Kremlin crack-up: who’s out to get Putin?

The soldier with the Kalashnikov wasn’t happy. Neither were the hundreds of comrades who had chosen him as the spokesman for their angry complaints as they milled about on a train platform somewhere in Russia. ‘There are 500 of us, we are armed, but we haven’t been assigned to any unit,’ the newly mobilised soldier complained on a video that went viral earlier this month. ‘We’ve been living worse than farm animals for a week… Nobody needs us, we’ve had absolutely no training.’ Other soldiers, most of them masked, chipped in with more grievances. ‘The officers treat us like animals,’ shouted one. ‘We’ve spent a fortune on buying food for ourselves.’

The video – and others like it – was rightly cited in the western press as evidence of the chaos that followed the ‘partial’ mobilisation announced by Vladimir Putin on 21 September. But the video also revealed something much more significant about how defeat in the field is sending cracks running through the ‘power vertical’ over which Putin presides.

Watch carefully and you can see among the ordinary forest-green camouflage army-issue uniforms several of the soldiers wearing more sophisticated kit, marked with the distinctive death’s-head badge of the Wagner private military company. The video was distributed by social media channels associated with Wagner’s founder and public face Yevgeny Prigozhin – a billionaire St Petersburg caterer and businessman better known as Putin’s chef. In other words, this video shows not only discontented soldiers but also a private army engaged in political manoeuvres.

It’s not hard to guess Prigozhin’s agenda in distributing – and possibly orchestrating – the video. The head of Russia’s largest private army is trying to undermine Russia’s beleaguered Minister of Defence, Sergei Shoigu. And Prigozhin is far from alone. Since Ukrainian advances near Kharkiv last month, Shoigu and his generals have come under heavy and public attack from patriotic pro-war bloggers, Wagner-affiliated media and the hawkish Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov and even state-controlled TV. ‘The guilty should be punished [though] we don’t have capital punishment unfortunately,’ the ultra-nationalistic TV host Vladimir Solovyov told his viewers. ‘They don’t even have an officer’s sense of honour because they are not shooting themselves.’ Aleksey Slobedenyuk, who runs a network of Telegram channels for Prigozhin’s patriot media group, was arrested by a squad of paramilitary police, and the footage was widely broadcast by pro-Shoigu media factions.

So far, only Russia’s military command, not Putin himself, have come in for public criticism. But the obvious question is whether, or when, Putin will come into the firing line. The image of the good tsar surrounded by bad advisers is as old as Russian history. But history also shows that military defeat – from the Russo-Japanese war to Afghanistan – rarely ends well for regimes whose corruption and incompetence are brutally exposed by the stress-test of war.

To date, Putin has stayed one step ahead of the rising tide of military humiliation and criticism by constantly escalating the conflict. In response to the collapse of the Kharkiv front, he announced partial mobilisation and ordered hasty referendums in the occupied territories, followed by formal annexation. In response to the partial destruction of the Kerch Bridge, Putin launched more than 100 cruise missiles in two days at mostly civilian targets in more than a dozen Ukrainian cities. In July, Putin dismissively said that: ‘We haven’t even started [fighting] in earnest yet.’ Now, in response to a rising chorus of critics urging the Kremlin to take off the kid gloves, Putin has publicly gone all-in.

But what happens if the Ukrainians keep winning? Putin can continue firing commanders (as he did after the Kerch attack). He can organise some public show trials of alleged Ukrainian ‘Nazis’ from among the unfortunate Azov battalion prisoners taken after the battle of Mariupol. And he could, theoretically, make good on the renewed promise he made last month that he was ‘not bluffing’ about the use of nuclear weapons – though the West has made clear that their conventional response to a nuclear attack would make it a suicide strategy for the Kremlin.

The good news, for Putin, is that 20 years of efficient repression and media control have meant that so far there has been little public resistance to the Ukraine war. On the evening of Putin’s mobilisation call, I saw some 200 people gathered on the Old Arbat for a brave but futile protest that was almost instantly extinguished by riot police who outnumbered the protestors by at least two to one. Two mass exoduses – one following the outbreak of war and another after the 21 September mobilisation – have seen between 500,000 and 700,000 people leave Russia for good. Among them were the bulk of the urban, politically engaged ‘protesting classes’. Currently, as historian Anatol Lieven recently wrote, ‘There is no coherent or organised force in Russian society that could bring about… revolution.’

The main challenge to Putin’s power, then, comes not from the street but from within the regime itself. Putin turned 70 on the eve of the Kerch Bridge attack. Whether rumours of his chronic illness are correct or not (CIA director William Burns said in August that he believed that Putin was ‘far too well’), the debate over Putin’s successor has been at the forefront of the minds of Russia’s top power-brokers for at least three years. In February 2019 the chief Kremlin ideologue Vladislav Surkov dared to publish a long essay discussing what a post-Putin Russia might look like. ‘Putinism’ would outlast Putin himself, Surkov argued, attempting to reassure the ex-KGB men who were Putin’s closest confidants that they had nothing to fear from a transition of power. They were not reassured. It was Surkov rather than Putin who was later shown the door.

Institutionally, the Kremlin has for years been effectively an extension of the Federal Security Service, or FSB. The three most powerful men in Russia today are all current or former FSB chiefs – Putin himself, the Security Council chairman Nikolai Patrushev and the current FSB head Alexander Bortnikov. They met in the Leningrad KGB in the mid-1970s and have known and worked with each other for nearly half a century. Most other top Kremlin mandarins – for instance the Rosneft head Igor Sechin, the foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin and many more – are also drawn from that same tiny Leningrad KGB circle, leavened by a few of Putin’s old friends from his time as deputy mayor of St Petersburg in the 1990s.

For these people, the question of who is eventually chosen to succeed Putin is much less important than who does the choosing. In 2000 Patrushev – newly appointed as head of the FSB by his former subordinate Putin who had just become President – wrote an essay comparing the FSB to Russia’s ‘new nobility’. And over the subsequent 20 years the FSB did indeed proceed not only to take over swaths of Russia’s state and private business but also to appoint their children as ministers and even – just like the aristocracy of tsarist Russia – make dynastic marriages among themselves.

Modern Russia is not just a security state but literally a state that has been taken over by its own security services. Putin is the ultimate decision-maker and arbiter in various disputes between rival factions inside that extended FSB-connected ruling class. And insofar as a ‘collective Putin’ exists, it’s composed of a tiny group of very closely connected, very paranoid old men whose chief goal is to preserve their wealth and power and pass it on to their children and protégés.

So when we consider whether regime change is possible in Russia, what we are really wondering is whether some outside force could ever challenge the rule, not of Putin himself, but of the extended FSB clan that currently holds ultimate political and economic power.

The army has not played a decisive political role in Russia since the aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953, when Marshal Georgy Zhukov effectively pulled off an armed coup by arresting and soon after murdering KGB boss Lavrentiy Beria. Ever since that painful showdown between soldiers and secret police, the KGB and FSB made very sure that Russia’s military had no role in internal security – most recently by creating the Russian National Guard, headed naturally by a former KGB man, Putin’s former body-guard Viktor Zolotov. The silent majority of Russia’s elite – the mid-level bureaucrats, professionals and business-people who have been robbed of their futures and their wealth by the war – are by all accounts collectively horrified by it. Notionally these people represent significant economic and bureaucratic power. But they have no organised political voice and generally have too much to lose to risk rebellion.

So when Kadyrov, Prigozhin and the other heavily armed patriotic critics attack the failed war effort, they are not so much challenging the status quo as jockeying for advantage within it. And they succeed in advancing up the chain of command to positions of greater influence. There are other critical voices – for instance the ultranationalist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, the Orthodox Christian fundamentalist billionaire and TV station owner Konstantin Malofeev, or the novelist-turned-Donbas rebel commander Zakhar Prilepin or former Donetsk People’s Republic defence minister Igor Strelkov – who were once in the nationalist opposition to the Kremlin but now find themselves more or less aligned with the newfound radical nationalism of the Putin regime. All have called for Putin to be more ruthless and aggressive in Ukraine. Strelkov has been a vocal critic of the Russian military’s failures from the start, and last month said that the war is already lost. Such radical nationalists are the true believers, they are armed, and they have spilled blood for their country. And they will not forgive further failure on the front lines.

If the Russian army suffers a serious collapse and the country moves into a revolutionary situation, such nationalist firebrands will be the Kremlin elite’s most dangerous foes. It is much more likely, however, that the FSB clique around Putin will respond to a rising tide of nationalist anger and frustration by becoming more nationalist and authoritarian themselves. They may make Kadyrov defence minister or appoint Prigozhin to a senior ministerial post. But Kadyrov’s and Prigozhin’s ambitions in themselves do not present a fundamental challenge to the power of the ruling FSB clan which controls serious military force, and has a stronghold on Russia’s media and politics.

The power of the extended FSB dwarfs that of any potential challengers except for one: a rising, angry people who feel cheated of victory by their corrupt leaders. That revolution is likely to be as chaotic and ugly as the one which followed Russia’s last catastrophic military defeat in 1917 – and will doubtless begin, as the previous one did, with angry soldiers on remote train platforms railing against the tsar’s corrupt ministers.

Letters: red kites are a menace

Free Kaliningrad

Sir: Mark Galeotti was right to identify the exclave of Kaliningrad as a target for a strong western response to any use by Putin of a nuclear weapon against Ukraine (‘Nuclear options’, 8 October).

Perhaps it should be offered the chance of secession from Russia, not only to avoid destruction, but to secure a better future than Putin or any successor could offer. It was subject to terrible ethnic cleansing after its conquest in the second world war, which rules out its return to Germany. But it could lose its dismal association with Kalinin. Under its historic name of Königsberg, it could revert to its previous status as a Free City – within the EU and as part of Nato’s territory.

The West could offer a handsome payment for all the military facilities and weapons Putin has poured into the place: the personnel could be offered Nato pay and conditions or demobilisation.

Similar attractive offers of a Putin-free future might be made to other parts of his crumbling empire.

Richard Heller

London SE1

The present aggressor

Sir: Peter Hitchens states that ‘Russia is by no means the only European power with an aggressive past’ (Letters, 1 October). Quite. But she is the only European power with an aggressive present.

Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Nick Ridout

Ingham, Lincolnshire

Woolly thinking

Sir: I share Charles Moore’s problem of a low temperature workplace (Notes, 8 October). I have some silk thermals but am keeping them in reserve while remembering the walker’s adage of ‘When your feet get cold, put on a hat’. The Thinsulate hat cost a mere £5. Sometimes visitors ask if I’m protecting myself from woodpeckers.

Patrick Benham-Crosswell

Hucking, Kent

Red kite menace

Sir: Paul Sargeantson is right about red kites (‘Killer in our midst’, 1 October): the birds are a menace. All RSPB members and the public in general should write to the society and copy in their MP, urgently requesting a review of the bird’s protection. My few acres of Oxfordshire have been devastated in just 20 odd years. We have lost virtually all of our songbirds, ground-nesting birds, frogs, toads, snakes: anything that moves. Kites snatch ducklings off the Thames, young hares off the Downs, thrushes and blackbirds off the lawn, clearing the countryside of all small creatures. As for the RSPB calling the kite reintroduction a ‘conservation success story’: total bunkum. The society ignores reality.

Bill Jackson

Goring-on-Thames, south Oxfordshire

Lay off Chesterton

Sir: Sam Leith insinuates that Giorgia Meloni is a Jew-hating fascist because she quoted G.K. Chesterton who, he tells us, was an anti-Semite and admirer of Mussolini (‘The prince of paradox’, 1 October). Undoubtedly, if Meloni had known this she would not have quoted Chesterton. She has said countless times that Mussolini’s 1938 anti-Semitic laws were ‘disgraceful’. She and her party robustly support Israel. The reason she quoted Chesterton is obvious: he was an English conservative like the two figures she quotes frequently and regards as an inspiration for own conservatism: J.R.R. Tolkien and Sir Roger Scruton.

But just how anti-Semitic was Chesterton? He denied it: ‘I am no anti-Semite. I respect and have the deepest regard for Jews, for their wonderful history, for their wonderful faith, and for their remarkably fine qualities, mental and moral’ (1911). ‘I will die defending the last Jew in Europe’ (1933). He was among the first to speak out against Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Sam Leith says Chesterton often talked about ‘the Jewish problem’ and ‘wanted British Jews to be deported to Palestine’. Yes, but not against their will. By ‘the Jewish problem’ he meant the Jews had, rather than were, a problem. He supported the Zionist cause and spent Christmas 1919 in Jerusalem as a guest of Zionists.

As for Mussolini, Chesterton did admire him to start with, like almost everyone outside Italy, including Churchill who called him ‘the Roman genius’. But Sam Leith is wrong about Chesterton ‘refusing to condemn Il Duce’s expedition into Abyssinia’. He was on holiday in 1935 when the invasion occurred and did condemn it on his return. Mussolini, whose main mistress was Jewish until the early 1930s, was not anti-Semitic while Chesterton was alive. He only became so in 1937 after his alliance with Hitler.

Nicholas Farrell

Ravenna

Theroux said it

Sir: Many thanks for Andrew Lycett’s review (Books, 8 October), about my biography of Jan Morris. In the interests of accuracy I would like to point out a mistake. The review states that Jonathan Raban described Morris as ‘looking like Tootsie’. However, it was in fact Paul Theroux who used this description in his travel book The Kingdom by the Sea, as outlined on p.336 of my book Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides.

Paul Clements

Ravenhill, Belfast

Joy of smoking

Sir: Rod Liddle reveals how smoking ‘gave me great pleasure’ (‘Giving up smoking was an absolute doddle’, 8 October). My father, who fought from the beaches of southern Sicily up to Monte Cassino before returning to Europe, often referred to smoking in his letters home. On 29 April 1944, two weeks before the final attack on Cassino, he wrote: ‘I am glad to hear you have posted me a few more cigars Pop… the cigar smoking season is just starting for me. It is unpleasant to smoke a cigar in the rain, but after the evening meal when it is dusk and the sky cloudless, that is the time.’

Keith McLardy

Bristol

Putin should fear those closest to him

I was interested to see that amid the Byzantine intrigues of embattled Conservative panjandrums, two Spice Girls have criticised the government. When the Spices manoeuvre politically, pundits sometimes cite my 1996 interview with the group in which they declared their Thatcherism and opposition to the single European currency. Such is their influence that it could be said they were precursors of Brexit itself, while their phenomenon was prophetic of this century’s Neronian-Trumpian merging of politics and showbusiness.

Anyway, this takes me back to the hilarity of the original encounter. It started when the Spices heralded ‘Girl Power’ and I wrote asking if I could debate Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche with them. To my astonishment, they agreed. I was invited to a diabolical jamboree of howling teenagers – the Smash Hits awards – where backstage I encountered these booted, miniskirted, exuberant potentates in person. Whenever I asked a question, Mel B chanted ‘GIRL POWER!’ as I discussed Hayek with Victoria Adams (as she was then) and Keynesianism with Geri Halliwell. I quickly recognised the fierce political acumen of Geri and Victoria, helmswomen of the movement, who guided the Spiceworld towards the sweet spot where elections are won: centre-right. When Geri declared they were Thatcherites, I realised it was a Clause IV moment; when Victoria expressed Euro-scepticism, I felt the world shake (though it may have been Peter Andre winning Best Singer on stage). When the story hit, Downing Street rang to ask if I could arrange a photoshoot with PM John Major and the Spices outside No. 10 – what impertinence! When I met Tony Blair, soaring towards election triumph, he asked: ‘How can we get the Spice Girls back?’ It looks as if Labour has finally managed it.

I couldn’t beat that Spice Girls interview so I started writing history books about Russia instead. When the USSR started to disintegrate I rushed out to Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine and Azerbaijan in time to see the fall of an empire. I spent time with warlords and presidents – essential for any historian. Whenever I got back to Moscow, I was debriefed by British and American ‘diplomats’ – spooks – who were so ignorant of what was happening outside Moscow that they asked: ‘Did you see any nuclear weapons? Who controlled them?’ If Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons, things would be different now, and it turns out the breakup of the USSR was not as bloodless as we thought.

My first history book, a study of the partnership between Prince Potemkin and Catherine the Great, caught the attention of the Kremlin. Potemkin annexed the Tatar Khanate of Crimea in 1783, then in 1791 southern Ukraine. On publication, I was approached by apparatchiks of the new President Putin. Their boss, they said, was fascinated by Potemkin’s conquests of Crimea and Ukraine. This was 2000.

If Putin loses the war, he will be in danger from those closest to him. Six of the last 12 Romanov tsars died violently: Catherine’s husband, Emperor Peter III, was strangled by her friends the Orlov brothers – though the announcement officially blamed haemorrhoids. When Catherine invited D’Alembert to visit, he refused, joking: ‘I suffer from piles, a dangerous condition in Russia.’ Today, as the Kremlin magnates endure what Russian gangsters call a razborka (takedown), no one mentions ‘haemorrhoids’, but a number of grandees are ‘falling out of windows’.

Talking of tsars, Europe’s last tsar, Simeon of Bulgaria, is this week talking at the Cliveden Literary Festival, which I help organise. After Hitler murdered his father, Boris III, in 1943, Simeon became a child-tsar at the age of six, which makes him the last living leader from the second world war. He was deposed by Stalin in 1946. Fifty years later, Simeon Saxe-Coburg was elected Bulgarian prime minister. Many rulers from history started as elected presidents and then made themselves monarchs, but only two – Simeon and Sihanouk of Cambodia – did the reverse.

On the subject of the Spice Girls and ‘girl power’, the great thing about writing a book about world history told through families is that women are so prominent: from empresses Zenobia, Wu and Iyoba of Benin to Artemisia Gentileschi, Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe – and, yes Thatcher.

Portrait of the Week: the gilt market, Larry the Cat and Iranian protests

Home

The Bank of England warned of a ‘material risk’ to financial stability as it stepped in to buy a wider range of gilts. But markets got the jitters again when Andrew Bailey, its governor, announced to pension funds: ‘You’ve got three days left.’ Kwasi Kwarteng, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, would present his ‘fiscal statement’ to parliament on 31 October, Halloween, not 23 November as originally planned. The Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank said that under current plans, public spending would need to be cut by £60 billion a year by 2026-27 to put the economy on a safe footing. GDP shrank by 0.3 per cent in August. British Cycling announced an eight-year sponsorship deal with the oil company Shell.

King Charles and Queen Camilla are to be crowned at Westminster Abbey on Saturday 6 May. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, bade farewell to his chief of staff, Sam White, and said the party was on an election footing. Conor Burns, who was sacked as a trade minister and had the Conservative whip withdrawn after allegedly touching a man’s thigh in a Conservative party conference hotel bar, said that the action against him offended natural justice. Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National party, said during its conference: ‘I detest the Tories and everything they stand for.’ The Supreme Court considered whether Holyrood could set up a Scottish independence referendum without the agreement of Westminster. The Ministry of Defence said it had detected 1,065 migrants crossing the Channel in small craft on Sunday, bringing the total for the year to 34,672. Dame Angela Lansbury, the actress, died aged 96. Clocks with hands were being replaced by some schools with digital clocks because GCSE candidates could not otherwise tell the time.

Unemployment fell to 3.5 per cent in the three months to August, according to the Office for National Statistics, but the number economically inactive because of long-term sickness hit a record high of nearly 2.5 million. Nurses voted on whether to strike. In England, the number of people testing positive for Covid rose to one in 50 by 24 September (from one in 65 a week earlier) and in Scotland remained at one in 45, according to the ONS. Larry the Downing Street cat chased away a fox.

Abroad

An explosion on the only bridge from Russia to Crimea left railway fuel wagons burning and brought down one carriageway of the road crossing, closing it to heavy vehicles. The attack was recognised to be of strategic and symbolic importance. Russia then struck cities across Ukraine, including Kyiv and Lviv (which suffered 15 hits), with 83 missiles, some fired from the Black Sea and the Caspian, 43 of which were said to have been shot down. Power cuts followed. Further strikes came the next day. ‘Leaving such a crime without a response is just impossible,’ President Vladimir Putin of Russia said of the explosion on the Crimean bridge. Russia had in previous days repeatedly attacked the city of Zaporizhzhia with rockets. Leaders of the G7 met by video link with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and declared: ‘We will continue to provide financial, humanitarian, military, diplomatic and legal support and will stand firmly with Ukraine for as long as it takes.’

Protests across Iran continued, focusing on compulsory headscarves for women. Switzerland discriminates against men in its rules on pension benefits, the European Court of Human Rights found. The Nobel Peace Prize was shared by three recipients: Ales Bialiatski, a Belarusian human rights activist, being held in prison without trial; the Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties; and the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, which was shut down by the authorities this year. Haiti asked for foreign military support to control gangs that have blocked the country’s main fuel terminal at Varreux since last month.

Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, declared a state of emergency over the ‘crisis’ of an influx of more than 17,000 migrants from the southern border since April. A former police officer, Panya Kamrab, rampaged through the town of Uthai Sawan in Thailand armed with a gun and a knife, killing 37, mostly children. At least 69 deaths of children in the Gambia were linked to cough mixture made by an Indian company, Maiden Pharmaceuticals. An explosion killed ten people at a petrol station at Creeslough, Co. Donegal. Mahathir Mohamad, twice prime minister of Malaysia, is to stand for parliament at the age of 97.

China’s great leap backward

This month should have marked the end of Xi Jinping’s time as leader of the Chinese Communist party. The twice-a-decade party congress is being staged in Beijing. It is a grand event at which a new General Secretary is meant to be either nominated (five years in advance) or given power.

But Xi has changed all that. He has sidelined all opposition and is now settling down to his 11th year in office – fully intent on ruling for life. The world’s second-largest economy will therefore this weekend be reconfirmed as an outright dictatorship.

Ten years ago there was a fatal car crash in Beijing involving a Ferrari driven by the son of Ling Jihua, chief of staff to the then president Hu Jintao. Ling Jr and two female companions were found in the wreckage, all of them reportedly naked. Young Ling died and the women were injured. The question was asked how the 23-year-old, whose parents both worked for the CCP, could afford such a car. Xi, who was by then Hu’s successor-in–waiting, used the accident to spearhead an ‘anti-corruption’ drive which turned into a ruthless purge.

Before Xi’s leadership, the CCP had operated under certain limits that were imposed after the carnage of Mao’s dictatorship. Leaders were not allowed to become too powerful and were constrained by ten-year limits. There would be other power-brokers, including Bo Xilai, one of Xi’s main targets, who had developed a new model of governing in Chongqing. Factions included the ‘Shanghai Clique’ of Jiang Zemin, who led China in the 1990s, and the ‘tuanpai’, Communist Youth League, a faction of Hu Jintao, which dominated the 2000s.

At first, Xi looked set to be another Hu or Jiang – lining his allies’ pockets when he was in power while preparing to move over when the time came. But a communist system with no proper checks and balances is wide open to manipulation – there was always the possibility that dictatorial power might return. Xi’s ‘anti-corruption’ drive purged, cowed or sidelined anyone who might have opposed him. In this way, the one-party state became a one-man regime.

China is now living with the consequences of Xi’s mistakes and paranoia. The zero-Covid policy has trapped 1.4 billion people in a series of stop-start lockdowns. The borders have been closed to most foreigners since the Wuhan lockdown. Many foreign investors and other westerners who lived there pre-lockdown have fled. If the economy grows at all this year, it will be at the slowest rate in 30 years. China is shutting up shop, as Xi’s insularity replaces the more global–minded approach of his predecessors.

This has huge implications. The last four decades – during which China opened up and power changed hands – saw the country transformed from a poor backwater to one that seemed destined to overtake America as the world’s largest economic force. The number of Chinese living in absolute poverty fell from 88 per cent to under 0.5 per cent. Cities were transformed. Universities flourished. It was still a repressive one-party state: dissidents like Liu Xiaobo were persecuted, and with the beginnings of social media came an increase in censorship. But Hu’s promise of a ‘peaceful rise’ – the idea that China could reach superpower status without antagonising the world – seemed plausible.

Xi has replaced this approach with a ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ which has badly backfired. America regards China as a threat. Chinese tech firms are routinely barred by western governments due to Beijing’s attempts to use them as weapons of influence. The Belt and Road Initiative – Xi’s bid for global dominion by sponsoring infrastructure projects in 150 countries – is imploding. Most of the foreign governments which banked Xi’s $1 trillion in loans are in financial distress. Xi has an empire of debt, not influence.

Perhaps most seriously of all, Xi has failed to defuse China’s population time bomb. He abolished the one-child policy, wrongly thinking that the state could expand family sizes by diktat. But far too many Chinese are living in an inverted-pyramid family structure, in which one grown-up child supports two elderly parents. China’s working-age population is in fast decline. That means it is unlikely to overtake the US economy, as was once predicted.

Gone are the days when China’s General–Secretary governed as the ‘first among equals’ with the others on the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee. It is strange to consider that senior Communists once had veto power over their leader. Ahead of the big party congress, even banks have been warned not to discuss anything political in research notes – such as, for instance, the chances of a Lehman-style collapse among China’s mortgage lenders.

Instead of debating China’s future, the CCP has resurrected the apparatus of the Mao-era personality cult. Chinese state media now refer to Xi not as President but ‘the People’s Leader’. A new 16-part TV series, The Navigator, offers to tell viewers how ‘Xi Jinping’s rich experience, big picture view and broad-mindedness have quickly distilled into great wisdom and knowledge’. Echoes of Mao’s self-portrait as the ‘Great Helmsman’ are chillingly obvious.

Few inside China dare to point out that the Mao experiment failed. For the CCP to try to repeat even a part of it now represents a calamitous leap backwards – for China and the world.

Apocalypse chic: Autechre, Last Days and Southbank’s Xenakis day reviewed

It was so dark, my friend noted, you could have had sex or done a Hitler salute. No stage lights, no stair lights, no desk lights, no door lights, no usher lights, no exit signs. The few wisps of illumination that did steal in created colossal shadows, giants freeze-framed on the walls. In these snatches the wooden ribcage interior of the Barbican Hall looked demonic.

A few photons lit up the Autechre boys, Rob Brown and Sean Booth, who flickered like blue flames rising from a hob. A few more nudged into view the ceiling that had become a vast charcoal grisaille. When, occasionally, someone left, the tiny glowing portal that appeared made it feel as though we were at the bottom of a cavernous well.

The barrage of doofs, thwangs, skwrshy-sweeshes of Autechre’s super-processed electronics also suggested we’d been plunged somewhere vast and inhospitable. The Kuiper Belt, possibly. Or the basement of a rusty old steelworks, perhaps, that a baby divinity had found and was hurling about its head. With the help of a beat, the set settled and landed on a groove. A friendly riff took hold. A tasteful clangor descended. The Autechre machine whirred into autopilot, cycling through agreeable, glinting abstractions. My head rocked dumbly. My mind drifted. Was anyone having sex?

It’s one thing to sit in the pitch black feeling like you’re navigating outer space, buffeted by solar winds and ice rock. It’s quite another to be doing this while vibing politely among a sea of IDM dads.

Much more startling was the latest show from Balenciaga’s creative director Demna Gvasalia, which seemed to be one of the most dystopian Gesamtkunstwerks the web had witnessed. Models in floor-length leather dresses trudged angrily through thick slushy mud looking as though they’d forgotten their coats at the Somme. Apocalypse chic.

Balenciaga were the costume designers for a new operatic reworking of a Gus Van Sant film at the Linbury Theatre, Last Days, that also inhabited a doomer aesthetic, wallowing in the hallucinations and visitations of damaged rocker Blake – a grunting blank: part Kurt Cobain, part Kevin from Harry Enfield – whose slow demise in the woods we track.

Behind the adaptation were two masters of entropy. Composer Oliver Leith makes music that I think of as being like a dropped ice cream: sweet muck that seductively liquefies and curdles and calls forth bugs and bees. The opera’s librettist and creative director was artist Matt Copson, whose most recent work was an irresistible animated opera, drawn in lasers, starring a suicidal baby the size of a house. French starlet Agathe Rousselle played the mentally mangled Blake, around whom various strays begin to orbit.

The highlight came in a gloriously messy sextet, in which a Mormon couple electrify Blake’s torpid hut, injecting it with hymnal vigour and uplift, then succumb, over a Purcellian ground, to the glamorous squalor. Later when Blake’s agent calls we hear a cattle-ranch auctioneer rap his price list down the receiver. We could have had more of this weirdness. Whenever Leith and Copson mined the mischievous edges of their imagination, the work took off.

But punches were pulled. Commonplaces and unsubtleties crept in. And much of the formal potential of the found sounds and central deliquescence was squandered. On paper there are few artists I’d rather deliquesce with more than this lot. And Leith never failed to dangle down something sparkly when needed: refreshing little eddies of sound from steel drums or broken bottles, exquisitely conjured up by George Barton. But artists of this quality should make more of the radical possibilities of opera.

Xenakis offers lessons. Just listen to the opening of his eye-watering work for percussion Pléïades. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Colin Currie Group pummelled, in unison, a single note on the sixxen, an instrument invented by Xenakis made of thick metal bars, that transports you to the centre of an infernal building site. This was opera: offensive, intoxicating, jaw-droppingly dumb, exhilaratingly joyous, deafening, possibly the loudest acoustic sound I’d ever encountered – louder even than Autechre’s stacks of amps at the Barbican. Not just loud, though. Rich and dense, too, generating a thick acidic haze of opalescent harmonics, a microtonal mushroom cloud that hovered over the base metal sound. My ears were full and about to be sick.

Almost everything Xenakis wrote was always both highly mathematical and shockingly immediate. He was a paleo-modernist: raw, muscular, lithe, thrilling. In his trio Ikhoor, we big-dipper our way over the strings of the astonishing JACK Quartet. In Thalleïn, the London Sinfonietta is Oskar Schlemmered, transformed into a kinetic theatre of outlandish ogees and parabolas. It’s insane that we hide these jewels of music in study days. They should be aired on prime-time. The industrial thwacks of Pléïades should usher in the New Year. A more fitting anthem, for growth, for end times (choose your fighter), is hard to imagine.

The death of the pop star

The definition of ‘pop star’ in the Collins English Dictionary is unambiguous: ‘A famous singer or musician who performs pop music.’ Well, that seems fairly self-explanatory, doesn’t it? It also seems way wide of the mark, because being a pop star (or a rock star, its longer-haired cousin) encompasses a great deal more than being famous for singing pop songs. As Nik Cohn wrote, describing the first flush of idols of the rock’n’roll age, they were ‘maniacs, wild men with pianos and guitars who would have been laughing stocks in any earlier generation… They were energetic, basic, outrageous. They were huge personalities and they used music like a battering ram.’

Or consider this line from David Hepworth, about Ian Stewart – who helped found the Rolling Stones, and was then dumped by them for not looking the part. ‘He could never have been a rock star for the same simple reason that the rest of us aren’t rock stars. Because we can imagine not being one.’

All this came to mind watching Brett Morgen’s film Moonage Daydream, about David Bowie, for if anyone encompasses the concept of the pop star, it is Bowie. He would have been a laughing stock in any earlier generation. He was energetic and outrageous (if not basic). He had a huge personality and used music like a battering ram. And very few of us could imagine being him. Oh, and he was a famous singer or musician who performed pop music. But where are the pop stars now?

Maybe pop stars have gone for ever – the pair of words has become meaningless, used to describe anyone who happens to make pop music (this time last year I went to the London headline show of an artist described in one daily newspaper as ‘the breakout pop star of the summer’; there were maybe 40 people there. I don’t think that person could accurately be described as either a breakout or a pop star).

There are people who should be pop stars. Charli XCX certainly exists like one, without ever quite achieving the monstrous worldwide fame that should surely be a prerequisite of actual stardom. Matty Healy of the 1975 both talks the talk and walks the walk, but his band still seem to be a huge niche concern, rather than globe-straddling titans of pop.

True pop stars – people who are recognised by people in all age ranges, who can get into newspapers without really having done anything, who live lives unimaginable to the rest of us and who continue to command loyal audiences – are few and far between: Beyoncé, Rihanna, Harry Styles, the members of the K-Pop band BTS, Taylor Swift, perhaps some of the post-Disney stars such as Ariana Grande, but not many others.

Contrast this with the days of, say, Band Aid, and imagine getting that many people in one room, almost all of whom could legitimately be called pop stars. It just wouldn’t happen. It just couldn’t happen, because those people no longer exist.

Part of this is a matter of metrics. Can you even be a star if no one knows how successful you are? A decade or so ago, I tried to write a piece about how the music industry was measuring success. I couldn’t, because no matter who I spoke to – managers, artists, publishers, label bosses – no one knew how to measure success any longer. The charts – the official measurement for those of us who remember music before downloading and streaming – are now all but meaningless, easy to manipulate (look at the number of groups who mobilise their fans to get their album to No. 1 in the week of release, only for it to plummet the next week), or with singles charts subject to the vagaries of multiple tracks from one album cropping up simultaneously.

Streaming figures don’t help much, because they measure only the popularity of a particular song. Live attendances are no guide, because the biggest live shows – with a few exceptions – tend to be old artists playing the hits of decades ago. Many record company talent scouts now choose to hunt new artists in data rather than at gigs in the backrooms of pubs – looking at social media follower numbers, and momentum on streaming platforms. This highlights another problem. Nascent pop stars aren’t competing with each other so much as trying to grab some attention from those drawn to Instagram influencers, YouTubers or TikTokkers.

That need for a constant presence on social media – something artists have started to complain about – has also destroyed the alienness of pop stars. Over the past decade or so, relatability has become far more important than exceptionalism – someone who tells you what they had for breakfast, and makes everyday observations about the world, is unlikely to turn themselves into the new Bowie or Bryan Ferry, or even the new Simon Le Bon.

And relatability signals vulnerability. These days, musicians’ behaviour and statements are scanned – for signs of being a wrong’un, for mental health problems, for anything wrong. Were a musician today to behave publicly as Bowie did in the mid-1970s, for example – starving himself by living off cocaine, milk and peppers, keeping his urine in the fridge, giving Nazi salutes at Victoria station – Twitter would be awash with people wanting them to seek help and sort themselves out.

But the main reason for the disappearance of pop stars, in the UK at least, is a functional one. We have lost the principal means of dissemination of information about them: Top of the Pops. If you look on Twitter on a Friday evening, you are very likely to see some half-forgotten star of the past trending, and that’s because a chunk of people are watching a repeat of TOTP on BBC4 and are reliving their past. In the days of Top of the Pops, the simple fact of the entire family seeing the biggest pop stars of that week in one place meant we shared a language about popular culture. No longer, alas.

It lessens the gaiety of nations to be without pop stars, those ridiculous peacocks with their will to musical power. Rather one Brian Connolly of the Sweet, or one Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran, than a thousand drearily earnest young singers talking about their self-esteem problems. Pop stars made us feel that they were too large for this humdrum existence, and that by taking us with them, we could become large too – we could be heroes, just for one day. Now they want to be the same as us, and where’s the fun in that?

Ravishing, daring biopic of Emily Brontë: Emily reviewed

The life of Emily Brontë is an enduring object of fascination. So small, the life, so sparse, so limited. Yet it delivered those magnificent poems and Wuthering Heights. How could this be? Genius, I suppose, paired with a vivid interior life. But as neither of those are cinematic, Emily imagines what could have led her to write as she did. It’s a ‘speculative biopic’, and modern, but there’s no Billie Eilish on the soundtrack or breaking of the fourth wall or jokey intertitles or any of those larks, which is a mighty relief. Instead, it’s daring, and ravishing. If you’d asked me if Emily might have ever tried opium, or had a passionate affair with a sexy curate, I’d have laughed in your face. But here I absolutely bought it.

It’s actor Frances O’Connor’s first time behind the camera yet there is nothing tentative about this film. Emma Mackey, from Sex Education, stars as Emily, turning in a performance so ferocious it will put you in mind of Florence Pugh in her breakout film, Lady Macbeth. It has that same raw, powerful energy. The film opens with Emily, who died at 30, on her deathbed as her younger sister, Anne (Amelia Gething), is asking her: ‘How did you write it? How did you write Wuthering Heights? It’s an ugly book and base and full of selfish people.’ ‘Good,’ replies Emily. Anne doesn’t much figure in the film after this, but then Anne never much figures. (Poor Anne.)

We spool back in time to when the parsonage at Haworth was populated by Emily, Anne, Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), their father (Adrian Dunbar) and their aunt (Gemma Jones). Emily is the weirdest of the weird sisters, known in the village as ‘the strange one’. She’s a loner. She doesn’t mix. She feels alienated from her family but finds solace with them. She travels to Brussels, when it’s thought she will be a teacher, but almost immediately returns home. That’s as far she gets. Brussels. ‘I’m an odd fish,’ she says. ‘Take me away and I fade away.’ But she has her imagination, and the stories she makes up with her sisters – although Charlotte thinks they are too old for that now – and she has the moors, where she can run wild, sometimes as rain pours and thunder claps and the violin soundtrack by Abel Korzeniowski goes berserk. The film has madly Gothic moments, of course.

Emily is closest to her brother, Branwell, who is always disgracing the family, one way or another. But he has the firmest grasp on what makes his sister tick, and how they are both restricted by convention. She discovers his opium stash and has a try. She is dispatched to fetch him from the pub and returns drunk herself. This sounds insane on paper – Emily Brontë, drunk! And high! – but set within the film’s internal logic it makes sense. She also falls passionately for William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a curate, but they are doomed, plus there is one of those letters that is read too late. Emily learns that love can be cruel, and violent, and vengeful, which will all be poured into the book Anne hates.

This is presented as a series of vignettes, filmed mostly in natural light and with hand-held cameras so, while the times may have been constrained, the characters aren’t. There are some deliciously beautiful visual moments as well as some funny ones. (Emily bakes a very bad cake at one point.) And Mackey is superb, able to convey her bafflement at the world, as well as her deep attachment to it, with just a flicker of an eye or the set of her jaw. It is one of those films that is better than anyone can ever make it sound.

Mirthless, artless farrago of jabber: The Doctor, at Duke of York’s, reviewed

The Doctor is an acclaimed drama from the pen of writer-director Robert Icke. We’re in a hospital run by a famous medic, Dr Ruth, whom the Cockney characters call ‘Dr Roof’. Two major problems beset Dr Roof who has to raise funds for a new private wing while grappling with her partner’s early-onset dementia. A Catholic priest barges in and demands to visit a dying patient. Dr Roof refuses. Then she punches him in the face to prove who’s boss. Her ill-advised left hook plunges the hospital into crisis, and the senior staff gather in the boardroom to sort out the mess created by Dr Roof’s violent temper. All the doctors wear white coats, like pantomime boffins, which seems an unlikely costume nowadays. And it’s hard to tell if this is a real or a fictional clinic. It doesn’t look like a TV hospital because the medics aren’t attractive enough, and it doesn’t look like a genuine hospital because the medics aren’t fat enough.

There’s another impediment to the play’s intelligibility: most of the characters have an alter ego. Dr Brian, for example, is a black female who identifies as a white male. Dr Roger suffers from the same delusion. A woman called Sami, once a man, dresses and talks like a teenage girl. An Asian MP played by Preeya Kalidas poses as an Anglo-Saxon female called Jemima. And an actor with a Jewish name, Daniel Rabin, plays a character called Dr Murphy who may be Irish and a woman. Or a giraffe perhaps. This show isn’t afraid of springing surprises. Incidentally, the priest thumped by Dr Roof asserts that he’s black although a white actor takes the role. And when we move to Dr Roof’s home we meet her lover, Charlie, who appears to be an Afro-Caribbean lesbian (although she may turn out to be a non-binary Egyptian scaffolder called Dennis).

Eventually it becomes clear that this pick-and-mix of ethnicities and genders is a joke aimed at identity politics. But the joke doesn’t stretch to the plot which revolves around conspiracies based on racial and sexual alliances. The characters constantly declare their gender, their ethnic background and their religion as they bicker and screech in the boardroom. And they divide up into factions determined by skin colour or faith. No one cares about medical ability. What a hellish place to work. Every figure on stage is an angry quarrelsome bigot. Juliet Stevenson brings some traces of warmth and softness to Dr Roof but none of the other players can match her.

In Act Two, the story shifts to a current affairs programme, Take the Debate, in which Dr Roof faces a panel of experts who plainly despise her. It’s unclear why she agreed to be grilled in public by these nasty bullies, and the scene merely regurgitates the chippy, malevolent dialogue of Act One.

Things cool off in the final half-hour as Dr Roof has a chat about euthanasia with the black priest whom she assaulted in scene one. (The black priest, by the way, is still white.) But the issue of euthanasia has no connection with the plot about the religious rights of dying patients. What a mirthless, artless farrago of jabber this is. How did it happen? Don’t blame Icke, the scribbler. He’s an innocent victim. The fault lies with the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam which awarded him the title ‘Ibsen Artist in Residence’. No writer could survive such a burden and the poor chap simply collapsed under the weight of expectation.

A brand new theatre has opened in a university building near Regent’s Park. The first show, Dmitry, is based on a drama left unfinished by Friedrich Schiller at his death in 1805. Peter Oswald has turned it into a swaggering Shakespearean history play. We’re in Russia in the early 17th century where the reign of Boris Godunov is threatened by Dmitry who claims to be the son of Ivan the Terrible and therefore the rightful heir. But is he an imposter? His mother, the former tsarina, affirms that Dmitry is her long-lost child but she may be fibbing to save her skin.

This is a grand, dense, exhilarating show. Weighty themes. Plenty of battles and violence. A plot crowded with stunts and reversals of fortune. Perhaps, in the second half, the rhythmic parade of dramatic surprises becomes a little predictable. And the venue feels very strange because the panelled walls and squashy blue seats remind you that you’re in a lecture hall rather than the heart of Russia. This is a reasonable debut if not a great one. The venue is a long way from theatreland, so play-goers must break new ground to find it. To put it on the map, the owners should produce a show led by a household name. Stars are expensive but they’re not a luxury. They’re an essential purchase.

How politics killed theatre

Hope can be remarkably persistent. And so, despite several years of experience pointing in starkly the other direction, a recent weekend saw me at Who Killed My Father at the Young Vic, the latest from ubiquitous Belgian director Ivo van Hove. A young friend had gone with his father the previous week and both described it as ‘excellent’. Intense, but in a good way. Worthy broadsheet publications gave it four stars.

I had my doubts: Édouard Louis, on whose angry memoir about growing up in a working-class, homophobic home in northern France the play was based, is not my cup of tea. But the friend, and his father, are both intelligent and well versed in theatre, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I should give it a chance; that it might have interesting things to say about masculinity and father-son relationships and France, and maybe even class.

It didn’t. It was, in fact, a crudely disjointed, simple play: first a dull exegesis of a loutish father’s failings, and then a predictable rant at the allegedly cruel French state, which, we were instructed at great length, was to blame for the father’s decline after an accident in the factory he worked at badly damaged his back. My favourite in Louis’s litany of French cruelties was the stopping of free digestion pills. Why we would lament this loathsome man’s descent into colonic discomfort (contra the title, he does not die) wasn’t clear.

Towards the end, as the Louis character, played by an exhausted-seeming Hans Kesting, began yelling out the names of the true ‘criminals’ – Macron, Chirac, Sarkozy – I began looking round for fellow audience members to smirk with. Nothing. At its close, instead of the lukewarm applause and shaking of heads I was expecting, the audience got to their feet for an ovation. The largely young crowd had – like many reviewers – clearly found it compelling.

As after so many nights at the theatre since Covid, I walked from the theatre relieved to be outside, away from the dullness, the unoriginality, the noise, the embarrassment of what theatre has become.

There have always been bad plays in London, but it was usually because they were boring, or badly acted, or too experimental for their own good. The badness has changed, and where it was shlocky before, it has become sinister. The light has gone out. Creativity, the free play of ideas, the grasping at interesting histories, weirdness, grossness, hilarity, daring, humour, extremity and experimentation – all the stuff that used to delight and provoke – have shrivelled up and been replaced by one mean axis: right or wrong.

Plays have become ‘political’, not in a plot or character-driven way, but in a narrow, literal way that must either be chokingly woke, or ‘bravely’ anti-woke. They self-consciously pursue either pluckiness or rectitude, dispensing with the idea of drama, acting, or even having a stage at all. Why bother with any of that when everything is meant to be a parade of diverse people reading angry screeds penned by activists – or, in rare instances, rebuttals of those screeds?

The reason for all this, at least superficially, is obvious: the enthusiastic take-up by arts institutions of identity politics. It’s not enough that hiring policy should address diversity, and that toilets should (uncomfortably and unpopularly) reflect the latest trans demands. It’s that every single thing to do with output – including the content of the plays themselves, new and old – should reinforce diversity ideology by exposing all the ‘isms’ of the present and past. This is a totalising project: no drama or subject is immune, which is why the National’s version of Wuthering Heights, directed by Emma Rice, was a painful rant about racism, and why the Globe’s take on Joan of Arc, I, Joan, began with a prologue stating Joan was a ‘them’ and ‘trans’. It’s why the West End can put on a ‘feminist’ Pride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth tells Mr Collins to eff off, and the Old Vic’s hip-hop musical take on Sylvia Pankhurst was as much about its all-black cast as the campaign for the vote.

Mark Lawson, the theatre critic and former Front Row presenter, blames ‘a series of events – the killing of George Floyd, the climate crisis, #MeToo [which] led to individuals and institutions feeling the need to declare where they stood on these and other issues, with a clearly signalled right or virtuous side. This was mildly irritating when these position statements were merely appearing on theatre websites or in interviews with actors and writers. But this instinct became catastrophic once it spread to the plays being staged.’ Lawson bemoans the rise of the ‘epilogue play… in which a final speech tells the audience what to think and rebukes those who have other thoughts’.

An example of this was Marys Seacole at the Donmar, which I sat through, in pain, with Lawson. At the close of the largely chaotic, shrill account of the allegedly neglected historical figure of the Jamaican nurse who tended to soldiers in the Crimean War, the audience was subjected to a furious diatribe, in which it was, by dint of being in the UK and largely white, accused of being racist and colonialist.

There is also the problem of ‘prologue’ plays. As well as espousing bewildering gender theory, the prologue of I, Joan at the Globe declared that the more than 400-plus plays about ‘them’ (Joan) were wrong because they were written by men. ‘This is simply historically wrong and arrogantly suggests that a novice playwright is superior to Shaw, Schiller and others,’ notes Lawson.

Dramatically, the result of all this earnest didacticism is an obviousness problem. As the citizens of the former Soviet Union could tell you, being choked to death on orthodoxy, or forced to rebel against it, is not good for the original presentation of ideas. Everything becomes a statement of or insistence on the obvious, either for or against. So even when the alternative position is taken – against woke or against Marxism-Leninism – it’s still boring. Eureka Day at the Old Vic is a play about vaccinations that skewers progressive Californians, and has been hailed as a strike against wokeness. But can’t we have something that is neither a strike for or against wokeness? Can we return to the days of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, or even The Lehman Trilogy, by Stefano Massini, the last truly epic play to be staged in London?

It doesn’t look likely. And meanwhile, the art of acting itself may also be going down the drain. Delivery has become terribly earnest. Actors shout, speak stridently, or yell. There are lots of hand gestures, lots of hands on hips, lots of huffy striding. This may be because scripts have been stripped to not far off primary-school level but with expletives. Intellectual dumbing-down causes a flattening of language: just ask those who suffered under the tiresome repetitions of communism. But how wearying it is to hear Cathy in Wuthering Heights, Cinderella (in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, which shut early) and Elizabeth Bennet reduced to yelling, stomping and swear words.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of the collapse of British theatre is the way audiences and critics are not only accepting, but embracing crude polemic and rehashed news in place of proper drama. Indoctrination has been depressingly thorough, and since most of those who find an evening of woke propaganda unpleasant have now fled the theatres, those who remain are unlikely to kick up a fuss. Even plays trying to self-consciously challenge theatrical groupthink are mired in it – and enthusiastically received by those who should know better.

On at the Royal Court is Jews. In Their Own Words, penned by the august Jonathan Freedland, which tries to skewer the anti-Semitism of the left. The way it does this, amazingly, is by exclusively allowing left-wing Jews to speak, and by walking us through the Corbynite anti-Semitism scandal: the longest section is a redux of Luciana Berger recounting her ordeal in the final days of her membership of the party. It may have been true, but it was not theatre.

Spectator competition winners: short stories entitled ‘The Queue’

In Competition No. 3270, you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The Queue’.

As well as inspiring this challenge, the queue to file past the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II during her lying-in-state in Westminster Hall spawned countless jokes and memes, obsessed crowd psychologists and became the top trending topic on Twitter. It now has its own Wikipedia entry.

Commendations go to Paul D. Amer and Paul Freeman; the winners earn £25 each.

Alone, Dmitri hobbled to join the queue, his arthritic bones aching and his aged eyes tearful. He could see only the shuffling throng ahead of him. The Mausoleum was still out of sight. Two, three, four hours, who knew? All Dmitri knew was that he had to pay personal homage to a great man who had led the nation in peace and war. Powerful emotions mingled in the old man’s mind till they demanded expression. He touched the sleeve of the man in front of him and poured out his admiration, pride and sorrow. ‘Stalin? No, you’re wrong, comrade –’ Dmitri was shocked. Was the man an enemy of the people, a Trotskyite or worse? ‘This is the banana queue.’ Dmitri mentally weighed the choice, then decided to stay put. It was a long time since he had seen a banana, and after all Stalin wasn’t going anywhere. Basil Ransome-Davies

‘So, this is a queue,’ said Alice. ‘I never thought to see one. It is well named, for it is just like the mouse’s tail.’ ‘Move along, if you wants a place!’ grunted someone. Alice found a Pig-Policeman right behind her. ‘Please,’ said Alice, ‘what are they waiting for?’ ‘Why, Miss, to get to the very end, of course,’ said the Pig-Policeman. ‘But for what reason?’ asked Alice. ‘What is the very end?’ ‘The reason is,’ said the Pig-Policeman, ‘they don’t want to miss nothing. And what is the very end? Search me!’ ‘I shall ask one of them,’ said Alice. ‘There’s no sort of use in asking,’ said the Pig-Policeman. ‘None of them knows neither. Now, Miss, if you wants a place…’ ‘Certainly not!’ said Alice. ‘I think I dislike queues more than anything!’ ‘Very well, Miss!’ said the Pig-Policeman. ‘But remember – you might miss something!’ Ralph Rochester

By the last day we seemed to have been in the queue all our lives. Singing and picnic-sharing had curdled into silent pilgrimage. People were reluctant to hold places for loo breaks, and a pair of queue-jumpers were dragged back to luggage drop. At Swarovski, where two single files started, I slipped into the left channel. My wife came alongside, and a strip of black nylon webbing separated us. ‘See you the other side of security, darling.’ The mazes spiralled us apart. As I dropped our water bottles into the bin, I saw her taking off her belt and shoes at a distant station. I undressed into the beige trays and stood naked for judgment as the posters instructed. A guard waved me through. ‘You self-assessed at Swarovski so you’re good to go. Down the ramp.’ Doors swished: a zing of brimstone cut through the oily smog of duty-free perfume. Nick MacKinnon

Tuesday week: Armageddon. A miraculously operational telephone receiver swings off the hook, a final call placed to the final Help Line by the last, now fatally irradiated, caller. There is an answer. ‘Your call is important to us and all our advisors are busy. Your call is at position 704,489,597, progressing inexorably if at unpredictable speed towards an interaction. Please have your five memorised passwords, the maiden name of your grandmother and the name of your least favourite geography teacher ready for required security checks. Reflect that those in front of you in the queue do not have to hand all, some or any of these details, slowing the queue in which you currently occupy position 704,489,957. Your call is important to us as all calls are important to us, the net effect being the sense of unimportance you are experiencing, for which we apologise while insisting we can help.’ Adrian Fry

We’re toeing the line when we line up, and we’re queuing expertly on cue. We line up for the goals we imagine, and we queue as if dreams might come true. We’re here for the line that can lead us to the queue for the place we should be to line up for conquest and power, and to queue with the will to be free. We line up in not strictly straight lines, and our queues aren’t as queer as some folk. We’re lined up for the queue to the line where we’ll queue to be in on the joke. We’re lined up for more of the same old, and we’re queuing to learn some new tricks. We’re lined up for serious matters, and we’re in this queue just for the kicks. We each got in line for a birthplace, and we’ll queue in due time at the Styx. Chris O’Carroll

It would take about 14 hours, according to the man giving out the coloured armbands for the lying-in-state, but she had come a long way and she needed to get at least close to the woman who had been there all her life. Her daughter had brought her down to London but had left on business of her own. She moved easily with the queue, gathered that the nearby group of fellow-queuers had come from Wolverhampton, and had a dim memory of having been there once. Some kind of formal dinner? The night passed, the queue thinned, and she wondered briefly why Constitution Hill was on the route. The need to stand near the draped coffin seemed less urgent now as she continued onwards and upwards, as if leaving London behind. The sun got ever brighter and to Elizabeth the ascent seemed to last into eternity. ‘Welcome,’ said the voice. Brian Murdoch

No. 3273: answering back

Anthony Hecht wrote ‘The Dover Bitch’ in response to Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. You are invited to supply a poem addressing a well-known poem of your choice (please specify). Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator by midday
on 26 October.

The Battle for Britain | 15 October 2022

2577: Light and dark

The unclued lights (three of two words, one of which has an apostrophe) are of two kinds.

Across

6 Eat away with genial wraith oddly (4,2)

12 Antibiotic disguised in nice pill (10)

14 He raises stock for reactor (7)

15 Second chapter on king and almost utterly mad literary character (4,6)

16 Medic enters to look round for old blunderbuss (7)

20 A country’s birds (4)

22 Intestinal trouble in Crete (7)

23 Cheat’s disappointment (4)

26 Currency of the red or blues distributed (7)

30 Runs by Hassett regularly upset old emperor (4)

31 Rough cowl on chimney in Portree (7)

34 Key that’s silver every so often (4)

36 No Dream arranged like Ansermet’s ‘Suisse’ orchestra (7)

38 Secret rivalry at home leading to struggle (2-8)

40 Cotton thread left by 34 (5)

41 Feeling of extreme anxiety left gunmen wandering (10)

42 Rainbow-coloured dress, first seen after I get up (6)

43 Tops gran knitted for a number (4-4)

Down

2 Thief jumping Carl and René (8)

3 Bit of spinach, fruit and asparagus stem (5)

4 Win a joust – south-eastern state lost out (7)

7 Cereal mixed for arbor vitae (6)

8 It sounds like a fish oil (5)

9 Small group caught de Falla’s hat (13)

11 French wine old boy knocked back with extra-large curries (9)

17 River in Chester and in Aberdeen (3)

18 Spirit lamps Greek characters placed round end of Parthenon (5)

27 Several with nothing to hide capsized in river (3)

28 South American crane from treacherous mire in salt water (7)

29 Frontiersman with individual in support (7)

32 Kill off grammar school activities (6)

33 Supported DUP, the old leaders having deserted (6)

35 Season hasn’t begun for Bury (5)

37 Passages made by Dutch among islands (5)

Download a printable version here.

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 31 October. There are two runners-up prizes of £20. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2577, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery. The dictionary prize is not available at present.

No. 724

White to play and mate in two. Composed by Bruce Leverett, Chess Life, 1968. What is White’s first move? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 17 October. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1…b5! cuts off the Qa5. 2 Qd8 Qe5+ 3 g3 Qa1 wins e.g. 4 g4 Rh1+ 5 Kg3 Qe5+ 6 Kh4 g5+ 7 Kh5 Rxh3#

Last week’s winner Mark Snell, Hove, East Sussex

Switchback

Vishy Anand’s eyes lit up as he described a beautiful variation from his game with Shakriyar Mamedyarov, played at the European Club Cup in Mayrhofen, Austria this month.

The first diagram shows a variation which could arise if Mamedyarov had tried 33…Bg5!? 34 Rxc4 Bxe3+. (See left game)

35 Kf1 is tempting, since 35…Bxc4 36 Qa4!, threatens to capture the Bc4 and put Black in check at the same time. But 35 Kf1 d2! is a powerful spoiler, since after 36 Ra1 Bxc4+ the mighty pawn and bishop pair are a match for the queen. Placing the king on g2 or h1 leaves it vulnerable to a check from d5.

Anand had planned to play 35 Kh2! Then, after 35…Bxc4 36 Qa4! disrupts Black’s coordination. He saw that Black might try 36…Bf4+ 37 Kg1 Be3+. But then 38 Kf1! does win the game, since 38…d2+ just loses to 39 Qxc4+, with a counter-check against Black’s king. Better is 38…Bd5, but 39 Rd1 d2 40 Ke2 wins comfortably, preparing to give up the rook for bishop and pawn.

Switchbacks and counter-checks often find a delicate setting in composed problems. For the former, I’m fond of the problem shown in the second diagram. White to play and win, composed by Herbstmann in 1928 (see right game).

White begins by dancing the knight around: 1 Nd6+ Ke5 2 Nf7+ Kf5 (note that 2…Kd5 or 2…Ke4 loses to a skewer: 3 Bb7+) 3 Nh6+ Ke5 4 Ng4+ Kf5 and now the beautiful coup 5 e4+! Again, 5…Kxe4 allows a skewer, and capturing en passant allows a fork on e3 (hence the dance to g4). After 5…Qxe4, the knight retraces its steps: 6 Nh6+ Ke5 7 Nf7+ Kf5 8 Nd6+ wins the queen, and the game.

Vishy Anand-Shakhriyar Mamedyarov

European Club Cup, Mayrhofen, October 2022

1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 a6 4 Ba4 Nf6 5 O-O Nxe4 6 d4 b5 7 Bb3 d5 8 dxe5 Be6 9 c3 Be7 10 Nbd2 Nc5 11 Bc2 d4 12 Nb3 d3 13 Bb1 Nxb3 14 axb3 Bf5 15 b4 O-O 16 Re1 Qd7 17 h3 Rfd8 18 g4 Bg6 19 Bf4 a5 20 bxa5 Rxa5 21 Ba2 Rxa2 A creative sacrifice, envisioning long-term compensation on the light squares. 22 Rxa2 Qd5 23 Ra1 b4 24 Nd2 f6 25 exf6 Bxf6 26 Rc1 Rf8 27 Be3 bxc3 28 bxc3 Bh4 29 Rf1 Ne5 30 f4 Nc4 31 Nxc4 Qxc4 32 f5 Bf7 33 Rf4 Qd5 33…Bg5 34 Rxc4 Bxe3+ leads to the first diagram. In fact 33…Qc6 34 Qxd3 Re8 still offered reasonable play for the material deficit. 34 Rd4 Qe5 35 Bf4 Qe2 36 Qxe2 dxe2 37 Re4 e1=Q+ 38 Rcxe1 Bxe1 39 Rxe1 With a clear extra pawn, Anand slowly converts his advantage. c6 40 Kf2 h6 41 Re7 Bd5 42 Kg3 Rf7 43 Re1 Kh7 44 Bd6 Rd7 45 Bc5 Bf7 46 Re3 Rd5 47 Bb6 Kg8 48 Kf4 Rb5 49 Bd4 Rd5 50 Re1 c5 51 Be3 Rd3 52 Rc1 Bb3 53 h4 c4 54 Ra1 Black resigns

The making of a Classics winner

For a Radio Four programme she was hosting Clare Balding once had the idea that it would be fun to apply the techniques of horse breeding to the political world. Strolling around the parade ring at Newbury we duly recorded an item imagining gene mixing between the will to win of a Margaret Thatcher and the indestructibility of a Denis Healey, the feistiness of Barbara Castle with the sinuous positioning of a Tony Blair. Some of those in the couplings suggested even continued speaking to me afterwards.

I sometimes become a sounding board for the views of racing connections aware of my political commentating past and at Newmarket on Saturday one expressed his despair not just at Trussonomics spooking the markets and wrecking his mortgage but at the winner-takes-all aftermath of Tory elections nowadays. Left and Right used to accept, when the fur stopped flying, that there were talents to be used among those of a different political shade. But no longer. Boris wouldn’t promote anybody who had been a Remainer, La Truss steers away from those who supported Rishi Sunak. That shrinks the pool of talent to a very small pond.

Numbers matter in both politics and racing. To produce potential Classic winners you need not just horses with impressive pedigrees but large numbers of them. For Godolphin, Charlie Appleby has around 250 inmates and Saeed bin Suroor another 150. Andrew Balding, Mark and Charlie Johnston and Richard Hannon have upwards of 200 with John and Thady Gosden, William Haggas and Ralph Beckett not far behind. Newmarket on Saturday started to look like another Godolphin benefit day with the Appleby-trained, William Buick-ridden Flying Honours taking the Group Three Zetland Stakes and Silver Knott the Group Three Autumn Stakes.

You can never grudge the cheery Charlie Appleby success, but thank heaven there are a few more yards with the resources to compete and it was Andrew Balding’s Chaldean, sired by Frankel, who took the big one, the Group One Dewhurst Stakes. The sight would have gladdened the hearts of the purchasers of the 25 yearlings by the same sire that fetched 18,745,000 guineas at the Tattersalls sales last week. Everyone wants a Frankel now.

Frankie Dettori, who rode Chaldean, had taken a painful tumble in the first race when Liftoff stumbled and fell. ‘I don’t envy the jump jockeys,’ said Frankie. ‘I’ve got a headache and a couple of knocks but there’s nothing like a Group One to put you right.’ Even with his bruises he demonstrated why he remains the go-to jockey for big races. Making much of the running he injected a burst of speed two furlongs out and then held on to the line under a strong challenge from Royal Scotsman to win by a head. Frankie felt he might have gone a little too early but Andrew declared: ‘It was probably a race-winning move. He didn’t have to make the running but it didn’t look like there was any obvious pace. What we didn’t want was for it to turn into a sprint and for us to be out of our ground.’ Chaldean, whom Andrew says will be well suited to a big field in the 2,000 Guineas next Spring, is the first horse he has trained in the pink and green colours of Juddmonte and there will clearly be plenty more for that big team.

His only sadness was that the horse which went down by a head to Chaldean is owned by Jim and Fitri Hay who have long been big supporters of his. I shared Andrew’s regret: having not forgotten Royal Scotsman’s track record performance at Goodwood when Derby-winning co-trainer Paul Cole said he was as good as anything he has trained, I had backed him each way at a generous 20-1. Co-trainer Oliver Cole said after the Dewhurst that he had been telling everyone at the sales that their horse would win and I certainly won’t be leaving him friendless in the 2,000 Guineas.

It wasn’t my betting day. I was fully convinced that the Cesarewitch, the second half of the Autumn Double, would be won by a jumps trainer with a clearly improving horse put by for the race. The one I had in mind was Nicky Henderson’s Ahorsewithnoname and I had invested rather heavily. The 21-runner handicap over two miles-plus was indeed won by a jumps trainer with a horse put by for the race but the horse who took the £103,000 first prize was Run For Oscar, trained in Ireland by the canny Charles Byrnes. With the horse backed down from 10-1 to 4-1 in the last two days, it was a brilliantly executed coup. Run For Oscar travelled so sweetly that jockey David Egan took a pull three furlongs out to stop getting to the lead too soon and the pair swept away from the field when he chose to win by three lengths.

For me, and I hope for some readers, the day was rescued only by Azure Blue later winning the Listed sprint at 9-2. It was his fourth victory this summer for our Twelve to Follow.

Me and the builder boyfriend are going to go without hot water

‘I’d like my money back please’ was what I was waiting to tell British Gas, if they ever stopped the deafening rock music of their recorded hold message to answer the phone.

My account was £490 in credit, like it was a savings account. Only it wasn’t a savings account for me, and now energy prices are going up beyond all reason, I’m not going to be so relaxed about these matters. I want my 500 quid back.

They have been over-estimating my usage for too long, despite me diligently giving them my meter readings.

The £2,500 cap announced by the Prime Minister doesn’t mean a damn for me, because it turns out it only applies to those whose usage would never come anywhere near that amount anyway.

If you use more, you pay more. And if you don’t want to use more, you will still pay more, because you can’t tell British Gas that henceforth, from the time of this diabolical increase, you intend to drastically cut your usage.

They are going to bill me based on what I used before, when the price was more reasonable.

My bill is now £3,761.60 a year, or £368 a month, because they are going on my previous usage.

Yes, I want to scream, but now you’ve put the price through the roof I’m not going to use that much any more, am I? Me and the builder boyfriend are going to go without hot water and get as dirty as a pair of homeless bums, huddling in front of the log burner for warmth with whatever twigs we can gather from the woods…

But you can’t scream that, or they will accuse you of abuse. They will accuse you of abuse, put the phone down, and then manage to continue to take your filthy, abusive money.

In between wrestling with British Gas, I had to call HMRC. They had billed me for a payment on account, then, when I paid it, they said they couldn’t find it and started charging me interest. Every time I phoned them to beg them to find the payment, the recorded message said: ‘We are a diverse team. We will not tolerate abuse of any kind.’

And then they would get started on me. The last hour-long conversation I had went something like this: you owe £394… oh no, hang on, you’re right, you did pay that, we’ve found it, but you still owe £46.10… no, wait a minute, it’s £56.10… oh no, actually that’s wrong, you don’t owe us anything… er, actually you’re in credit by £84…we need to cancel your direct debit, you’re paying too much…’

As I sat on the sofa tearing the hair from my head, all I could think was: who is being abused in this situation?

It’s the same with British Gas. When I log into my account, it shows how much of my money they’re holding in their bank account, but when I try to ask for it back, huge letters come up saying: ‘We can’t offer you a credit refund.’ As if I’m trying to steal from them.

‘Right now,’ they explain, ‘you’re in credit by £490.40 but you’ll need that to put towards the cold winter days when they arrive.’ Oh will I?

So I have to go on their blasted phone line where they quickly make clear ‘We operate a zero tolerance policy on abuse of our employees,’ before doing this to me:

‘Hello, welcome to British Gas… We are reluctantly having to raise our rates… You can find more information by visiting www… Please choose from one of the following options… To discuss your gas or electricity account press one… Please enter your account number… Please enter your date of birth… Please tell me the reason for your call… To help get you to the right place I need to know more… Is it about a bill?…Do you want to pay a bill, query a bill, or speak to our bereavement support team?… (Has someone died? Am I dead? Is this hell?)… You want to correct a bill? Is that right?… I’m sorry, we have had to close our enquiries line.’ And they cut me off.

I started again. I went through the whole thing again and this time, just after the offer of bereavement support, I got: ‘There’s a wait of between 24 and 36 minutes…’ Suddenly, the volume went sky-high, a rock music track began that was nerve-shredding in its intensity, and a menacingly smooth female voice began intoning:

‘We operate a zero tolerance policy on abuse of our employees… We can help you if you have a disability… Why not visit our website!… We operate a zero tolerance policy on abuse… Why not visit our website!…’

I allowed the torturer to pull my teeth and hold my eyeballs open for about five minutes before I caved. Of course I did not get my £500 back.

The 100-year-old opiate had lost none of its potency

Our neighbour Michael is a keen and knowledgable attender of vides-greniers, the equivalent of our car-boot sales. His focus is on old bottles, full or empty, and old china, but he’ll pick up anything that piques his fancy.

Some months ago, for example, he bought for €1 a glass tube of opium tablets issued to the French infantry during the Great War. Last week he reissued me with three of these little brown pills knowing that I had an abiding interest in the first world war and was using a modern version – white crystals of morphine sulphate in a red gelatine pill – to mask the pain I was experiencing due to the metastases in my bones. Perhaps the kindly impulse was that I could pretend I was a heroically wounded poilu for an afternoon instead of a nitwit English expat costing the French state a fortune on taxi fares alone.

As it happened I was rereading Sir Edward Spears’s second volume of Great War memoirs, Prelude to Victory. Sir Edward was the chief liaison officer between ours and the French armies and this second volume details the negotiations between the French and British generals and politicians prior to the tragic so-called Nivelle offensive in 1917, in which General Nivelle was given command of the entire Allied force in France, bet the farm on a single, overwhelming British and French attack, and lost. The British section of that joint offensive was the Battle of Arras and the successful assault on Vimy Ridge. Calculated by the day, British casualties were greater at Arras even than on the Somme. The French attacks on the Aisne heights were so costly that the army mutinied and for several months the British continued the struggle alone.

Prelude to Victory isn’t as tragicomical a book as his earlier Liaison 1914. Nevertheless, his account of General Nivelle’s ludicrously overweening confidence of success, compared with the French politicians’ and generals’ grave doubts, and the latters’ reluctance to express those doubts to the great man’s face, does contain moments of high comedy. BBC iPlayer has a 1963 interview with Sir Edward and his kindly, deadpan patrician humour is as evident in his personality here as it is in his writing. I don’t suppose there are many who would say this now, but I find myself very attracted to this long- dead, not widely known, but once important Englishman, and would go as far as to say that I love him.

So one afternoon last week I was lying upstairs with one of Michael’s small brown military-grade opium tablets dissolving into my bloodstream, while reading Sir Edward Spears’s amazing account of the schoolboyish, two-faced behaviour of his commanders in the face of Nivelle’s increasingly Napoleonic certainties on the eve of attack.

I must have drifted off at about 4.30 on the morning of the 16 April 1916. It was pouring with rain. Up to their waists in their trenches, 53 waiting French divisions watched the bombardment of the plateau: 5,350 French guns were firing on a front of 40km. Zero hour was six o’clock. Down I sank. Down, down, down into that warm and comfortable nether world. The 100-year-old opiate seemed to have lost none of its potency. On the odd occasion when I’ve accidentally taken a double dose of modern French morphine sulphate and fallen asleep, the depths are equally profound. But the effect of these old ‘Poilu’s Friend’ on my dreams was somehow more organic, more exotic, more far-fetched.

I think I was dancing in tights in the chorus line of a smash-hit musical when I was ‘ripped untimely from the womb’ by a banging on the bedroom door. A stricken Catriona ran in to announce that she had just tested positive for Covid. For a disoriented moment I thought I had woken up during the flu pandemic of 1919.

Last week her plane was held on the runway at Gatwick for four hours. It was a weird, old plane, she said, with 200 packed tightly on board. Few wore face masks. Across the aisle from her a woman was coughing thickly and continuously. After a while Catriona said to her: ‘Shouldn’t you be wearing a face mask?’ It was nothing said the woman. A chest infection only. ‘Well, I don’t want a chest infection, either,’ said Catriona. It was this woman, asserts Catriona, who infected her and probably scores of others with Covid during the long delay with no air conditioning.

Catriona is asthmatic. One day she was so terribly ill she thought she might die. A massive dose of steroids on five consecutive days has pulled her through. Meanwhile I lie up here snorting Boots’ First Defence and slipping in and out of Never Never Land, while Nivelle squanders 187,000 compatriots in a single month and what’s left of his army mutinies.

We’re all victims in the Bagel now – even me

 New York

That Kim Kardashian dame being fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for a ‘pump and dump’ scheme should help add victimhood to her other assets. Everyone in this country revels in being a victim, or so it seems when watching the news or reading the papers. Here’s our own Jeremy Clarke, as ill as it is possible to be, and what we get is his brave and wonderful column every week, never complaining about how unfair it is, but expressing how lucky he feels to have Catriona taking care of him, and so on.

I was telling a friend about this, in a deliberately loud voice, hoping that some wise guy would take exception and confront me, but no such luck. Victims would rather cry than fight, and everyone here in the Bagel is a victim – rich, poor, black, white, men, women, young and old. The latest victim is one Jamie Fiore Higgins, whose memoir of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs I did not buy and will not read because it’s too ridiculous and boring.

So how do I know anything about her alleged victimhood? By reading a book review in a trash newspaper, that’s how. Higgins worked at Goldman Sachs from 1998 to 2016, a long enough time, I guess, for her to become a victim. She’s astonished to discover two colleagues having sex on the premises while she was cramming for a presentation.

And it gets worse: more trauma and more victimhood. She finds cocaine in the office bathroom, something I have to admit would also traumatise me, and in fact it has done so in the past. And there are crude jokes during the office Christmas party. No wonder 32.8 per cent of American adults last year – according to the July issue of Spectator World – suffered from depression. Crude jokes, coke in bathrooms, ‘writhing and moaning in the back of a car with an older executive’; if stuff like that is not victim-making, then I don’t know what is.

Never mind. I’m also a victim, with my old friend Scott McConnell writing to the Speccie stating that I scribbled an untruth. Why would I do that? I originally financed the American Conservative and gave equal one third shares to Pat Buchanan, Scott and myself. I wrote that Scott wished to distance himself from Pat. We argued over the telephone about it. Of course Scott liked Pat, but he also wanted to please the neocons who saw Pat as the devil. Twenty years on, it’s not important any more, but it’s a Rashomon situation (a Japanese film in which each character has a different version of true events).

True victims are the Sacklers, whose name has been removed from the V&A Sackler courtyard. The Sacklers are those nice guys who gave us OxyContin, caused 500,000 deaths, paid a couple of billion in fines, and kept ten billion for themselves. Now that’s what I call real victimhood. And it’s worse for men and boys, in the Land of the Depraved, or so a new book and newspaper reports tell us. Political and economic decisions have made American life brutal for boys and men, thunders an asinine headline in the Bagel Times. Perhaps if left-wing American women would stop using the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ for everything that’s wrong on this planet, the boys would not feel as vulnerable as they seem to at the moment. If American boys and men are in crisis and consider themselves victims, there is one sure way of rectifying the situation: force strident left-wing journalists to shut up, and hey presto.

Real victims such as those who paid exorbitant amounts for 1776, the revival of the wonderful 1969 musical about the birth of this nation, remain uncomplaining, but dumbfounded and confused. Women, transgender and non-binary actors are cast as the Founding Fathers, including a pregnant Thomas Jefferson. I am told that a few of the small audience needed help after watching the play. Oh yes, also-ran beauties in the Miss USA beauty contest are also victims and crying rather loudly about it. The loss has left them humiliated, all 50 of them, but I’m glad Miss Texas won, it’s the best state in the union by far.

Again never mind. Things have got so bad even The Donald is now a victim. The Mar-a-Lago raid was banana republic stuff, and politically engineered. At dinner last week chez my friends Pepe and Emilia Fanjul I had a good chat with Blaine Trump, ex-wife of The Donald’s brother. Blaine is a nice woman who doesn’t stick the knife in. But she made it clear that The Donald does not take advice kindly. He listens only to his instincts, which would be fine if he were, say, Margaret Thatcher about the Falklands and the miners, or Ronald Reagan about the Soviet Union and the Cold War. But he’s not. They’re afraid of him and they won’t stop until they jail him.

Bridge | 15 October 2022

Did you know that a ‘heartbreaker’ is a real term in bridge? It’s described in The Bridge Player’s Encyclopedia as ‘a hand which fails to live up to one’s original expectations’.But that’s way too flat a definition. A heartbreaker causes emotional distress; it hurts. That might sound a bit dramatic to non-players, but bridge is a game which mimics the extreme highs and lows of a love affair – a hand which dashes your hopes can depress you out of all proportion.

It’s not just bad luck which can turn a hand into a heartbreaker – sometimes it’s the opponents’ skill. I’ve never forgotten the time, many years ago, when the most beautiful hand I’ve ever picked up turned to ash. I was playing rubber bridge, and it was my misfortune to have the great Gunnar Hallberg to my left (see diagram).

What a hand! With no real bidding methods in rubber to explore a grand, I settled for 6♥. Gunnar (West) led the ♠Q. I won with the ♠A and drew trumps, ending in dummy. Next I played a diamond to the ◆Q… and Gunnar smoothly ducked! I now had a choice: I could cash the ◆A and if the ◆K didn’t drop, use my last entry to dummy (the ♠K) to finesse the ♣K. Or I could cross to dummy, repeat the diamond finesse and hope the suit broke 3-2. I chose the latter. When Gunnar won and returned a spade, I had to lose a club. One down. Do you know what it feels like when the most alluring hand you’ve ever picked up ends up running off with one of your opponents?