even better. If Doggett had just kept to the last 50 years or so, this would be a book that everyone would be talking about reading, instead of just trying to lift.

These I have loved Daniel Swift

Latest Readingsby Clive James Yale, £12.99, pp. 192, ISBN 9780300213195Spectator Bookshop, £11.69

In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises.’ Auden’s criticism is like that: a passage of insights instead of a single sustained argu-ment, and the same is true of Samuel John-son, whose works are a pleasure to read for the feeling of the pressure of a great mind at play. Clive James belongs in this company.

His new book Latest Readings is a kind of reading diary: a collection of short essays, each prompted by one book or a handful he happens to be reading. They are not in any

No high court judge has ever asked, ‘Who are the Beatles?’, but one did once ask, ‘What is a saxophone?’

Jazz soloist Charlie Parker with his saxophone c. 1946

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logical order or sequence, but are given unity by two things: one biographical, the other stylistic. James is — as has been widely pub-licised over the past two years — now dying, of leukaemia and emphysema, and while he only briefly mentions it here, this whole book is marked by a sense of medical struggle and imminent extinction. Olivia Manning’s cycle of novels, he writes, ‘makes now more bear-able’. So the title contains a very Jamesian pun: it means both most recent and, implic-itly, last. He will not be reading these books again.

He looks again at Hemingway, and Con-rad, and writers he has clearly spent his lifetime with, and because this is mostly re-reading, the timeframe is a little blurred. He writes in a constant present tense (‘I have just started to read…’ and ‘I am currently under the spell of…’), and this is perhaps because of another buried pun: ‘I read’ is both the present and the past of the same verb, pronounced differently but spelled the same, as if the act had only its ever-present moment.

What kind of reader is he? A charming one: inquisitive, insightful, wry. He reads very personally (on Patrick O’Brian’s swashbuck-ling maritime adventures: ‘I started wonder-ing whether I might have been a better man if I had gone to sea’). He likes books about wars and politicians, about movies and the sea; which is to say that he has masculine tastes. He is generous: both to the book in hand and also to his readers, and is polite enough to assume that we might have read almost as much as he has. As he is also Aus-tralian, a thread which connects many of his reading choices is the colonial experience, both as a subject and a master (Kipling, Nai-paul; even the military volumes bear upon that particular history). He does not make this point explicitly, but he does not really need to.

Reading this collection it is hard to escape the impression that all criticism — and perhaps all reading — is an autobiographical exercise. Reading is for James a physical activity: both a pleasure (he com-pares reading Anthony Powell’s novels to eating ‘plates of sweets and grapes’ in the late summer sunshine) and a necessary therapy (he describes reading Kipling’s poetry while ‘ambulating’, or walking round and round his house to prevent thrombosis). Sometimes it is even treatment — he reads the Australian poet Stephen Edgar while hooked up to an IV drip — but most of all, it is simply life. On Hemingway, he writes: ‘For any writer who does not die instantly, the time of physi-cal decline is a new subject.’ Close to the end he reveals that due to operations for cataracts, he reads with only one eye, which makes this book the record of truly noble determination.

All this might add up to a gloomy book; but it isn’t. Of one military history, he observes: ‘The text is full of observation,

judgment and accurate detail, and those things are always new.’ The same might be said of this book. Or, better, in looking upon the volumes which surround him, which he has loved through his life and to which he keeps returning, he writes: ‘They are an arca-dian pavilion with an infinite set of glitter-ing, mirrored doorways to the unknown.’ Oh, and he also likes Game of Thrones.

The writing on the wall Sara Wheeler

Circling the Square: Stories from the Egyptian Revolutionby Wendell Steavenson Granta, £14.99, pp. 384, ISBN 9781783782345Spectator Bookshop, £11.99

‘Every day’, writes the foreign correspond-ent Wendell Steavenson in this account of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, ‘see-sawed between joy and death.’ She covered the 18-day cataclysm and stayed on in Cairo for another 18 months to report its after-math, filing for the New Yorker among other outlets. The title refers of course to Tahrir Square, the heart of the conflict, a place ‘shaped like a giant teardrop with a traffic circle in the centre’.

Steavenson’s previous books include The Weight of a Mustard Seed, a portrait of a Ba’athist general in Saddam’s Iraq; she also reported on the fall of the Soviet Union. In Circling the Square she artfully arranges her material over a series of short chapters, each a ‘story’, as the subtitle suggests. This creates, successfully, a spontaneous and impression-istic tone; the book reads almost like a diary.

She writes with descriptive flair. One civic building is ‘a grey toady hulk’, while an interlocutor has ‘one if those eternally

beautiful Egyptian faces, cast several millen-nia ago from reddish Nile mud’. Throughout this engaging book Steavenson conjures the thick leaves of the ficus trees on the Zama-lek Corniche; the whiff of a McDonald’s picnic on the sofa as she watches Mus-lim Brotherhood deputies taking their parliamentary seats on television after that party won the post-revolution election; a moon rising in a ‘lavender sky’.

With the journalist’s instinct for quotes, she allows Egyptians to speak for them-selves. ‘At least we tried,’ says one middle-class young man; ‘not like our parents, who have done nothing for 30 years and watched Egypt stagnate into this mess.’ Steavenson is good at the lightening character sketch.

Here’s one of a female lawyer: ‘After 20 years of handling internecine property dis-putes, Akila Mohammed had ceased to be shocked by the nefarious.’

The long haul of a book allows an intel-ligent reporter to acknowledge the impossi-bility of writing ‘the truth’; the form is suited to the ambiguity at the heart of everything. Again and again Steavenson describes the foreign correspondent’s difficulty in making sense of something as it is happening, with-out the hindsight of history.

She has been compared — by her friends, I suspect — to Martha Gellhorn. At her best, she almost reaches that high bar. She’s not angry all the time as Gellhorn was. Nor is she a bad girl, as Gellhorn was (‘I want to be hell on wheels, or dead,’ she said). And she’s rare-ly alone on the hack’s beat, tending to pair up with someone else — another reporter, per-haps, or a committed Egyptian.

The book is illustrated copiously and rather wonderfully with images of graffiti that sprang up after Mubarak fell: fists and hammers and attacks on corporatism such as Vodamoan. ‘The images told the story of the revolution and memorialised its protagonists and its martyrs,’ the author writes. ‘I wanted to use them in this book to illustrate a visual narrative that was being sprayed and played with on Egyptian walls.’

On the first anniversary of the conflict she marches, with several hundred thousand others, ‘in high holiday mood’. But revolu-tionary ideals quickly went up in smoke. A week later she dons a 5lb plastic gas-mask and sets off with her interpreter to inves-tigate the murder of 74 football fans while police stood by.

Failure was inevitable. As Steavenson points out, in trying to shape a new coun-try after the 18 days, ‘no politician or party ever discussed publicly what their constitu-

‘At least we tried — unlike our parents, who just watched Egypt

stagnate for 30 years’


tional policies were’. She continues: ‘New rules were grafted onto precedent — what had always happened in the past — and this made a hobbled creature, lacerated with law-suits and bandaged with spur-of-the-moment compromises.’ Nicely put. Egypt is a failed state, and worse.

This is not the first book to chart the revo-lution from a foreigner’s point of view. What marks it out is the author’s interest in, and compassion for, those ‘ordinary’ people who live and die at the mercy of their ghastly pol-iticians. A boy featuring in one of Steaven-son’s stories is the embodiment of this: ‘Thin and fragile as a baby bird,’ he was alone on the streets. Lifting his shirt, he showed a long scar around his abdomen, ‘and quite matter-of-factly said that was from when they stole his kidney.’

Hurricane Lolita Anna Aslayan

Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolitaby Robert Roper Blooomsbury, £20, pp. 354, ISBN 9780802743633Spectator Bookshop, £16

Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov’s nos-talgic memoir, reflects on his life from the age of three to 41, taking us from early-20th-century Russia, soon to be engulfed by revo-lution, to Europe at the start of the second world war. He planned a sequel to it, based on his American years, but Speak On, Mem-ory was never written, partly because much of that experience had found an outlet in his novels. As Robert Roper argues in his lit-erary biography, it was America that made

Elysium

The best time is the summer timeWhen cow parsley is high,And daylight hours of field flowersAre spread beneath a skyThat drops upon them so much lightAnd unseals blooms that closed with night.The best time is the summer timeTill cow parsley is dry.

And there is clover nowAnd bees to take the yield.And it is over nowAnd there are changes in the field.

The best games are the summer games,The bowler rushing in.Though voices call and wickets fallTo seamers or the spin,Men caught in the pavilion’s shadeCan play the strokes they never played.The best games are the summer gamesWe still have time to win.

And so we find we’re stayingAfter afternoon.And so we find they’re playingChanges to a tune.

The best songs are the summer songsWith friends and a guitar,When choruses are all that is,And we have travelled far,It seems we’ve passed all wish to roamSo let the fields become our home.The best songs are the summer songsBeneath the evening star.

— William Wootten

Nabokov the master we now admire. Nabok-ov in America, a detailed account of the 20 years the writer spent there, revisits some of the less widely known facts and draws a number of fresh analogies.

Nabokov, his wife Véra and their son Dmitri arrived in America in 1940, having fled Germany via France: Véra’s Jewishness meant they could no longer stay in Europe. America, according to Roper, had been an ‘invitation to adventure’ to Nabokov since reading as a boy The Headless Horseman, a western by Mayne Reid. Growing up in

an Anglophile family, he learned to read in English before he could do so in Russian, and although he wrote mainly in Russian in the first two decades of his career, his move to America signalled a new start.

One of the highlights of this biogra-phy is Nabokov’s passion for butterfly col-lecting: a talented lepidopterist, he found a rich terrain for his passion in the Amer-ican West, where the family travelled often and extensively. Butterflies punc-tuate the book, framing Nabokov’s liter-ary work, as the biographer meticulously

Graffiti outside the American University of Cairo reads ‘Revolution’(December 2011)GETTY IMAGES


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follows the writer’s progress in the new environment.

At first Nabokov was not entirely happy with his English — a quaint product of the Old World — and it took him some years to master it. He never achieved ‘the planned Russification of the American reader’ (that he did have such plans is one of the book’s more questionable claims), but his own Americanisation was certainly success-ful. The road to Lolita was full of research, both linguistic and cultural: Nabokov gath-ered slang words and studied teenage hab-its; the trips to the West, where the family usually stayed in motels, provided both prac-tical details and vivid images for Humbert and Lolita’s year on the road. One of the most original ideas in this book concerns Dmitri’s influence on Lolita: Humbert’s obsession with his stepdaughter is seen here as the ‘dark negation’ of Nabokov’s protec-tive love for his own son.

First published in France in 1955, Lolita reached America three years later and immediately became a sensation. Although ‘Hurricane Lolita’ is at the centre of Roper’s narrative, ample space is also given to Nabokov’s other books, including the novels Pale Fire and Pnin, as well as his annotated translation of Eugene Onegin, running to 1,895 pages and still considered by many the best English rendition of Pushkin’s masterpiece.

When these works brought their author fame, one person who did not join in the praise was Edmund Wilson, the most influen-tial American literary critic of the time and a good friend of Nabokov’s. Their correspond-ence was a source of intellectual pleasure to both, despite differences in their political outlook: Nabokov hated communism, while Wilson was left-wing. What made the two grow apart was Wilson’s appreciation of Doctor Zhivago (Nabokov thought it a Sovi-et propaganda stunt) as against his negative reaction to Onegin — and to Lolita, which he liked less than anything else by Nabok-ov. Unlike many, Roper does not believe Wilson’s scathing remarks resulted from jealousy and is convinced that his support generally was crucial to Nabokov’s success in America.

An interesting angle explored in the book is Nabokov’s views on other American writ-ers. He had an ‘especially keen disregard for Hemingway. Faulkner he dismissed with similarly appalled commentary,’ while ‘Salin-ger was the rare author of his time of whom Nabokov did not speak with disrespect.’ In fact, Roper demonstrates that The Catcher in the Rye and Lolita ‘are vaguely aware of each other’. These observations complete the portrait of the writer within the Ameri-can canon. Yet when it comes to the Nabok-ov phenomenon, Roper admits that, despite there being many interpretations, ‘the myth remains, and so do the books, ever ready for rediscovery’.

Common sense, moral vision — and the magic touch Carey Schofield

An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Educationby Tony Little Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 288, ISBN 9781472913111Spectator Bookshop, £14.99

An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education is Tony Little’s valedictory meditation on his profession, published on his retirement as headmaster of Eton. In a series of loosely connected essays, erudite and eccentric, he contemplates issues of fundamental concern to us all. What are schools for? How should teachers be educated? How do good schools work?

The book is rather oddly larded with insights from The Schoolmaster (1902) by A.C. Benson (brother of E.F. and Rob-ert Hugh) who was, like Little, an Old Etonian who went back to teach at the school. Benson’s commentary on his own teaching experience is used as a touch-stone, generally reinforcing Little’s civilising, rational approach to education.

These essays reveal Little’s vigorous moral vision. He believes in character and discipline, in agreeing boundaries and in giving boys a second chance, but possibly not a third.

He is interested in character education but acknowledges that this is a difficult issue for many schools. Eton has the advantage of time (its teachers are less constrained by bureaucracy than those in the state sec-tor), resources and tradition. Crucially, it has teachers who ‘get it’, and it also has a thicket of traditions to underpin character educa-tion. ‘It becomes a virtuous circle: when a school has the confidence born of experi-ence to give time and resources to character education, the more confidence it breeds in teachers.’

Young people grow to be part of the tribe at school, ‘learning where the parameters of behaviour lie, learning to accept and value discipline’. Society needs individuals with imagination and energy ‘but just as importantly it needs individu-als to exercise restraint. Curbing personal dreams for a greater good is a defining mark of civilisation.’

Eton works, Tony Little says, because its pupils believe in the school and in its ways of doing things. ‘The truth is that the school operates well (indeed operates at all) because at root the pupils want it to work.’ He returns several times to this cru-cial insight.

The most illuminating — and idiosyn-cratic — section of Little’s book is his essay on adolescence. He uses neuro- biology to explain why, precisely, teenage boys’ brains go haywire. The headmaster admits that he now realises that a carpet-ed pupil who replies to the question ‘Why did you do it?’ with ‘I don’t know, sir’ is tell-ing the truth. Little’s sympathetic study of the adolescent brain is leavened with brac-ing common sense. He feels that we under- estimate teenagers nowadays, pointing to the effectiveness of young naval officers in the age of sail as evidence that teenagers can assume considerable responsibility.

An essay on imagination stresses that this is the crucial element that will make young people effective in a globalised mar-ket place. The fashionable STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathemat-ics) subjects ‘can be taken to a new dimen-sion by imagination expressed through the creative arts. Stem becomes STEAM’. Pupils need to learn to discriminate if they are to navigate a world in which many profession-al tasks (dispensing legal advice, diagnosing disease) can be done by a machine. They need to be able to take new knowledge and use it in a different way. They need to be able to imagine.

Little’s book is self-evidently the prod-uct of a life spent in an intensely privileged environment, where preposterous tradi-tions can become powerful opportunities for discussion of values that are crucial to civilised behaviour.

There is much in this Intelligent Person’s Guide, however, that is relevant to anyone involved in the struggle to educate young people and in particular to anyone try-ing to reform a school that has gone badly astray. In one of the later essays, ‘Turning it Around’, Little observes the successes of struggling heads of grim state schools. He describes the transformation of an estab-lishment in Slough that was staffed by unambitious and complacent teachers who were utterly unconcerned by the arrival of their third new head in three years. They were confident that ‘local difficulties would be resolved, an objectionable, demanding new head would be seen off and life would

‘You start off wanting to be Tintin but end up as Captain Haddock...’


Lust for life Rachel Redford

We all know about Samuel Pepys witness-ing the Great Fire in his Diaries, but how many have read the definitive Latham and Matthews nine-volume edition, published between 1970 and 1983, complete with Pepys’s coded sections and his inconsistent and archaic spellings? Certainly the only per-son in the world to have read it aloud in its unexpurgated entirety is Leighton Pugh, on this three-volume 116-hour Naxos record-ing released between January and May this year. Produced by Nicolas Soames and with prefaces to each volume written and read by David Timson, it is a superb feat.

Pugh had recorded 30 full-length audio-books in the two years before this gargan-tuan challenge, an experience which helped him cope with the 40 gruelling record-ing days with their 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. routine. He had a mere fortnight to prepare Pepys’s 1.25 million words before the studio work started, but so thoroughly immersed in Pepys did he become that he must have had some difficulty in getting back into his own skin once it was all over.

The Diaries open in 1660 when Pepys is 27, five years after his marriage to Elizabeth de St Michel (who had been 14 years old at the time) and two years since ‘it pleased God’ he was ‘cut of the stone’, the successful operation (without anaesthet-ic) to remove his gallstone. It was the year in which his Navy career began, when he became Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board at a salary of £350 a year, a position acquired through the patronage of Edward Mon-tagu, Earl of Sandwich, the husband of his great aunt.

One of the Diaries’ greatest delights

is Pepys’s detailed charting of his rise in status. It has a strikingly contemporary ring to it: the important thing is ‘to see and be seen’, so he gives Elizabeth an £80 necklace for display at the theatre, and spends £50 on having his dining room ‘new done’. Nine years later in 1669, when fears for his eye-sight bring the Diaries to an end, this son of a London tailor takes inordinate pride in his reputation and his £6,000 fortune. Keeping it in an iron chest, he is afraid of thieves, ris-ing one night with a firebrand, only to find birds in the chimney. He entertains in rooms decked with portraits and mirrors, the spines of his books in his extensive library specially gilded and ‘very handsome to the eye’. And he has acquired the ultimate status symbol: a coach and two black horses with his boy sporting green and red livery. No wonder Elizabeth is ‘out of herself with joy’.

The historical events — including the Second Dutch War and Charles II’s Restoration — are well known from extracts, and give a cameo of the age; but it is the details of the unexpurgated, una-bridged version which provide the unique insights. The pleasure Pepys felt at a vic-tory over the Dutch in 1665 is as great as his pleasure in the new coloured suit he bought ‘for joy of the good news’. Two years after the Great Fire, Pepys’s cousin Anthony Joyce, maddened by his losses, threw himself into a deep pond, and Pepys used his influence with the King to ensure

that Joyce’s estate would not be forfeited.

Above all, he exudes joy-ful exuberance in his life, from theatre and the pleasures of ‘discourse’, to the ‘muchness of business’ at the Navy Board, or hearing nightingales at 5 a.m. on his way to the Rope Yard. This delightful energy is con-veyed through Pugh’s variation of tempo and tone and his skil-ful manipulation of Pepys’s com-plex dangling sentences, essential when the 1.25 million words are in the voice of Pepys alone, unrelieved by dialogue or other characters. He drops his voice in wonderment as Pepys’s ever-inquiring mind absorbs a new navigational aid, spies Jupiter through a 12-inch glass, or watch-es blood drained from one dog to another in a scientific experi-ment. Pugh’s tempo increases for Pepys’s tumbling words for that which ‘did wrap up’ his soul: sing-ing remained for Pepys ‘the mer-riest enjoyment I must look for in the world’ and music ‘transport-ed’ him. Playing his flageolet and singing with his wife and friends was one of his purest joys.

And then there are the glori-ous catalogues of foods relished: venison pasties, lobster, pullets, sturgeon, turkeys, oysters, goose pie and veal — and the calves fed with chalk to whiten their flesh. This lust for life was matched by his fully indulged priapic appetite, related in detail in a mix of languages expunged from pre-vious editions, here presented conspira-torially by Pugh. Pepys was, as Elizabeth said of her music master, ‘as very a rogue for women as any in the world’. With women of all classes and ages, he enjoyed regular bouts of ‘tumbling and tossing’, mutual caressing, and doing as he says, ‘ce que je voudrais’. Having taken one woman ‘both devant and backward’ to his ‘grand plaisir’, he returned to Elizabeth, having bought Montaigne’s essays on the way. The crisis comes after eight years when his wife discovers him with Deb, her 18-year-old companion, his hand ‘in her cunny’. Elizabeth’s ensuing wild rages and Pepys’ genuine shame force him to keep his breeches tied — for a while, at least.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1660–1669. Read unabridged by Leighton Pugh (Naxos Audio Books). Volume I: 1660–1663: 34 CDs, 42¾ hrs, £100; Volume II: 1664–1666: 29 CDs, 37½ hrs, £85; Volume III: 1667–1669 : 29 CDs, 36 hrs, £85. Available from naxosdirect.co.uk and amazon.co.uk and downloads from naxosaudiobooks.com and audible.co.uk.

continue as before.’ Within a year Little witnessed the new head’s success. He found the school calm and ordered with a sense of momentum and direction:

A high-performing school can by sustained by institutional momentum for a while. Heads in the business of turning around a school have no such luxury. They must necessarily concen-trate on getting the basics right day by day — and that requires a deep well of energy from which to draw.

The chapter on spirituality is the least interesting element of this book. The author is good at morals, but religion at Eton, it would appear, is mostly sunbeams on ancient stone.

Nevertheless, this is a wonderful book. Tony Little captures the magic, the surpris-ing alchemy that makes things work in an outstanding school, and offers hope and inspiration to people elsewhere who are battling lethargy and low standards.

Portrait of Pepys, after John Hayls. The Diary for 17 March 1666 reads: ‘This day I begin to sit [for Hayls], and he will make me, I think, a very fine picture.... I sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder to make the

posture for him to work by.’GETTY IMAGES

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The master returnsThe visionary theatremaker Robert Lepage is back in Edinburgh after a 20-year absence.

Matt Trueman talks to him about trends and legacies

There’s a scene in 887, Robert Lep-age’s latest show, which opened at the Edinburgh International Festi-

val last week, in which the French-Canadi-an director stands alone in his kitchen, lit up by the glare of his laptop, watching his own obituary. Three beers sit on the work surface and he has a fourth in his hand. As it plays, he tuts, peeved that three decades of visionary theatre merit merely two min-utes of screen time — inaccurate, at that.

Even if his reputation has waned in recent years, Lepage is still considered one of the world’s great theatremakers. A slash-ie before slashies were slashies, he writes, directs and designs his shows — often per-forming in them as well — and the best of them slip down with a shimmering, magic-eye theatricality: tumble-driers morph into space stations and shoeboxes turn into cit-ies. His stories are grand, globetrotting epics encompassing vast clouds of associated ideas: The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994) wove Hiroshima, the holocaust and the Aids crisis into a treatise on death in the 20th century; The Far Side of the Moon (2000) condensed the space race into a tale of two brothers.

However, Lepage is not considered the force he once was. It’s 20 years since he was last part of the Edinburgh line-up, with his one-man staging of Hamlet, Elsinore — strange for a mainstay of the international festival circuit. The year before had proved controversial: a work-in-progress of The Seven Streams wasn’t billed as such and audiences weren’t best pleased.

‘People say, Oh you’ve been pouting,’

Lepage says, perched on a cream sofa in an empty foyer. ‘No, I’ve not been invited —probably because there are trends in theatre. There was a time when my work was a little more fashionable. This is a great festival: an antenna for what’s going on in the art world and maybe other people were more on-trend. Now, the swing is coming back. Peo-ple are interested in what I’m doing again.’

Certainly, 887 marks a return to form for the French-Canadian. His first solo show in almost a decade, it muses on memory, and the relationship between personal lives and

public history — hence his fretting about legacy alone in his kitchen.

It’s a madeleine of a show. Lepage takes us back to his childhood home, a Quebec City apartment block, 887 Avenue Murray, which appears on-stage as a giant doll’s house com-plete with wrought-iron railings and Lillipu-tian neighbours. The Lepages lived on the third floor, cramped into too few rooms, after his grandmother moved in on account of Alz-heimer’s. His father, who served in the navy during the war, was a taxi driver; his mother looked after the four children.

Autobiography has always underpinned his work — the two space race brothers rep-resented split sides of his personality — but this is the first time Lepage has appeared as himself on-stage. ‘I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time,’ he explains. ‘It’s fair-ly pretentious to come out and say, I don’t need a mask. I’ve always been afraid that people would deem that self-indulgent.’

Lepage is a man of contradictions: nar-cissistic enough to try to appear otherwise; a self-proclaimed ‘liberal pessimist’, who wants change but can’t see it happening; an auteur who came to theatre as ‘a collective form of expression and a nice way to hide

ERICK LA

BBÉ

A scene from Robert Lepage’s autobiographical ‘887’, a madeleine of a show

Lepage’s stories are grand, globetrotting epics encompassing vast

clouds of associated ideas

BOOKS & ARTS

behind other people’. On-stage, he cuts an imposing figure: his squid-ink hair darker and more definite than his charcoal three-piece, beneath which he wears a tight, ton-ing T-shirt. When he takes his shirt off, he’s surprisingly hench for a man of 57.

In person, he’s softer — a blue short-sleeved shirt gives him the air of a holiday-maker, and his face is gentle but intriguing. His features have a sci-fi quality that takes a while to pin down. Alopecia means he has neither eyebrows nor eyelashes, making him seem androgynous and ethereal.

His work is worldly, though. Alongside autobiography, 887 looks at Quebecois his-tory, specifically the separatist movement of the 1960s, when the Front de libération du Quebec was at its most active and bomb-ings, kidnappings, even killings were com-monplace.

Lepage’s version of events, swirled with childhood memories, diverges from the accepted pro-federalist narrative. The con-flict, he says, was not about nationality. ‘It was about something else. It was a class struggle.’ His taxi-driver father is a symbol of that, connecting the personal and the political. ‘I never thought he’d be a major protagonist in the piece, just as I thought he wasn’t a major protagonist in my life.’

Today, Lepage calls himself ‘an occasion-al separatist. I still believe that an independ-ent Quebec would be a great thing, but of course, the reasons people want independ-ence today are radically different. That’s why I felt the urge to show the origins of the argument.’ That, of course, gives the piece special resonance in Scotland.

Lepage’s position is clear: he’s with the ‘Yes’ camp and he relates to the politics of identity involved. ‘It’s an odd thing, nation-al identity. When you live in Quebec, you don’t feel Canadian. You’re burdened by this prime minister and the rest of the coun-try doesn’t have the same values that we do. We’re neighbours, that’s all.’

Yet, working internationally, Lepage rep-resents his country as well as his home prov-ince — both sent commissioners to his first night — and he’s every bit the cultural export. Unlike most artists, he’s not uncomfortable with that. ‘It’s fine,’ he shrugs. ‘Artists can play a role in the shop window of ideals and the savoir-faire of your country — as long as the country is as you represent it. If you don’t necessarily agree with the policies governing your country’ — Lepage calls Canada’s con-servative government ‘retrograde’ — ‘repre-senting your country becomes tough.’

If Lepage’s theatre works internationally, it’s because it is so beguiling to watch. He is a master of transition, sliding between scenes in a way that can collapse time and space. His theatre is mercurial and chimerical. It has to be, he says: ‘If you just tell the thing, then there’s no theatre. You have to use the whole form to communicate. Theatre has come to the rescue of some very dry ideas.’

Composition, then, is a forensic process. ‘You have to study the DNA of a piece of theatre,’ he explains. ‘You have to find out where it connects and how it flows. My thea-tre is very filmic and, in film, you can switch just two frames and change the whole story.’

Today’s audiences, he believes, are more fluent in storytelling techniques — jump-cuts, flashbacks and the like — but, thanks to the internet, they’re also accustomed to con-necting disparate material and ideas quick-ly. That has the potential to free up theatre and, arguably, it explains Lepage’s return to favour.

He pushes against ‘metronomic’ classical theatre with its beginnings, middles and ends, always looking for something slicker and speedier. ‘Too often the audience are at the end of a play before you are, so they don’t like theatre. They think it’s old and artsy-fart-sy. If you’re faster than them, then theatre has a chance of moving into the next centu-ry.’ Lepage’s legacy will be getting it there.

887 runs at the Edinburgh International Festival until 23 August.


Music The greatest pianist you’ve never heard of Damian Thompson

William Kapell was an American concert pianist with the looks of a male model and the fingers of a wizard. He played the con-certos of Rachmaninov at dashing speed but with delicate precision. He was snapped up by RCA in 1944 at the age of 22 and the world’s leading conductors queued up to accompany him.

In October 1953 he toured Australia. On his last night there he visited Jascha Spiva-kovsky, a pianist who had escaped the Rus-sian pogroms as a child, settled in Berlin and then fled to Melbourne after Richard Strauss warned him that he was on a Nazi hit-list. He spent the war helping fellow émi-grés escape. That was one reason he never signed a recording contract. Also, Australia didn’t have a classical label. When Spivak-ovsky died in 1970 he hadn’t made a single record as a soloist.

That night, Spivakovsky played Kapell the slow movement of Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ Sonata. The next day, Kapell headed back to the US, telling reporters at the airport that he wouldn’t be coming back — some Australian critics had been rude and he was notoriously thin-skinned. As his plane approached San Francisco in the fog, it hit the treetops and crashed; everyone was killed.

Kapell’s all-too-few recordings are treas-ured. Spivakovsky has been forgotten. In his prime he performed with Fürtwängler, Knappertsbusch, Szell and Monteux. His

Carnegie Hall debut in 1948 was a triumph. The Daily Telegraph called him ‘one of the greatest pianists of our time’. After hear-ing him play Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Neville Cardus wrote him a fan letter — ‘you entered the sublime world of the work with an intent, unselfconscious eloquence which brought me close to tears’.

But how are we to judge these verdicts if we can’t hear him? Well, now we can. The first Jascha Spivakovsky CD was issued in the spring; another is coming in October. Why has it taken so long?

Actually, the fact that they’re appearing at all is a small miracle. These are mostly home recordings, made by Jascha’s son Michael in the 1960s while his father was rehearsing for concerts. Spivakovsky didn’t always know he was being taped. Michael would tell him, ‘I’m just checking for sound levels, Dad.’

The mono reel-to-reel tapes, stored in an old sea chest, quickly deteriorated; they were copied on to new tapes, but they also started to disintegrate. Also, as Michael told me last weekend, the quality of reproduc-tion wasn’t great in the first place. ‘Jascha’s sound was extraordinary, and picking it up with a little plastic microphone was like fit-ting an ocean into a bottle,’ he said.

It was Eden Spivakovsky who insisted that his grandfather’s playing should be

introduced to the public. ‘My grandmother was old-school — she and Jascha were both humble people — and she didn’t want to push things. Dad respected that. But I’m a bit more brash.’

After the tapes were saved in digital for-mat they were ‘restored’ — but the results were horrible. That’s no surprise: most digital remasterings of vintage pianists are botched jobs in which tonal colour is scraped away along with the hiss. But Eden refused to give up. Finally he got in touch with Andrew Rose, a former BBC sound engineer whose praises I’ve sung before. Rose performed the equivalent of open-heart surgery on the recordings. He gently lifted off the hiss, cor-recting the pitch and the tonal inaccuracies of the microphone. Then — his signature touch — he added some ambience, in this case from a concert hall at Santa Cecilia in Rome that is ideal for solo pianos.

So far I’ve only listened to the first CD, issued on Rose’s Pristine Classical label. It includes the Bach-Liszt Fantasy and Fugue in G minor, Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ Sonata and Chopin’s First Ballade. All three justify Michael Spivakovsky’s claim that his father’s sound was extraordinary — and unique. The touch is crystalline; the rubato subtle but ingenious, illuminating tiny phrases in the Beethoven that I’d never even noticed. Spivakovsky’s finger control is so powerful

Picking up Spivakovsky’s sound with a plastic microphone was like fitting an

ocean into a bottle


Exhibitions French connection Martin Gayford

Sickert in DieppePallant House Gallery, until 4 October

Walter Sickert was fluid in both his art and his personality: changeable in style and tech-nique, mutable in appearance — now dress-ing as a French fisherman, now as a dandy, next shaving his head — and even in name (for a while he styled himself Richard, not Walter, Sickert). All of which makes his long artistic association with the seaside resort of Dieppe apt in more ways than one. This is the theme of an excellent exhibition at Pal-lant House Gallery, Chichester. A century ago Dieppe was a very Sickertian place.

In ancestry and artistic attitudes, Sickert was an exemplary cosmopolitan. His father was Danish-German; his mother the ille-gitimate daughter of a wealthy astronomer from Leeds and an Irish dancer (it was from the last, one suspects, that he inherited his handsome looks, and perhaps the impish strain in his character).

Thanks to the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and the steamboat from Newhaven, the French port was one of the closest bits of abroad to the West End. In the late 19th century, the journey took 11 hours. On one occasion, Sickert’s friends Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Conder and the writer Ernest Dowson set off impromptu on the boat train after an evening’s drinking. When they arrived the next day, these luggage-less decadents would have found a Norman town with ancient churches and picturesque streets, but also grand hotels, nightspots and a casino.

Dieppe was crumbly and up-to-date, seedy and smart all at the same time — a touch of Brighton and a smidgeon of Monte Carlo, with a Norman accent. Over near-ly 40 years, from the mid-1880s to the early 1920s, Sickert (1860–1942) painted all these different aspects of the place. The results, as the exhibition demonstrates, were varied in approach, but also uneven in quality.

Sickert at his best was a connoisseur of urban moods that were a bit like the still life

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‘Le Grand Duquesne, Dieppe’, 1902, by Walter Sickert

he painted of a piece of Roquefort cheese: piquant and pungent. His ‘L’Hôtel Royal’ (1894) — the sky behind a light mauve, the structure itself greenish in the twilight — perfectly catches that desolate, slightly weird quality that seaside places often have.

In that vein, ‘Le Grand Duquesne, Dieppe’ (1902) is an out-and-out master-piece. It depicts the statue of a local naval hero, Admiral Duquesne, silhouetted in deep shadow against brilliantly sunlit buildings. Around the railings at the base of the monu-ment a few figures are standing aimlessly.

You could not confuse ‘Le Grand Duquesne’ with a work by anyone else (though the enigmatic melancholy is remi-niscent of Edward Hopper and also De Chir-ico). Yet several of the pictures in the same room are nondescript; so, too, are almost all the landscapes done in the country near to Dieppe. ‘Le Vieux Colombier’ (1913) man-ages to be lurid and dull at the same time.

It is not uncommon for major artists to veer between mediocre and marvellous in this way (Gauguin is another example). In Sickert’s case, the inconsistency was perhaps to do with the complexity of his origins. He was, he once insisted, ‘a French painter’, by which he meant that his two teachers were

first Whistler — an expatriate American whose sensibility was formed in France — and later Degas. Sickert produced pictures heavily influenced by both (and featured himself in Degas’s group portrait of ‘Six Friends at Dieppe’ from 1885).

There were, however, other ingredients in Sickert’s make-up. He had a pronounced affection for Victorian painting of the ‘every picture tells a story’ variety (and hence an

unexpected taste for the works of Frith). This led him to produce eccentric imag-es such as ‘The Blind Sea Captain’ (1914), a tear-jerker in the Pre-Raphaelite mould executed in a technique close to Monet or Pissarro. Also he had a tendency — perhaps derived from his Nordic painter father — towards crepuscular atmospherics.

Sickert painted the Church of St Jacques in Dieppe over and over again, which might seem reminiscent of Monet’s depictions of Rouen Cathedral. But Monet analysed the fluctuations of light and air on the façade; Sickert seemed more interested in the dark and brooding aspect of the Gothic structure.

Dieppe was one of the closest bits of abroad to the West End

that he can produce three or four dynamics simultaneously. This pays glorious dividends in the Bach fugue, where you could almost be listening to separate organ pipes.

It’s risky to make a judgment on the basis of just one disc: we’ll have a clearer picture when we can hear the fabled Beethoven Op. 111 in Volume Two, out in the autumn. Right now, however, I’m tempted to go fur-ther than Rose’s description of Jascha Spiva-kovsky as ‘the greatest pianist you’ve never heard of’. He may well be one of the greatest pianists I’ve ever heard.


BOOKS & ARTS

Opera Stravinsky’s ingenious toy Richard Bratby

The Rake’s ProgressUsher Hall, Edinburgh

Le Nozze di FigaroFestival Theatre, Edinburgh

Is Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress any-thing more than an exercise in style? ‘I will lace each aria into a tight corset,’ Stravin-sky told Nicolas Nabokov, and for most of three acts that’s pretty much what he does, deftly fitting W.H. Auden and Chester Kall-man’s libretto to a steadily chugging parade of his smartest, pertest neoclassical tricks. The motor-rhythms, the acid harmonies, the borrowings from Mozart, Rossini and Handel: it’s all brilliantly accomplished and supremely knowing.

In small doses, it’s appetising enough, and even at full length there’s much to enjoy — especially when played with the relish that Sir Andrew Davis and the Scottish Cham-ber Orchestra brought to this concert per-formance. The Usher Hall acoustic couldn’t blur the sheer exuberance with which the SCO players brought out the primaries and pastels of Stravinsky’s score: whirring strings, blowsy trumpets and a pair of slith-ering, snorting bassoons who clearly felt the whole piece had been written as a double concerto just for them.

The real problems with The Rake’s Pro-gress are in the foreground; problems which, paradoxically, come into sharper focus when it’s performed this well. The various grotesques with which Auden and Kallman peopled their Hogarth-based scenario make for delicious cameos, and both Alan Oke, smarming and fussing for Scotland as the auctioneer Sellem, and Susan Bickley — just sufficiently over-ripe as Baba the Turk, com-plete with purple harem pants — found an ideal mixture of absurdity and pathos. Of the three central figures, Emily Birsan’s poise and sunny voice as Anne Trulove made her an excellent match for Andrew Staples’s cringing Tom Rakewell: the purity of her tone suggested the possibility of redemption — musically, at least — for Staples’s slightly querulous tenor.

With characters who are essentially line drawings, it’s hard to ask for much more — any more than one could expect either of them, really, to stand much of a chance against the opera’s sole fully realised fig-ure. As Nick Shadow, Gidon Saks’s bass-baritone rang out with brazen power and hissed viciously at the bottom of its range; Saks had the kind of stage presence that drew the eye even while he was slouching by the stage door. In the opera’s superbly conceived penultimate scene, as Rakewell

Edinburgh Festival Northern lights Lloyd Evans

In the clammy shadows of Cowgate I was leafleted by a chubby beauty wearing all-leather fetish gear. ‘Hi! Want to spend an hour with a prostitute for nothing?’ Yes, please. Her show The Coin-Operated Girl (Liquid Room Annexe, until 30 August), part of the free fringe, deals with the seven years she spent servicing sex-starved men in swish London hotels. One of the common-est fantasies was ‘GFE’, which has nothing to do with threesomes or gimp-masks. ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ means sex, kissing, cuddling, chatting, bickering and everything involved in a normal relationship. Her story is warm, hilarious and extremely refreshing because it reveals the sex trade as a good-natured branch of social work rather than as a nightmare of drugs, misery and violence.

The Man Called Monkhouse (Assembly Hall, until 31 August) is a superb semi-suc-cess. Simon Cartwright’s impersonation of the suntanned clown borders on the mirac-ulous. He shows us Bob in many guises. Cre-ative Bob works at home harvesting gags almost by accident from his internal mono-logue. Zoot-suited Bob charms the crowds at TV studios. Tortured Bob mourns his cold and undemonstrative mother. Night-club Bob does private gigs, whisky in hand (‘I never go on alone’), and uses surprisingly coarse material. ‘Britain’s first commercial sperm bank has gone into voluntary liqui-dation. There were only five donors. Two came on the bus. Three missed the tube.’ But the play’s structure is awry. The script opens with Bob’s discovery that his jokebooks have been pinched and this leads to lengthy conversations over a speakerphone with a bumbling detective. It’s tough for Cart-wright to develop a credible relationship on-stage with an invisible audio tape. And the complex investigation means we lose the more potent emotional material from Bob’s past. He had a depressive writing part-ner, Dennis Goodwin, who once quipped, ‘I’d commit suicide but I’d live to regret it.’ Goodwin took his own life, aged 45. And we should hear more about Bob’s disabled son, Gary, who was photographed at his wedding by paps who published shots of him look-ing ugly and outlandish. When Bob deals with these stories the show is heartbreaking

When all the strains in Sickert’s complex temperament blended together — which was by no means always — the results were compelling. Then, despite his claim — possi-bly cantankerous — to be a French artist, he can seem the most notable British painter in the century between the death of Turner and the advent of Francis Bacon.

but it needs a rewrite or two. The dazzling Simon Cartwright is so good he’s bound to get a second tilt at this terrific role.

John Lennon: In His Own Write (Voo-doo Rooms, until 30 August) is a collection of insane but riveting short stories pub-lished by Lennon in 1964. The text has been reorganised as a set of wacky sketches per-formed by a likable trio. The material, being half a century old, will appeal most to audi-ences of a similar vintage who don’t suffer a moral collapse when they hear words like ‘spastic’ or ‘coloured bus conductor’. Len-non’s lyrical panache is amazing. He creates a new mock-heroic language whose constant puns recall the inventiveness of James Joyce or Spike Milligan. ‘I carn’t not believe this incredible fact of truth about my very body which has not gained fat since mother begat me at childburn.’ There’s a sketch where a Scouser is placed under arrest. ‘What you say will be taken down and used in Everton against you.’ This is a fabulous rediscovery which could, and should, tour the country.

When Blair had Bush and Bunga (Pleas-ance Courtyard, until 31 August) conforms to two fringe stereotypes. First, it’s an atroc-ity cabaret along the lines of ‘Gaddafi the

Musical’. Second, it’s a popular hit that the reviewers have trashed. I can see why. The opening is clumsy and the threadbare plot takes too long to emerge. It’s 2001 and we’re poolside at Cliff Richard’s mansion in Barba-dos, where the Blairs are nervously awaiting the arrival of George W and Silvio Berlusco-ni. It’s like a panto full of grotesque carica-tures. A panicking Tony trots around in his tennis whites. Carole Caplin lays out healing crystals on the tiles and sings Buddhist drivel. Cherie arrives in her red lipstick and gives us the famous goalpost smile. Scowling Alastair Campbell swears nastily at Carole’s thick Australian boyfriend. A hairy-backed Ber-lusconi shows up in leopard-print Speedos and chases an elderly waitress, who squeals with glee at the prospect of being raped by a half-naked foreign pensioner. It’s not exactly Voltaire. And the haphazard jokes are often corny. ‘Who is this Cliff Pilchard guy?’ But that doesn’t matter because the show works. After a sluggish start the laughs increase, the plot coheres and the momentum builds. There’s a great performance from Clive Mantle, who captures George W’s air of babyish naivety underlaid by a scary, screw-loose steeliness. Towards the end the audi-ence were laughing at every joke and they gave the cast a huge ovation. But bad notic-es have inflicted undeserved damage on this show. It’s not a classic and it may struggle to extend its life beyond the festival, but never mind. Treat yourself. It’s extremely silly, deeply unsophisticated and crackingly funny.

Simon Cartwright’s impersonation of the suntanned clown borders on the

miraculous


Cinema Male order Deborah Ross

Gemma Bovery15, Natiowide

Gemma Bovery is a modern-day refash-ioning of Gustave Flaubert’s literary mas-terpiece Madame Bovary, and while such refashionings can work well in some instanc-es — Bridget Jones as Pride and Prejudice, for example, or West Side Story as Romeo and Juliet, if we want to go further back —this is not one of those instances. Instead, this is that other kind of instance; the one that desperately makes you wish they’d left well alone.

It’s based on the graphic novel by the writer-artist Posy Simmonds which, in turn, was based on her comic strip in the Guard-ian. It was the same with Tamara Drewe, Simmonds’s reworking of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, which was filmed in 2010, and also starred Gemma Arterton, and which was just as superfi-cial and tiresome. (Advice for Ms Arter-ton: should someone come along with a project called, say, Hannah Karenina, just say ‘no’.) Here, Gemma plays Gemma, wife of Charles Bovery (Jason Flemying), a furniture restorer. They are English but, fed up of London, decide to relocate to a run-down cottage in the Normandy coun-tryside. The story, such as it is, is told not through their eyes, but through those of a neighbour, Joubert (Fabrice Luchini), a doleful, middle-aged baker who loves clas-sic literature and who becomes convinced that Gemma is tragically doomed; that

gambles with Shadow for his soul against midnight chimes and an eerily jangling harpsichord, Saks seemed to grow, stalking around Staples like a big cat measuring up its prey.

Here, for the first time in the piece, it’s possible to believe that something real is at stake. Saks and Staples’s exchange was gen-uinely gripping. But after two and a third acts of tightly corseted comedy, it’s simply too late to start feeling that any of this actu-ally matters. With a cast, an orchestra and a conductor as committed as this (plus bra-vura choral singing from the Royal Con-servatoire Voices), the final impression was of a gap between means and ends — and of frustration at seeing this level of artistry, both creative and in performance, expend-ed on an opera that’s really just an ingen-ious toy.

A new production of Le Nozze di Figaro opened at the Festival Theatre the follow-ing night. Stravinsky didn’t hesitate to meas-ure himself against Mozart, so it’s perfectly fair to note that by the end of Susanna and Figaro’s first recitative, Mozart has already created two more believably human charac-ters than Igor and Wystan managed in their entire three acts. That remains the case even when — as here — they’re surrounded by members of the Budapest Festival Orches-tra and a ramshackle collection of risers and costume rails, with the conductor/stage director Iván Fischer sitting right in front of them, carving away.

Yes, conductor and director: ‘My identity is changing too,’ announces Fischer in the programme book (he’s already mastered director-speak). ‘The performance starts as a concert and then eventually, is dressed up as an opera. I call it a “staged concert”.’ In fact, that transformation lasted little longer than the overture. Barring some awkward-ly contrived business with period costumes, what we saw for the rest of the evening was a more or less straight production of Figaro on an unusually cluttered stage. Musically, it was on a high level. Miah Persson sang with melting tenderness (though occasionally under the note) as Countess Almaviva, Syl-via Schwartz was a delightfully spirited and generous Susanna and if, as Figaro, Hanno Müller-Brachmann’s voice had frayed slightly by Act Three, his charisma hadn’t.

The Budapest Festival Orchestra played with flashing brilliance even while peri-wigs were being dropped on to their heads, and smiled politely throughout an over-long scene change, during which Fischer mooched about, hand in pocket, assuring the audience that ‘it’s going well’. Great conductors don’t automatically make good or even competent directors. Fischer got by — just — on the quality of his performers and the curious fact that while a first-rate performance does no favours to The Rake’s Progress, even in a misconceived production Figaro remains unsinkable.

Gemma’s story will duplicate the original Emma’s. He proceeds to watch her in a way that is meant to be amusingly harmless and fondly Maurice Chevalier-ish (but is, in fact, creepily stalkerish) while simultaneously developing the hots for her himself. Actu-ally, scratch that. He doesn’t develop the hots for her. He is electrified from the off. And ogles from the off.

This is what I call ‘a Movie of the Panting Male Gaze’, which, considering it was writ-ten by a woman (Simmonds), and is directed by a woman (Anne Fontaine, Coco Before Chanel), is properly inexplicable, but there you are. Whenever Joubert and Gemma

bump into each other, as they do often —you’d think no one else lived in this particu-lar village — the camera lingers pantingly on her rack, and sometimes pantingly on her legs, and sometimes pantingly on her swishy hair, but mostly it’s her rack, although, fair play, rack, legs and swishy hair is all she is. There have been more substantial roles for women in Carry On films. Gemma is the male sexual fantasy made flesh and, as such, has been awarded no personality whatso-ever, and no smarts whatsoever. Say your name was a near-homonym of that of one of the most famous characters in literature, ever, wouldn’t you be curious? Wouldn’t you wish to know something about that charac-ter and wouldn’t you be prompted to inves-tigate, particularly as just about everybody is going to point it out? (Gemma Bovery? Seriously?) But this isn’t Gemma’s way. Indeed, it’s not just that she’s never read the novel (helpfully, though, Joubert does recite chunks of it as we go along); she doesn’t

Gemma Arterton as Gemma Bovery, the male sexual fantasy made flesh, and Fabrice Luchini as Joubert

There have been more substantial roles for women in Carry On films


BOOKS & ARTS

Television Poldark porn James Delingpole

My favourite moment in The Scandalous Lady W (BBC2, Monday) was when the her-oine played by Natalie Dormer was shown being taken vigorously from behind by one of her 27 lovers. It wasn’t the sex that did it for me but the appalled expression on the face of Girl, who, with perfect timing, had just poked her head round the TV room door to see what the grown-ups were watching. She let out a little yelp of horror — and ran.

Which was rather how I felt during a lot of the sex scenes. ‘Do you think they put in this stuff for us? Or the women?’ I said to the Rat (over on a flying visit from Hong Kong, where he’s doing very nicely as an interior designer, thanks for asking). ‘Oh, the women, definitely. We’re much more Games of Thrones. Straight in there. Tits and arse,’ he replied.

He’s right too. You know where you are with Game of Thrones: pert breasts, heav-ing buttocks, with sex portrayed as men understand it — as a form of conquest and possession, or a jolly bit of rumpy-pumpy. That’s why you can safely keep your eyes on the screen at all times, unlike with all this female-friendly soft porn such as The Scan-dalous Lady W or Poldark — or the new Lady Chatterley, by the sounds of it — which just makes you want to hide behind the sofa.

Though Poldark porn — or perhaps it ought to be called Mr Darcy porn, because that scene with Colin Firth was the origina-tor, wasn’t it? — is less visually explicit, it’s actually a lot filthier. As women’s minds are, of course. It’s about white linen shirts, bare male torsos and lush fabrics. Fingers creep-

Radio Summer listening Kate Chisholm

Just back from a few nights in Sweden to find the perfect programme on Radio 3. It was one of those interval shorts that are always such a nightly bonus during the Proms sea-son. That 20-minute space between concert halves is the perfect length for listening. On Sunday night it was Kate Clanchy’s turn to fill in between Sibelius symphonies and what better topic than The Summer House (produced by Julian May), or rather the stuga, mokki, sommerhus or dacha beloved of Scandinavians and Russians, where Sibel-ius would retreat to write those symphonies redolent of dark woods and deep waters. Here the hassle and routine of city life are abandoned and days are spent chopping wood, gathering cloudberries or just soak-ing up the long-awaited sunlight.

We don’t really have a word in English to describe them. To us a summerhouse is usually a folly on a lawn, a creosoted doll’s house for adults, somewhere to store the croquet set or have tea on a dismal after-noon. In Sweden, Finland, Norway and Russia, though, it’s always a real house, a place to go back to every year, where you spend time with family and friends and get back in touch with what matters. There’s nothing posh about them, says Clanchy. One third of Sweden’s population have access to a family stuga, to these clapboard homes where there’s nothing to do except hang out on the deck or lose yourself in

appear to have even cast her eye over the plot synopsis on Wikipedia. Nice rack, nice legs, nice hair, but if you’ve ever encoun-tered a bigger idiot, I’d be most surprised.

The conceit — that Gemma’s life may emulate Emma’s — is what counts as plot, but it always feels like a conceit. There is no narrative drive. Is Gemma bored with pro-vincial life? If so, we don’t see it, yet still she embarks on an affair with the local deathly dull aristo (Niels Schneider) while her ex-boyfriend (Mel Raido) also pops up, but who cares? They’re all as empty and vile as each other and there’s not a squeak of chem-istry between any of them. The result is like watching dogs hump the furniture. It’s as scintillating as that. Plus, it does not evoke the novel in any way whatsoever, and I sim-ply wished everyone had taken arsenic early on, so we could have all gone home. Like I said, the refashioning of classics can work well in some instances, but this instance is not one of those.

ing higher and higher up soft legs towards expectant, ahem, thighs. Lips parted in rap-ture. Terrifying, in-the-head girl-fantasy stuff. Like being forced actually to read Fifty Shades of Grey, which, obviously, any nor-mal man would rather be gang-raped by the Samoan rugby team than ever have to do.

Not that I didn’t enjoy most of Lady W hugely. Natalie Dormer was wonderful, as she invariably is, with that slightly uncon-ventional, almond-eyed beauty and the apparent intelligence and poise enhanced by that sleazy, knowing smile. And the Geor-gian interiors, exteriors and outfits, as sump-tuously shot by director Sheree Folkson, were a visual treat. But I definitely got the

impression throughout that I was being sold a relentlessly 21st-century young female version of events, rather than any attempt at objective social history.

It feigned to tell the true story of Seymour Worsley, an 18th-century heiress married to a mildly depraved and unpleasant-sounding politician husband who attempted to sue one of her lovers for the then astronomi-cal sum of £20,000 for having damaged his ‘property’. Back then, as the drama rarely missed an opportunity to ram home, a wife was considered as much a husband’s posses-sion as his house, his land or his cattle.

Now clearly this was a perfectly frightful state of affairs. Seymour — worth well over £100 million in today’s terms when she mar-ried Sir Richard Worsley — was, as the law then stood, denied access both to her for-tune and to her illegitimate children. Hav-ing nothing to lose, she avenged herself in court by allowing every last sordid detail of her marriage to be publicly revealed: that, with her husband’s eager complicity, she had taken a number of lovers (acquiring sundry venereal diseases), that her daughter was illegitimate, that her husband preferred to watch through the keyhole while pleasuring himself manually.

A great period scandal, then, ripe for TV drama: and with the perfect pay-off too. At the end of the case, the jury finds in Sir Rich-ard’s favour. And awards him, in damages, the princely sum of one shilling. Unfortu-

nately, the production team weren’t content to make harmless bodice-ripping entertain-ment. They had to spell out the sociopoliti-cal implications with a giant trowel engraved with messages such as ‘Isn’t she feisty!!?’ and ‘Gosh, weren’t 18th-century notions of patriarchy so TOTALLY WRONG?’

In real life, Seymour seems to have had few qualms about abandoning either her legitimate son or her illegitimate daughter when she eloped with her lover. She once went on a three-day rampage with friends, which began when she set fire to a room in an inn occupied by the militia. Also, it was said that apart from her fortune neither she nor her sister had ‘one personal attraction’.

Slightly different, then, from the TV her-oine who was simultaneously required to be a paragon (who took those lovers only out of duty to her pervy husband), a feisty proto-feminist, a doting mother, and a total-ly delightful person. (Unlike vile, scheming hubby who, like his evil lawyers, was just horrid!) Is this the problem with TV these days: that everyone now is assumed to be so thick that they have to have everything explained?

TV these days assumes that everyone is so thick that they have to have

everything explained

‘OK, road’s clear . . . Go!’


In September, the Royal Academy of Arts will present a solo exhibition of works by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. This follows his installation of porce-lain sunflower seeds in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, a solo show at Blenheim Palace and two solo exhibitions at the Lisson Gallery (which represents him). Peculiarly, the Royal Academy’s press release claims that Ai’s work has not been seen extensively in Britain, which might suggest that its press team doesn’t get out much. He has certainly been exhibited here more than other key Chi-nese contemporary artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, Yang Fudong or Gu Wenda.

Ai transcends the art world, par-ticularly since his arrest by the Chi-nese authorities in April 2011 when he was held without charge for 81 days. His detention sparked petitions, pro-tests, a Free Ai Weiwei website and an Anish Kapoor-led lip-syncing video of the South Korean pop hit ‘Gangnam Style’ featuring prominent art-world fig-ures. Mysteriously, the Chinese authori-ties failed to bow to pressure from the staff of MoMA, Norman Rosenthal and the Serpentine Gallery team dancing in the style of a jaunty horse-rider. A few months after his arrest, Ai was named as the most powerful person in Art Review’s Power 100 (he’s since drifted

down to number 15, although that is still above Gerhard Richter, Jay Jopling and François Pinault).

Behind the adulation, however, there is a growing feeling that the actual art-work Ai produces is simply not up to much. In 2013 there were a couple of significant take-downs of his work. The first was an in-depth essay by the art critic Jed Perl. While making clear his admiration for Ai’s stand against the Chinese authorities, Perl argued that his art was alternately inane or derivative of American modernism. The early work is described as ‘highly diluted Dadaism’ and the later work as ‘postmodern mini-malist political kitsch, albeit in the name of a just cause’. A more withering assess-ment came from Francesco Bonami, one of the art world’s most well-respected and plainly spoken curators. ‘I hate Ai Weiwei,’ Bonami said in an interview. ‘I think he should be put in jail for his

art, and not for his dissidence . . . I think he exploits his dissidence in favour of promoting his art.’ Bonami’s critique was fleshed out by Colin Chinnery in a review for Frieze in September 2014. Like Perl, Chinnery noted his respect for Ai’s political stance but argued that the artist had moved from focusing on Chi-na’s political issues to a relentlessl focus on himself.

Lurking beneath this is the suspi-cion that Ai’s valorisation by large sec-tions of the western art world is shot through with a certain level of cultural condescension. Of all the well-known Chinese contemporary artists, Ai’s work is the most attuned to western modern art movements. He uses the now rather obvious Duchampian strategy of treating everything as a readymade and Chinese cultural artefacts are often recontextu-alised in his work in this way. He is an ideal Asian artist for lazy western cura-tors, making works that signal their ‘Chi-nese-ness’ through him waving around Chinese objects such as Han vases, while saying appropriately negative things about the Chinese authorities. Bonami went a bit far. Ai Weiwei doesn’t deserve prison for his art, but on the other hand he probably doesn’t deserve the whole of the Royal Academy.

— Niru Ratnam

THE HECKLER

Ai Weiwei

watching the clouds moving across a star-tling blue sky.

She reminded us of Tove Jansson’s haunt-ing evocation of the experience in The Sum-mer Book. A grandmother leaves the city behind to spend the summer on a tiny island with her granddaughter Sophia. It takes only four and a half minutes to walk round the island in the gulf of Finland but to the reader the distances travelled each day by Sophia and her grandmother appear much, much longer because of Jansson’s imaginative free-dom, her willingness to explore inwardly.

‘Are there ants in heaven?’ asks Sophia. ‘No,’ says the grandmother, bluntly, before telling Sophia, who is lying beside her on the grass, to stay still and listen to the insects. ‘You could hear thousands and millions of them.’

Saturday afternoon’s dramatic perfor-mance of Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell (Radio 4) was a welcome reminder of Bernard’s Spectator column, last seen in 1997. That ability to turn a life of doing nothing into 800 or so words of razor-sharp wit smacked of some kind of literary genius. He always made you laugh even while appalled by his apparent behaviour. And not just laugh. He also made you wince; wonder whether per-haps you might be that ice-cold harpie, or dyed-in-the-wool toadie.

John Hurt took the part that Peter O’Toole so memorably made his own in Keith Waterhouse’s West End play, the title of which came from this magazine’s cryptic announcement whenever Bernard was too ill (or drunk) to produce his weekly Low life copy. To create the right atmosphere, the play was recorded in Gerry’s bar in Soho, which claims to be ‘one of the last places keeping the Soho boho tradition alive’, and where Bernard once worked as a barman. The sound effects were suitably Bernard-ian: liquids being poured, glasses clinking, a match being struck and cigarette smoke exhaled. Hurt did his best to recapture that compelling mixture of booze-inflated self-aggrandisement and remorseless self-pity. He even attempted, and succeeded (so we were led to believe), the infamous egg trick perfected by O’Toole on-stage. Yet there was something missing and, dare I say it, at one-and-a-half hours there was a touch of the longueurs.

What was so remarkable about Bernard’s column is that mysterious thing called ‘voice’ (also possessed by his much-loved successor Jeremy Clarke). That unmistakable pres-ence on the page. Plus an uncanny ability never to use a word out of place. Bernard might have been a disreputable presence in

the Coach and Horses, and insufferable to be with when too much under the influence, but on the page his prose was always crystal-clear and impeccably crafted.

Sian Williams’s lunchtime series for Radio 4, How to Have a Better Brain (Mon-day to Friday, produced by Dixi Stewart), was inspired by her encounter with Dr Cath-erine Loveday, a neuropsychologist at the University of Westminster, and her mother Scilla, who used to work as a psychiatrist. Scilla is suffering from accelerated memory loss and her daughter is trying to find ways to stem the tide of symptoms. Exercise has been proven to help, with studies showing that there is less shrinking of the brain and fewer lesions on the white matter in those who walk regularly. More critical, though, are levels of stress. Cognitive tests have shown that prolonged anxiety causes increased cor-tisol levels, which are toxic to the brain.

What to do about it? Have a good laugh, says Dr Hannah Critchlow. This releases endorphins which help us to feel good (and keep the memory working well) while also exercising the ribs and intercostal muscles. What, I wonder, would Bernard have made of the idea that by making us laugh with his stories of drinking to excess he was saving the NHS a lot of money?


Turkey

son from 1784 to 1787, when he was enforc-ing the Navigation Acts, preventing trade with the new United States of America.

The dockyard — a classical complex of copper and timber stores, sail lofts and ship-yards — is enchanting; a chunk of Georgian England teleported to the Caribbean. The little Dockyard Museum is good on Nelson — who found his wife, Fanny Nisbet, on the nearby island of Nevis. The Admiral’s Inn, in a splendid old house, does a fine risotto.

You’ll bump into more of the island’s main modern import — tourists — at Shir-ley Heights Lookout, the hilltop bar in a for-mer military base above English Harbour. It’s popular on Sunday nights, when a steel band plays Bob Marley songs as the sun goes down over Montserrat. Antigua lies on the cusp of two seas: look west and you see the calm, warm Caribbean; look east for the cool, choppy waters of the Atlantic — and Eric Clapton’s villa and recording studio, strung across the spine of a seaside peak.

Just a short walk away is the cemetery to the men of the 54th Regiment (2nd Bat-talion Dorsets) who died in the West Indies between 1840 and 1851. It was a pretty grim posting, with the humid heat, yellow fever and intense self-medication with local rum. Today, the cemetery is haunted by dozens of tiny hummingbirds.

‘T ourism, tourism and tourism,’ said my Antiguan cab driver, when I asked what the country’s main

industries were. Still, it’s easy to avoid the other tourists, even though the island’s just over 100 square miles. Take a quad-bike tour — arranged by my hotel, the Sandals Grande Antigua Resort — and you can go from one end of the island to another in a morning, without seeing another tourist.

Instead, you’ll see fields of sweet pota-toes, dotted with sprawling tamarisk trees; jagged cliffs and pale-yellow beaches, fringed with luminous, aquamarine water. You’ll also come across remnants of old sugar plantations; in the early colonial years, slavery was Antigua’s biggest moneymaker.

Most stirring of all is Betty’s Hope Estate, Antigua’s first major sugar planta-tion, founded by Christopher Codrington in the late 17th century. I felt a little chill when I read, in the pretty little museum there, that Codrington’s son’s legacy paid for Hawksmoor’s library at All Souls, Oxford. I once spent many happy hours in that library, reading in the shadow of Christo-pher Codrington’s statue. I didn’t realise my pleasure was subsidised with slave money.

Divine retribution, in the form of a hur-ricane, has swept away the Betty’s Hope mansion. The slave village has been swal-

lowed up by undergrowth. But the windmills that ground the sticky cane still stand, their robust machinery imported from Derby.

A happier legacy of colonial rule is Anti-gua’s capital, St John’s, its yellow and pink pastel houses clustered beneath the baroque towers of St John’s Cathedral. Just outside St John’s, the old sugarcane fields are domi-nated by a worthy replacement: the Sir Vivi-an Richards Stadium, named after Antigua’s greatest cricketer and largely built, like the new airport, with Chinese money.

Loveliest of all is Nelson’s Dockyard in English Harbour, on Antigua’s southern tip. This hurricane-proof inlet was home to Nel-

Antigua: pastel houses and striking views

NOTES ON …

AntiguaBy Harry Mount


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‘I’d prefer to be at the bottom of the social pyramid rather than somewhere in the middle’— Toby Young, p60

High life Taki

These are the languid, sensuous days of summer, and I’ve had another birthday, which is the bad news. But it’s the silly sea-son, so I’m going to be silly yet again and tell you about Patrick and Isabelle Balkany, a couple who got into trouble last week in the land of cheese. I don’t know them, but I had the bad luck to run into the wife about 20 years ago in Rolle, Switzerland, where the Rosey school is located. It was Septem-ber, the first day back at school, and my son J.T. was miserable at the prospect of going to boarding school for the first time. He had tried every trick in the book as his mother and I were driving him down from Gstaad. He invented all sorts of illnesses and final-ly pretended to fall asleep just as we were coming into Le Château du Rosey, where the school has its campus in the autumn and spring. (In the winter months, it moves up to Gstaad.)

Once we had registered him, he was assigned to a brand-new dormitory, which I almost had to carry him into. That’s when things took a turn for the worse. An unpleas-ant, very short woman with a long cigarette in her mouth was in the room with her son. She looked at us in the manner an Indian maharajah might once have looked at an untouchable. I tried some polite conversa-tion about another Balkany, who was born Robert Zellinger but called himself Robert de Balkany, a man I had played polo with and against in Paris. ‘He’s a relation,’ said the woman, seemingly unimpressed by my name-drop. She kept puffing away, so Alex-andra and I had to leave our little boy in that smoke-filled room and beat a hasty retreat back up the mountain. We felt like crimi-nals. Four days later, after countless des-perate telephone calls from our little boy, I rang the headmaster and asked him to move our son to a different room. It seems that the boy fidgeted too much at night and J.T. couldn’t sleep.

Two months into the school year, the French minister of culture — Jack Lang, I

Low life Jeremy Clarke

‘How many people have you slept with in your life, roughly?’ she asked. We were lying in bed in the morning. ‘You go first,’ I said, needing time to think of the right answer. She looked at the ceiling and thought long and hard. ‘About 50,’ she said finally. I asked her about the worst experience. ‘Your turn, Low life,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to hear this.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it would take a Professor Brian Cox working with the latest European Space Agency number-crunching software to come up with anything like an approximate figure.’

By a weird coincidence, the next evening I was invited by a friend of a friend to have

believe — visited Le Rosey and was taken by the head to inspect one of the new dorms. ‘Monsieur le Ministre, voici une chambre d’étudiant typique,’ said the headmaster, opening one of the doors.

He quickly slammed it shut. Inside he had spotted J.T.’s old roommate lying on the floor looking at an enormous poster of Elle Macpherson and doing what 13-year-old boys do. The story quickly got out and the dining room went wild. My son called me and tried to blame his bad grades on the fact

that one cannot study when one’s roommate constantly plays with himself. ‘You were only with him for a few days,’ I spluttered, and then hung up laughing.

Well, last week Patrick and Isabelle Bal-kany had their passports taken away by the French authorities, who accused them of tax fraud and all sorts of corruption. Patrick Bal-kany is a very popular mayor of Levallois-Perret, and has been re-elected many times. He is also a member of the French parliament, but his parliamentary immunity has been lifted. He is obviously innocent until proved otherwise, but as far as the short smoker is concerned, it seems she had put grand coun-try houses and other assets in companies that were formed for just such evasions — or so the French papers have written. My son’s ex-roommate of four days and nights has not been accused of anything, thank God, though the children have been called illegal benefi-ciaries. This story will run for a very long time, so I thought I’d stick in my two cents before the family becomes even more famous — or infamous, as the case may be.

Otherwise everything’s hunky-dory. My son is sailing around the Aegean with his tiny children, my daughter is in Hampshire after flying into Paros for my birthday, and I’m about to embark on a short cruise on a friend’s boat before the Cunard-Spectator extravaganza. Summer can be exhausting. I fell during my own cruise and am covered in bruises. Sailing on old classics is not for the old. One loses balance as the years roll by, and trying to stand upright under heavy winds and under sail was good prepara-tion for the judo world championships in Amsterdam next month. The bad news is the boozing and smoking after the sailing is over.

Here in Athens things are strangely quiet. The calm before the you-know-what hits the fan in a couple of weeks. The capi-tal is empty and the streets I walk at night are devoid of the maddening Athenian traf-fic. I dine outdoors, can hear myself think, and reminisce about the time Athens was like this all year round. On the night of my return, in an outdoor restaurant in Kolonaki, where a very young Taki used to live, I dined while listening to a pianist play old tunes, songs I remember from long ago. Nostalgia swelled to tsunami levels. Outdoor piano bars can be dangerous things, especially if you are under the influence.

Outdoor piano bars can be dangerous things

LIFE

Real life Melissa Kite

If anyone wants to know why the Labour party is about to elect Jeremy Corbyn as its leader then they should come and sit in my back garden in Balham.

I have just heard, while lying on a sun lounger, the most absurd and yet horribly revealing conversation between two neigh-bours talking to each other over the fence.

I think it is worth me giving a full tran-script of the dialogue for posterity, so that

dinner with Professor Cox at his home. I had neither met him before nor seen him on telly.

Over dinner we talked about Einstein’s theory of relativity being the last word, still, on how we understand the universe. We talked about how the latest theories about the origin of the universe are tending towards the astonishing idea that there was in fact no beginning, and that the universe is eternally going backwards in time as well as forwards. (Astonishing, anyhow, for the couple of hun-dred world-class physicists and astronomers, but common or garden knowledge for about 80 million Anglicans, 300 million Evangeli-cals, 600 million Pentecostals and Charismat-ics and well over a billion Catholics.) We also talked about this pair of once enormous suns, now shrunk to about the size of a couple of tennis balls, and locked together in a sort of shimmying dance. Brian did say how much each of these condensed suns weighed in tons, but I’ve forgotten the incredible num-ber. All I can remember thinking at the time was that the number corresponded roughly to the weight of my ignorance. Their dance moves have been measured to the nearest millimetre, he said.

I say ‘we’ talked about these things. In actuality Professor Cox talked with great articulacy and enthusiasm while I pulled faces at him across the table. These faces ranged from the humorous scepticism of a Jeremy Paxman to — as I trailed further and further in his intellectual wake — a grinning George Formby, a loving, faithful golden retriever, and finally a stupefied gonk.

Then he rocked back in his chair, slapped his forehead and said, ‘I nearly forgot! Tonight is the climax of the Perseid meteor shower! What time is it?’

It was almost 11 o’clock, the time given in the newspaper for the show to start. We grabbed our wine glasses and followed him up two flights of stairs to his roof terrace and lay down in a row on the tiles like victims of a massacre.

Above us the sky was perfectly clear and the stars so magnificent that it seemed to me a terrible pity that I have looked up so sel-dom during my time on the planet. While a disposable glasses wipe was passed around by the light of my iPhone torch for the bene-fit of spectacle wearers, Professor Brian Cox pointed out and named some of the major constellations in such a way as to suggest that of course we were all well acquainted with them already but it was just a quick reminder. He then showed us from which point in the sky it would radiate (just below and to the right of the stand-out W of Cas-siopeia) and explained the cause, nature and composition of the annual Perseid meteor shower (the meteors are bits of debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle hitting the earth’s atmosphere at 130,000 mph).

What I really wanted to know was which constellation showed the face of Victor Mel-drew, but I thought the question perhaps

too fatuous to ask of a professor of particle physics and refrained from asking it.

As we settled down to watch and wait, we chatted desultorily, our voices disem-bodied in the darkness. Someone remem-bered that today was the Glorious Twelfth, the start of the grouse-shooting season. I, glad to be back in my own element and able at last to contribute something of interest to the evening’s discussion, reported that it had been a terrible year for the grouse because the weather had been too wet for the chicks to thrive. But my crumb of infor-mation about the natural world was totally ignored because at that moment the biggest, longest, brightest and thickest meteor I had ever seen shot spectacularly across the face of the heavens, descending obliquely all the way down to the western horizon.

I have seen shooting stars before, of course I have — one or two. But I’d never seen anything like that. We all let out exple-tives of one sort or another; even Professor Brian Cox OBE was moved to a thrilled profanity. About a minute later — anoth-er! Similar magnitude, length and thickness; different direction. After that they came at the rate of one a minute. We lay there in the darkness, oo-ing and ah-ing at the unearth-ly spectacle. The Glorious Twelfth. Totally amazing.

history might understand why the main opposition party of the United Kingdom elected as its leader a man who signed a Commons motion looking forward to the day when an asteroid hits the earth and wipes out mankind.

It all started with the conversation catch-ing my ear because one of the women was talking about her love of horse-riding. Both women, I must tell you, were middle class, highly educated and very well-to-do.

One of them was opining to the other that she used to be a keen rider, but had not been able to keep it up since moving to the city where she and her husband worked. She now had children and thought it would be wonderful if one day her family could move out of London to live somewhere nice in the countryside with a paddock where they might keep a pony for the kids.

Just an everyday, middle-of-the-road conversation, taking place between two mid-dle-aged, middle-class aspirational mothers,

sitting in the gardens of their fairly expen-sive properties in a south London suburb.

‘I used to be raaaahly into horse-rid-ing. I even did some eventing,’ said the one woman to the other, in a posh voice. ‘Wow! How amaaazing!’ said the other. ‘Yes, but you know how life is? Things took over. I haven’t ridden for ages. But I would like to think one day we might be able to move to the country so the kids can have a pony. Mind you, horses are so expensive.’ And there followed a brief interlude about horse costs, during which I zoned out, because I am always so worried about my own equine overheads that I can never bear to listen to someone else banging on about them.

I lay back in the sun, mind drifting, eyes shut, half hearing such phrases as ‘cost of hay and bedding . . . hard feed . . . vet bills and shoeing. . . . ’

And then my brain was jolted violently to attention by the horsey woman suddenly saying the strangest and most alarming sen-tence I have ever overheard. And the sen-tence was: ‘Isn’t Jeremy Corbyn wonderful?’

‘What the WHAT?!’ I thought, sitting bolt upright. One minute two ladies were talking about ponies for the kids and the next, Jeremy Corbyn was wonderful.

When I closed my eyes in the sun it was to the faint twitter of Middle Britons bang-ing on about their aspirations for little Tal-lulah and the next thing I knew, I was rudely awakened by the sound of the militant left.

Ponies to Jeremy Corbyn? How is this possible? I tuned back in and it became clear that the women had moved from a dis-cussion of horse costs, via the cost of living, to the state of Britain today. And thence to the issue of how politics was rotten to the core, but no matter because, thank heavens,

From ponies to Jeremy Corbyn? How is this possible?

‘It’s not back-firing properly.’



Long lifeAlexander Chancellor

I was saying the other week that my new hearing aids had come with a warning not to swallow their batteries, because this could be bad for you. I doubt if anyone would choose to swallow a battery, but such warn-ings against barely conceivable eventualities are now commonplace. Manufacturers rack their brains to think of new perils to which buyers of their products could theoretical-ly be exposed. Sometimes these warnings make no sense. I will not distress you with details of the colonoscopy I endured last

Jeremy Corbyn would soon be leading the Labour party, of which, by the way, the pair of them were keen members.

Now, I think I told you that during the general election campaign I was made pain-fully aware of how many of my wealthy, pro-fessional south London neighbours were Labour luvvies because a huge number of them put up Vote Labour posters in their front windows.

The ex-builder boyfriend would walk past them screaming blue murder about the hypocrisy of it all. ‘That’s right! Vote for Miliband, you rich morons! I’m voting Con-servative because I can’t afford to ruin the economy and not get any roofing work.’

I had an inkling, therefore, that there were many genuine, signed-up Labour members in my street. I had no idea that these were of the renationalising, veganis-ing, asteroid-loving loony left sort. Perhaps the terrifying point is, they might not be.

These might be perfectly ordinary Labour members preparing to vote for Jer-emy Corbyn. Or maybe the less terrifying possibility is that all Labour members are renationalising, veganising asteroid-lovers, hurtling towards their own extinction.

Whatever the case, woman two replied: ‘Oh yes! He is wonderful.’ Then woman one said: ‘I just checked I’m still registered to make absolutely sure I can vote for him.’

TO BOOK:www.spectator.co.uk/bragg 020 7961 0044 | [email protected]

Wednesday 14 October, 7 p.m. | Church House, Westminster

Hear critically acclaimed author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, in conversation with Andrew Neil, discuss his new book Now is the Time, a compelling tale set in the heart of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Tickets: £22 / £30 with a signed copy of the book (RRP £18.99)

In association with

Wednesday 21 October, 7 p.m. | The Royal Institution, Mayfair www.spectator.co.uk/thatcher

Woman two: ‘Yes, he’s just what we need. He’s a breath of fresh air.’

At this point, I couldn’t help spluttering. Breath of fresh air? Presumably, the asteroid that hits the earth will be a breath of fresh air too.

week (all fine, just one little benign polyp), but the packets of laxative powder designed to empty the bowels prior to this humiliating procedure were labelled ‘Keep out of reach and sight of children’. Out of reach, yes. But out of sight? What’s scary about the sight of a packet of powder?

Last weekend I went to the old-fash-ioned butcher in Towcester to buy a chicken for Sunday lunch, and affixed to its wrap-ping was a note saying ‘Cook before eating’. Who needs telling this? Even in Northamp-

tonshire there can’t be many people so hun-gry, desperate or ignorant that they will hurl themselves upon a raw bird and gnaw away at it. But maybe chicken farmers feel they can’t be too careful and might be exposed to legal action if they haven’t given warning that raw chickens are not very good to eat. You’d think that even people who had never personally encountered a chicken would be aware of this from their viewing of cookery programmes on television. They may not ever cook anything themselves, but they will surely have grasped that with chickens cook-ing is the preferred approach.

Talking of chickens, I don’t want to count

It’s amazing how attached one can become to chickens, given that they

are neither intelligent nor affectionate


LIFE

The turf In the know Robin Oakley

Master golfer Gary Player had the perfect retort when a 19th-hole pundit on his fourth G&T declared, ‘It’s all down to luck really.’ ‘Of course,’ replied Player. ‘But it’s strange: the harder I practise the luckier I get.’ Bet-ting is much the same: a bit of luck helps but good information can improve your luck. When it comes to food I have access to the top gen: Mrs Oakley may be pencil-slim but she devours the writings of top chefs, cooks like an angel and sniffs out good new res-taurants like a truffle-hound after a tuber. As we waited to embark for a lecture trip in New York last month, she led me unerr-ingly to the basement brasserie of the Andaz Hotel on Fifth Avenue where the five-course tapas-tasting plate was the nearest thing to culinary nirvana I have yet encountered. Obtaining info of that quality about four-legged investments is not easy, but a magic day at Newbury last Saturday confirmed that it can be found without the aid of nose-tapping tipsters.

Turf column readers learned recently how much trainer Clive Cox likes Kodi Bear, who duly won at Salisbury last week and sent me to Newbury flush with the Enemy’s funds. I had, too, urged readers to watch the young jockey Harry Bentley. From considerably fewer rides than any of the jockeys in the list above him, Harry has now scored 32 vic-tories this season. One in five of his mounts won: only Ryan Moore and likely champion Silvestre De Sousa have better strike rates and £1 invested on each of Harry’s 157 rides would have brought a net profit of £109.64. Only six jockeys in the top 50 show a level-stakes profit and De Sousa, at £52.16 as I write, is the only other one over £50.

Saturday began with a race for pure-bred Arabians, and Harry Bentley, who is cham-pion jockey in Qatar, travelled to Newbury for just one ride, the Qatari-owned Ba’sil, in

Munch’s ohmigod!

that opener. It seemed a no-brainer and I managed to get 7–4. Harry came home well clear on Ba’sil before heading to Newmar-ket to ride She Is No Lady to victory at 5–1 for Ralph Beckett.

It was the fillies maiden, though, which proved my contention that most of the infor-mation you need is publicly available. Bare listings for Mick Channon’s Czabo showed her only 8th of 11 on her debut at Newmar-ket under the capable young rider Charles Bishop. But the published detail revealed that despite being badly left at the start Czabo had finished within four lengths of the winner. This time she was to be han-dled by Silvestre De Sousa, currently riding with the confidence of God’s charioteer at a green light. Amazingly, she opened at 25–1 and I got 28–1 before she was backed down to a starting price of 16–1. Brought with a smooth run up the stands side, Czabo did the business beautifully. Afterwards Mick told us, ‘She ran a good race last week. She must have got left ten or 15 lengths.’ He was particularly pleased for the owner-breeders Tania and Patrick Trant of Norman Court Stud, who stand her sire Sixties Icon. They had raced Czabo’s dam Fiumicino but after a series of accidents to others this was the first of her offspring to reach the racecourse. Sixties Icon, Channon added, was a badly underrated sire.

I should have listened more closely. In the next race I had backed Twin Sails and felt hopeful after meeting his cheerful train-er Dean Ivory in the car park. Alas Twin Sails found the tacky ground too much and Mick’s Epsom Icon came home the winner, making it two out of two for the Norman Court stud.

When I saw the avalanche of late money for Agent Murphy in the Group 3 Geoffrey Freer Stakes, driving him down from 5–1 to 11–4, I was tempted to forget my ante-post bet on Pallasator and join the rush. More fool me that I didn’t. In that sort of stampede it is best to be swept along, even if it does occasionally take you over a cliff. Agent Murphy powered clear of his field to score a popular victory for jockey Jimmy Fortune, his first since cracking vertebrae in a nasty fall at Ascot.

It was thanks to a good steer in the Rac-ing Post that I then profited from Mullion-heir at 17–2 in a seven-furlong handicap about which I knew little — that and the publicly available knowledge that his train-er John Best has been going great guns since moving yards. I lost on the next two races, but the last, a race for lady amateurs, was a doddle. In such contests I have one rule: I ignore the form, I find out if solicitor Serena Brotherton, another rider with a rare 20 per cent strike rate, is riding in them and then I back her. She was, I did and Albert Bridge, with three duck eggs to his name this season, came home at 3–1. There really is help out there when you look.

them before they’re hatched, as it were, but the position regarding my own poultry is a great deal better than it has been. Or so it seems. Having fretted for years about how to let my chickens wander the garden free-ly without being killed by foxes (very many having suffered this fate), I now have them fenced in behind yew hedges in a patch of garden that so far no fox has tried to enter. Maybe some brave Charlie (as people call foxes here) will have a go soon, but in the meantime all is peaceful and serene. I only have five chickens at the moment, but they’re laying five excellent eggs a day, and I don’t even have to shut them in their coops at night any more. It’s amazing how attached one can become to chickens, given that they are not exactly either intelligent or affec-tionate. I can’t imagine ever killing one and eating it, cooked or uncooked, and I expect most other chicken owners feel the same.

My ducks, too, are having a good time. Thanks to foxes, they have been reduced in number over the years from 14 to six, but for many months now the remaining ones have been spared. They live on the pond at the bottom of my garden, and foxes don’t like swimming; but ducks are nevertheless

at risk when out of the water. So maybe the combined efforts of the Grafton Hunt and of the farmer, Geoffrey Smart, who assidu-ously stalks foxes with his rifle, have been having an effect. And now my team of ducks is about to grow with the addition of eight new ducklings.

Last time ducklings were born here they were only tiny when they followed their mother on to the pond, where they bobbed about like plastic ducklings in a child’s bath-tub, only to be picked off one by one by herons. But this time one of my six ducks conveniently made her nest in a flower bor-der against a wall of my house, where her progeny have been fenced in for safety until they have grown big enough to face the world outside. Their mother is an Indi-an Runner duck, but Mr Smart, who put up the fences, is convinced that her young are partly mallard. ‘I think she must have been raped,’ he said, though in my view the cou-pling could well have been consensual.

In any event, I am happy that a mallard has infiltrated my collection of Indian Run-ners and Khaki Campbells because I might hear some quacking at last. I have been irri-tated for some time that none of my ducks ever makes a noise even faintly resembling a quack, but I learn from John McEwen, for-mer art critic of this magazine who writes a column about birds in the Oldie, that the mallard is the only one of the many species of duck that actually quacks. I wonder why I never knew that before?

The mallard is the only duck that actually quacks. I wonder why I

never knew that before?


SPECTATOR WINE VAULTS JONATHAN RAY

James Franklin of Corney & Barrow presented a very strong selection for this offer, any bottle of which I would

have been happy to recommend. We did finally narrow it down to four wines, though, and a tip-top quartet it is too.

Readers will be delighted to hear that all prices are discounted, and the celebrat-ed Brett-Smith Indulgence (£6 off per case) will apply to purchases of one or more cases. For ease, the cheaper prices shown below include both the discount and the BSI.

The 2014 Moscato d’Asti Fratelli Antonio e Raimondo (1) is charm incar-nate; if you know of a better mid- morning reviver, lead me to it. It’s honeyed, grapey (don’t laugh, Muscat/Moscato is the only grape whose fermented juice actually smells of grapes) and wonderfully fresh and frothy. It’s also ridiculously light in alcohol. £8.95, down from £9.95.

The 2011 L’Empreinte de Saint Mont (2) is a gem of a white from Producteurs Plaimont in Gascony. A part oak-fer-mented, part tank-fermented blend of the local Gros and Petit Manseng and Petit Courbu that spends six months on the lees,

it bursts with Gascon character. It’s rounded and slightly oily in the mouth with grape-fruit and melon flavours. £11.80, down from £12.95.

If you can’t bear to be torn away from Chardonnay then the 2013 Olivier Leflaive Bourgogne ‘Les Sétilles’ (3) is for you. James Franklin reckons it’s one of the best value whites on Corney & Barrow’s list. Blended from top quality parcels, it boasts the creamy richness of Meursault and the austere steeli-ness of Puligny. It’s a class act in every way and so full of oomph that James F suggests serving it with sirloin steak. £14.65, down from £15.95.

Finally, the 2013 Domaine de Saissac (4), one of Corney & Barrow’s longest-standing wines and a great favourite of Simon Hog-gart, who called the 2011 version a ‘knock-it-back-and-stick-your-glass-out-for-more’ wine. A vibrant Cabernet Sauvignon from a small estate on the banks of the Canal du Midi in the Languedoc, it’s rich and concen-trated but fresh and exhilarating too. £7.53, down from £8.45.

There’s a sample case with three of each wine, and delivery as ever is free.

List Indulgence Prices in form are per case of 12 price price No.

White 1 2014 Moscato d’Asti Fratelli Antonio e Raimondo, 5.5% £119.40 £107.40

2 2011 L’Empreinte de Saint Mont, 13.5% £155.40 £141.60

3 2013 Olivier Leflaive Bourgogne ‘Les Sétilles’, 12.5% £191.40 £175.80

Red 4 2013 Domaine de Saissac, 13% £101.40 £90.36

Mixed 5 Sample case, three bottles each of 1–4 £141.90 £128.81

Total

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Prices include VAT and delivery on the British mainland. Payment should be made either by cheque with the order, payable to Corney & Barrow, or by debit or credit card, details of which may be telephoned or faxed. This offer, which is subject to availability, closes on 3 October 2015.

ORDER FORM Spectator Wine Offerwww.spectator.co.uk/wine-clubCorney & Barrow, 1 Thomas More Street, London E1W 1YZ Tel: 020 7265 2470; Fax: 020 7265 2540; Email: [email protected]

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NW E

S

Bridge Janet de Botton

I have great respect for top French bridge players but I think it’s fair to say they don’t go in for dazzling displays of bravado and brilliance; neither do they crash in disas-ter. They are great card players and great, straightforward bidders. Calmly and steadily they do their best on every hand and it real-ly pays off. In the last two months Philippe Cronier and Sylvie Willard took gold in the European Mixed Pairs in Tromso, Thomas Bessis and Frederic Volcker won the Open Pairs in the same event and Jean-Christophe Quantin and Cedric Lorenzini have just won the hugely prestigious Life Master Pairs in the Chicago Summer National. They must be doing something right.

Thomas Bessis made this contract in Tromso when some of the best players in the world went off:

Dealer East North/South Vulnerable

Thomas was South, and took some time before inviting with 3 hearts. West picked up on this and added a double to the uncon-vincing auction.

The lead was a small club to the Nine, Ten and ruffed. Declarer started with the Jack, covered and won in dummy. The Jack went to the Queen and Ace, and a small diamond returned towards dummy’s 10-8. Thomas knew that East would not have cov-ered with long diamonds, so smartly finessed the 8. Now he carefully played a heart to the Queen followed by another diamond to the 10, which East ruffed but was without resources. He played a heart to declarer’s Ace who cashed his winning diamond, dis-carding a heart in dummy and cross ruffed the rest of the hand. All the defence got was three trump tricks.

Chapeau.

West North East South 1 1 pass 2 pass 3 pass 4 pass passX All pass

J 10 6 4 2

A Q 5 4

A K 6 2

VOID

8 5

K 10 8 3

Q 5

A Q 10 3 2

A 7 3

9 6 2

J 10 8

K J 9 6

K Q 9

J 7

9 7 4 3

8 7 5 4


LIFE

kingside. 14 ... Nxd4 Black’s aggressive play has been rewarded by the recovery of the sacrificed pawn and, more importantly, the destruction of White’s centre. At this point Degraeve should have been looking to minimise his disadvantage. Instead, he captures the poisoned b7-pawn on its second offering, to his great regret. 15 Qxb7 Rb8 16 Qxa7 Ne2+ 17 Kh1 Ng4 (see diagram 2) Black has gained an overwhelming attack on the kingside. 18 g3 Qf6 19 Kg2 Rxb2 A ‘black knights’ tango’ checkmate is imminent. 20 Na4 Qc6+ 21 f3 Nf4+ White resigns After 22 Kh1 Rxh2+ 23 Kg1 Nh3 mate, the black knights get the final say.

The Australian grandmaster David Smerdon has written a truly exciting book about some of the byways in the Centre Counter or Scandinavian Defence. The old main lines started 1 e4 d5 exd5 Qxd5 3 Nc3 and generally condemned Black to a long defence. The apparent activity of the black queen tended to be outweighed by White’s lead in development and the fact that the queen itself, more often than not, degenerated into a target rather than a great and mobile force. Smerdon is quite candid about the dangers which his advocated move of 2 ... Nf6 would entail. But the variations are dramatic, it represents a one-stop shop as a black defence against 1 e4, and in spite of heavily computerised analysis, the tactics never conclusively work out in White’s favour. Meanwhile, both players are treading a tactical knife edge, so for aggressive players, good at calculation, Smerdon’s book is ideal.Smerdon’s Scandinavian is published by Everyman Chess. Degraeve-Ekstroem; Ohrid 2001; Scandinavian Defence 1 e4 d5 2 exd5 Nf6 3 c4 e6 4 dxe6 Bxe6 5 Be2 Avoiding 5 Nf3 Qe7 (which is fine for Black) in this way is safe and sensible, but hardly critical. Black gains full compensation with natural development. 5 ... Nc6 6 Nf3 Bc5 7 0-0 0-0 8 d3 Re8 9 Nbd2 White opts for a timid response, but the knight is heading for b3 where it will control the key d4-square. Instead, 9 Nc3 Bf5 creates ideas of ... Qd7, ... Rad8 and ... Nd4. 9 ... Bf5 10 Nb3 (see diagram 1) 10 ... Rxe2 A nice move to play, if practically forced. 11 Nxc5 Re8 12 d4 The uncompromising 12 Nxb7 was stronger, although White was understandably hesitant about further pawn-grabbing with such underdevelopment. 12 ... Bg4 13 Be3 Bxf3 14 Qxf3 14 gxf3 b6 15 Nb3 Qd7 gives Black excellent chances against White’s broken

In Competition No. 2911 you were invited to submit a thriller in three text messages.

This one seemed straightforward enough but it turned out to be a tough assignment that stretched veterans and newcomers alike. As in all forms of micro-fiction — the mini-masterpiece attributed to Hemingway, ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’, springs to mind — it’s all about the reader filling in the gaps.

Many entrants went for the mistaken-identity trope, which became rather monot-onous after a time. But while I applauded those who attempted a more original twist, most of these didn’t quite come off.

The standard was somewhat disappoint-ing, then, but there were some creditable exceptions, printed below. They earn their authors £15 each.

The good news: your cyber-temporal experiments succeeded. You won the Nobel for your Paradox Amelioration Algorithms. This message is from your 2055 self.

And the bad news?

You’re a wanted man in space and time. Weapons training starts now. You’re about to hear an explosion.Chris O’Carroll

Wassup Jezza? Job done innit! Polonium-210 in Yvette’s gin as U wanted. Go whn U’ve necked yr whisky!

OMG! YFI! Yvette is whisky. I is gin.

Soz bro :( 4get fee! IOU1.Alan Millard

Hey hun just woken up. Appreci8 u takin the bbe out 4 a bit

Actually just gone 2 buy pot8os. have solvd cryin problem 4 gud btw

Yeah? Cool. Sumthin smells gud in the oven. What r we havin?Rob Stuart

Did you just hear me calling you down for dinner?

Yes Mum! I’ll be down in a second!

Stay in your room. I’m in the upstairs bathroom. And I heard it too.Christopher Davies

You sweet lover man, what a time we had. But not a word to anyone, Jim would kill us if he found out.

You got that right. One down, one to go.

Jim darling! I think my phone’s been hacked.Basil Ransome-Davies

PUZZLE NO. 375

Black to play. This position is from Kosmo-Smerdon, Goa 2002. Can you spot Black’s beautiful winning move? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 25 August or via email to [email protected] or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week there is a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 … Rxe4Last week’s winner Gareth Davies, Winchcombe, Glos

Chess Viking trail Raymond Keene

Competition Triple thrill Lucy Vickery

W4W1rDkD !W0WDp0p WDWDWDWD DWHWDWDW WDPDWDnD DWDWGWDW P)WDn)P) $WDWDRDK

WDkDWDWD 0pDrDp0p WDWDWDWD DW0PDWDR W1nDW!WD DWDWDPDP P)WDr)BD DWINDWDR

rDW1rDkD 0p0WDp0p WDnDWhWD DWgWDbDW WDPDWDWD DNDPDNDW P)WDB)P) $WGQDRIW

Diagram 1

Diagram 2


LIFE

Across 1 Defeat leader in every way

(5) 9 Untidy tapestry one

turned, enthralled by colour with depth (10)

11 Load knocking arch over (5)

14 Learned man, no villain (5) 15 Peculiar ghost of

depression (5) 16 Single healer’s claim (6) 21 Molluscs in rotary motors

(8) 22 Marsupial passed rat,

running (7) 24 Higher bit above ski-lift

(4, hyphened) 25 Miss rare displays (4) 27 Seek hot tracks in addition

(7) 28 Pedestals decay among

trees (8) 33 Alternation of notes under

pilot light (6) 34 Gynaecologist spoke

elegantly (5) 37 Riddles permeating story

(7) 38 Drop estimated rates (5) 39 Dry retreat containing a

desk (10) 41 Fool with alien item of

property (5)

Down 2 Tale recording response by

god (6) 4 Bad law emissary lamented

(6) 5 Minor lie about appendage

(4) 6 Muddled start reviewed (7) 7 Survival gave girl

confidence (5) 8 Crime not earning mark of

honour (8) 10 Student of grass roots

worked with lecturer in past on main point (13)

13 Absolute monster playing (7)

17 Prepare urgent trial (6) 18 Short, for example, short of

a bob (6) 19 Beginner relegated in due

order (7, two words) 23 Relax rule nun checked (8) 26 Took map as reliable guide

for sailors (7) 29 Volcanic argument one

avoided (6) 31 Official presents pass (6) 32 Big tree lumberjacks tackle

(5) 36 Pot roast left (4)

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 7 September. There are two runners-up prizes of £20. (UK solvers can choose to receive the latest edition of the Chambers Dictionary instead of cash— ring the word ‘Dictionary’.) Entries to: Crossword 2225, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Crossword 2225: Category by Columba

Darling! Thanks for anniversary gift. Went down a treat! They’re poisoned. Will swap antidote for frozen embryos. Can be there 30 minutes.

No rush! I fed chocolates to your mistress. Embryos in an oven starting 30 minutes. Give me ALL the diamonds, I’ll give you ONE location! Rob Johnston

Hi Hon, had a good day?

Stop texting me. You’re still dumped. Got more important things. My sister got attacked last night. Might not pull thru

How terrible. BTW . . . your sister’s tears taste sweeter than yoursTracy Davidson

These steaks look great! Haven’t seen Toby though, is he with you?

Yes I’ve got him. We’ve been having fun. Enjoy your lunch!

It’s John. Lost my phone!!? Bringing dinner home now. Don’t forget to feed Toby xxxTom Parker

Darling, let’s keep the money our little secret. Dinner’s on me. OK. Tyres sorted. Great garage. Cheap! Never guessed he’s your ex. Also fixed the brakes . . . for free! Didn’t even know they were faulty. Driving now. See you at Carlo’s — bottom of that steep hill. I don’t think soSue Murdoch

Amy, why aren’t you answering your phone? Are you still coming over to dinner?

Sorry Brad, I was walking to the bus stop but then your cousin pulled over and gave me a lift. Shouldn’t be long now xx

What? Amy . . . I don’t have a cousin.Rafael Pachiko

Hi — You need to pack! Meet usual place Heathrow. 2 hours?

Can’t do that! Sat. night party. House full. What’s the urgency?

We’re tomorrow’s front pages! Storm Hutchinson

NO 2914: BENNBOOZLED

Forty-five years ago, after a speech by the late Sir Keith Joseph in which he said that the government was trying to ‘Bennboozle’ the country, competitors were asked to sup-ply their own coinages. The time has come to revisit this challenge. You are invited to submit coinages inspired by today’s politi-cians, supplying full dictionary definitions and illustrative examples of their use. Email entries (up to three each) to [email protected] by midday on 2 September.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20 21

22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31

32 33

34 35 36

37 38

39

40 41

SOLUTION TO 2222: EXQUISITE

TOO-TOO is a HOMOPHONE (38) of TUTU (defined by 1A and 8, and the surname of 17, the former 11 of 25). The highlighted words, both starting at 22, combine to form a homophonous representation of the puzzle’s number.

First prize Michael Grocott, Loughborough, LeicsRunners-up Brenda Widger, Altrincham, Cheshire; F. Khaya, New South Wales, Australia

Name Address

Email

Four unclued lights (two of which consist of two words each) belong in the same cate-gory; one unclued light defines them. Remaining unclued lights are the surnames of their crea-tors. Each of twenty-seven clues comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer including one extra letter; the extras are the unchecked letters of all nine unclued lights. Elsewhere ignore an accent.


LIFE

tical because the camp rules stipu-late that you have to wear Speedos — more hygienic than swim shorts, apparently. But their embarrassment at having to squeeze into ‘budgie smugglers’ was tempered by their amusement at seeing me in a pair. As Caroline put it, I look like a sausage that’s exploded on the barbecue.

If they get bored with verruca lake, there’s always the amusement arcade, which is situated so close to the main restaurant you can actu-ally hear the noise of the pinball machines as you eat. That is, if there isn’t any ‘entertainment’ taking place. Every ten minutes or so, a French-man pops up dressed in a yellow-and-black jumpsuit and an orange wig and organises a North Korea-style display of mass gymnastics, complete with deafening French pop music. These are the local equivalents of redcoats, I suppose, and the kids love them, too, because they look like characters in Where’s Wally?, one of their favour-ite books.

There are other British people here who are slumming it like us, and there’s plenty of gallows humour when we bump into each other at the bar. One man endeared himself to me immediately by telling me he’d recognised me at the pool, but when he’d pointed me out to his wife she’d disputed it since it simply wasn’t con-ceivable that someone like me — a major celebrity — would be stay-ing here. I stood him several rounds before discovering that he thought I was the actor who plays Phil Mitchell in EastEnders.

OK, so those are the upsides. Less good is the ‘chalet’ — in reality, a

I ’m currently at a French camp-site in the Languedoc, having been persuaded by my wife that

it would be a good place to spend our summer holiday. She described the campsite as ‘a French Butlins’, which she knew would appeal to me. If I can’t afford to stay at the Hotel du Cap, which I can’t, I’d prefer to be at the bottom of the social pyra-mid rather than somewhere in the middle. But her main argument was that it would be incredibly cheap —cheaper, even, than renting a house in Cornwall. We’re paying about £100 a day for a ‘chalet’ that sleeps six. There was simply no way we could be disap-pointed.

Well, yes and no. I’ll start with the positive. The staff are remark-ably well-mannered. During check-in, I detained the pretty receptionist for about 15 minutes by forcing her to ring round all the local sports bars to see if any of them were showing the QPR game that was about to be broadcast on Sky. The answer, inevi-tably, was no, but she smiled at me so sweetly and said ‘Désolé’ so sympa-thetically that I almost didn’t mind.

Another big plus is that the kids love it. There’s a water park that Caroline calls ‘verruca lake’ which they’re happy to play in 24/7. My three boys were initially a bit scep-

bottom-of-the-range mobile home. There’s no oven, only two power points, and both the lavatory and the shower stopped working on the sec-ond day. To be fair, they were both fixed within a few hours — and, again, the young man I spoke to about it was very accommodating. He seemed to take it in his stride, as if it happens every day.

The biggest negative is the food. I naively imagined that because we were in France the local fare would be edible, even at a place like this. In fact, it’s the French version of Amer-ican junk food — greasy, tasteless pizzas made with red peppers rath-er than tomatoes, and horrid, shriv-elled-up little burgers called ‘steak haché’. Even though we’re less than a mile from the coast, my inquiries about fresh fish have been met with bafflement.

The wine list consists of three choices: ‘rouge’, ‘blanc’ or ‘rosé’. I find this particularly depressing, hav-ing fallen off the wagon on the first day. Every night, as I drain my first glass of the house red, I screw up my face in disgust and think, ‘I broke my vow of temperance for this?’

Caroline and I debated whether to cut our losses and decamp to a nearby hotel, but the staff’s customary good cheer evaporated when I asked if we could get any of our money back if we left before our week was up. Having paid for seven nights, I’m too much of a skinflint to leave early, so we’ll just have to grin and bear it. Next year, we’ll be going back to Cornwall.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

Status AnxietyOur holiday ina French ButlinsToby Young

MICHAEL HEATH

Every ten minutes, a Frenchman pops up in an orange wig and organises a North Korea-style display of mass gymnastics


from choir practice and has to show his ID to get a drink. After the 5-0 thrashing in the 2013-14 Ashes down under, he returned not with his head down but more determined than ever to build a team for whom playing for England was the ultimate honour. He now seems to have done just that.

Cook is a model of leadership: at the end of the Trent Bridge Test, he was quick to pay tribute to Peter Moores, the former and oft-sacked coach who, along with Paul Downton, had put the Pietersen issue to bed and persuaded Cook to stay on. After the last Austral-ian wicket fell, it was telling that Cook rushed to pull out a couple of stumps, which he gave to his young stars Mark Wood and Ben Stokes. Cook has also given the impression that he is listen-ing to the former England captains, and inviting ‘legends’ into the dress-ing room. I don’t know whether he believes it, but it is terrific politics.

Even now, football has some treas-ures. When it comes to newspaper kiss’n’tells the bar is not set high, but a new standard of tawdriness was reached at the weekend when an unsavoury young creep called Rupert Patterson- Ward, who is hardly a household name, revealed to the Sun that Chelsea’s much- photographed doctor, Eva Carneiro, had ‘ruined his life’. Eh? Well, it turns out she was a bit feisty. You don’t say, Rupe! But it’s a story that won’t go away: oh bliss.

Ah, José and Eva: like Tristan

The roar of the Premier League is beginning to drown out everything else in sport (there’s

even Friday night football now: anoth-er blissful resting place occupied. Shouldn’t we ring-fence some time — greenbelt-style — that football can’t colonise, say 2 a.m. on a Monday, that’s preserved from football’s end-less development?)

But while there’s a chance, let’s not lose sight of a great Englishman and a great English achievement. This Ashes series has not been a good con-test; they often aren’t. But with his modesty, determination and resil-ience, it has been a personal triumph for the captain Alastair Cook. Not long ago, a chorus of self-appointed cricket ‘legends’ in the media was calling for his head: ‘Bring back KP — Cook out.’ Barely a week went by without the message being rammed home. You don’t hear it so much now, do you?

Cook is a fundamentally decent man who proves that good guys can come first. He is also extremely tough, even if he looks like he’s popped in

and Isolde or Sonny and Cher, these intense relationships can end badly. The Chelsea manager’s issue with Britain’s best-known doc is clearly that she’s too good-looking. José is used to being the most attractive human on the bench at any time: contrast all those Portuguese bruisers with broken noses that he surrounds himself with. Mourinho has managed to turn the entire football world against Chelsea in a week. Well, it saves time.

Couldn’t the Rugby World Cup sign up Dr Eva? Is there a transfer market in doctors? There is clearly a massive feelgood factor around the minxy medic. Who wouldn’t want to see her treating Sam Burgess, though you wouldn’t see him pretending to be injured. Burgess would have winked at Dr Eva and all would have been well.

The athletics World Champion-ships start next week in Beijing. Never can I recall athletics having a lower profile. I grew up in an era of great middle-distance runners and legend-ary sprinters. Now ask anyone in your street to name six athletes. I bet they will struggle. Who is the fastest woman in the world? No one will know. Partly this is because of drug scandals and the vague sense that everyone seems to be bent, partly because the global calen-dar is a mess and partly because very little is being done to involve young people. Sebastian Coe, the new head of world athletics, certainly has a big pile in his in-tray.

Q. How can you tactfully tell someone that the large skin tag or blob they have grown in the centre of their forehead is disfiguring and should be removed? The person involved is a dear cousin who spends all her time do-gooding and thinking of others and is totally unvain. Her boyfriend, who should be the one to tell her, is one of those half-baked hippie types and would consider himself above commenting on anything so transient as ‘appearance’. No doubt he reassures her if she asks whether she should have

it removed, but it is definitely spoiling her looks. — Name withheld, Ludlow

A. Next time you see your cousin gasp in astonishment as though you have just noticed the blob and tell the white lie that by coincidence you have just had an almost identical blob removed from the back of your neck. Make a fuss about how identical your own blob was and how these blobs must run in the family. Do this as an excuse to warm to your theme so you can inform your cousin that they can be painlessly removed in a trice by GPs, with no need to even go to Harley Street. She’s bound to ask why you bothered if it was on the back of your neck, at which point you can answer, ‘Oh I did it for other people, not for myself. I know that lots of people think they look really revolting. You should

definitely have it done for the sake of others. Shall I drive you to the surgery tomorrow to give moral support?’

Q. May I pass on a tip to readers who might easily make the same common mistake I have just made? Six of us were on the train from Glasgow, returning from a week’s holiday in a shared house in Mull. It was very late at night and we were all going to west London, so I ordered a cab on my own account. What I failed to do when booking on the app was to mention the six lots of luggage. When the cab came there was not enough room so one person had to volunteer to go and find his own taxi. The moral is — don’t expect a cab company to assume people arriving in Euston will have luggage: you have to tell them. — M.W., Pewsey

A. Thank you for helping readers to avoid making the same mistake.

Q. I was on holiday in France and a fellow guest borrowed €90 from me when we went shopping in the market of Aix en Provence. I don’t think people should borrow money and forget to give it back. We are not likely to see each other again any time soon, but our mutual host sees her all the time and I feel she should know this woman is flaky and inconsiderate. — C.D., Bruton, Somerset

A. Ring your host and say you want to pay back her friend the €90 you borrowed at the market. Since you’re unlikely to see her, can she give it to her and you will pay her back later? Then quickly scream, ‘OMG, I must be going mad, she borrowed the euros from me!’ Leave the ball in your host’s court.

Spectator Sport Captain Cook proves good guys can triumph Roger Alton

After the last Australian wicket fell, it was telling that Cook rushed to pull out a couple of stumps, which he gave to his young stars

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED


LIFE

ing, like a dead TV alien, from the ceiling.

Explore further, however, and learn what new horrors planning restric-tions can summon in a Victorian pub that has been bought by a fake-revolu-tionary chef expanding, in every sense, too fast. There are metal staircases and crazy art to invoke edge when there is none; Oliver, for all his anti-establish-ment posturing, is a conservative force. Women who feed their children chips through the barbed wire at school know him as their enemy. There are five cramped and sweaty floors of it; a 440-cover restaurant lurks behind the signage. It is a Tardis.

The service is a tribute to Oliver’s TV schtick — chaotic love-bombing. The waiter sprints through the spe-cials, waving his arms, as if conducting antipasti. Presently he brings Jamie’s Ultimate Plank (what to say?) — a small tree held up by two empty tins of tomato puree. It carries a series of mediocre cheeses and meats and sal-ads, selling itself by size, improbability and size again; it is obliviously porno-graphic and I do not want to eat it.

Jamie’s Italian is squeezed into the Devonshire Arms on Denman Street, Soho, borne on the duplic-

itous winds of TV shows and book deals. It’s an odd fit, like a Flump meeting Dante. The Devonshire was a pub at the end of the world, a Vic-torian dystopia made of violence and despair. Now Jamie Oliver — an aghast teenager running to fat even as he declares war on the Turkey Twizzler and the civilisation that wrought it — has sucked it into his empire of Jamie’s Italians (there are 41, from Aberdeen to Gatwick), installed a roof terrace and written ‘Established 2014’ over the door.

At first glance, Jamie has done nothing to the Devonshire Arms. It is still a grim London pub, now struck down with a late-term identity cri-sis. He has not even removed the signs that told the very drunk they were in the Devonshire Arms, rather than New York, or a swimming pool, or hell. There are green leatherette banquettes, brown plastic walls mas-querading as wood panelling and a hideous air-conditioning system hang-

Floored by the plank, so to speak, we progress through the enormous menu; enormous, in menus, usually bespeaks anxiety and, in this case, con-fusion about geography and prove-nance. Oliver likes to place the word ‘Italian’ before dishes that are not Ital-ian, as if wishing it will make them so: there is Crispy Italian-Spiced Duck Leg and, more preposterously, Italian Steak Frites. This is larceny: it reminds my companion of the time the owner of a Milanese trattoria insisted he had invented Sachertorte.

It is boastful too: Our Famous Prawn Linguine. The Ultimate Burg-er. World’s Best Olives on Ice. Award- Winning Pecorino & Chilli Jam. Epic Brownie. This is narcissism. It is like eating a certain kind of journalist.

The pasta is well-seasoned but overcooked; the Crispy Italian-Spiced Duck Leg has never dreamt of Italy, let alone quacked there; the Italian Steak Frites are French Steak Frites.

All this is a hoax inflicted on the clients, who have been enticed away from Pizza Express, where they really wanted to eat, by Oliver’s fame. (Pizza Express is a very good restaurant.) It is a restaurant for Alan Partridges who dare the poisons of Soho and are fleeced for their trouble. It may be in Piccadilly Circus, but spiritually it is a Surrey pub for divorced dads on Sundays; an ‘Italian-Style’ Harvester selling overpriced food that does not know where it is from. (Harvester is not a good restaurant.)

Fennel ‘rubbed’ pork scratchings tell us all — this is a child’s restaurant.

Jamie’s Italian, Denman Street, London W1D 7HW; tel: 020 3376 3391.

Food Jamie in chains Tanya Gold

The Crispy Italian-Spiced Duck Leg has never dreamt of Italy, let alone quacked there

There was a time when my husband, who often addresses the television, would habitually react to Edward Heath’s appearance on the screen with the greeting ‘Hello, sailor.’ Last week, though, the man who was Sir Edward’s principal private secretary during his time as prime minister, Robert Armstrong, now Lord Armstrong, commented on the posthumous accusations against him. ‘You usually detect some sense of sexuality when you are friends or work closely with them,’ he said of political colleagues. ‘I think he was completely asexual.’

Asexual is an anomalous word, combining a Greek prefix,

signifying negation or privation, with an adjective derived from Latin. The word, when it came into use in the 19th century, meant ‘lacking sexual organs’. A derivative, asexualisation, meant ‘castration’ or ‘sterilisation’. It was a popular recourse of the influential eugenics movement.

An advocate of eugenics, much respected at the time, was J. Ewing Mears, who in 1909 published Asexualization as a remedial measure in the relief of

certain forms of mental, moral and physical degeneration. The procedure was suitable for ‘criminals of a certain type who, as a rule, are the subjects of sexual perversions and abnormal indulgences’. If Sir Edward harboured homosexual tendencies he would no doubt have qualified for treatment.

After his death in 1919, Mears was found to have left $60,000 to Harvard for the teaching of eugenics, ‘notably that branch relating to the treatment of the defective and criminal classes by surgical procedures’. As Paul A. Lombardo explained in a learned paper last year, although the

university had eugenic activists on its faculty, it refused the bequest.

Reports of the Mears bequest appeared in May 1927, in the same week as the US Supreme Court decision in the case of Buck vs Bell. The court endorsed the constitutionality of sterilisation laws, in a judgment written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, the son of the humorist and physician. In Dr Lombardo’s opinion, Holmes borrowed arguments directly from Mears. Holmes’s memorable dictum from the case was: ‘Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ That, however, is not a principle ever applied to British politics. — Dot Wordsworth

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Asexual

1 0 8 PA N T RY AT T H E M A RY L E B O N E H O T E L , B U L S T R O D E S T R E E T, L O N D O N W 1 G 8 D N

W E D N E S DAY 3 0 S E P T E M B E R | 7 P. M . £ 1 5 0

STARTERGrilled Selsey lobster, Isle of Skye scallops,

pickled fennel, tarragon

MAINRoast fillet and slow-cooked haunch of Balmoral estate

venison, squash, baby onions, smoked bacon

DESSERTWarm chocolate fondant, black cherry ripple ice cream

CHEESETasting of La Fromagerie cheeses, home-made chutneys.

T O B O O K

W W W. S P E C TAT O R . C O. U K / P E N F O L D S 0 2 0 7 9 6 1 0 2 4 3

Join us on Wednesday 30 September at 108 Pantry at the Marylebone Hotel for an exceptional Penfolds dinner in

the company of head winemaker Peter Gago.

Peter will introduce such treasures as the 100-point 2008 Penfolds Grange, the 1996 Block 42 (from the world’s oldest continuously producing Cabernet vines), plus

back vintages of St Henri and RWT, the 2008 Yattarna Chardonnay (in magnum), the 2010 Reserve Bin A, the

rare Great Grandfather Tawny and more.

Peter Gago is a riveting speaker, his wines are remarkable and this dinner promises to be heavily oversubscribed — so we suggest booking promptly.

Enjoy Penfolds Grange – Australia’s fabled ‘First Growth’ – with Peter Gago

the spectator 22 august 2015

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