The Battle for Britain | 11 December 2021
Society
Thursday
Bridge | 11 December 2021
All the best people play bridge. Stephen Sondheim, who died two weeks ago, was mad about the game. In his memoir Big Deal, the concert pianist and bridge professional Augie Boehm recalls playing with him in a game organised by Alan Truscott, the New York Times’s bridge columnist. Sondheim had at first declined the invitation, fearing the others would be too good for him. As it happened, Truscott and Boehm had recently collaborated on a musical review of bridge songs. When Truscott asked Sondheim if he could send him some lyrics to look at, Sondheim changed his mind about coming. ‘If you have the temerity to send me your lyrics,’
A hidden side of the Somme
Noticing via this Low Life column that I had trench fever, the Western Front Association treated me to a year’s membership and subscription to their excellent quarterly magazine Stand To!. And if that wasn’t enough, they also offered me a place in their contingent at this year’s Service of Remembrance at the Cenotaph — a dream come true. ‘It’ll make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck,’ promised WFA legal trustee Richard Hughes in an email. My torch might be sputtering but my trench fever burns still brightly. ‘Not another book about the first world war!’ says Catriona as she hobbles up the path with yet another
Wednesday
No, the Downing Street party probably didn’t break the law
Was the law broken at the Downing Street Christmas party last year? A video has now been leaked showing a No. 10 advisor joking about the festivities. Yet this incident, which is currently dominating the news, almost certainly did not break the law – which is why the story is so perplexing. During the course of the pandemic, the Covid laws have changed regularly. Yet one thing has stayed largely consistent: the rules have always treated people and places differently. Despite what some might claim, there’s nothing sinister in this. And it’s for this reason that the ‘cheese and wine’ gathering – which the PM has said did not take place –
Tuesday
The Foreign Office isn’t fit for purpose
Now that the dust from the choppers has settled, we are left with two abiding images of the West’s adventure in Afghanistan. The first is an American Chinook hovering over its embassy, rescuing staff in a botched evacuation. This debacle unfolded just weeks after president Biden promised the world there would be no parallel with the fall of Saigon, and ‘no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy’. The second is a plane taking off from Kabul laden with 150 pets. The general success of the war in Afghanistan never came down to British policy. It’s for Washington’s post-mortem to confront the difficult truths about
Fact check: are cycle lanes really making traffic worse?
London is the most congested city in the world and it’s the cycle lanes wot done it. That is the impression you will pick up from the headlines this morning. ‘Cycle Lanes Blamed as City Named Most Congested,’ reads a BBC headline, to take but one example. The story emerges, it turns out, from a global index published by transport consultancy Inrix, which claims that motorists in London spent an average of 148 hours in traffic jams this year, more than in any other country in the world. In the past year, the city climbed from being the 16th most-congested of those studied to the most congested of that lot.
Monday
A war on drugs? I do hope so
I’m not going to lie, I let out a little chuckle — maybe even a murmur of approval — when I read that the government plans to target middle-class drug users. About time, I thought to myself. For too long the so-called ‘war on drugs’ has focused on the poverty-stricken poppy-growers in far-flung fields, or the desperate ‘mules’ who risk life and liberty to get drugs across borders, or the working-class kids in the UK who get caught up in drug-dealing because they feel they have few other prospects in life. And all the while the privileged people whose narcissistic needs motor this industry, whose selfish desire for a synthetic high is
What’s the point of vaccine passports?
What is the purpose of vaccine passports: to keep down infection or to try to persuade more people to get vaccinated by making life for the unvaccinated inconvenient and restricted? Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen wasn’t trying to conceal her intentions when she announced in a press conference on 8 November that vaccine passports would be reintroduced. ‘For all of you who are not vaccinated, it of course becomes more burdensome and that is also how I think it should be,’ she said. ‘In my eyes, there are no excuses to not go out and get vaccinated.’ ‘In my eyes, there are no excuses to not go out and get
Meghan woz right
The Duchess of Sussex’s legal ding-dong with the Mail on Sunday (which published her private correspondence with her father) has been one of those battles where you regret it’s not possible for both sides to lose. But one side did lose, and it deserved to. Meghan was in the right. I half wish she hadn’t been, if only so we didn’t have to read her statement after the court of appeal found in her favour. It managed the peculiar feat of crowing and simpering at the same time: ‘This is a victory not just for me, but for anyone who has ever felt scared to stand up for what’s right.
Sunday
Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and our broken child protection system
The official sentencing remarks on the short life and cruel death of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes begin with this trigger warning from the judge: ‘This is one of the most distressing and disturbing cases with which I have had to deal.’ This week Emma Tustin was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 29 years for the murder of her stepson Arthur last year. Thomas Hughes, her partner and Arthur’s father, was sentenced to 21 years after being found guilty of manslaughter. Both were also convicted on several charges of child cruelty. In his sentencing remarks the judge described their behaviour as ‘cruel and inhuman’. And no wonder. In the space of just three
Saturday
The sinister side of Meghan’s court victory
Reading the Duchess of Sussex’s press release after the Court of Appeal upheld her privacy case against the Mail on Sunday, you might be forgiven for thinking of C.S. Lewis’s Last Battle. Meghan talked of her part in the fight between right and wrong, her brave struggle against ‘deception, intimidation, and calculated attacks’, and how she was taking on a tabloid industry that conditioned people to be cruel, profited from lies and pain, and had now broken the law. Well, up to a point, Duchess. The reality was much drearier. The articles in the Mail on Sunday told no lies, and were more a comment on Meghan’s apparent insistence on
Friday
Why has Shell really decided to ditch the Cambo oil field?
One of the unfortunate side effects of a steeply rising oil price this year is that it seems to have undermined the potential profitability of the Cambo oil field off the Shetlands. Announcing this morning that it was pulling out of the project, in which it had a 30 per cent share, Shell said it had re-examined the figures and ‘concluded the economic case for investment in this project is not strong enough at this time.’ No, it doesn’t make much sense to me, either. If Shell was happy to go ahead with the Cambo project this time last year, when oil was $40 a barrel it is hard to
Thursday
Jimmy Carr’s anti-vaxxer joke isn’t funny
Jimmy Carr was once the smug face of shock comedy. As a stand-up comedian, and a host of various comedy shows, he used to joke with his trademark poker face about looks, disabilities and sexual violence. The Welsh, the Scots and obese women and children were also targets. When controversy inevitably came, Carr stood his ground. He caused uproar in 2009 by joking: ‘Say what you like about those servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re going to have a f**king good Paralympic team in 2012.’ Carr said sorry for that gag, but he insisted: ‘My intention was only to make people laugh.’ Does Carr still hold true to that view? His new special
UK approves new Covid antibody drug
In the face of the Omicron strain, the UK regulator has approved a drug that its manufacturers, GlaxoSmithKline, claim reduces hopsitalisations and deaths by 79 per cent. The MHRA announced this morning that it had given the NHS approval to start administering the Xevudy antibody drug to everyone over 12. The drug has been sanctioned for use in patients with ‘mild or moderate’ Covid who are at risk of developing severe illness. It is the second treatment of its kind to be approved after Roche’s Ronapreve was given the green light in August. Both treatments are ‘monoclonal antibodies’, and work by binding to the spike protein of the virus and
Why is a ‘trans ally’ GP trying to fight the gender wars?
Dr Adrian Harrop, a 31-year-old GP, has been suspended from practising medicine for a month. Harrop, a so-called trans-ally, had conducted a personal crusade online, supposedly to protect trans rights. But woe betide anyone who happened to disagree with him. Harrop called one woman who took a different view ‘a venomous transphobic bigot’. He said her central aim was to ‘demonise trans people’ while ‘excluding them from public life’. In another message, he wrote: ‘Cis people, on the whole, are just awful and there needs to be a massive state-sponsored programme of re-education’. Trans people like me will have to pick up the pieces He condemned women who defend their sex-based rights
Why punish a scientist for defending science?
As a defender of free speech, I sometimes feel like a man falling through a collapsing building. Just when you think you’ve finally reached rock bottom, the floor gives way again. That was my sensation last week when I read about the disciplinary investigation of Professor Garth Cooper by the Royal Society of New Zealand. For background, Professor Cooper is about as eminent as you can get in his field. He is professor of biochemistry and clinical biochemistry at the University of Auckland, where he also leads the Proteomics and Biomedicine Research Group. He’s principal investigator in the Maurice Wilkins Centre of Research Excellence for Molecular Biodiscovery, a member of
Anticolonialists have their myths too
Much is now being made of the evils of empire. As a child of empire I bridle. I acknowledge the wrong and injustices of colonialism, the racism, and the greed too. I accept that a re-balancing of history was due. It’s good that the darker side of the picture has now moved into the light. But from my own boyhood experience I know that mixed among the aims of empire there were also idealism, principle, and a belief in the betterment of those we governed. And success: there were things to be proud of. The roots of my mix of pride and shame about empire are the impressions a white
Will we ever learn to ‘live with the virus’?
Comparing Saturday’s Downing Street press conference to Groundhog Day would insult one of my favourite films. The hilarious, multifarious strategies our cinematic protagonist employs to repeatedly negotiate the same day in February are anything but monotonous. No. 10’s top-down strategies for containing Covid are always the same. That press conference seemed like a cheap Chinese knock-off video of Groundhog Day, one that only shows a clock radio playing ‘I Got You Babe’ at 6 a.m. over and over. Phil Connors never punches Ned Ryerson in the gob. What a shock: the coronavirus has spun off another variant. Battle stations, everyone. The PM warns that Omicron — evocative of an Arnold
‘Prince Charles is more socialist than the Labour party’: an interview with Nigel Kennedy
‘If I needed a guide to go up a mountain, I’d choose someone who knew the way,’ says Nigel Kennedy. ‘So if someone is telling me what to do, they’d better know a little bit more than me.’ In September, Kennedy’s Jimi Hendrix tribute at the Royal Albert Hall was cancelled after organisers Classic FM deemed it ‘unsuitable for our audience’. It still rankles: ‘I reckon I know more about my particular art form than some guy sitting behind his desk,’ says Kennedy, ‘and so I can’t quite take it when people start saying what is classical music and what isn’t. To me, Hendrix’s “Little Wing” is a kind of
Hospital pass: The NHS is on life support
The cabinet meeting this week turned into a surprisingly frank conversation about the National Health Service. Rishi Sunak was asked to give his thoughts on the future of health and social care. He gave a candid assessment of the dangers of being blind to the NHS’s many shortcomings. It’s political blasphemy to criticise the NHS. But once Sunak started, others joined in. Jacob Rees-Mogg added his concerns. Steve Barclay, the new Cabinet Office minister, and Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, also contributed. By the end of the meeting, the ministers had heard each other say out loud what they have long been thinking: that the NHS, as it stands, is