2584: Song XI – solution

‘MANY A TEAR HAS TO FALL’ (10/30) is the first line of It’s All in the Game whose tune, originally called ‘MELODY IN A MAJOR’ (1D), was composed by Charles G. Dawes, a future NOBEL LAUREATE (40D/2) and was often played by FRITZ KREISLER (30/6). TALLEST (34): It’s ALL in the game (TEST). DAWES (diagonally from row 4) was to be shaded.

First prize Jo Anson, Birmingham

Runners-up Tim Moorey, London EC1Y; Jim Knox, Salisbury, Wilts

Bunch

‘It’s very annoying when someone pulls a grape or two off the bunch,’ said my husband, glowering at the ‘obscenely’ denuded pedicels. To him it is a crime not to break off a cluster or cut its peduncle with grape-scissors.

For me a far more annoying trend is to use bunch in a strange new way. We are used to bunches of grapes with natural connections or bunches of radishes connected by being tied together. We have absorbed the application of bunch to socially connected groups, as in The Wild Bunch (film, 1969) or any old bunch of idiots.

But now it is used as a synonym for lots. ‘You spend a bunch of money without getting the benefit,’ I read in the Guardian. That newspaper also quoted an explanation of the gains of nuclear fusion in which scientists ‘shot a bunch of lasers at a pellet of fuel and more energy was released from that fusion ignition than the energy of the lasers’. We could see this vogue usage coming, as for several years the phrase thanks a bunch has been in use, usually with irony.

It was something of a surprise to find that bunch originally meant a bump or hump, like that of a camel. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that in 1398, our old friend John de Trevisa, in translating the encyclopedic De Proprietatibus Rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, wrote: ‘The camele of Arabia hath tweye bonches on the bak.’ I thought it was Arabian one hump and Bactrian two humps, or bunches, but the point remains.

Another surprise is how early bunch was used for a collection of people. ‘See what persons God hath picked out of all the bunch of the Patriarches, Prophets, Judges, and Kings,’ wrote Thomas Jackson in 1622. In the next century, according to Boswell, Samuel Johnson said: ‘I am glad the Ministry is removed. Such a bunch of imbecility never disgraced a country.’

Bunch has been used of flocks of ducks, bundles of teasels and the fingers of the clenched fist (a bunch of fives). They all have some connection. It is a pity to lose the distinctive meaning of bunch, and its abusers don’t sound smart.

2586: Inst

To start off the New Year, the unclued lights (one of two words) share a common feature.

Across

11    A female, for example, talked of items for discussion (6)

14    It happened during the 70s (5)

15    Regularly reveal art of great wordsmith (5)

16    Our Fraser getting hold of 111 (6)

17    Article aboard cruise ship following a straight path (6)

19    Domestic flight (9)

21    Turned up with artist’s surveillance devices (7)

24    Combining well with competitor in shelter (9)

26    Heartless judge misread translated tales of woe (9)

29    Worried Australian ran away to historical East European area (7)

30    Those of the same calling (9)

32    Develop a link with old clay (6)

33    At first, awfully naughty, greedy little boy could be obtuse (6)

35    Praise old flame’s ring endlessly (5)

36    Lowdown on the team’s spirits (5)

37    Check on heartbeat (7)

38    Raptor circles its dinner? (6)

39    Wimps swap their first three bridge partners just the same (7)

40    Lowers old manor houses, we’re told (7)

Down

2    City in Ulster changing sides recently (5)

3    Stops happening what curlers play (4)

4    Degas and Miro adapted Chinese characters (9)

5    Fires and parachutes to safety (6)

7    Proboscis worker left one afternoon (6)

8    Money raised by cop for formal wear (4,6)

9    Shabby party clothes with news boss (3-5)

10    Request directions before outing? (7)

13    Former president washed up on time (2,6)

18    Crimson first lady prunes blossoms again (10)

20    Watchman dispatched, off-line (8)

23    Plugs foreign word in foreign prose (8)

25    Offensive nature of order on headland (8)

29    Listed as erudite, but heartless (6)

31    Butt contralto who’s caught WI batsman (5)

34    Grappler on and off revealing width of fish-hook (4)

A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on  23 January. 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 2586, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery. The dictionary prize is not available at present.

Download a printable version here.

Dear Mary: Can I tell my sister-in-law that my daughter is unhappy with her Christmas gift?

Q. I have enjoyed strained relations with my sister-in-law over many years. This Christmas she has chosen to donate her £15 gift to my 16-year-old daughter to a local charity, previously unknown to us, without any prior consultation. She has provided the charity with my daughter’s name and a message supposedly from her. My daughter is no stranger to charity-giving but would have preferred to exercise her personal choice and has been unsettled by her aunt’s dominance. My sister-in-law is a pedant with regards to manners and will expect a handwritten thank-you note. Mary, how can I proceed in this matter, which is causing anxiety to my daughter and a deep fury in me?

– Name and address withheld

A. Do not rise to this bait. It is a classic example of passive aggression by an in-law hoping to provoke an irreparable fall-out with their partner’s ‘blood family’ so they can have the partner all to themselves. Explain this to your daughter. Ask her to play the game by acting daft and thanking politely and give her £15 as a reward for her diplomacy.

Q. My problem is that a few (older) men who are not that savvy on their phones send funny rude jokes to me, mistaking my number for my husband’s. Do I acknowledge these WhatsApps? I don’t want them to think I have read them, as some are definitely meant for him, but they might think he is rude in not replying.

– Name and address withheld

A. Text back that your wifi is so slow that you can’t download the content so will send to your husband’s mobile at work. Supply his number ‘for future reference’.

Q. I have a policy of not giving out other people’s phone numbers without their permission. What should I do when I’m asked for a number which I obviously know? – Name and address withheld

A. Tell the questioner you have three numbers for the person, and you are not sure which one they use. Then you can pass the request to the other person and leave it to them to make contact if they want to.

Q. While shopping over the busy festive season in Waitrose and M&S, I absentmindedly placed some items in trolleys being pushed by bespectacled gentlemen, mistaking them for my husband dawdling behind me with our shopping cart. Each time this led to delightful and amusing exchanges. My husband was less impressed. Mary, may I pass this on as advice as to how your single readers (of either sex) could instigate a meeting in the aisles – which, with luck, could lead to a more important aisle. They could shop with an accomplice and target whoever takes their fancy.

– L.T., Lavenham, Suffolk

A. What a wonderful idea. Thank you for sharing.

The Battle for Britain | 7 January 2023

No. 733

White to play. Dubov-Sarin, World Rapid Championship, 2022. Dubov’s next move turned the attack up to 11, inducing instant resignation. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 9 January. 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…Qc2+! 2 Kxc2 Bf5 mate, or 2 Ka1 Qxb2 mate.

Last week’s winner Ted Ditchburn, Monkseaton, Tyne and Wear

Triple crown for Carlsen

Doing your job, and not a jot more – ‘quiet quitting’ – became one of the buzzphrases of 2022. In The Spectator, Stephen Daisley lauded this as the philosophy of the clear-eyed pragmatist, not the layabout, and wondered when more young employees would cotton on.

Was Magnus Carlsen thinking along the same lines? For the time being, he remains the world champion in classical chess, and many believe that his job, his grand duty, is to defend the title at all costs. So there was much consternation when he announced in July his intention to abdicate, leaving the title to be contested between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren later in 2023.

It seems to me that Carlsen sees his job differently. The title is a bauble, but his real job is to prove, repeatedly, that he remains the best player in the world. If he can do that by playing online in his pyjamas, that’s a lot more appealing than enduring a six-month treadmill of training camps to prepare for a world championship match.

The World Rapid and Blitz Championship is the next best thing, where two world titles are up for grabs in a five-day stretch. The world’s best players (with very few exceptions) all convened in Almaty, Kazakhstan, between Christmas and New Year. Even for the elite, speed chess is a bumpy ride, but over 13 rounds of rapid and 21 rounds of blitz, the usual suspects tend to rise to the top. Still, even by Carlsen’s standards, taking the gold medal in both disciplines was an exceptional triumph. (Last year, in Warsaw, he got a bronze in the rapid and finished 12th in the blitz.)

Carlsen needed a little luck in this topsy-turvy game from round 14 of the blitz event, which featured four pawn promotions. In the diagram position, he missed an extremely subtle win, beginning with 39 f3! The idea is to block the h1-d5 diagonal, to prepare 40 f8=Q Rxf8 41 Qxd5+ Kb8 42 Qb7 mate. A better try for Black is 39…g6 40 hxg6 h5+ 41 Kg5 Qxf3 42 g7 Qg4+ 43 Kf6, but bizarrely, the heavy pieces are powerless and Black is lost.

Instead, Carlsen jettisoned the f7 pawn to set up a mate threat, which Rapport rebuffed, only to lose his way in the ensuing mayhem.

Magnus Carlsen-Richard Rapport

World Blitz Championship, Almaty 2022

(See diagram)

39 f8=Q Rxf8 40 Qd7 Rxf4+ The only defence, but a good one. 41 gxf4 Qg2+ 42 Kh4 Qxf2+ 43 Kg4 Qg2+ 44 Kh4 g5+ A clever trick to chase White’s king in a different direction. 45 hxg6 Qh2+ 46 Kg4 h5+ 47 Kf3 Qh1+ 48 Kf2 Qh4+ 49 Kf3 Allowing the exchange of queens, but there was nothing better. Qg4+ 50 Qxg4 hxg4+ 51 Kxg4 With an extra rook, it is a miracle that Black must still be accurate to win the game. b5 52 f5 b4 53 f6 bxc3 54 f7 c2 55 g7 c1=Q 56 f8=Q Two new queens, and a new set of problems. How to finish White off? Qg1+ 57 Kh5 Qh2+ 58 Kg6 Qg3+ 59 Kh6 Qh4+ 60 Kg6 Qg4+ 61 Kh6 c3 62 Qf7 Qh4+ 63 Kg6 Qe4+ This was the moment to seal the deal with 63…Rc6+! 64 Kf5 Qf2+ and 65…Qxf7 64 Kg5 Qe3+ This throws away the win, but by now only the precise 64…Rb8! suffices to win, with the idea 65 g8=Q Qg2+ 65 Kh5! Qe8? A tragedy, all the more so for looking like it wins on the spot by forcing a queen exchange. 66 g8=Q! The final twist. 66…Qxg8 67 Qb7 is mate. Black is lost. Qe2+ 67 Qg4 Rh8+ 68 Kg5 Qe3+ 69 Kf6 Qh6+ 70 Ke7 Qc6 71 Qgg8+ Black resigns

Real memories aren’t ‘made’

If I could make a new year’s resolution for everyone in the English–speaking world, it would be that we all agree never to use the phrase ‘making memories’ again, or to think about life in terms of making memories, let alone post a photo with the hashtag #makingmemories.

All of a sudden, all across the internet, it seems to me, merchandise has sprung up encouraging us to think of life as a ‘memory–making’ project: frames, filters and albums designed to capture and enhance every breathing moment. There are mats for lying babies on next to their age in months for memory-making photoshoots, though none I’ve seen yet for the other end of life: look how Granny changed through her nineties! My friends now regularly comment on each other’s Christmas photos: ‘What lovely memories you’re making!’

I know it sounds unobjectionable but I find it frightening. It’s as if, under the influence of Apple Inc, we’ve started living not in the present but in some other tense, the future past, forever constructing a picture for later gratification; as if we’ve begun to imagine that the actual meaning of life is to record it. If I worked for Apple, I might suggest some sort of photo-based life scoring system: I think customers would like it. Nice set of Instagrammable breakfasts, but… where are the dogs playing in the surf? Only 7/10. Must make better memories.

The usual criticism of life as presented on social media is that it’s too curated, that people post only their most enviable moments. My issue with ‘making memories’ isn’t that the photos and videos are selective so much that they are fictitious. You cannot record life and live it properly at the same time. That’s just a fact. And if I feel strongly about it, it’s only because I’m riddled with guilt.

I don’t post on social media, but I still compulsively record my life. I have on my phone, for instance, a cracking set of Christmas photos of my family frolicking in Weardale, County Durham. The low and stormy sunlight catches the tips of the heather and a rainbow fills the sky, arching down beside my smiling son. If I were the posting sort, rather than the stalking sort, my online friends would imagine that before and after this magical shot, life had continued full of unself-conscious moorland fun. The reality was more like this: ‘Ceddy, stand there would you, no a bit to the left. Yes, I know it’s raining, but seriously, it’s not cold. Just a bit more to the left… love, please! It’s going to look so cool. If I give you a Polo, will you smile?’

As we pushed through the heather up to the summit’s cairn, I trailed behind, face in phone, cropping the rainbow photo, tinkering with its colours. ‘Mum! Stop looking at your phone!’ The pitiful cry of the 21st–century child.

Apple makes video montages for its users, clips of your own photos and video set to music. They’re disgusting but also irresistible. My husband and I watch them sometimes, sitting side-by-side grinning like a pair of old buzzards at footage of our son interspersed with the odd shot of a bank statement or a sofa that future algorithms will know to edit out. In a few days, the fraudulent rainbow shot will have slid into a making–memories montage, and I’ll have quite forgotten that events weren’t exactly as described. I imagine myself visited by an updated version of the Christmas Carol ghost who shows me a photo roll of real life as it would have looked to an observer: an endless series of me ogling at my phone.

And what is it all for? Who are those 15,000 photos saved in the iCloud for? I’m aware as I write of a faint feeling that this is a form of insurance policy; that wherever I wash up in my eighties, I’ll at least have an unending loop of fake memories for company. A simpler explanation is the obsession with ‘memory-making’ just provides us phone junkies with an opportunity for a fix. If you’re caught on a family walk looking at Facebook, a spouse is apt to become a little snappy. But who can complain if you’re simply making family memories?

If I ask my pals what their extensive photo archives are for, they say they’re for the kids. We were born in the pre-phone era, so most of us have, at best, just a few albums – pictures of pasty-looking children in hand-me-down shirts with pointed 1970s collars. Won’t it be wonderful for our own children to be able to scroll back through their lives and see photos or videos documenting almost every day?

I’m not so sure. It’s not that I don’t value the photos I have. But there are so few of them that they pose no threat to my own internal memories, and the older I get the more I value those. Real childhood memories haunt the edges of adult life. They involve the feel and smell of things: my mother’s dressing table and the smell of Elnett; floorboards creaking after dark. Real childhood memories are of close-up things: wallpaper, gravel, hands, cake. Memories made from an adult perspective have nothing to do with childhood.

Will a child brought up on a diet of recorded memories retain her own internal remembered past? I don’t see how they can quite. Even my generation sometimes find it hard to know if we remember the event or just a photo. The one affects the other, the same way the film of a favourite book erases the mental pictures you made reading it.

As I sit in cafés in London N1, I see parents appeasing their progeny by showing them snippets of themselves: this was you as a toddler, weren’t you cute? It’s strange to think that for Generation Alpha (that’s the post-Z lot), some of their earliest memories will be of looking at photos of themselves which their parents took in the interest of making memories.

Is Boris going to do the chicken run?

Is 2023 going to be the year of Boris? Much of the commentariat seems to think it’s possible, with the supremely-connected Paul Goodman writing this week in the Times that Johnson’s return to No. 10 ‘has a certain plausibility to his Westminster supporters.’

And now that same august paper of record has published another intriguing article by a onetime Tory MP, hinting at Bozza’s possible new year plans. Matthew Parris writes in his notebook today about rumours sweeping the Peak District that Johnson is about to do the infamous ‘chicken run’ by switching from his London base to a safer seat ahead of the next election.

With his Uxbridge constituency (majority: 7,210) looking likely to go red in 2024, Johnson is reportedly eyeing up the much safer seat of Derbyshire Dales (Tory majority: 17,381). The latter is currently represented by Sarah Dines, a former divorce lawyer. Parris writes that:

She and he are on excellent terms: within two years of her election, Johnson, as prime minister, made her one of his parliamentary private secretaries. To the surprise of some, he paid an unpublicised visit here some five weeks ago where, hosted by Dines in Wirksworth, he met local Conservatives — his second visit since the 2019 general election.’

Though skeptical of the rumours, Parris has pledged to stand against the former premier ‘should Johnson ever stand here.’ Two former Tory journalists going head-to-head? At least the hustings would make for good copy…

How to get nothing done

I sometimes wonder whether our government makes any decisions at all. In fact I’m trying to think of any area of public policy that is not the subject of a review, commission, inquiry or similar. The most charitable explanation for this trend is that it worsened in the coalition years. Whenever the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives couldn’t agree on anything they could always kick the matter into the long grass by commissioning a review. So much better than risking upsetting Nick Clegg.

All this of course has a deep impact on the country, because it means nothing actually gets done. I am sure you will all remember the Casey review (2016). This was commissioned by David Cameron’s government from the admirable Louise (now Baroness) Casey. Its remit was to look into problems of integration in the UK. After much work, Casey delivered her review, was thanked for it, and I am sure that you will all agree that in the years since we have all noticed integration in the UK improve massively. For instance, now when a mob wants to shut down a film in Leicester or get a Batley school teacher fired for ‘blasphemy’, they can do it much faster than they could a decade ago.

You may also remember that after the London Bridge terror attack (or London Bridge 1, as it was soon to be known) the then prime minister, Theresa May, said: ‘Enough is enough.’ To which I am sure that the Islamists thought (as I did): ‘Ooooh. Tough talk.’ May then announced that she had personally had enough of young girls being blown up at pop concerts and women having their throats slashed on London Bridge, so she was going to commission a review. ‘Not a review!’ said every Islamist in chorus.

The also admirable Sara Khan was appointed to lead said review and immediately got to the heart of the matter by requesting that academics in the UK send in papers analysing what problems they believed could exist in the UK in relation to extremism in Britain. Khan and her team then spent some years trying to work out a definition of ‘extremism’, and which parts of society extremism might come from.

Sara Khan is a Muslim, but because she isn’t an extremist her appointment was roundly condemned by the usual suspects. The Muslim community may be overwhelmingly peaceful but it is poorly served by its representatives, who include a strange number of non-violent extremists. They spoke out against Sara Khan before she had published a single word.

Some such critics are perched within the Conservative party. The failed politician Sayeeda (Baroness) Warsi, for instance, had hoped to run the review herself and condemned Khan’s appointment.

So it goes on. In 2019 the government decided to have a review of Prevent. This is the strategy set up by Tony Blair’s government and gained prominence after the 7/7 bombings to try to tackle Islamist extremism in the UK. Since then Prevent has had some successes and many failures. Most of the time, after a successful Islamist terrorist attack is carried out, we learn that Prevent was aware of the person in question, but didn’t think the case required any follow-up. The man who murdered Sir David Amess is just one case in point.

Since 2005 the strategy has also naturally metastasised. For only to focus on Islamic extremism is of course deeply ‘Islamophobic’. Why concentrate on the community which has produced suicide bombers? Why not also focus on any and every other possible form of extremism? Including extremism which isn’t violent, doesn’t intend to be violent, but might for instance have perfectly mainstream attitudes on questions such as mass immigration? In its list of deviant ideologies, for example, the Prevent handbook mentions ‘cultural nationalism’, which it defines as ‘a belief that western culture is under threat from mass migration into Europe and from a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups’.

In this way, over the years the Prevent strategy swiftly became a great, expensive boondoggle for the public sector and gave jobs for life to people who were lucky to find any employment at all.

The Boris Johnson government (yes, that long ago) asked the distinguished author and former head of the Charity Commission, William Shawcross, to carry out its review into Prevent and this too proved an excellent opportunity for government to avoid making a decision. The Shawcross report was apparently finished last summer and delivered when Priti Patel was home secretary (yes, that long ago). Because while prime ministers and home secretaries come and go, the endless desire of politicians to kick cans along the road never does.

In recent weeks and indeed months there have been reports of struggles and rows within government about the Prevent review. There have apparently been efforts from officials to redact names, because you can’t have any Islamists publicly shamed, can you? What a terrible strategy that would be.

The report is rumoured to include the suggestion that maybe a strategy set up to tackle one type of extremism has instead decided to try to become an equal–opportunities strategy, which regards blowing up a pop concert as being on a roughly even keel as some young man in the north of England saying something politically incorrect.

And now finally it is said that the Shawcross report may be released. I hope it is. It has survived three prime ministers and should not be held up a moment longer. But let me predict what will happen when this report, from one of our most mainstream and respected public servants, is published.

We can expect Baroness Warsi to be on the airwaves explaining how ‘Islamophobic’ the whole thing is and how outrageous it is to ‘single out’ the Muslim community. The former heads of Muslim organisations who have advocated attacks on British warships will also be invited across the airwaves to say how terrible they think the report is. All of this will happen before they have read a word of it. All will be listened to in respectful silence by interviewers who don’t know what questions to ask.

Then the Shawcross report will be shelved. But the problem it addresses will not be. That, though, is Britain in the current era: report-heavy, action-light.

The intellectual legacy of Pope Benedict XVI

For reasons too complex to go into, while completing a doctorate in the German College in Rome in the 1990s, I shared breakfast with the then Cardinal Ratzinger every Thursday morning for nearly three years. Those breakfasts were often initially awkward because, although the Cardinal was always gracious, he had no ‘small chat’ at all and was fairly hopeless at making casual conversation. Ratzinger was a painfully shy man who did not find socialising easy.

At those breakfasts, therefore, I would engage him in theology – at which point he would come alive. I was writing a thesis on the great German theologian Karl Rahner, with whom Ratzinger had taught, and so it was easy to draw him into theological conversation about Rahnerian themes. For Ratzinger was, above all else, an intellectual. He was by nature an academic – but he was also much more than an academic. He was, in my opinion, one of the last great thinkers of the 20th century.

Ratzinger belonged to that flowering of Catholic theology which happened in the middle of the 20th century – when the Church was blessed with a group of outstanding theologians and philosophers who led and guided her through the profound societal change that swept Europe after the war and who helped to shape the modern Church in the wake of Vatican II. Maritain, Gilson, Lonergan, Rahner, von Balthasar, Congar, De Lubac – Ratzinger knew and had worked with them all.

And like many of them, Ratzinger was a polymath. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of world culture, of literature, of scripture, of the arts. He could play all of Mozart’s piano sonatas, many from memory.

Much later, when working in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, I taught a course at the Gregorian University in Rome, based on his seminal work Introduction to Christianity – which, as anyone who has read it will know, is anything but a light introduction to Christianity. I did this because I was convinced, and remain so, that in this early innovative work of his one sees traces of true brilliance. There are very few thinkers in any age who truly have something new to say – Ratzinger was one of those few really synthetic thinkers.

Unfortunately (in some ways) Ratzinger’s intellectual development was cut short when Pope Paul VI appointed him as Archbishop of Munich in 1977. Ratzinger never wanted to be a bishop and he never sought ecclesiastical advancement. Because of his shyness, he never enjoyed the social side of being a bishop and, as time went on, he found the notoriety surrounding him painful.

But Ratzinger was a man of the Church, and he did what was asked of him – and so when, three years later, Pope John Paul II asked him to become Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he agreed without demur. In this role it was Ratzinger’s duty to elaborate Catholic faith and to clarify the boundaries of Catholic thought and this he did with unparalleled insight and lucidity. It was his duty at times to say things that were not popular with many and that jarred with the prevailing zeitgeist. But that was his job and so he did it with as much grace and charity as it was possible to have in that role.

Unfortunately, over the years, many commentators who were unable to enter into real debate or dialogue on such issues simply resorted to verbal insult, and so the caricature arose in the media of the ‘Panzer Cardinal’ who ruled the Church ‘with an iron fist in a velvet glove’. For those of us who knew him, this caricature was so radically at odds with reality that it was, and is, simply risible. For Ratzinger, like many true intellectuals, was confident in his opinions and always curious to understand the opinions of others. He was always open to discussion and never refused the opportunity for debate. In all the years I knew him and in all the years I worked with him I never once saw him become flustered or aggressive. He was never overbearing in discussion, and the idea of Ratzinger raising his voice is simply absurd to anyone who knew him.

I have never met anyone who actually knew Ratzinger and did not love him. I studied German in Munich in the 1980s and was amazed at the affection in which he was held by the burghers of that very secular town. At the German College in Rome in the 1990s I was overwhelmed by the hundreds of German pilgrims who would turn up every Thursday to celebrate mass with him at 7 a.m. When I arrived at the CDF in the 2000s I found that he was held in almost reverential awe across the whole curia because of his integrity and honesty and intelligence.

He was a man of deep faith. His spiritual writings (including Seek That Which is Above, Dogma and Preaching, Seeking God’s Face and Ministers of Your Joy) are so beautiful because they are borne out of his experience of the love of God and his deep understanding of the scriptures.

But above all Ratzinger’s legacy will be intellectual – he was an influential theologian at the Second Vatican Council; he engaged in the debate on faith and reason, championing the validity of faith in what has become a profoundly relativistic age; and he attempted to refocus Catholic scriptural exegesis through a new lens (see his three–volume Jesus of Nazareth). Ultimately, through all his theological work he sought to show how Jesus Christ is the centre of all things and gives direction and a greater horizon to human beings in an age beset by the trivialising of life and the constant reduction of the human person to something less than what Christ reveals we can be.

Ratzinger’s contribution to the life of the Church has been enormous. He was not a great administrator and, like all of us, he made mistakes. But he was a truly great man, and the world and the Church are the poorer for his passing.

How worried should we be about falling sperm counts?

Here’s a jolly thought to start the year: humanity is on its way to extinction due to a drastic decline in sperm counts. Men’s reproductive health is in such a parlous state that it won’t be long until nobody can conceive a child unassisted.

That, anyway, is the argument that’s become a perennial: every year or so – most recently just at the end of 2022 – a new sperm-counting study emerges and reignites the fears that we’re biologically condemned to extinction. How anxious should we be?

Here’s the story so far. In 1992, a seminal study was published in the British Medical Journal that claimed to show ‘evidence for decreasing quality of semen during [the] past 50 years’. It was a meta-analysis, a review paper that gathered together all relevant studies that measured sperm count since 1938, lining up their results to discern any trends. The conclusion was that the average sperm count had fallen from 113 million per millilitre (the standard unit in this field) in the early 20th century to 66 million/ml by the 1990s.

The study was torn to pieces. There simply isn’t a fair comparison, other researchers noted, between 1940s and 1990s equipment for measuring sperm count, the latter being far more accurate. Not only that, but there was very little data available for the first 30 years of the analysis (samples from a mere 184 men were included), so the comparison across time was murky. Critics re-analysed the data and found no evidence of a decline in sperm count overall.

The debate went quiet while more data accumulated. Then, in 2017, researchers put fresh data together and published a new meta-analysis. Looking at 244 data points beginning in the 1970s, average sperm count had dropped from 99 to 47 million/ml by 2011 – approximately a 50 per cent decline.

Shanna Swan, one of the authors of the 2017 meta-analysis, wrote a book, Count Down, that made apocalyptic claims about declining sperm counts. She claimed that the phenomenon ‘threatens human survival’ and that extrapolating the line from her study meant that sperm counts could reach zero in 2045. Yikes.

Like the study from 1992, the 2017 analysis had its critics. Some of their arguments, though, were rather weak. For instance, a few researchers noted that even though sperm counts had dropped, the current average would still be considered ‘normal’ under standard medical guidelines – it’s not until the number falls below 15 million/ml that you have a serious problem. It’s not a great argument: imagine if someone said ‘sea levels have been rising dramatically, but we shouldn’t worry because major cities are not yet underwater’. Such daft thinking is based on a failure to look forward in time. Not only that, but if the average is so much lower now, the proportion of men with a medically low sperm count must be far greater than it was.

Alas, politics also set in. Since the meta-analysis appeared, some commentators have been happy to help spread panic about the coming fertility crisis. This caused an equal and opposite reaction: one group of researchers fretted that the studies might be co-opted by ‘men’s rights/alt-right activists’, and that the science could become ‘racialised, implying imperilled white male fertility’. It’s a rather silly form of criticism, but it contains an element of truth. The meta-analysis included very few studies from non-western countries, rendering it impossible to make claims about a worldwide decline in fertility.

This brings us to the newest addition to the debate: the same researchers have now published an update to their 2017 meta-analysis, including 44 more data points, many of which are from a more diverse array of countries. It’s still bad news. Not only do they find, using the same methods, that the sperm count decline is happening in non-western countries too, but they find that the decline has become even more precipitous since 2000. Yikes again.

Here’s where it’s helpful to look at some details of how the individual studies in the meta-analysis were done. The best kind of study is a prospective study: you take sperm samples from a group of, say, 20-year-olds in, say, 2001, then wait a decade, and take samples from a group of people who are 20 in 2011. That generation-on-generation comparison is really what we want to know – but because it takes so much time and effort, it’s the rarest kind of study (you can count them on one hand).

Far more studies are retrospective, for instance looking at samples given to one sperm bank over some time period, and comparing the counts with the year of birth of the donors. There are many more studies of this kind, but they can be misleading, since the donors’ age, not just their year of birth, could really be the cause of sperm count differences. We know that sperm counts naturally diminish as people get older and so this is why the better studies compare donors who were born in different years but are the same age at the time of donation.

Many more data points come from one-off studies that are entered into the meta-analysis and compared. That’s not optimal, since the studies differ on many other factors that are hard to control (the method of measuring sperm count, the characteristics and health of the donors and so on). Critics argue that in trying to compare all the different studies, with all their different variables, the meta-analysis ends up with meaningless conclusions. They say that the researchers mistake changes in measurement, study-to-study health differences or mere statistical noise for true changes in sperm count.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that meta-analyses are unreliable. But several of those individual high-quality, prospective studies – the ones that compare people of the same age over decades – have shown worrying, declining trends in at least some parts of the world. Then again, as with the original 1992 study, we have much less data from further in the past, making the comparison across time much harder. Neither side should be too certain, but to my eyes, the evidence we have should at least concern us enough to look at this much more closely.

If you thought that was all very tangled, wait until we get to the issue of the practical consequences of this drop in sperm counts. We know that the fertility rate, at least in the developed world, has declined massively since the mid-20th century. But it’s not known to what extent – if at all – this has anything to do with ‘fecundity’. That is, how much is it due to a drop in the biological ability to have kids (which might have to do with sperm count) as opposed to social or economic factors such as greater education and employment for women, less child mortality, high cost of housing and so on?

And here’s a final question: if we agree sperm count really is declining, then what’s causing it? Swan is convinced that it’s largely due to environmental pollutants – specifically the chemicals given off by some plastics, known as phthalates, which can disrupt our hormones. There’s some unclear evidence for this from animal studies, though not much for humans; one prospective study that tested the donors’ urine for phthalates found that they were able to explain about a fifth of the overall decline in sperm count. Other than phthalates, higher rates of obesity and poor diet are plausible, and other environmental pollutants, not just plastics, could also have an effect.

That’s the broader problem. We have so many possible trends and potential explanations, all with very little certainty. We don’t even know for sure whether we have a phenomenon of declining sperm count in the first place, let alone what might be causing it. Given its importance, it is something approaching a scandal that we don’t have better data – collected routinely in medical examinations and added to healthcare datasets, or as part of studies explicitly set up to address this question – on trends over time.

Studies that argue that humanity is doomed certainly grab the headlines – and fears are buoyed by over-the-top press releases like that from the meta-analysts, which warned of a ‘looming crisis’. Despite that, it’s not time to panic. But it is time for medical scientists to really get to work.

Putin, Nicomedia and the case for peace

As Vladimir Putin’s war grinds on, how does one make the case for peace? Around ad 100, the ancient Greek orator Dio Chrysostom (‘golden-mouthed’), persuaded the citizens of Nicomedia in the Graeco-Roman province of Bithynia (N. Turkey) to make peace with their bitter local rival Nicaea.

His central theme was praise of harmony. While discord splits marriages and households, and war brings death and destruction alike to young and old, harmony lies at the heart of ‘friendship, reconciliation and kinship’. It enables us, he said, to trade freely with Nicaea, with whom we exchange embassies, and enjoy marriage and ties of personal friendship. Unified, we double our strength and increase our standing and joint interests in the region, showing that we have the welfare of all Bithynia at heart. If we wish for supremacy, it is better to be supreme in thoughtfulness, fairness and moderation than in violence, which stirs up only hatred. Is there not much to be said for brothers who share rather than divide a patrimony? And if this spirit of brotherhood is achieved, will it not bring even greater blessings and riches? Do not our joint ancestry and personal ties of blood and friendship all point in that direction?

Now mark what Putin himself says in his essay on the relationship between Ukraine and Russia: ‘Our spiritual, human and civilisational ties formed for centuries … our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation … in the hearts and the memory of people … [and] the blood ties that unite millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people …Ukraine must decide what it wants.’ Last week he expressed his ‘brotherly feelings’ for it.

If that is not a case for peace, what is it? Historical drivel is the answer, designed not (like Dio’s) to prevent war but to justify it, by ‘proving’ that Ukraine is and always has been Russian. If it disagrees, war and the murder, rape and looting so dear to Putin will lead it back into joyous reunion. Right?

Simon Clarke: What the PM can learn from Liz Truss

After Liz Truss’s spectacular fall from power, it was hard to find Tories who were happy to admit to having supported her. ‘Trussonomics’ became a punchline. Most of her plans were scrapped, including, this week, her childcare proposals. But among the wreckage of the Truss experiment, there is one survivor who is willing to defend its principles, loudly and publicly. And now he’s waging a lonely fight on the backbenches.

Simon Clarke had little profile when he was a Treasury minister under Boris Johnson, but as Truss’s levelling up secretary he was one of the most vocal advocates of her ideas. When she was forced to abandon cutting the top rate of tax from 45p to 40p, Clarke deplored the U-turn. He is pro-growth, pro-enterprise and (he’d argue) pro-young. His side of the debate, he thinks, is being silenced in an overreaction to the failure of Truss’s premiership, which risks turning the Conservatives into the party of managed decline.

His new project is called Next Generation Conservatives. ‘It’s about the political sustainability of the Conservative electoral coalition,’ he says. Current polling is ‘nothing less than apocalyptic’ among the under-forties – just 15 per cent say they will vote Tory. Clarke, a millennial himself at just 38, fears that his party is retreating into a grey comfort zone. He believes long-term factors are more to blame for the collapse of public support than just September’s mini-Budget.

So what went wrong? ‘The bluntest answer would be that because we are so reliant on older voters we have at times done things unwisely which have dragged us too far over in our courting of the grey vote,’ he says. ‘If we are serious about giving people the chance to own a home, we’ve got to build some. If we’re serious about them accessing childcare, we should be addressing things like [staff-to-child] ratios and maybe the tax breaks.’ Truss recently ordered a review to increase the ratios which she felt were pushing the price of childcare to un-attainable levels. Rishi Sunak has just junked that review.

Before Truss, the Tories were about ten points behind Labour in the opinion polls. Now it’s closer to 20 per cent. Do her allies have to take some share of the blame? ‘Dreadful mistakes were made in those six weeks and I am not putting myself on a pedestal here. I bear my share of responsibility.’

But this does not mean he is sitting quietly. Barely a month after leaving government in October, he tabled an amendment to the Levelling Up Bill to overturn the ban on new onshore wind farms. ‘If we’re going to have some anti-growth amendments,’ he said, ‘we might as well have some pro-growth ones too.’ It was backed by both Johnson and Truss and prompted a government U-turn. Yet that came just 24 hours after ministers dropped compulsory house-building targets thanks to a rebellion led by Theresa Villiers and Bob Seely. The latter suggested that the term ‘Nimby’ ought to be seen as a badge of pride.

The Next Generation Conservatives eschew words like left and right, preferring instead to position themselves as a force for ‘pro-growth’ conservatism. For Clarke, it’s about ‘making sure that when it comes to those internal policy debates that inevitably arise that we aren’t allowing negative forces to organise without contention’. Clarke expects ‘dozens and dozens’ of colleagues to sign up in the coming months. So far, 11 have publicly announced (including the soon-to-be-ex-MP Matt Hancock).

Clarke served as Sunak’s deputy at the Treasury for ten months and calls him ‘one of the cleverest people you will ever meet’. He praises the ‘formidable minds’ of No. 10 chief of staff Liam Booth-Smith and policy aide Will Tanner but warns that restoring stability ‘can’t continue deep into 2023 – we don’t have time. There’s no point governing with the brakes on because we’ve only got two years until an election’. He continues: ‘We do need to be looking at those supply-side reforms that Liz was talking about and I know Rishi believes in this stuff because he’s an economic liberal at heart. There are always siren voices arguing for a much more cautious approach.’

Clarke fears that the Tory wets are starting to hold sway. ‘Perhaps the way the leadership election played out meant that much of Rishi’s support ended up coming from the One Nation wing of the party, which I frankly think is just so wrong on so many of these questions,’ he says. ‘It would be lovely if life was as basically comfortable as a lot of One Nationers would like it to be. But it isn’t, actually. You’ve got to fight for reform, you have to challenge status quos and vested interests. That means tough decisions.’

By being a ‘bit more radical’, he says, Truss attracted the reformers in the Tory party. A lot of the people who drifted to Rishi were ‘almost by self-definition’ more cautious – so Sunak, a radical, ended up being the candidate of the anti-radicals. ‘Rishi, I know, is actually a pretty radical and brave policymaker underneath. I really want that side of the Prime Minister to win out.’

The fight, he believes, is on. ‘If the leadership dramas of the past year have taught us anything, it is that a battle for the soul of the Tory party is under way. I am not a conservative: I am a Thatcherite, really. That’s what I’ve come to realise this past 12 months. There is a form of conservatism which is just about the literal business of conserving the status quo. That’s not why I’m in politics.’

But do the Tories want to hear more from the Trussketeers? ‘I always try to be very humble. Liz hasn’t been wading out there, shooting from the hip like John Wayne,’ he says. ‘I don’t think there’s a lack of acceptance that we got the balance wrong. I just think that there is a real risk that with Liz’s eclipse comes the wider rejection of an entire school of Tory thinking. We don’t have time for that. We do not have time for this to be the 1970s again.’

How often do you see a walrus in Britain?

Tusk force

A new year firework display in Scarborough was cancelled for fear of disturbing a walrus which was resting on the seafront. How unusual is it to see a walrus in Britain?

– There have been 27 recorded sightings in UK waters in the past 130 years, the most recent in Seahouses Harbour, Northumberland, in November 2021.

– In the same year a walrus continued even further south, visiting northern Spain before returning to the Arctic.

– There have been 11 sightings in Irish waters over the past century. A 125-stone walrus was responsible for sinking several anchored boats in Irish harbours in 2021.

Top of the crops

A Radio 4 programme, Rethink, repeated claims that crop yields could fall by 30 per cent by 2050 as a result of climate change.   What is happening to crop yields in the real world? Change in yields 2011-20:

Maize 11.9%

Potatoes 10.3%

Soy beans 10.3%

Wheat 9.8%

Rice 3.5%

Cassava -8.5%

Source: UN Food and Agriculture Organisation

Growing pains

The IMF said that it expected a third of the global economy to be in recession this year.   The best and the worst years for global economic growth since 1961:

Best

1964                 6.6% 

1973                 6.4%

1968                 5.9%

2021                 5.9%  

1969                 5.8%  

Worst

2020              -3.1%

2009              -1.3%

1982               0.4%

1975               0.6%

1991               1.5%

Source: World Bank

Hit the gas

Wholesale gas prices – as measured by the Dutch Title Transfer Facility – fell back to €80 per MWh, the level at which they were on 23 February 2022, the day before Russia invaded Ukraine. Global oil prices are lower than they were then – with a barrel of crude oil costing $80.30 compared with $90.40 in February. How has this translated into consumer prices in the UK?

– The government’s energy price cap was £1,277 in February 2022. It is now £2,500, but only thanks to the Energy Price Guarantee. Before that was announced it had been due to rise to £4,279.

– A gallon of petrol, according to the RAC, cost an average of 147p in February 2022, compared with 152p now.

– A gallon of diesel cost 151p in February 2022, against 175p now.

Letters: The vileness of Richard Harris

Three kings

Sir: In his analysis of British politics over the past 12 months (‘A year is a long time in politics’, 17 December), James Forsyth named 2022 as ‘the year of the three British prime ministers’. Some interesting comparisons were drawn with Prussia’s year of the three emperors in 1888. Two alternative choices slightly closer to home could have been illustrated through the dramatic consequences of the two years when England saw three kings. In both 1066 and 1483 the monarchy changed three times, ushering in profound political upheaval with lengthy repercussions.

Perhaps in the long view, and contrary to Whig interpretations of history, 2022 was not so exceptional after all. It could however carry a warning to politicians that a desire to engineer rapid changes of leadership often results in dynastic change.

Dr Peter Watson

Blackhill, Co. Durham

On productivity

Sir: James Forsyth finished his article on 2022 in politics by writing that ‘how to fix the productivity problem is one of the biggest questions in British politics’. My view from the cheap seats is a feeling that politics has been mugged by a lazy focus on the low-hanging fruit of captive markets. It appears so much easier to retain political power with a lax attitude to parking charges and allowing new house builds than by manufacturing ourselves towards greater self-reliance and making sure that infrastructure works everywhere, not just in the most bounteous orchards. Productivity is as much about questioning the status quo as having the drive to build. It appears to be a game for professionals, not chancers.

Jonathan Allen

Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire

Behold biodiversity!

Sir: Mary Wakefield’s account of Defra’s plans to make Lindisfarne a Highly Protected Marine Fishing Area – and thereby destroy the livelihood of its fishermen – was simultaneously enraging and depressing (‘The greatest threat to Holy Island since the Vikings’, 17 December). However, I cheered up when I got to the bit where she finally got a response from Defra: ‘Lindisfarne is being considered as an HPMA because of its incredible biodiversity.’ This supposed argument for a ban should, in fact, be cited by the fishermen (who catch only lobster and crab): because if the waters have ‘incredible biodiversity’, this demonstrates that their activities since time immemorial have done nothing to harm what Defra calls ‘the biological community’ and their responsible practices may even be part of the reason for this abundance. QED.

Dominic Lawson

Dallington, East Sussex

Voices from home

Sir: I agree with Douglas Murray’s thoughts about the BBC (‘Repeat offender’, 17 December). There are also many legacy radio programmes which may exist in the dungeons but are not made available to download. One favourite of mine was Kipling’s History, a gripping reading by various voices of Rudyard Kipling’s English history poems. As expats, my wife and I are dependent on BBC radio for our link to the homeland. Our internet radio is permanently tuned to Radio 4 (Today, Desert Island Discs, The Archers etc). Thanks to an impenetrable decision by the BBC regarding internet protocols, our radio sets will soon no longer be able to receive live broadcasts. We can get BBC Sounds on computer or mobile phone, but it is a more cumbersome method. We have never been able to get certain programmes (notably Test Match Special) here due to ‘rights restrictions’. This represents a dismal failure by the BBC in negotiating contracts with the ECB, or whoever. It gets worse. Despite being licence holders (we retain a TV in our UK residence, which we visit on holiday), we are not able to view most TV programmes legally. The BBC has been removed from our local broadcasting services, apparently because of the cost. We would be happy to pay for individual programmes by subscription, but that option has never been offered.

Dr John Grabinar

Beersheba, Israel

Oxford traffic

Sir: The claims made by Rod Liddle about Oxford’s planned traffic filters (‘The march of the local council dictators’, 10 December) are simply not true. Residents will not be confined to one area of the city, nor will there be any roadblocks. Traffic filters are designed to reduce traffic levels across the city, making bus journeys quicker and walking and cycling safer. Everywhere will still be accessible by car, although some drivers may need to use a different route during the operating hours of the filters. Oxford residents will be able to apply for a permit to drive through the filters for up to 100 days per year. Residents in other parts of the county will be eligible for a permit to drive through the filters 25 times a year. Unlimited permits will be available for blue badge holders, health workers and care workers. People receiving frequent hospital treatments will also be eligible to drive through the filters, as will buses, coaches, taxis, vans, mopeds, motorbikes and HGVs.

Bill Cotton

Corporate director, Environment and Place

Oxfordshire County Council, Oxford

Boor on the floor

Sir: Roger Lewis’s review of a new book about Richard Harris is aptly headlined, based on my only encounter with the actor (‘Braggart and bully’, 17 December). In the early 1970s I played rugby at London Irish, where post-match sessions were held in the legendary Fitz’s Bar. On one occasion the actor was holding court at the bar bragging about how wonderful he was. There was a quick scuffle and he fell off his stool to the floor, where he remained unconscious until a minder carried him off into the night. The culprit/hero was the late Dr Ken Kennedy, hooker for club and Ireland, who didn’t have to buy a drink all night.

John H. Stephen

Gloucestershire

My property market predictions for 2023

How bad can it be? Predictions for 2023 have been universally miserable. Even if inflation and interest rates stop rising, there’s no pundit out there who believes consumers, homebuyers, investors or business owners will be cracking open the Mayerling brut rosé recommended below in 12 months’ time and saying: ‘Phew, that was tough but I feel great about 2024, so pull my cracker and I’ll put my paper hat on.’

And I’m not here to buck the trend. We’re in for a long haul of budgets squeezed and projects deferred. Let me nevertheless rebut one doom strand with a plea for common sense, provoked by a Telegraph piece headed: ‘Why house prices will nosedive in 2023… Property experts predict a plunge as buyers are priced out and sellers panic.’

Top marks to the unknown subeditor for ‘nosedive’, ‘plunge’ and ‘panic’ in one strap. But what are we really talking about? Nationwide’s UK house price graphs, taking Q1 2020 as 100, peaked in Q3 2022 at around 127 for houses and 118 for flats: irrational surges since the onset of the pandemic, before a Q4 droop. Nationwide itself foresees a 5 per cent further fall in 2023, agreeing with Halifax and Zoopla but a touch gloomier than Rightmove – four sources that between them have access to all the UK housing market data there is. Meanwhile, most mainstream economists now expect interest rates to peak at 4 per cent, affecting a minority of mortgage-holders unlucky enough to be coming off fixed rates at the wrong time. And yes, inevitably, house sales will be sluggish. But a sellers’ panic? I seriously doubt it.

What we’re looking at is the loss of, say, half the pandemic price spike and with it a slight positive shift in affordability to offset an uptick in long-term mortgage rates. So let’s calm down on this one and if I’m wrong (yes, I sometimes am) I’ll eat my paper hat.

Chinese swan

But what if there’s a black swan – the financial shock, outbreak of war, revolution, killer bug, nuclear accident or cyber wipe-out that knocks all conventional predictions aside and which only the off-grid lunatic fringe will claim to have been expecting? Your guess is as good as mine, but if it happens I’d say there’s a 60 per cent chance it will come from China, 30 per cent from Russia, 10 per cent from anywhere else. So that’s the way I’ll scan the horizon. Meanwhile, my darkest prediction is that Putin and Xi will both still be in power in 12 months’ time.

Hero of a bygone age

Lord Young of Graffham, the former right hand of Margaret Thatcher who died last month aged 90, was an inspirational friend of mine. A passionate believer in the power of entrepreneurship, David Young liked to point out that the 1980s cabinets in which he served were not only a decade older on average than those of the Cameron-to-Sunak years but also wiser, worldlier and more effective in delivery – because many members, like him, had built businesses before going into politics.

Perhaps it’s a trope of getting older ourselves that we believe the immediate past generation held more wisdom than our own. But David really was wise, kind, genuinely interested in other people’s opinions and – remarkably for his age – fascinated by the new: an early adopter of the Apple watch, Adobe Photoshop for his photography hobby, and the MacBook Air.

Above all, as he wrote in his foreword to my book on capitalism, he believed prosperity depends on ‘a successful enterprise economy that has the support of the people. If we lose that support… we risk returning to the chaos of decades of old’. As workers and bosses hurl abuse across the barricades this winter and entrepreneurs huddle against the storm, let’s remember that warning.

Seasonal winners

Pointless to name all the disrupted, under-manned and mismanaged services that let us down during what we’ve learned to call ‘the holiday season’ – to which I’ll return in a moment. In more positive mood, let me cite businesses that triumphed against the odds or simply did their job well.

Starting, love ’em or hate ’em, with Amazon, whose next-day promise never failed and whose white-van men deserved a happier Christmas than their truculent Royal Mail cousins. Next, Ryanair, brutally efficient as ever: my cheap new year flight to France was bang on time and full to the last seat. Likewise Grand Central, the German-owned north-south train operator that strove to maintain service despite network chaos. And cheerful Co-op corner shops, open all hours everywhere.

I’m sure you’ll have other suggestions (to martin@spectator.co.uk) for this roll of honour. Here are a few more seasonal picks: Ben Lonsdale, the Grimsby fishmonger who makes a weekly tour of Yorkshire markets. F.W. Read & Sons, the family farm at Alford that makes Lincolnshire Poacher, the best new English cheese of the past 30 years. Cave de Turckheim in Alsace for Mayerling brut rosé, most elegant of sparkling bargains. And Mud Daddy, the portable dog-washer that was a regional winner in our 2022 Economic Innovator awards: I gave one to a friend for Christmas and her spaniel’s now the cleanest in town.

Don’t mention the C-word

Harry and Meghan’s ‘Joyful Holiday Season’ card showed anyone with commercial ambitions how to avoid causing offence by mentioning Christmas. But a booby prize goes to Barclays for its ‘Best Wishes for the Holiday Season’ email, illustrated with frosted holly, which continued: ‘This message is… not a recommendation, advice, offer or solicitation… It is not directed at retail customers.’ No, I don’t suppose it would be. As we pack away our non-denominational decorations this weekend, let me nevertheless wish every-one – even Harry, Meghan and Barclays – a shock-free 2023.

The age of AI diplomacy 

We’ve long known that computers can beat us at chess, so does it matter if they have started to beat us at more verbal and collaborative games such as Diplomacy? It certainly does, and suggests a future in which artificial intelligence may begin to play a growing role in the whole spectrum of international affairs, from crafting communiqués to solving disputes and analysing intelligence briefings.

Diplomacy, a strategic board game that was a favourite of both Henry Kissinger and John F. Kennedy, is set in Europe before the first world war. The objective is to gain control of at least half the board by negotiating alliances via private one-to-one conversations. There are no binding agreements, so players can misrepresent their plans and double-deal. To play, let alone win, requires the capacity to understand the other players’ motivation, but also to be able to negotiate with them in a natural and flexible way, eliciting their trust, only to betray it at the right moment. It’s a game of guile, not mechanics.

So the development at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta of Cicero, a computer able to play Diplomacy better than 90 per cent of human players, demonstrates that computers can learn how to talk, understand and scheme like the rest of us. Of course, Diplomacy is just a game, but it uses the core skills needed for real diplomacy, as well as its shadowy younger brother, intelligence. It suggests that AI, already being presented as the next big thing in war-fighting, may also play its part in peacemaking.

AI systems simulate learning, problem–solving and decision-making processes that have hitherto been the preserve of human intelligence. Already they are in widespread use, from high-frequency stock-trading platforms to the speech-recognition systems on our phones. But it is one thing to crunch large numbers very fast and quite another to be able to second-guess, engage with and understand human intent.

The company OpenAI recently unveiled its ChatGPT system – a computer programmed to talk like a human. You can find it online and ask it to draft anything from a history essay to a marriage proposal. For a while, it was a phenomenon, with journalists claiming that it could even replace journalists. But the limitations of the chatbot became clear after a while, such as a pedestrian sameness about its replies. What, though, did ChatGPT have to say when asked whether AI could revolutionise international diplomacy?

Its answers all revolved around improved analysis and decision-making: ‘AI algorithms could be used to analyse vast amounts of data and provide insights and recommendations on complex diplomatic issues,’ ChatGPT replied. ‘This could help diplomats make more informed and strategic decisions and improve their ability to navigate complex international situations.’

This, essentially, is one of the two main areas in which – for the present – AI is beginning to be employed. It has become normal for machines to take over dull, repetitive work; it started with stamping out identical components, then assembling cars. So why not automate some of the boilerplate messaging that is a part of diplomacy? Official condolences and congratulations, speeches at the opening of a cultural centre here or a graduation there: all these need to be pretty standard but personalised enough not to be insultingly so. This is precisely the kind of thing at which AI excels. A British diplomat in Washington enthused to me about ChatGPT, saying: ‘The amount of time this could have saved me in my career, finding slightly different ways of saying the same damn thing…’

Hard-pressed analysts, scarcely able to cope with the sheer amount of information available to them, can also use AI to look for correlations, hunt out the anomalies that merit human attention or even backtrack sources. In the late 1990s, I was briefly attached to what was then the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s research analysts department. I could spend all day reading everything from media stories to intelligence materials without writing a word or giving a single briefing, and still not catch up with everything available. The situation in today’s data-saturated world is even more extreme.

There has never been more to digest. As individuals, whether we like it or not, we live in a surveillance society. Smartphones pinpoint our locations, bank card transactions reveal our indulgences and cameras watch our movements. It has never been harder for someone to hide something, and this also applies to governments. Consider how the open-source sleuths of Bellingcat used leaked Russian databases to identify the would-be assassins who tried to poison Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. Their challenge was not so much acquiring the information as processing it all. AIs have the untiring speed of a computer but also the capacity to learn the kind of analytic leaps we would call human intuition. Before their cybernetic gaze, even states may become naked.

Already, AI is tiptoeing into the world of intelligence. MI5, for example, has for the past five years been working with the Alan Turing Institute (named after the man who was effectively the father of the original concept of AI) on unspecified projects. MI5 has said that the UK faces a ‘range of threats, with the clues hidden in ever more fragmented data’, so it is asking AI machines to help look for those clues. This will likely include the use of big data analysis and voice–recognition systems to track suspected terrorists and foreign spies.

In the pages of this magazine, Henry Kissinger himself raised the spectre of ‘autonomous weapons… capable of defining, assessing and targeting their own perceived threats and thus in a position to start their own war’. ‘How can leaders exercise control,’ he asked, ‘when computers prescribe strategic instructions on a scale and in a manner that inherently limits and threatens human input?’ However, it is worth noting that the threat of autonomous weapons is still very limited, largely confined to anti-missile defences designed to shoot down targets moving so quickly that having a human ‘in the loop’ would slow them down too much. Another use is that of ‘loitering munitions’ that may go after a target that meets pre-programmed criteria. In both cases, a human will have had to switch on the system or launch the munition.

When the ChatGPT bot is asked about AI and diplomacy, it signs off with an important sentence: ‘It is important to carefully consider the potential ethical and societal implications of using AI in this context.’ There is certainly a valid concern about the degree to which bringing AI into altogether fuzzier realms involving human interaction – such as diplomacy and politics – may begin to distort the process and disempower the humans.

The idea, therefore, is that AIs could become advisers, supporting but not replacing their human partners. Five years ago, at a World Trade Organisation meeting, a ‘Cognitive Trade Adviser’ was showcased, a system designed to provide quick answers to complex questions relating to the arcane intricacies of global trade. A job, in other words, that otherwise takes time and an array of experts. Likewise, the UK Foreign Office has adopted AI tools to monitor public data to flag up potential crises with the hope that they can be prevented (or at least prepared for). The German Foreign Ministry has followed suit.

All well and good, but any student of politics – or watcher of Yes, Prime Minister – knows that real power lies in those who frame the choices. Might humans become dependent on their AI advisers? The computers can be phenomenally smart and astonishingly stupid. Their capacity quickly to collate, digest and assess a huge range of data is offset by the biases and assumptions built into the algorithms they use to interpret the world and learn. These may be flawed at the outset, or even deliberately manipulated.

Seven years ago, Microsoft introduced Tay, an AI Twitter chatbot that learned conversational gambits and new vocabulary through its interactions with users. It immediately became something of a sport to get it to tweet offensive terms and opinions and after just 16 hours, Tay was withdrawn. No one expects government AI to be as vulnerable, but at a time when hacking has become another tool of great-power rivalry, what might happen if Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies could tweak the algorithms?

We are nowhere near the age of autonomous AI diplomat engines writing treaties and issuing démarches on their own initiative – and neither would we want it. As with military AI, except in very specific circumstances, we will for the foreseeable future want humans in the loop to set the parameters of policy and veto the less appealing suggestions from the systems.

Nonetheless, as AIs begin to pass the so-called Turing Test – able to communicate in a way which cannot reliably be distinguished from a human – their role in diplomacy and politics will inevitably grow. As with quantum computing, an AI arms race is under way as countries seek to steal a march and change the global balance of power.

As Vladimir Putin grandiloquently put it in 2017: ‘Artificial intelligence is the future, not only of Russia, but of all mankind… whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.’ Maybe not (and in any case it doesn’t look as if it will be Russia), but if computers are now beating humans at Diplomacy, its success suggests we’re approaching a new stage. In the future it will not just be autonomous ‘slaughterbots’ and similar violent applications that demonstrate the power of AI, but also diplomats’ cybernetic aides, analysts, copywriters and protocol officers. For some time, robots have been helping us fight wars. The next challenge could be to help us avoid them.

Bridge | 7 January 2023

Did you make any new year’s resolutions? High on most people’s lists – along with shedding a few pounds – is to exercise more. But what about mental fitness? It’s a lot more fun than getting sweaty in the gym – and all it requires is taking up bridge. Bridge really is the best mental workout you can do; endless scientific studies have proved that it staves off dementia. But forget the studies – just ask anyone who plays, at any level. To quote the Irish novelist Colm Toibin: ‘Bridge saved me from becoming a lazy bastard.’

My own resolution isn’t to play more but to play better: to push myself harder, minimise the lapses of concentration, banish the brain fog. In other words, to try and be more like – well, any of the world-class players I so admire. I’ll pick the Norwegian star Boye Brogeland, given that he has just won the International Bridge Press Association’s award for Best Defended Hand of 2022.

Boye (South) led the ♠10. Declarer (John Kranyak) won with dummy’s ♠Q, and led a low club. Had North, Christian Bakke, risen with his ♣K and played another club, or switched to a heart, the contact would fail –but that was an almost impossible play to find, even for someone as good as Bakke. Boye, however, was there to rescue the defence: he played the ♣7 under declarer’s ♣J! East played the ♦9 to Boye’s ♦A next, and Boye switched to the ♣5. Bakke won with his ♣K and found the heart shift for one off. What fantastic vision!

The acceptable face of alcoholism

The same resolution every year goes nowhere. Stop fighting battles and just have a nice, quiet life, I tell myself – and by the second day of the year I’m up to my eyeballs in kerfuffles.

Having sworn off helping anyone with anything ever again for the grand total of three hours of 2023, from shortly after midnight until about 3 a.m., I awoke during the night, at that dead of night time when ideas come out of nowhere into your dreams, and sat bolt upright in bed.

‘Oh! That’s it!’ I exclaimed. And I got up the next morning and spent the first day of the year not celebrating my 51st birthday in order to deal with the fallout from the latest assault on my friend the bricklayer, who is being banned from AA meetings.

So far as I can make out, he’s being objected to on the basis that he is too much trouble. In this day and age, a self-help group cannot possibly be expected to deal with the sorts of people who need help.

In Surrey, one finds the meetings are more like coffee mornings with women sharing their childcare problems, their marriage woes, their teenagers’ gender orientation choices, their disappointment with a new washing machine.

The last thing they want in their midst is a recovering alcoholic banging on about not wanting to drink Kronenbourg and get arrested.

The better class of alcoholic in the Surrey Hills have perfected the art of upmarket lifestyle advice gathering, the wellbeing forum, and these are not the sort of groups where they want to risk triggering impressionable young millennials by admitting a common or garden rock-bottom alky who actually really needs to come.

To recap: this man has been informed he is banned from meetings because he has criminal convictions, and because, allegedly, he makes women feel uncomfortable.

He’s been banned from meetings he’s only been to once. He was banned from one meeting after agreeing to be the main speaker at the invitation of a group member who wasn’t up to speed with the campaign against him, and who had to then inform him, after he bared his soul by giving an honest speech about his life and times, that he should not come again.

And that was where I thought it had plumbed the depths. But then the bricklayer turned up at another meeting he thought might welcome him and was afterwards informed that a discussion was going to be held about whether he could come again.

And after that discussion took place, shortly before Christmas, he was then not informed of the result.

That’s right. They held a discussion about him, decided whether he could or could not go, and refused to tell him.

He battered his head against that particular brick wall for a while, so I asked them for the answer on his behalf.

This was in case they didn’t want to speak to him for ‘safety’ reasons, because the gossip about the bricklayer is now so wild I would not be surprised to find there are people who think that if they ring him he might hypnotise them into setting themselves on fire.

I asked if they could please tell me the result and I would tell him. And they told me they couldn’t tell me because it was ‘complicated’.

I pointed out he could not be expected to know whether or not to go if they didn’t tell him. Please just inform him whether he is banned or not. And reply came there none.

Was it a trap? Did they want him to turn up to find them all at the door waving placards saying ‘No People With Problems Here!’. He would lose his rag, a fight would ensue, the police would be called, he would get banged up in jail with no possibility of parole… Is that what they wanted?

I was asleep in bed when it came to me. I sat bolt upright and I thought: maybe they won’t tell him he’s banned because he’s not banned.

Maybe these people finally realised they can’t ban someone from meetings without it looking bad for them.

Maybe the nicer breed of alcoholic decided that all they can legitimately do is not tell the bricklayer he is not banned in the hope he won’t go there if he doesn’t know he can go there: the bricklayer is not supposed to know if he’s coming or going. Maybe that’s the whole point.

As for me, I’m starting to think this issue will not get sorted until someone sets up a revival organisation where old-style alcoholics can meet to talk about alcoholism, not childcare and washing machines.

Until then, my New Year’s resolution to opt for a nice quiet time is going nowhere, as usual.