Bogs, midges and blinding rain: the joys of trekking in the Highlands

Raynor Winn’s first book, The Salt Path, was a genuine phenomenon. Having been evicted from their farm after 20 years, she and her husband Moth, who suffers from a degenerative disease, set off on a courageous walk around the south-west of England in the hope of restoring his health and finding a new life. It was a deserved international bestseller.

Landlines picks up the story. Although walking proved a temporary respite for Moth, his corticobasal degeneration (CBD) – which the medics advised was without treatment or cure – takes a turn for the worse. Raynor decides to commit to another walk, to ‘let the oxygen back in and for the spark to regenerate’. And not just any walk. She suggests to Moth they embark on the Cape Wrath Trail, generally thought to be the hardest of British long distance routes, often unsignposted and always arduous.

It does not make for an easy experience. Midges assail them, there is almost constant bad weather (she feels ‘they will become the rain’) and not all the locals are friendly. Thin-skinned Scots should perhaps avoid the book, for it certainly doesn’t present a cosy tartan-and-shortbread version of the Highlands. Winn is astute at noticing how depopulated some areas have become. ‘Most of the people who worked the land have gone,’ she’s told, leaving mainly deer and visitors.

In the hands of a lesser writer it might not make for an enjoyable read, as the bog and black heather stretch away and there’s a lot of squelch and blisters. I’m not usually a fan of miserable journeys (Chekhov set a benchmark for these with his account of travelling across Siberia), but Winn has a gift for making her account profoundly human.

One strength is the power that the couple’s long relationship gives them to overcome considerable adversity. Raynor says that after 40 years she can no longer tell where her hand ends and his begins. Moth had always been skilled with a map and compass, but he finds it difficult to see routes and make those connections in the way he used to – ‘as if he had lost an entire language, a way of understanding and describing the land as a whole picture’.

Perhaps because of this Winn redoubles her own attempts to describe it for us. Connection to the land doesn’t come from ownership, she says; it’s not something you buy. It comes from time spent immersed in the smell of fear and the feel of the rocks beneath your feet.

Scotland provides a good place to think about ownership and the right to roam. Since the Scottish Land Reform Act in 2003, everyone there has the statutory right to pass overland – unlike England, where Winn is concerned that trespass is becoming more criminalised and the countryside more enclosed. But even in Scotland it’s not all that open: they find they can’t begin their walk at Cape Wrath because it’s been closed off for military manoeuvres.

She has other problems, including ill-fitting boots that leave her with feet that are ‘balls of burning hot pain’, and continual guilt that she has got them both into a situation where they are out of their depth – sometimes literally, when they have to cross flooding rivers. But as they travel, she sees the return of the Moth she’s always known: someone with a passion for life and creativity.

Winn has some of the strengths of the late Dervla Murphy – an honesty in the approach, a sympathy in the telling and a gift for conversation. While alive to the beauties of the natural world and its sudden epiphanies – an eagle taking off in sunlight after sheltering near a waterfall during a storm – this is not one of those nature books that leaves out the people. Nor one that takes itself so seriously it can’t tell a joke.

Reaching the remote Knoydart peninsula, with its vast wilderness known as the Rough Bounds, they bump into walkers who have opted for the full Land’s End to John O’Groats (LEJOG), one of whom theorises that something remarkable happens when you do a long distance path: that you find an honesty you don’t see in normal life and that it unites those who walk in a sort of euphoria that can only be described as ‘trail magic’, and that if you need help it will come from somewhere.

Most readers will give a small cheer when, having survived the Cape Wrath Trail and getting to Fort William, Moth’s immediate response is to carry on and do another 100 miles down the West Highland Way. Indomitable is the word that comes to mind. And the Borders and Pennine Way follow on, all the way back to home in Cornwall for 1,000 miles.

Those worrying that we might be in for a simple retread of The Salt Path should be reassured. In some ways this book goes deeper. In exploring what it means to be seeing a landscape possibly for the last time, it achieves moments of rare vision and compassion.

No chocolate-box portrait: Bournville, by Jonathan Coe, reviewed

British novelists love to diagnose the state of the nation. Few do it better than Jonathan Coe, who writes with warmth and subversive glee about social change and the comforting mundanities it imperils. Bournville, his 14th novel, lacks the caustic verve of What a Carve Up! (1994) or the wistful charm of The Rotters’ Club (2001), but it’s an affectionate work of social history in fictional form, tracking four generations of a West Midlands family whose dreams, successes, misadventures and divisions reflect the shifting contours of postwar Britain. 

It’s largely set in a model village on the south-west side of Birmingham. Created by the Cadbury family of Quaker industrialists in the 1890s, Bournville was designed to house workers from their chocolate factory and ‘alleviate the evils of modern, more cramped living conditions’. Coe grew up five miles away, and one of the main characters, Mary, is based on his mother. Garrulous and resourceful, she has three sons: timid musician Peter, doomed forever to repeat the rhythms of childhood; perennially wary Martin, whose job with Cadbury plunges him into European politics; and breezy Jack, a football-mad pragmatist who likes asserting his suspicion of all things German.

Coe dwells on seven key events. Each is seen obliquely, and each provides an opportunity, laced with irony, to sample the country’s mood. On VE Day, Winston Churchill speaks of ‘this ancient island’ drawing the sword against tyranny, and his phrasing rings down the years. The televised coronation of Queen Elizabeth II prompts one character to muse that this still newish broadcasting medium will surely prove a force for good. The 1966 World Cup Final, rather than being a moment of sublime unity, exposes different seams of national feeling, as does the wedding of Charles and Diana, which promises to sell an attractive and smartly orchestrated image of Britain, yet is fraught with nervousness.

Other developments highlight the nation’s unease about its brand. Any suggestion of decline meets with a blast of triumphalism, but this is tinged with self-doubt or queasy nostalgia. When the Birmingham-built Austin Mini Metro is launched in 1980, advertisements show the little cars forming a platoon on the white cliffs of Dover. Prospective buyers learn that ‘Now we have the means to fight back’ and ‘This could be your finest hour’. As Martin remarks to an enraptured Jack: ‘It’s a bit much, isn’t it?’

A recurrently sticky subject is the attitude to British chocolate – relished here and in Scandinavia, yet deemed by French and Belgian bureaucrats to be greasy and unsuitable for adult palates. Among the comic set pieces, cleverly conceived even if hardly subtle, the best is an account of a European Parliament meeting to address this issue, where the obsession with procedure trumps any urge to achieve an outcome. Martin is on hand to document the impasse. His frequent trips to Brussels also bring to his attention a young British journalist with a wild mop of blond hair. Although he strikes Martin as ‘always underprepared, always over-committed, always in demand and always out of reach’, the pundits seem worryingly transfixed by his charisma.

As Bournville draws closer to the present, it grows angrier. Coe is plainly dismayed by the erosion of community and the opportunism of politicians. But he is too self-aware to harangue the reader. His pleasant sense of the absurd never recedes from view, and for all the novel’s satirical tang and historical sweep, it’s at root a tender portrait of apparently simple folk trying to fathom the mystery of their own personalities.

Philosophers in the cradle: Marigold and Rose, by Louise Glück, reviewed

‘We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory,’ is how Louise Glück closes her poem ‘Nostos’. The same sentiment guides Marigold and Rose, the latest book by the 2020 Nobel Prize winner and the poet’s first to be deemed ‘a fiction’.

Marigold and Rose are babies – infant twin girls in the first year of their lives. They are also stand-ins for Glück’s own young granddaughters, not to mention for the author herself, in this piercing book in miniature that feels as if the former US Poet Laureate is mining her own preternatural memories to explore who she is.

‘I want experience to mean something,’ Glück has said, apparently even if that experience is lying in a cot leafing through an A-Z primer, which is where we meet Marigold, the younger twin. She is a writer – or would be if she knew any actual words and wasn’t a baby. Rose, in contrast, is a social being. ‘But we have inner lives, Rose thought.’

Marigold is anxious to be done with babyhood and hungers for knowledge, frustrated that the twins can’t ask questions. ‘They had to take what they could pick up, like pigeons in the public park.’ Things happen to them, problematic things, like their grandmother going to heaven, and worse:

It was also around this time that Mother began to talk about going back to work. She told Father that she wanted to contribute to the household. If you asked the twins (no one did) they would say that Mother contributed by being Mother. Father explained that to Mother this was different because mothers didn’t get paid and apparently people who got paid contributed and people who didn’t get paid were no help at all. The twins saw right through this.

Marigold in particular watches everything. ‘I will put that in my book, Marigold thought, when things did not go well for her,’ writes Glück, who has amassed 13 volumes of poetry and two collections of essays doing exactly that since her first book, Firstborn, came out in 1968. Both babies are beset by insecurities, which seems unfair and yet makes perfect sense when you consider how fraught infants appear to find life. Each sister frets that the other is better: more perfect, more resourceful.

This slim book, which alternates between Marigold and Rose’s third-person perspectives, may be light on action, ending as it does at the babies’ first birthday, but it is heavy on ideas. The twins’ musings take in everything from the futility of existence to the purpose of memory, perennial themes for writers from Elizabeth Strout to Annie Ernaux:

It seemed to Marigold that you remembered things because they changed. You didn’t need to remember what was right in front of you. And the twins were still too little to have much behind. But Marigold wanted to be prepared for change, which meant you had to learn to remember before you needed to remember.

As any parent who has dabbled with writing letters from their young child knows, an infant’s voice is hard to pull off. In lesser hands Marigold and Rose could feel mawkish. But Glück, at 79, hasn’t won most of the major literary prizes out there to mess this up. It’s an affecting, alluring book. As soon as I’d finished I read it again.

Books of the Year I — chosen by our regular reviewers

Philip Hensher

There were some very good novels this year, but they came from surprising directions. It is astonishing that one as original as Kate Barker-Mawjee’s The Coldest Place on Earth (Conrad Press, £9.99) couldn’t find a major publisher. A friend recommended this wonderfully controlled and evocatively written novel about a heart coming to life in the depths of Siberia. 

I always enjoy Mick Herron’s half-arsed spy thrillers, but Bad Actors (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) took a big step into literary excellence. The dazzling, Conrad-like structure turned an entertainment into a major literary statement. Sheila Llewellyn’s Winter in Tabriz (Hodder & Stoughton, £8.99) was a revelation – long considered and slowly overwhelming with its sense of time and place (Iran, 1979). Someone else who has written magnificently about Iran is James Buchan. His A Street Shaken by Light (Mountain Leopard, £16.99), not about Iran but about a Scotsman on the make, is the first of a cycle. It is one of those historical novels that evokes not just a past time but a lost way of speaking.

I shouldn’t really comment on Penguin’s short story anthologies since I’ve edited three myself, but Patrick McGuinness’s two-volume The Penguin Book of French Short Stories (£30 each) is outstanding – even if it left out George Sand.

In non-fiction, I liked Keiron Pim’s life of Joseph Roth, Endless Flight (Granta, £25) – a work long wanted in English and capably carried out. Graham Robb’s France: An Adventure History (Picador, £25) might be the book that I was assigned to review which I enjoyed the most. I ordered Betsy Balcombe’s memoirs of Napoleon in exile on the back of it, which is always a good indicator.

I’m a year late, but Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar (Granta, £9.99) was a knockout: a responsible history of places that at the time aspired to nothing more than a few hours of lurid fun and total oblivion. God knows how he remembered any of it.

A.N. Wilson

Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook by Karina Urbach (MacLehose Press, £20). Alice Urbach was a household name in pre-war Vienna, and her cookbook So kocht man in Wien! was a bestseller. Then came 1938 and, being Jewish, she escaped to England, and later to America. Her publishers coolly stole her book and reissued it in an ‘Aryanised’ version (for example, altering the preface, which had contained celebratory comments about the ‘international’ quality of Austrian cuisine) and supplied it with a new author, ‘Rudolf Rotsch’, almost certainly non-existent. Her granddaughter, the distinguished historian Karina Urbach, after patient research, unearthed the extraordinary story not merely of how the book was Nazified but how the publisher, Ernst Reinhard Verlag, continued to market it under the name of a fake author and hold on to the royalties until this century. An unputdownable narrative, told with remarkable restraint.

Clare Mulley

After recent lockdowns, two of my choices this year involve impressive getways: Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (John Murray, £20) is such an important piece of history that it is remarkable it hasn’t received more attention until now. This dramatic, compelling and deeply sensitive account raises issues around courage, agency and the credibility of facts that still resonate today.

A leaky gothic fortress provides the setting for Ben Macintyre’s page-turner Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle (Viking, £25). There are plenty of false moustaches on stiff upper lips here. But by including the lesser-known stories of those who were not straight, white, wealthy, healthy or male, Macintyre brings fresh colour to the classic picture of Colditz. This is escapist non-fiction at its most engaging.

Allan Mallinson

Charles Spicer’s Coffee with Hitler: The British Amateurs Who Tried to Civilise the Nazis (Oneworld, £20) is squirmingly enthralling. I’d never fully appreciated just how vulgar and lacking in taste, style and sophistication the Nazis were.

Just occasionally a dedicated historian of his long-gone local regiment finds a treasure trove of photographs and publishes them with a fine narrative. Mark Forsdike’s The Malayan Emergency: The Crucial Years, 1949-53 (Pen & Sword, £18.99) is fascinating. The Emergency was arguably the British army’s finest campaign, and the Suffolks the most successful regiment. They were mainly national servicemen, but they took to the jungle remarkably well.

Leanda de Lisle’s Henrietta Maria: Conspirator, Warrior, Phoenix, Queen (Chatto & Windus, £25) is a shrewd and elegant reassessment of Charles’s I consort and widow – or ‘that popish brat of France’ and ‘Romish whore’, as she was also known. She was certainly a fighter.

Susan Hill

Mary & Mr Eliot by Mary Trevelyan and Erica Wagner (Faber, £20). A not unfamiliar story: adored man and devoted woman friend, liked but never loved and devastated by his sudden marriage to another. T.S. Eliot – great poet, bastard behaviour. Heartbreaking and wonderfully told.

The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson (Mantle, £12.50). A fictional bastard, in a fine novel inexplicably omitted from every shortlist. There’s no justice. Though there was, eventually, for the late Hilary Mantel. But, weary of the Tudors, I prefer her first novel (which remained unpublished until 1992): A Place of Greater Safety is a masterpiece about the French Revolution. There’s no one left to touch her.

Stephen Bayley

Books on architecture are often pious and dull – except for the vanity publications, when they are just plain embarrassing – so I enjoy irreverence for its rarity in this milieu. The photographer Jethro Marshall has produced a picture book, Building Society: Low-rise Bungalows in the West Country (West Country Modern, £12.50), an ironic but rather beautiful appreciation of this lazily despised building type. Barnabas Calder’s Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency (Pelican Books, £10.99) is not to be compared with Ruskin in scope or style, but is an interesting read which considers buildings in terms of the energy they exploit and consume. Projection: if we follow strict eco demands, new architecture might become a thing of the past. We’ll have to reuse everything. Typical line: ‘Every seven US residents get through more energy than was required to build the pyramid of Khufu.’ 

Meanwhile, more delightful than apocalyptic is Jeremy Lee’s Cooking Simply and Well, For One or Many (HarperCollins, £30). Architecture and cookery have a lot in common: you need a design or recipe, and each requires sound ingredients, intelligent execution and a desire to please. Just when we thought we’d never need another cookbook, the charming, loquacious and occasionally outrageous Lee proves us wrong. It’s nicely written too.

Sara Wheeler

I loved a heavenly little volume of bons mots from the open road: On Travel and the Journey Through Life, edited by Barnaby Rogerson (Eland Books, £9.99). Not just the usual carpe diems from Horace, or everyone saying it’s the journey that counts, but things such as St Augustine’s ‘Solvitur ambulando’ – it is solved by walking – or Dorothy Parker’s ‘Too fucking busy and vice versa’. Rogerson is the skipper of the good ship Eland, the best travel publisher ever.

Andrew Motion

Ed Yong’s An Immense World (Bodley Head, £20) is an exploration of the ways in which our fellow creatures navigate, understand and interact with one another and their environment through their senses. Dogs, ants, birds, butterflies, fish, flies, scallops, seals, elephants and the Philippine tarsier (which communicates in ultrasonic frequencies inaudible to humans) are among the multitude the author considers, and he writes about them all with a bewitching mixture of clarity and awe. The result is so mind-boggling, it’s tempting to say ‘forget looking in deep space for astonishment’. But let’s not do that. Let’s continue searching there while also paying better attention to the miracles right under our noses. Yong’s marvellous book shows us how.

Ruth Scurr

I began the year reading Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These (Faber, £10). I have now reread it three times and will fit in a fifth reading before the year is out. Set in New Ross, Co. Wexford, in 1985, it quietly, accurately and beautifully explores what happens when Bill Furlong, the local coal merchant, faces a moral dilemma that his whole family and community have an interest in ignoring. Keegan writes with breathtaking elegance and compassion. Every rereading reveals something newly marvellous. I also much admired Lucy Caldwell’s novel These Days, set in Belfast during the Blitz (Faber, £10.99). Her evocation of the devastation caused by the bombs resonates with the images of Ukraine that have shocked the world this year. Finally, Stephen May’s Sell Us the Rope (Sandstone Press, £8.99) is a terrific reimagining of Stalin’s time in London attending the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party in 1907.

Michela Wrong

I own a few books which have been transported from flat to flat and country to country yet never opened. Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 (Eland, £12.99) was one such. A trip to southern Italy this summer gave me a reason to finally crack it open and register my foolishness. Lewis’s account of Naples immediately after the Allied invasion of fascist Italy, when the city’s aristocrats were either elegantly starving or pragmatically turning to prostitution to make ends meet, is extraordinary. His phrases catch you effortlessly by the throat. It’s the kind of writing – photographic in its intensity, cynically knowing, yet humane – that every journalist and non-fiction writer aspires to.

If you’ve been a foreign correspondent for any length of time you end up wondering what has pushed so many of the societies you cover into conflict and what can be done to prevent a repeat. Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace by Chris Blattman (Viking, £18.99) answers many of those questions, examining the causal factors for war and the methodologies of peace-building. Contrary to expectations, it’s an optimistic book. The author, a Canadian-American professor, believes that outbreaks of violence are the aberration, not the norm, and that small, incremental measures can have a disproportionate impact when it comes to avoiding strife. Tinkering trumps transformation. He has an accessible style, and the frequent use of concrete historical examples prevents the book toppling into game theory abstraction.

I bought one copy, for myself, of Kate Muir’s Everything You Need to Know About the Menopause (but were afraid to ask) (Gallery, £8.79), a paean to properly calibrated Hormone Replacement Therapy, then another two copies for friends, and am now considering buying it for my nieces. One day I suspect we will look back with pure astonishment on the era in which the 51 per cent of the population that experiences the menopause was either told by their doctors to ‘put up with it’ or was routinely prescribed anti-depressants. Muir’s campaigning work, along with that of the broadcasters Davina McCall and Mariella Frostrup, is already having a major impact.

The Wolf Hunters by Amanda Mitchison (Fledgling Press, £9.95) is an unashamedly nepotistic plug, since the author is a cousin. Set in a post-independence, dystopian Scotland, where rewilding is all the rage, this is the author’s first venture into the crime/thriller genre, and it’s a corker. Genuinely creepy and full of convincing detail, it’s a story with whisky on its breath, a wicked sense of humour and a dark, beating heart.

Jenny Colgan

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (Faber, £14.99). Biographies by massive fans are often dull and slavish, but Rundell, with her own beautiful style, makes you cheerfully submit to and share her adoration of the man who believed that if you ‘tap a human… they ring with the sound of infinity’.

The Trees by Percival Everett (Influx Press, £9.99). I didn’t know what to make of this book and still can’t get it out of my head. It’s funny, dark, heartbreaking, clever and an absolute cracker.

The Palace Papers by Tina Brown (Century, £19.99). Nobody, but nobody, writes gossip like Tina Brown: she’s the gossip Goat – and you will tear through the pages.

Really Good, Actually by Monica Hersey (Fourth Estate, £14.99). This is funny – proper actual funny, not literary fiction funny. It takes every single time you have felt sorry for yourself and pushes it until it nearly breaks. I loved it.

Julie Burchill

The only good thing about the culture wars are the brilliant books we free speech fans have written on the subject. This year has produced three smashers: David Swift’s The Identity Myth (Constable, £20), Konstantin Kisin’s An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West (Constable, £18.99) and Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans (Constable, £20). The fact that they’re all from the same publisher who so short sightedly cancelled my own book on the subject (last year’s Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics) and I still love them is a testament to how good they are.

Doyle quotes me in his book – ‘Woke is the revenge of the dullard on the wit, of the wallflower on the whirling dancer’ – and this hat trick of excellence proves that it’s also the revenge of those who can’t produce anything more than a few sweary tweets a day on those who can sustain writing of real style and substance.

Antony Beevor

Ian McEwan’s Lessons (Cape, £20) is a brave venture. In this 500-page novel, his longest yet, he deploys the life of a helpless man-child to cover the entire post-war era, with its moral ambivalence and political paradoxes. He mixes true events from his own life with perceptive asides on the untrustworthiness of memory, yet turns the usual fictional pattern of writerly success completely inside out. His protagonist, Roland Baines, a feckless poet, is abandoned by Alissa, his German wife, who cannot face having anything to do with their baby son. To his astonishment and mixed dismay, she later turns out to be the star of contemporary German fiction. However much one wants at times to shake Roland out of his bemused torpor, McEwan’s wry humanity and gentle amusement at his own generation proves irresistible and a joy to read.

Christopher Howse

I thought I was a bit of a church crawler, but it was a revelation to devour the 365 full-page photographs by C.B. Newham in his Country Church Monuments (Particular Books, £40). He had all the best skin-and-bone cadavers, life-size horses, obelisks, swans and hand-holding couples to choose from, having spent years photographing 9,000 churches for national projects. There’s the famous hug-wrestling baronet of Bunny (Notts), laid out by Death, and the buxom waxwork of Sarah Hare, bright as life, at Stow Bardolph, Norfolk. It’s a complete history of England’s eccentric church embellishments, some outdoing their rustic housing in scale and daring. And Newham’s camera has caught wonderful images where no one has succeeded before. It makes me want to stay away from foreign glories till I’ve consumed these.

Jonathan Sumption

Johan Huizinga’s Autumntide of the Middle Ages, translated by Diane Webb (Leiden University Press, £55), is an old classic in new clothes. First published in Dutch in 1921, it sets out to explain the mentality of late medieval men: their limitations, their joys and sorrows, the intensity of their experience of life and the profound pessimism of their outlook, all coloured by the universal presence of religion, ritual and symbolism. This is a literary and historical masterpiece which opens up a beautiful but arcane world. It was the book which inspired me as a teenager half a century ago to write about this rich and complex period. Diane Webb has written a fine new translation which for the first time does justice to the original; and Leiden University Press has produced an inviting volume, richly illustrated in colour.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

The best writing I encountered this year also happened to be a form of rewriting: novels which took familiar stories and gave them an unexpected modern spin or even a bit of postmodern topspin. Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (Faber, £20) relocates the action of Dickens’s David Copperfield to southern Appalachia – a place that has usually been seen by the rest of America as a source of either humour, in TV shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies, or horror, in the 1972 film Deliverance – and the result is emotionally raw and riotously entertaining.

Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind (Mantle, £18.99) reimagines the classical myth of Medusa in a narrative that manages to be both very funny and unexpectedly terrifying: a true comedy of terrors.

Graham Robb

This year, the average date of publication of the books I’ve read is c.1840. One of the most recent is J.B. Priestley’s English Journey (1934). Grumbly, hilarious and historically priceless, it recounts the author’s investigative odyssey through some of the loveliest and ghastliest rural and industrial parts of England, from Southampton to his native Bradford and back to London, by way of Tyneside and East Anglia. He talks to people, watches them at work and play, and consumes their depressing food. Finding none in print, I read a 1994 edition. The book is said to have boosted the Labour party’s electoral fortunes. With its meditations on the ‘miserable meanness’ to foreigners of ‘the cheap press’, the shrivelling of the railways and ‘the present age of idiotic nationalism, political and economic’, its fresh and lively feel makes it my best ought-to-have-been-republished book of the year.

Daniel Swift

I missed a train because I was so engrossed in Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall (Vintage, £9.99). First published in 1963 and reissued this year in a translation by Shaun Whiteside, it is a novel which sounds silly in plot summary. A woman is trapped in a high Alpine valley by a mysterious invisible wall and has to learn to survive. Totally gripping

Mark Amory

The Lion House by Christopher de Bellaigue (Bodley Head, £20) is a complex piece of history told with extraordinary clarity. In the 16th century, a Greek slave becomes the best friend and adviser of the Ottoman emperor. The Doge of Venice, playing a double game, happens to be his father; there are threatening pirates with red hair, and where does the pope stand in all this? At a banquet, the slave, now sophisticated but unknown, has a drink: ‘After each sip of wine, he pours in a little water. That way a single glass lasts the whole evening, turning first mauve, then pink, then clear.’ We can see, and understand, everything.

Chips Channon would probably have met them all, since he knew ‘everybody’ and liked royalty best. On one evening alone he was invited to 11 dinner parties. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57, the third volume edited by Simon Heffer (Hutchinson, £35), finds bombs falling on Belgrave Square. Channon is a little bored with being an MP and hopes to become a peer, while the love of his life, Peter Coats, is working for Lord Wavell in India. Perhaps the brilliantly successful and ‘sweet’ young playwright Terence Rattigan might take Coats’s place? Channon is honest, frank, intelligent, and wrong about practically everything, but always intensely readable.

Boyd Tonkin

‘Let cursed neutrality go to hell,’ spat a Puritan preacher, as Oliver Cromwell’s troops stormed Basing House. Jessie Childs’s The Siege of Loyalty House (Bodley Head, £25) turns an English Civil War stand-off into a fable of murderous polarisation: gripping, timely history. Graham Robb’s France: An Adventure History (Picador, £25) delights and illuminates, as the chronicler of the Hexagone cycles around its demythologised past.

In fiction, Ian McEwan’s Lessons (Cape, £20) spans baby-boomer lives, minds and times with vision, insight and dexterity. Further afield, Zhang Yueran’s fierce, tender, penetrating Cocoon, translated by Jeremy Tiang (World Editions, £13.99), shows how the catastrophic legacy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution blights Chinese lives. The wildly inventive dystopian satire of Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria, translated by Max Lawton (New York Review of Books, £15.99), confirms that Putin’s Russia has met its (self-exiled) literary nemesis: it’s Orwell, Vonnegut and Calvino in one.

Claire Lowdon

I’ve read a lot of mediocre-to-bad books this year about the pandemic, and one really good one: Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends (Allen & Unwin, £8.99). Set in the sun-soaked, jittery days of spring 2020, this madcap lockdown novel is fleet-footed, extremely funny and then, when you least expect it, rather moving. Also funny, also unforgettable, is Either/Or by Elif Batuman (Cape, £16.99), which concerns the misadventures of an intelligent, naive young undergraduate during her second year at Harvard in the late 1990s. Batuman is particularly good on sex and sexual politics.

In both books, the star feature is the narration. In refreshing contrast to the current vogue for minimalist plain speak, these are garrulous, rambunctious novels, full of baroque riffs and digressions. Treat yourself to some pure pleasure over Christmas: either of these would make perfect holiday reading. 

The morality of begging for trade with Saudi and Qatar

Cop27? Me neither. Barring a last-minute call to join Boris Johnson’s Sharm El Sheikh entourage, I’ll be minding my carbon footprint at home. But I’m sorry not to be reporting firsthand from a more controversial Middle Eastern gathering of the global elite: the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, or ‘Davos in the Desert’.

A ticket to Cop27 is a virtue signal in itself. But attendance at last week’s FII, an annual showcase for progressive sovereign spending within Mohammed bin Salman’s otherwise medieval Saudi state, is a moral conundrum. Just as the UK relies on Qatar for liquefied natural gas supplies while our dignitaries queue to cite the emirate’s human rights record as reason not to go to the World Cup there, so we beg the Saudis to buy gilts and British-made arms but we don’t want to be seen cosying up to the regime that butchered Jamal Khashoggi.

The US – with a starry line-up led by Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, the billionaire investment guru Ray Dalio and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner – seemed to have no trouble burying its scruples in the desert sand; the Chinese delegation, one assumes, had none to bury. As for the UK, our only big name on the platform was the former chancellor George Osborne, bravely reassuring anyone who would listen that ‘Britain’s back on track’.

My man in the canapé catering truck texts to tell me there was a rich moment of comedy when proceedings were interrupted by an unscheduled invitation for the assembled financial titans to dine with MBS himself – prompting an undignified scramble through extra security to bag seats in the motorcade, which duly delivered them all to the wrong palace. Several hot and hungry hours later, their reward was a brief shake of the ruler’s allegedly bloodstained hand. But that’s how the business gets done.

Sane hands?

Donald Trump declaring himself ‘very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands’ tells us all we need to know about the completion of Elon Musk’s $44 billion buyout of the San Francisco-based social media site from which the former president was ‘permanently suspended’ after the storming of the Capitol in January last year. Having launched his quixotic bid in April, supposedly in the cause of free speech, Musk tried to pull out in July but was sued by Twitter and forced by a court in Delaware, where the company is registered, to see the deal through. Meanwhile other leading tech shares have been plunging – including Musk’s own Tesla electric car company, down by a third – and banks that agreed to back the Twitter bid with some $12.5 billion of debt are reportedly wishing they hadn’t.

Does living in a silo of libertarian billionaires while basking in the adulation of millions of online followers make Musk a safer custodian for this powerful channel of communication than the top executives he fired after closing the deal, or the public shareholders he has replaced? Of course it doesn’t. Should he have taken my advice in April and stayed focused on Tesla? Of course he should. Will financiers and co-investors turn against him? Within months, I’d guess. And will the world be a happier place if Twitter self-destructs under his ownership? Yes, until something even more corrosive of truth and decency replaces it.

Flat battery

Good news: Britishvolt, the venture that’s trying to build a £3.8 billion, 3,000-job electric–vehicle battery ‘gigafactory’ at Blyth in Northumberland, did not die on Monday night. Despite rumours during the day of its impending demise, cash was secured from unnamed sources to keep the business afloat, at least for the time being.

Parachuted into the old coal port of Blyth (in the Labour stronghold of Wansbeck that very nearly fell to the Tories in 2019), the Britishvolt project was hailed – or perhaps cursed – by Kwasi Kwarteng when he was business secretary as ‘exactly what levelling up looks like’. It boasted ‘world-leading lithium–ion battery technologies’ and a target to begin production in 2023. The investment group Abrdn is a backer and the commodity giant Glencore a ‘strategic partner’.

But having struggled to raise continuing funding and parted company in August with the founder and chief executive Orral Nadjari, it reached the cliff edge this week when the new Business Secretary, Grant Shapps, refused to release £30 million of promised government funding ahead of schedule. According to one report, he found Britishvolt’s management ‘totally chaotic’.

So the bad news is that the survival prospects of the UK’s boldest stake in the global EV battery market look shaky at best. An industrial buyer – almost certainly not British – may be its only hope. Nissan of Japan is building its own battery factory 20 miles south at Sunderland; talks have been held with Tata of India, parent of Jaguar Land Rover, but evidently with no result. I see no pictures of Chinese delegations on Britishvolt’s website, but let’s hope that’s not where salvation has to come from.

Ghoulish binge

The horror of Saturday’s crowd stampede in the Itaewon nightlife district of Seoul – where I was an occasional partygoer myself, many years ago – makes flippant Halloween observations distasteful. But before I’d heard that dreadful news, I was making my way across London’s West End through throngs of scary costumes, masks and black-eyed maquillage.

On an unseasonally warm evening, families with half-term children filled every pavement; box-office tills were ringing; bars and bistros were rammed, with queues round the block for the most fashionable places. We read – and some of us write – every day about the dark winter to come, the tax rises, the fuel bills, the strikes, the NHS chaos. But younger consumers, I sense, may be seeing it differently: an opportunity for one last ghoulish binge from now till Christmas.

Letters: Where past PMs went wrong

Catalogue of disasters

Sir: Matthew Parris, in his article ‘The real cause of all the chaos’ (29 October), asks of our last three prime ministers: ‘What big thing did any of these unfortunate souls do wrong?’ In a spirit of helpfulness:

Mrs May: net zero by 2050, derisory defence spending.

Mr Johnson: hospital clearances, lockdown, vaccine mandates, derisory defence spending.

Ms Truss: tax cuts without public sector spending cuts.

As a consequence of these three, Britain is not so far away from having to go cap in hand to the IMF once more, and is again confronted by war in Europe as a result of the failure of conventional deterrence.

Tim Bidie

Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Poisoned Cup

Sir: Rod Liddle’s scathing commentary on Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup, ‘Playing at morality’ (29 October), overlooks the benefits of awarding such an event to regimes with which we are in fundamental disagreement. Just look at the progress in human rights in China since it hosted the Olympic Games (summer 2008, winter 2022) and Russia since its Winter Olympics (2014) and World Cup (2018). 

Bryan Matthews

Leigh-on-Sea, Essex

True sisters

Sir: I agree with Louise Perry’s analysis about the possible future of feminism (‘Radical tradition’, 29 October). To my surprise, as a gender-critical feminist and educationalist, I now find myself with more in common with my more conservative sisters of ‘middle England’ than many of those on the left. A hardened ideology has taken over and those who question it feel silenced or are vilified for speaking out.

Christine Crossley

Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire

Balfour’s faith

Sir: Charles Moore lists Balfour among prime ministers who ‘cannot unequivocally be described as Christian’ (Notes, 29 October). Yet at the end of his life Balfour wrote about his mother’s positive approach to scientific study – adding that ‘she never surrendered her own convictions as to the inestimable value of her central religious [Christian] beliefs’. Balfour said this ‘may have lacked theoretic finish, but it appealed to me in 1866, and after more than sixty years’ reflection, it appeals to me still’. Moreover, he was a lifelong communicant in both Anglican and Presbyterian churches.

The Revd Dr David Weekes

Kilmany, Fife

Central bank balance

Sir: Martin Vander Weyer was on the money about the rate of UK corporation tax (‘The truth about corporate taxes’, 22 October) and could have usefully applied some of his scepticism to business rates. But I wonder if his support for either the reduction or elimination of the rate at which the Bank of England remunerates reserves would make a tricky situation even more challenging. These enormous liabilities have accrued as a direct result of quantitative easing (QE), a programme originally conceived to provide liquidity to the markets more than a decade ago. Now however, central bank balance sheets are of a size which could easily capsize national economies. As a central bank cannot be insolvent, losses on a QE programme must be indemnified ultimately by the taxpayer. 

In the USA, the Federal Reserve has in fact raised the amount of interest that it pays on these reserves, the better to control the winding down of its own QE programme. In this way, it has tightened credit availability by putting a floor under the rate at which commercial banks lend to each other. If the Bank of England reduces the rate of interest that it pays on its liabilities, it may lose control of its own balance sheet and interest rates in the wider market. It might give some short-term pleasure to those who believe that no punishment of banks is enough, yet would be disastrous for the economy as a whole.

Jonathan Cobb

Dunbar 

Baptism of fire

Sir: Melanie McDonagh’s ‘Notes on … Candles’ (29 October) contained many illuminating facts but lacked one she should have highlighted when she said ‘We’ve got out of the habit of using candles’. This change of habits has resulted in increased fire risk, with Home Office data recording almost a thousand serious candle-related fires last year alone. If candlelight is to be used to combat blackouts and possibly to reduce energy costs this winter, relearning the care we took with them during the 1970s will be as important as advice on ‘candle management’ and making ‘a DIY candle’.

Peter Saunders

Salisbury, Wiltshire

Two-term Truss?

Sir: Is Jacob Rees-Mogg correct to say that Liz Truss served two terms as PM ‘because she kissed hands twice’ (Diary, 29 October)? Surely the sovereign invites the new PM to form a government (as the late Queen did two days before her death), and when Ms Truss had her first audience with the King this was not required, because her government was already in place?

Melanie Mitchell

Berwick-upon-Tweed

Heinz beanpoles

Sir: Toby Young writes about height (‘At last, a PM I can look down to’, 29 October). When I started my first job as a sales clerk at the H.J. Heinz company in 1958, I remember that one of the conditions for employment as a salesman was that the successful candidate needed to be at least six foot tall. If my memory serves me faithfully, they were also required to wear a bowler hat and carry an umbrella. Incidentally, I was 5ft 8½in at the time, but am now gradually shrinking.

Robin Hunter-Coddington

Chiswick

Don’t sneer at Elon Musk

I know a man who plans to burn an effigy of Elon Musk on his bonfire on 5 November. Musk will be on a cardboard rocket and it will be hilarious, apparently,to watch him being engulfed by flames, because he’s ridiculous, he and his weird ideas about Mars. The idea that Musk is laughable is one of the few topics on which the progressive left and the old hawkish left agree. Musk isn’t a serious person, they say, and because he’s not serious, he’s dangerous. He shouldn’t be allowed to own Twitter, let alone space rockets.  

There was cautious, grudging approval when Musk donated terminals for his Starlink satellites to Ukraine, followed by great alarm when he speculated about the possibility of a peace deal with Vladimir Putin. Seize his satellites, nationalise Starlink, said the Atlantic’s David Frum.  

Is Elon Musk a less serious person than David Frum? It’s not clear to me that he is. Why is it less sensible to speculate about a way to end the war than it is to trudge on towards some nuclear catastrophe? It’s not as if we can or would want to go to war with Russia. And yes, Musk’s a child on Twitter, but then Twitter’s a playground. What’s the point of being in a bouncy castle if you don’t bounce? Musk goads his enemies and posts memes and daft emojis. Jimmy Kimmel calls him ‘a piece of shit’. Frum wants to take his toys away. So it goes. Everyone’s a teen on Twitter and anyone who seems adult is just acting that way in the hope of applause. I’m not sure my marriage would survive if I read my own husband’s tweets.

Outside the Twittersphere, how is Musk a joke? He survived a brutal childhood in South Africa, escaped to the US and then made a fortune co-founding what became PayPal. It’s often said, dismissively, that Tesla relies on handouts, as if we’d all be car magnates if only we knew where to apply for subsidies. But of the ten largest publicly traded companies, Tesla Inc is the one that’s grown most in the past decade. Revenue has increased more than 250-fold, sales have surged, shares boomed and the workforce quintupled since 2016. ‘Unlike its peers,’ wrote Matthew Winkler of Bloomberg, ‘Tesla persevered through the dislocations caused by the first pandemic and then the war in Ukraine by spending years focused on shoring up its supply chain.’ Bitch about Elon’s management style all you like, but it’s working. 

It’s amazing how many people think Musk’s talk of humans living on Mars is another sign of his derangement. I have every sympathy with anyone who prefers not to think about the enormity of death and space. As Spinal Tap’s David St Hubbins put it, in conversation with my hero Nigel Tufnel, it’s ‘a little too much perspective’. 

But the people most affronted by Musk’s talk of Mars are often the very same people who are most anxious about the environment and most certain that we humans aren’t long for this planet. If we’re actually facing extinction, shouldn’t we at least give Mars a shot? Or try to harness solar power or mine asteroids? No dice. It’s as if they think it’s in bad taste somehow to try to solve the problem. 

What they really mind about, though, isn’t the planet so much as Twitter, which Musk has just bought for $44 billion, and which most British politicians consider their real home planet. The overreaction to Musk becoming the compère has been astonishing. Newspapers worldwide reported an instant rise in racism. Racist trolls are exulting in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, said Variety.‘Scary AF,’ agreed NBA star LeBron James, ‘so many damn unfit people saying hate speech is free speech.’ A sizeable proportion of progressives seem to think that the moment the deal with Musk was signed, some barnacled gate that once kept the scaly bigots at bay creaked open and populist orcs began to lope and drool about, ripping the gauzy wings from rainbow folk. ‘Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned. Bye,’ declared a blue-tick TV producer called Shonda Rhimes (1.9 million followers), whose Twitter account remains active.

But Musk hasn’t let the orcs back in. As Twitter’s head of safety, Yoel Roth, reported, what may have looked like a rise in racist tweets was in fact an organised attempt by a small number of accounts designed specifically to make it look as if Musk had unleashed the trolls. He hasn’t changed any of the rules about Twitter content moderation, or let any banned tweeter back into the fold, including the great orange tweeter–in-chief. ‘If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me whether Trump was coming back on this platform, Twitter would be minting money!’ he wrote. 

What Musk has done is suggest that he might let anyone buy a coveted ‘blue tick’ (‘Power to the people!’) and he has also floated the idea of an official debating chamber, an online gladiatorial ring where people with opposing ideas can clash in public. This is an idea I can get behind. It could be the saving of civilisation, a way of persuading the kids that truth matters, and that the best and only way to test opinions and ideas is to have them challenged. 

I don’t hold a candle for Elon Musk. He’s not my kind of guy. I don’t go for gamers or stoners and I could never fancy a grown man who goes to Burning Man. I find most of his tweets impenetrable and I’m wary of the way his various wives and girlfriends all seem to dye their hair blonde two years into the relationship. But Musk is his own man, not in anyone’s gang: he’s half Republican, half Democrat, he has said. And he’s clear-eyed about himself, which sets him above almost all the serious people. ‘If you list my sins, I sound like the worst person on Earth,’ he said in a recent interview. ‘But if you put those against the things I’ve done right, it makes much more sense.’ 

The Battle for Britain | 5 November 2022

Dear Mary: How do I get my friend to make time to see me alone?

Q. As a radio producer one of the most infuriating – and surprisingly common – things people ask is: ‘When will you be a presenter?’ Can you help with a withering response that lets them know I don’t feel like a failure, but have willingly chosen a completely different job?

— M.G., London SE1

A. You might reply: ‘Oh God no, I’d hate to do that but … [assume a sympathetic facial expression] why do you ask? Would you like to be a presenter? 

Q. My best friend lives in Australia, and visits annually to see friends and family. Every time we meet she has invited along so many other people she wants to catch up with that we never manage to engage in any kind of decent conversation. Then she always calls me from the airport bemoaning the fact that ‘we haven’t seen each other properly’. This year, how can I ensure we have some time alone without causing any trouble? 

— J.B., Pimlico

A. Next time, get in early by suggesting you give a surprise lunch party for her at your house. Let her assume she will be working off a payload of mutual friends at this event. Then make sure you only invite people who you know will either be at work, away or flaky. When she turns up to find it is just the two of you, explain that when, by a weird coincidence, none of the other people you invited were able to make this particular day, you concluded that fate must be conspiring to ensure that the two of you could enjoy quality time. Your friend will be secretly relieved that someone else made the decision to take the ‘bulk processing’ option off the menu. 

Q. How do we discourage our family from giving us books about books? My husband and I live in a house which has been described as ‘a library with bedrooms’. The thousands of books we have carefully collected and catalogued over the decades are both precious and useful. Because we ‘like books’, family members frequently give us books about books – book-collecting, bookshops, book lists. We find them gimmicky. How do we persuade them to give us book vouchers instead? 

— M.P., Unley, South Australia

A. Put the relevant books on a single shelf – making sure that the shelf is the right size to fill it completely. Point them out with relish to your friends and say: ‘Look at all these lovely books about books. We’ve so loved collecting them and being given them. Now we’ve filled this shelf we’ve decided we simply can’t fit in any more on the subject. You’ve given us some of these lovely books. Now that we’re full up here, if you ever feel like giving us anything again, we are still book-mad. But if it’s horrible having to choose we would love a voucher…’

The many uses of ‘multiple’

I once failed to entertain the former Master of Balliol Sir Anthony Kenny by telling him about the inscription in the lift at the London Library, the gift of the Byzantinist Sir Steven Runciman. I suddenly forgot what it said.

All I could think of was Inter medium montium pertransibunt aquae, ‘Between the midst of the hills the waters shall pass’. That wasn’t right. I felt like Alice trying to recite Isaac Watts’s ‘How doth the little busy bee/ Improve each shining hour’, but coming out with ‘How doth the little crocodile/ Improve his shining tail’.

My failed quotation came from a Psalm, number 103 in the Vulgate numbering, number 104 in the Authorised Version. What I’d wanted was Daniel 12:4 Plurimi pertransibunt, et multiplex erit scientia. Perhaps Runciman was quoting not so much from the Book of Daniel as from a book of Francis Bacon, who used the biblical verse in his Advancement of Learning (1605).

The Authorised Version had not then been made, but the Bishops’ Bible translates this sentence as ‘Many shall go about here and there, and knowledge shalbe encreased’. The Authorised Version favoured the rendition ‘many shall run to and fro’, which suggests useless hurry and scurry. Bacon took it to imply ‘proficiency in navigation’; he saw ‘thorough passage of the world and the increase of knowledge’ as going together.

From multiplex comes the word multiple. Jake Berry accused Suella Braverman of ‘multiple breaches of the ministerial code’. How many would that be? More than a few? More than several?

In the past, multiple established itself in multiple phrases: multiple choice, multiple injuries, houses in multiple occupation, multiple pile-up, multiple rocket launcher. But it sounds odd as an alternative to many: ‘Multiple women are set to testify about Weinstein,’ the Guardian reported. Someone in the Daily Mail said: ‘I’ve spoken with them multiple times.’

Runciman’s lift has been replaced. I don’t know how many passed through its doors or whether knowledge has been increased, but certainly the books written since are multiple.

The march of Germany’s extreme monarchists

The far right in Germany isn’t all angry young men with shaved heads, baseball bats and black boots. There are those who appear respectable, even intellectual. The Reichsbürger movement includes accountants, teachers and academics; many members are middle-aged. It’s a fractured network with vastly diverging world views, united in their belief that the current government is illegitimate.  

The Reichsbürgers claim that the German empire was not legally abolished when it collapsed at the end of the first world war and that it therefore continues to exist. To them, the so-called November Revolution of 1918, in which Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate, ending the German monarchy, was a coup without legal basis. The governments that followed – beginning with the Weimar Republic and ending with today’s parliamentary democracy – have no right to exist. Today’s Bundestag can therefore be overthrown without qualms, even with violence if necessary. While this kind of extremism is still rare, there has long been residual monarchism in Germany. Around 10 per cent of Germans support the restoration of the royals; among those under 34, that number is nearly one in five.

Elisabeth R, arrested last month by state police, is alleged to be one of those extremist Reichsbürgers. She is not how you imagine a terrorist to be: a 75-year-old retired teacher with shoulder–length white hair, pictured carrying her belongings in a brown potato bag. She is accused of plotting to overthrow the incumbent government to restore the German monarchy. Prosecutors say she is the head of a terrorist cell of Reichsbürgers called the United Patriots that attempted to procure weapons and explosives. One of her alleged co-conspirators, a 54-year-old accountant named as Sven B, was arrested in April when police found an SS uniform and an AK-47 in his cellar. 

When questioned by police, he admitted plotting to abduct the health minister Karl Lauterbach, the architect of Germany’s lockdown policies. Plans had been drawn up that included the potential need to kill members of Lauterbach’s security detail. Next, the group would have formally declared the restoration of the German constitution of 1871, when the country was first unified under Kaiser Wilhelm I. They would then have found a stand-in for the current president or chancellor who they could use to confer legitimacy on their revolutionary restoration. 

Finally, the plan involved countrywide blackouts, brought about by attacks on the national electricity grid. The idea was to create chaos and cut the population off from the media so that ‘the new German government can begin its work unimpeded’. Sven B assumed that parts of the police and the army would be supportive of the plan.

It’s an idea that isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds: a few years ago a group of German commandos was disbanded when a far-right sergeant major was discovered with SS song sheets and thousands of rounds of ammunition buried in his garden. ‘He had a plan,’ said the parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces at the time, ‘and he is not the only one.’ Sven B wanted to be sure that Vladimir Putin, too, was on side. He admitted contacting the Russian President but wasn’t sure if his message had got through. Elisabeth R, who is known as the ‘countess’ in the movement, was supposedly destined for a role in this new government.   

There are other monarchist groups that lobby for a restoration of the Hohenzollern dynasty that once ran the country. One, Ewiger Bund, makes its own passports in a pre-1914 style which it then attempts to get stamped by a member of the old aristocratic families to gain citizenship of a lost imperial Germany. Many see Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia and the great-great-grandson of Wilhelm II, as the only legitimate ruler of the country. 

Elements within German society have long been susceptible to the esoteric. Biodynamic agriculture, which can involve practices such as burying bull horns full of quartz next to crops, has its largest following in Germany. Many former East Germans still believe that HIV is a man-made virus resulting from a disinformation campaign run by the Stasi and the KGB in the 1980s. Other more insidious elements have adopted parts of the American QAnon philosophy, mixing Covid conspiracies with theories about a secret global government. Some believe that it is Donald Trump’s destiny to free Germany from supposed foreign occupation, allowing Germans to abolish parliamentary democracy.  

According to a 2020 survey, more than half the voters of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland believe that ‘the world is controlled by secret powers’, as do 45 per cent of non-voters. The AfD now leads the polls in the eastern parts of the country and is the fourth largest nationally, with 15 per cent. Not all its voters subscribe to conspiracy theories, but the party often panders to such fears.   

Kerstin Köditz, a spokeswoman for the far-left party Die Linke in Saxony, has argued that the authorities are still underestimating the problem of these extremist monarchists. She’s right, but there are problems too with how the German state reacts to dissidents.

According to the constitution, ratified in 1949, any attempt to change the country’s political framework is prohibited. The so-called ‘eternity clause’, enshrining an unchanging constitution, has led to Köditz’s own socialist party coming under investigation by the security services. The AfD is being monitored on suspicion of counter-constitutional behaviour. For those inclined towards conspiratorial thinking, strict policing of politics confirms their fears about the state. Repression risks turning the weird into the dangerous.

Cutting the links with reality

It was a difficult one for the BBC, but they got through it. The problem was this: how to do the story on the chaos at the migrant centre in the former Manston airport which might result in the Home Secretary’s resignation without acknowledging that the root of the issue was a huge increase in asylum seekers? They were avid for the story because they could smell Suella Braverman’s blood on the wind. But it is, I think, contrary to BBC producer guidelines to suggest that Britain may have a problem with illegal immigration. How, then, to stick it to Braverman without implying there’s loads of Albanians flooding the country?

They got round it by interviewing, repeatedly, a SJW hobgoblin from a migrant-enabling charity to insist that even though it looked as though there were lots of illegal migrants, actually there weren’t really. This clown turned up on virtually every BBC radio news programme and even made an appearance on Newsnight in an opening package which seemed to say that all illegal migrants are absolutely bloody lovely people who only want a better life for themselves. By which dodge the corporation was a) able to castigate Braverman and the government for letting too many migrants in, while b) suggesting that there are not too many migrants coming in and that they should all be allowed to enter anyway. Generally, the BBC is curious about immigration and asylum seekers only if there’s a chance to hammer the government for being nasty to them. Credit, mind, to the World At One which allowed Nigel Farage to advance the proposition that Manston should once again become an airport, specialising in one-way flights to Tirana.

Another lack of curiosity about what seemed to me an interesting news story came with the severing of two undersea internet cables within the space of a week, one from Shetland to the Faroe Islands, the other from Shetland to the Scottish mainland. This latter ‘accident’ ensured that the islanders were effectively cut off from the world for a few days. The immediate response from the government – perhaps before they could possibly have known for sure – was that a fishing vessel had been responsible, and the press in general was content with this. There were fishing boats in the area at the time, but the arrival a little later of a Russian ‘research’ ship raised one or two eyebrows. Not long afterwards, a similar cable was severed in the Mediterranean, cutting internet links from Marseille to Lyon, Milan and Barcelona. The company responsible for the cable, Zscaler, described it as ‘an act of vandalism’ although still stopped short of using words like ‘Putin’. Or ‘Russkies’.

Of course, domestic trawlers have indeed severed various undersea cables – but much more in the past than of late. These days the boats are equipped with Kingfisher Bulletin technology which enables skippers to know what is lurking beneath their hulls and thus avoid inadvertent snagging. Bill McKenzie, chairman of the Fishing Vessel Agents and Owners Association (Scotland), was dubious about the notion that the cables had been cut by fishing boats. ‘I have been trying to think how many times trawlers have snagged a cable and I cannot think of one in the last ten to 15 years. That’s not to say it hasn’t happened, simply that I can’t remember it doing so,’ he told me.

So two such infractions in the space of a week is stretching credulity a little far, no? For sure, coincidences of this kind happen – that is the essence of statistics. But when you add in the severing of the French cable then the odds for such a coincidence begin to look infinitesimal. And that’s before we consider the weird blowing-up of the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines, which the Kremlin and quite a few QAnon nutters insist was a joint enterprise carried out by London and Washington.

There must be at least a suspicion that the Russians are both metaphorically and literally testing the water – demonstrating the sort of chaos that could be very easily wreaked on western Europe and the UK in particular just by snipping a few cables. Even so, there seems to be no particular appetite for addressing the problem – which is itself curious because it is not as if this form of Russian mischief is entirely unknown, nor our vulnerability to it.

As Alexander Downer reported in last week’s Spectator, in 2017 Rishi Sunak wrote a report for Policy Exchange about our cable network. In it, he said the following: ‘A successful attack on the UK’s undersea cable infrastructure would be an existential threat to our security. Yet the exact locations of these cables are both isolated and publicly available – jugulars of the world economy which are a singularly attractive target for our enemies.’

Meanwhile, the Shetland fishermen complain long and loud about the increased clutter of infrastructure around their islands, whether it be internet cables or the cables which accompany the growing number of offshore windfarms. Shetland depends upon its fishing industry, but every increase in cabling makes that activity more and more hazardous and increases the likelihood of a boat snagging a cable.

The shadow defence secretary John Healey has been tabling parliamentary questions about the level of security afforded to our undersea cables, having been assured rather blithely in a previous question that the Shetland incidents were merely an unfortunate accident. Well, if so, we should expect many more such ‘accidents’, given that the majority of our most important cables are neither buried beneath the seabed nor even shoved in a trench. They are just lying there, wholly exposed to whoever would cause them mischief, inadvertently or otherwise.

Neither the Ministry of Defence nor the National Maritime and Coastguard Agency responded to my questions on the matter.

How a tweet got me sacked 

I always advise younger journalists never to use irony or make jokes on social media, so when I was effectively sacked for alluding to an edible fruit of the palm family, I should have known better. And of course I did know better. I deleted my three-word tweet within minutes. But screenshots live for ever. There are no second thoughts on Twitter, no clarifications allowed. No second chances either. It is judge and jury and will take away your career, reputation and livelihood at the click of a mouse, if pusillanimous employers allow it to.

I’d been in countless Twitter storms in the past over Scottish nationalism, hate crime, gender. It’s what Twitter does. So when the editor of the Scottish Herald, for which I had been a columnist for more than 20 years, rang to tell me I was suspended, I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. The order had come from ‘upstairs’. I was out.

What for? Had I libelled someone? Nope. Broken the law? Nah. Had I been accused of groping? Of course not. I hadn’t even offended Twitter’s notoriously woke algorithms. I had used a word that is ‘not acceptable’ and the Daily Mail (shock horror) had asked for a comment. I pointed out that publications including the Guardian and Newsweek had recently published articles about how black Tories had been abused as ‘coconuts’ (brown on the outside, white on the inside) by the left. My tweet – ‘a coconut cabinet?’ – was an allusion to this, an ironic response to another tweet by someone who had said the presence of black ministers in the Conservative cabinet does not make it truly ‘diverse’.

When the Labour MP Rupa Huq said Kwasi Kwarteng was ‘superficially black’, she meant it. I quite clearly did not. The people who denounced me on Twitter knew this perfectly well. But it was possible to frame my three words in a way to suggest otherwise, inviting obloquy.

Trying to explain irony is hard, because it is a figure of speech in which words used mean the opposite of what they say. But it’s not that hard. I had also tweeted that the Liz Truss cabinet made Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish government look ‘hideously white’ – which was a reference to Greg Dyke’s famous remark about the BBC when he was director-general. Again, this was a turn of phrase, a use of exaggeration to make a point. It was not a literal assertion.

Do newspapers no longer know the meaning of irony, of hyperbole? Of course they do. But we now live under the tyranny of the literal. Anything you say will be turned into a statement of intent. 

Attention-seekers on social media deliberately misconstrue what people say to generate contrived outrage. When Gordon Beattie, the chairman of Beattie Communications, wrote online ‘We don’t hire blacks, gays or Catholics. We sign talented people and we don’t care about the colour of their skin, sexual orientation or religion’, everyone knew what he meant. But he had to ‘stand down’ from his own PR company because he’d used the words ‘we don’t hire blacks’.

When politicians talk about a ‘decapitation strategy’, they don’t mean that they intend to execute the rival party leader. If someone says ‘I’ll bloody kill you if you do that again’, it’s not a reason to call the police. Though come to think of it, under the Scottish government’s Hate Crime Act it could be.

Irony isn’t the only thing that suffers if everything is taken literally. Debate becomes impossible. It was futile to point this out in my case. There was ‘reputational’ damage to Newsquest, the parent company of the Herald group. They are committed to ‘Diversity Inclusion Equality’ (DIE).

I was suspended for a week before my fate was eventually decided. The Herald stated (on Twitter, naturally) that there had been no ‘racist intent’ on my part. That I have written ‘sensitively on racial matters’ for more than 20 years. They knew I’d been stitched up. But the gods of social media had to be appeased.

I’ve been ‘let go’ before in my long career. I was a BBC TV and radio presenter for 25 years. I’ve been a columnist for every-one from the Observer to the Big Issue. It’s part of the game. But this was something else. It was an assault on my integrity.

The Herald in Glasgow is one of the oldest newspapers in the world, published daily since 1783. It has had fearless editors such as Arnold Kemp, who revelled in the ancient Scottish tradition of hyperbolic abuse and offence-giving called ‘flyting’. How sad that it is now subject to a higher editorial authority composed of censorious figures who don’t even read the paper. These guardians of moral and political probity have been elected by no one. They aren’t accountable – they aren’t even identifiable in many cases. Only a small minority of the population have a Twitter account and only a tiny minority of those accounts, 10 per cent, actively tweet.

The Herald isn’t the only publication that lives in fear of social media. The journalists who are addicted to Twitter are part of the problem. Free speech and independent journalism are finished if we submit to the caprice of doctrinaire online zealots. Newspapers are, to use another no doubt unacceptable metaphor, cutting their own throats.

At sea: can Sunak navigate the migrant crisis?

It’s not hard to see why migrants come here. For those who make it across the Channel illegally, there is only a small chance of deportation. About 72 per cent of the predominantly young males who leave the safety of France can expect to have their UK asylum claims granted. The success rate is more than twice the EU average (34 per cent).

That’s part of the reason for the extraordinary growth in numbers coming across. Three years ago, 2,000 people arrived in small boats. So far this year, it’s 40,000. It’s funny to think that when 40 migrants crossed the Channel on Christmas Day in 2018, the then home secretary Sajid Javid was forced to cut short his family holiday amid the outcry. Last Saturday alone, 1,000 people made the crossing. 

Britain’s generous asylum system has an obvious appeal. Then there is the generosity
of the state, which offers an average of £13,500 of public spending per head each year, including access to an extensive benefits system that typically does not demand a record of tax contributions, citizenship and has few qualifying hurdles besides demonstrable need. When you are from a country offering none of these things, who can blame you for trying your luck?

Throw in the world’s second language, extensive diaspora communities, no requirement for ID cards and a large informal economy still open to cash-in-hand remuneration and it is little wonder that vast numbers of men are pitching up in northern France willing to pay traffickers for a seat in a dinghy across the Channel. Some 12,000 this year were from Albania, a safe and free country – the equivalent of 1 or 2 per cent of their adult male population. The UK acceptance rate for Albanians is 53 per cent; in France it’s 8 per cent and in Sweden and Germany it’s zero. 

At the last count, 127,000 asylum seekers
and their dependents were waiting to be processed, a number equivalent to the population of Exeter. Of those who arrived last year, just 4 per cent have been processed (and nearly nine in ten of those were accepted). All have to be accommodated in the interim at taxpayers’ expense. At the last count, some 25,000 asylum seekers were being billeted in hotels, some at a nightly cost of £150. This is on top of legal migration of 240,000 people a year, the same as the population of Swansea. No wonder the Home Office is struggling. 

It’s easy to game the UK system. Would-be refugees can claim to be victims of modern slavery, or to be from a country that does not easily take back failed applicants, or they can say they are gay. Another option is to convert to Christianity when their country of origin is Islamic, thereby conferring on themselves a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted’ under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

They can claim membership, however tenuous, of a political clan or faction that is out of favour at home. They can claim to be under 18, or try to find a British partner during the lengthy wait for their application to be processed. Given that 90,000 have been stuck in the system for more than six months while being legally prohibited from working, they have plenty of time. The applicants’ lawyers have no end of options.

Our deportation record for non-refugees is, meanwhile, very poor. Overall removals of foreign nationals (including convicted prisoners) have fallen dramatically from 46,000 per annum a decade ago to below 20,000 in
2019. The number of deportations fell below 10,000 in the Covid-affected
years of 2020 and 2021. A huge backlog of unresolved cases makes it unlikely that this will be rectified soon.

During the summer Tory leadership contest, Sunak set out a ten-point plan for fixing what he admitted was a ‘broken’
asylum system: ‘Law-abiding citizens are understandably shocked when they see boats filled with illegal immigrants coming from France to our shores, with our border force seemingly doing nothing to stop them.’ Sunak gave himself a deadline of 100 days. He hasn’t got long, and Tory MPs’ concern about their disgruntled voters is growing.

Then there’s the lurking presence of Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Though given to expressing herself rather crudely – see her pre-resignation attack on the ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’ – Braverman is a cunning political operator. She is already putting Sunak under far more pressure to address migration than her predecessor Priti Patel ever managed with Boris Johnson. Her reference to an ‘invasion of our southern coast’ was scripted and the shocked reaction intentional. She aims to cast herself as someone with no illusions about the situation and with the determination to succeed.

Braverman is helped by the fact that the Tories know the danger they face; all over Europe, governments that do not control immigration are threatened by insurgent parties. So she is being cheered on by the traditional right of the party: John Redwood, Edward Leigh, Bill Cash and others, as well as influential red-wall MPs. While no cabinet minister can ever be regarded as unsackable, if Sunak were to try to remove her now, it would be seen as evidence of a worrying lack of grip on the immigration issue.

Sunak’s long-time ally, the immigration minister Robert Jenrick, has admitted that the government must now consider ‘radical options’. Yet the options being discussed pose difficulties that few in government have properly come to terms with. Despite announcing his intention to seek a new agreement with France to better patrol their borders, Sunak must know it won’t work. Such agreements have been reached before and proven ineffective. Given that France refuses point-blank to adopt the one measure that could solve the problem – simply agreeing to take back every migrant that the UK picks up in the Channel – its co-operation is unlikely to deliver a solution.

Sunak has hinted that he wishes to tweak the legal definition of a refugee. Rather mysteriously, he claimed his change would ‘prevent anyone who enters the UK illegally from staying here’. That would be extremely
difficult, given that Article 31 of the 1951 Convention expressly limits a state’s right to impose penalties on grounds of an applicant’s illegal entry. Sunak has promised to give parliament ‘control of the number of refugees we accept each year’. This sounded very much like a pledge to impose fixed quotas, which again is impossible to reconcile with Britain’s open-ended obligations under international law. Sorting this out would mean finding international agreement on a subject that many European leaders find hard to even discuss. Sunak has also said he wants to ‘tackle’ the European Court of Human Rights where it seeks to ‘inhibit our ability to properly control our borders’. Presumably the ECHR’s objection to the plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was partly what he had in mind.

Braverman has said it would be her ‘dream’ to restart the Rwanda scheme, but there are doubts that in its current form this plan will ever be deemed acceptable by the European courts. Even if it were, the Rwandan government has said that it only has capacity for 200 people. Already the scheme has cost an estimated £140 million and yet we have managed to send precisely zero migrants to Rwanda. Relying on a third country for something as sensitive as our migration policy seems fraught with problems, at the very least.

A radical alternative idea would be to set up offshore processing on a UK overseas territory, with Ascension Island being the most likely location, given its lack of any indigenous population who might object. If Sunak were able to introduce that new rule, signalling that illegal entry means removal, regardless of refugee status, there would be a very good prospect of dissuading anyone from paying £3,000 to people traffickers for a space in a boat to England. These reforms would not weaken Britain’s moral duty to refugees. If anything, controlling illegal immigration would increase public support for the refugees who arrive through legal routes. The money that is saved on legal fees for bogus claims could be spent on helping those in genuine need. The Homes for Ukraine scheme showed a huge impulse to step up when the need is seen as genuine, so it’s hard to accuse Britain of being an anti-refugee country. Sunak can say that the public anger over small boats is in reaction to the unfairness that those in genuine need are not being prioritised.

The real solution is to create a new system that all western countries can agree on. There is an obvious need to come up with a modern, practical and moral equivalent to the 1951 Refugee Convention. That old agreement is incompatible with the modern era of mass travel. When it was signed, those attempting to leave Albania faced imprisonment for treason. Today, you can fly direct from Albania to London for as little as £45. The ease with which international travel can now be achieved has fundamentally changed the migration equation.

It has changed politics too. Denmark’s Social Democrat government outmanoeuvred the country’s right by adopting draconian measures on integration and deportations, arguing that such toughness is progressive, as it promotes the fairness of the official system. Denmark is also in talks with Rwanda about setting up its own UK-style transfer scheme for asylum seekers. But long-term Sunak watchers wonder if he would really risk such apparently Trumpian manoeuvres as leaving the ECHR, pitching Britain once more against international legal architecture and drawing accusations of breaching the Good Friday Agreement. 

During Europe’s 2015 migration crisis, Britain stood out. People smugglers hadn’t worked out sea routes to Britain, so the illegal influx went to France, Italy, Sweden and Germany. Their authorities were soon overwhelmed and deep social problems ensued – followed by an inevitable political backlash.

So Sunak should have no difficulty working out what will happen if he fails to address this problem. If there are still increasing numbers of small boats crossing, Tory-leaning voters will be yet more demoralised and disenchanted. The Brexit motto was ‘Take back control’. But it’s harder than ever to say that the Tories are in control. That leads to a deeper, more basic question: can Sunak govern?

Greta’s right about Cop being useless

Greta Thunberg said, in a newspaper interview, that Cop27 is a ‘scam’ for ‘greenwashing, lying and cheating’. Then she said to Jeremy Vine: ‘The fact that one of the most powerful people in the world [Rishi Sunak] doesn’t have time for this, it’s very symbolic and says that they may have other priorities.’ It is very disappointing that Mr Sunak did not listen to her words, recognising that the Cop is indeed a place of greenwashing etc and sticking to other priorities (though not ones pleasing to Greta). He has now gone back on his promise to stay away. This is a dreadful sign of weakness. His appeal lies in his sense of what matters most. There have already been 27 years of Cops, and yet global carbon emissions have continued to rise. They do not work. By giving in now, our new Prime Minister has let himself be captured by the false doctrine of climate ‘emergency’, and disabled from meeting our pressing energy needs. 

At the time of writing, however, the King is still not going to Cop. He withdrew on the advice of Liz Truss. The new Environment Secretary, Thérèse Coffey, says that whether he goes is ‘up to him’. This is surprising. For a reigning monarch to go to Cop is an official act and therefore something done only on prime ministerial advice. It is not for the King to act on how he feels: it is a matter for His Majesty’s Government. If the government itself is confused about this, then the King is exposed to political risk. If he does go after all, Sharm El Sheikh will be full of people trying to trap him into embarrassing his own Prime Minister.  

The new King is often referred to on television, including the BBC, as ‘King Charles’. Surely this is not right. He is ‘The King’, just as his mother, when alive, was ‘The Queen’. We normally use our monarchs’ names only when they are dead – Queen Victoria, King George VI. It is also strange that the Princess of Wales is often referred to as ‘Kate Middleton’. She deserves to be known by her new title, just as her most recent predecessor in that role soon ceased to be ‘Lady Di’.

Harry Armstrong Evans was a student at Exeter University when he killed himself. The coroner at his inquest criticised the university for not responding to his ‘cry for help’. He had sent an email about his poor state of mind after bad exam results, but no one from the university ever spoke to him about this or replied substantively to an anxious voicemail from his mother. Harry’s parents complain that universities do not have a duty of care towards their students. Troubled students fall through this gap. Since the age of majority was reduced from 21 to 18 half a century ago, universities have not been in loco parentis, so they have become careless about students. At the same time, parents have no right to know anything about their student children because they are, in law, adults. Their child could be in utter despair and yet the university (if it knew, which it often does not) could tell them nothing without the child’s consent. Many students, especially those leaving home for the first time, are much more like children than adults. For their own sake, parliament should recognise this and give all full-time students under 21 the status of children. 

This week, I became an old age pensioner, but I quite recently discovered that you do not have to take your state pension as soon as you qualify. You can take a bet with the undertaker and postpone (up to the age of 75, I think). If you do this, the amount you will eventually be paid compounds. Since I am in full-time employment, I do not need the money as much now as I may later, and I might end up in my dotage being taxed at a lower rate and therefore keeping more of my pension than if I collect now. Another thing I did not know until last month is that when you reach pensionable age and are still employed, you no longer have to pay National Insurance contributions. This is, now that I think about it, logical, since NI is supposed to pay for one’s pension, though of course it doesn’t. So suddenly I am in favour of high rates of NI. The only fly in the ointment – apart from the possibility of losing money by dying prematurely – is the thought that some future government short of money will renege on the promise to pay me more later. It will probably be a Conservative government, in love with its latest device for ‘levelling up’.

Despite my sudden interest in the state pension, I cannot find much of a defence for keeping the ‘triple lock’ on it, except for the important one that it was a solemn electoral promise. The lock is a stupid idea, because one of its three elements – keeping pace with average earnings rises – makes no real sense and might not be, in some circumstances, affordable. The purchasing power of the state pension should be protected against price inflation in normal times, but why should people who no longer work automatically do as well (or as badly) as the average of those who do? So many people are now old that the triple lock is much more expensive than when first invented in 2010. The triple lock benefits not only the poor, but millions who are quite well enough off not to need such protection. When you consider that the old usually have no mortgage, are often living in valuable property on whose sale they pay no tax, get free prescriptions, cheap rail travel, bus passes and pay no inheritance tax between spouses, you might tilt the balance a bit more in favour of the young, whose property opportunities are hundreds, even thousands, of square feet worse than those of their grandparents.

Poor Matt Hancock. He simply got things the wrong way round. If he had become a celebrity first and a politician after, he might have shot to the top like Donald Trump or Volodymyr Zelensky.

Robert Buckland: ‘Let asylum seekers work – and pay tax’

When the small boats crisis began, it was seen by some in government as a positive sign. ‘It was an emblem of success,’ says Robert Buckland, who was solicitor general at the time. ‘If you remember, the previous mode of entry for migrants was on lorries.’ Heat scanners had been introduced at the Channel Tunnel in 2015, which meant more stowaways were being caught. The switch to boats, it was argued at the time, was a desperate tactic on the part of the people-smugglers. No one guessed what a problem it would become.

Back in 2014, the UK asylum system was coping: 87 per cent of cases were handled within six months. Now that number is just 7 per cent. The challenge of accommodating tens of thousands of applicants is too much for the Home Office to handle. The root cause appears to be the bureaucracy. ‘There will be people in the system for years waiting for their claims to be determined,’
says Buckland.

His long time in government gave him a ringside seat in this losing battle over law and asylum. He was solicitor general for five years, then justice secretary and Lord Chancellor. He was sacked by Boris Johnson in July’s reshuffle, and then brought back into cabinet in the dying days of Johnson’s premiership before becoming a casualty of Rishi Sunak’s ascendancy. 

We meet to discuss what lies at the root of the asylum pile-up and how it got to 100,000 cases. It was recently pointed out to the Home Affairs Committee in the Commons, appeals are being processed at the rate of just two a week.

Buckland believes the problem lies with legal creep. Over the years, he says, the criteria for asylum have become ever more complicated. ‘The checklist and tests you have to apply are all extremely technical, with a myriad of different interpretations. If you’re a layperson trying to negotiate the immigration rules, I really think you’d struggle. You’d need a lawyer, and lawyers themselves will often struggle with the sheer complexity of those rules because they’ve been amended and re-amended so many times.’

If you lose a hearing, that’s not the end of it. ‘There’s a constant ability to appeal and appeal and appeal,’ he says. ‘So you can come at the last minute and say: “Oh, by the way, I’m gay.”’ And then start a fresh appeal on new grounds. One reform Buckland suggests is to demand that every asylum seeker is required to state their full case at the start, and not change their story later on. ‘It’s very important to incentivise early disclosure, to avoid this sort of repetitive set of applications on new facts. That happens very often in the system.’

Lockdown, he says, was a huge missed opportunity. The months of inactivity could have been the perfect time to cut the asylum backlog, given the lack of anyone coming into the country. The magistrates’ courts managed to make the switch to Zoom hearings, but the asylum complaints system could not cope. Britain left lockdown with an even bigger asylum backlog than before the pandemic. At present there are about 70,000 asylum seekers who have been waiting six months or more, and in the meantime they are legally prohibited from finding work or doing anything to support their families. Buckland says he has started to see this as an economic and moral failure.

‘We should take a leaf out of Denmark’s book and do more to give rights to work,’ he says. At present, an asylum seeker can apply for voluntary work after 12 months on the waiting list. ‘But why not make it six months? We’ve got thousands of people costing us money, standing idle – instead of being able to contribute. Or worse, actually doing work of an irregular nature.’

There are five refugee hotels in Swindon, his constituency. ‘I was in town on Friday and I saw the asylum seekers milling about with nothing to do. I’m a big fan of something called “time banking”, where if I mow your lawn, you give me something back in exchange – a meal, a voucher or something.’ But asylum seekers can’t even do that. ‘It’s just so unimaginative and a waste of resource,’ he says. ‘It’s costing the health service more as well, because all these people are turning up with mental health problems and other ailments. It’s a vicious circle.’

What would he do? ‘Let them contribute to the economy in a legitimate way. Let them pay tax,’ he says. But wouldn’t that encourage even more arrivals on small boats? Studies have shown no evidence of this, he says. ‘Let’s have a grown-up conversation. Until we have more automation, until we really harness more people who are economically inactive in the UK, we are going to need an element of migration to fill the job vacancies.’ UK vacancies currently stand at 1.2 million, near a record high. There are 5.3 million on out-of-work benefits, also nearly a record high.

It’s dangerous, he says, for any Tory to declare (as Suella Braverman did this week) that the system is broken. ‘The system has its problems, but we’ve been in control of it for 12 years,’ he says. ‘We have been trying to refine it, improve it, speed it up, with mixed results. That’s the reality of it. But I don’t think it’s broken.’

Sunak’s government is planning to introduce a Bill of Rights (drafted by Buckland’s successor at the Ministry of Justice, Dominic Raab) which intends to remove obstacles such as the European Court of Human Rights, which recently outlawed the government’s Rwanda deportation policy. Buckland believes the bill would make things worse. ‘It’s worse than useless. It threatens spawning a whole range of domestic rights which I think really sit ill with the English common law tradition. We already have the likes of [Labour MP] Stella Creasy saying “I want a right to abortion, so I’m going to amend the bill”. All these things suddenly become a political headache. It’s a real problem for people like me, who want to just keep the “rights culture” under control.’

A dispute over the Bill of Rights led Buckland to abandon Sunak and endorse Liz Truss during the summer’s leadership race. Even though Sunak sacked him from cabinet, the Tory party, he says, is ready to unite. His colleagues have ‘looked over the cliff. Some have even felt as if they were falling. This has made them realise that if we cannot make this government work, then we really are going to be out for a long, long time’.

Kazuo Ishiguro: My love affair with film

Everyone has a type they can’t resist. For the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s old men. Old men secretly worried they’ve spent entire lives on the wrong side of history. Old men born in a world of certainty, transplanted to a different, more dubious one. Old men asking themselves, as so many of us will do (if we haven’t already): ‘What was it all for?’

But as I wait at the offices of a West End PR firm to interview Sir Kazuo about his new film with Bill Nighy, Living, I can’t help but wonder what unlikely preoccupations these are for arguably the nation’s greatest living literary talent. Those of us with humdrum lives may daydream about winning a Nobel Prize. But in Ishiguro we have a Nobel laureate who, perversely, can’t stop fantasising about a life of mediocrity or failure. 

In his Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day (1989), it is the English butler Stevens (memorably portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in Merchant and Ivory’s film version) who looks back on a life of service only to be nagged, after the second world war, by the feeling that he had all along served the wrong master – a Nazi collaborator. In Ishiguro’s earlier novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986), the ageing painter, Ono, broods on much the same, in post-fascist Japan. These themes now take a new form. Though directed by the South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus, Living was very much Ishiguro’s brainchild, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) that tells the tale of Mr Williams (Bill Nighy), a terminally ill bureaucrat in 1950s London, whose last wish is to make a difference after a lifetime of conformity.

As Ishiguro arrives, exactly on time, a small party for film industry types is happening in the lobby. In a rain-sodden trench coat, the kind favoured by men of a certain generation, he looks much the outsider. Though no stranger to bohemia, Ishiguro’s imaginative affinities somehow lie with a different sort of person and scene, the sort that prompted the New Yorker to recognise in his work a quality of ‘almost punitive blandness’ (intended, apparently, as praise).

‘I thought I would have an ordinary life,’ Ishiguro tells me, recalling his childhood in the  commuter-belt town of Guildford, where he arrived aged five from bombed-out Nagasaki in the late 1950s. ‘We lived in this little cul-de-sac, where my mother lived in the same house until she died; it was like a small community.’ His Japanese family was ‘treated very well, despite this recent history of enmity’, and his experiences were typically middle class. ‘I even sang in the local choir,’ recalls Ishiguro, who also attended a grammar school and, later, university in provincial towns (Canterbury, Norwich) rather than the Oxbridge conveyor belt.

Around him all along were those ordinary, strait-laced, bottled-up people, who had served king, country or empire only to find their values placed under a moral microscope – not least, eventually, in Ishiguro’s own work. ‘What would I have done,’ he admits to asking time and again, ‘had I been of their generation?’ His characters – Stevens, Ono and now the timeserving clerks in Living  – all pass the buck. ‘I think it’s complacent to say as a member of the generation that came afterwards that we would have never been like this.’

Fascination with his elders came early. There’s an image Ishiguro describes in his 2017 Nobel lecture of how, taking a suburban train to school, he ‘shar[ed] the carriage each morning with ranks of men in pinstripe suits and bowler hats, on their way to their offices in London’ – a vision of the past reminiscent of Larkin and his ‘fools in old-style hats and coats,/ Who half the time were soppy-stern’.

The memory wouldn’t leave Ishiguro, with each passing year becoming a more potent picture of a vanished world, until it ended up as the defining visual motif of his screenplay for Living. The lives of the civil servants portrayed in the film all have the regularity of a train timetable – no unscheduled stops, no detours – and the sound of the wheels trundling along the tracks drums home what pointless careers they have as cogs in the bureaucratic machine of London county council. It’s wonderfully evocative. (Still, Ishiguro kids himself: ‘I don’t know how to write screenplays.’)

Approaching the end, Mr Williams realises what Stevens in The Remains of the Day also comes to suspect: that they lived up to their quintessentially English ideals, the bowler-hatted gentleman and the black-tied butler, only to find themselves in an England bewilderingly indifferent to everything they took pride in. What was at the bottom of Ishiguro’s precocious sensitivity to this predicament, which he started writing about in his mid-twenties, long before any personal experience of it himself. ‘That just was an instinct I had when I was young,’ he says.

But what if it were the experience of migration that had grounded it all? Was Ishiguro not, aged only five, displaced from one world to another? To become estranged from the world around oneself – is this not what happens to the old men who captivate him? ‘I think there’s something in what you say, “the past is a foreign country” and all that’, though he later reflects that ‘very few English people ask questions about the past’.

But Ishiguro observes a vital difference between ‘emigrating to old age’, and simply emigrating: a difference in the ‘appetite’ for new things. Immigrants still have one, and are celebrated for it; old men have lost theirs, so we despise them. ‘People like me in my sixties are being asked to think about the world in terms of climate change, rather than the old arguments about communism vs capitalism,’ says Ishiguro. ‘But too much energy has already been spent understanding the world in one set of terms.’

It’s a feeling that presents a challenge to any ageing artist. In his Nobel lecture, Ishiguro asks: ‘Can I, a tired author, from an intellectually tired generation, now find the energy to look at this unfamiliar place?’ His own body of work provides an interesting answer. What’s so subversive about the way he confronts this unfamiliarity inflicted by time on the old is that, even if Living may be ‘a fictional recreation of a Britain, remembered from childhood, very rapidly disappearing’, Ishiguro has developed a method of envisioning the past free of nostalgia, where the stories we tell about it become instead objects of mistrust. ‘We’re all unreliable narrators, not just to other people, but to ourselves,’ he explains.

Ishiguro is referring to a technique that he is famous for mastering in his novels. But isn’t it harder to get the camera to deceive or evade? ‘This is one of the differences between cinema and written fiction,’ Ishiguro agrees. ‘It’s harder to have unreliable narrators, just as it’s difficult to get the haziness of memory on the screen.’ He cites Kurosawa’s Rashomon as a rare film that pulls it off. Ishiguro has publicly stated – after being quizzed enough times – that he isn’t much influenced by Japanese literature, but what about Japanese movies?

He lights up. ‘I was being taken to the cinema in Nagasaki when I was four,’ he reminisces, ‘and among the movies that came out of Japan in the 1950s, there was a ridiculous number of masterpieces.’ It turns out this has been central to his work, though underexplored in critical appraisals of it. ‘The Japanese filmmakers of that period had a huge effect on me. When I started writing fiction back in the early 1980s, I was copying Ozu,’ he confesses, referring to the director of Tokyo Story (1953) which he explains also portrayed ‘older people displaced in the modern world’. But even more than that now familiar theme, it’s Ozu’s invention of a style perfectly suited to that culture of restraint – slow, dignified, elliptical – that has been most inspiring. ‘When I write even in a more western environment,’ Ishiguro remembers thinking to himself, ‘I’m going to have the courage to go really, really slowly.’

At the start of his career, Ishiguro says, it wasn’t clear if he was going to be a screenwriter or a novelist. For a while he earned his living from the former but not enough films got made, and so cinema’s loss was literature’s gain. 

His involvement in the film industry persists though, with seven projects in development, including at Netflix, on top of being a judge at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Salman Rushdie once observed how Ishiguro’s ‘sensibility was not rooted in any one place, but capable of travel and metamorphosis’. Neither is it rooted in any one form of creativity, and if, like Mr Williams, Ishiguro gets one last chance to make an about-face, I wonder if it might be from novelist to filmmaker.

Thrilling: Hieroglyphs – unlocking ancient Egypt, at the British Museum, reviewed

‘Poor old Mornington Crescent, I feel sorry for it with this highly made-up neighbour blocking the view it had enjoyed,’ commiserated Professor C.H. Reilly in the Architects’ Journal in 1928. He was talking about the new reinforced-concrete Carreras cigarette factory designed by architects Marcus Evelyn and Owen Hyman Collins that had just gone up across from the station. It wasn’t the concrete that bothered him so much as the make-up: the gaudily painted façade with papyrus-form columns copied from the ancient Egyptian tomb of Panehsy and the two huge black cats representing the goddess Bast – while advertising Black Cat cigarettes – flanking the entrance.

How did this time-travelling lump of Egyptiana come to land in north London? It’s a long and very complicated story told in two fascinating exhibitions marking the anniversaries of the two great eureka moments in Egyptology – the decoding of hieroglyphs in 1822 and the rediscovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb a century later – both involving imperial conquest, bitter scholastic rivalries and appropriation on a humungous scale.

It was the Romans who began emptying Egypt of its pharaonic patrimony: to mark his conquest in 30 BC Octavian had a pair of obelisks carted off from Heliopolis and set up in Rome. When Renaissance archaeologists began digging into Rome’s classical past, up came imperial loot from ancient Egypt inscribed with mysterious symbols that some humanists fancied held the key to lost priestly wisdom. But how to unlock it? Enter another conqueror, Napoleon. In 1799 French sappers rebuilding an old fort in Rashid dug up a Ptolemaic decree of 196 BC inscribed in three languages: hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. In the Rosetta Stone they had found a philological phrasebook.

The story of the race between the French philologist Jean-François Champollion and the English polymath Thomas Young to decipher hieroglyphic script is a page-turner thrillingly told in the British Museum’s Hieroglyphs exhibition. Far from priestly arcana, however, the show reveals the content of most hieroglyphic texts to be surprisingly mundane. Alongside the usual royal decrees, exhibits include a Brexity graffito of 2,985 BC celebrating King Den smiting a foreigner and an 11th century BC Book of the Dead commissioned by the murderess of two policemen to get her off the hook in the afterlife.

There are some beautiful objects in the British Museum’s show – the 4th century BC basalt torso of the deified Pa-Maj inscribed with hieroglyphic body art makes today’s tattoo jobs look hopelessly naff – but it’s basically an exhibition about the power of the word. The power of the image is the subject of the Sainsbury Centre’s Visions of Ancient Egypt, which traces the history of our love affair with all things pharaonic back to the Egyptomania that swept Europe at the turn of the 19th century. Its first flush can be seen in Piranesi’s fantastical 1769 design for the interior of the Caffè degli Inglesi in Piazza di Spagna – ‘fitter to adorn the inside of an Egyptian sepulchre than a room of social conversation’, thought Thomas Jones – and Josiah Wedgwood’s Egyptian-style ‘Teapot with Crocodile Finial’ (1800-10). Illustrations of Egyptian antiquities by Napoleon’s archaeologist Dominique Vivant Denon reproduced on the Empress Josephine’s Sèvre dinner service in 1810 were more authentic. Artists who had never been to Egypt could not compete. The young Alma Tadema painstakingly researched the setting for his ‘Pastimes in Ancient Egypt 3,000 Years Ago’ (1863), but Edwin Long’s inclusion of a Bes jar in ‘The Gods and Their Makers’ (1878) didn’t lend credence to his vision of a temple workshop staffed by topless sculptresses modelling idols of fluffy white cats.

Egyptomania had nothing on the Tutmania unleashed by Howard Carter’s extraordinary discovery of an intact pharaonic tomb in 1922. Photographs show an entire carpentry workshop dedicated to making crates for the 3,000-year-old booty and a train of Egyptian bearers carrying it off; no wonder the fez-wearing officials posing with Carter in front of the tomb in 1924 look less than happy. Even if they could have halted the exodus of grave goods, they couldn’t stem the flow of pseudo-pharaonic frippery flooding the European market. From flapper dresses with names like ‘mummy wrap’ and perfumes in obelisk-shaped bottles called Ramses II to the French ocean liner Champollion featuring columns copied from the Aten temple and the façade of Upton Park’s Carlton Cinema crowned by a giant winged scarab – not an insect normally associated with fleapits – art deco design became a pharaonic free-for-all. Meanwhile modernist sculptors such as Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti co-opted Egyptian art’s formal qualities.

‘Should the continued appeal of Egypt be seen as appreciation or appropriation?’ is a question posed at the end of the show. It closes with ‘The Other Nefertiti’ (2016), a 3D-printed copy of the smuggled sculpture of Queen Nefertiti in Berlin’s Neues Museum, covertly scanned by Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles and published online as a digital model. In an adjacent video the artists bury another copy on the outskirts of Cairo, kicking sand in the faces of future smugglers.

Manet’s Mona Lisa: Radio 4’s Moving Pictures reviewed

Elizabeth the First is a ten-part American podcast series that isn’t about Elizabeth I at all. The assumption of its producers seems to be that the Tudor monarch was all right – a bit of a trailblazer, one might say – but not really worthy of her title.

The real ‘Elizabeth the First’ was actually Elizabeth Taylor. The series aims to present the actress as the first ‘influencer’ the world has ever known, even though poor old Taylor didn’t even know what Instagram was. Taylor did, however, court the media before the word ‘social’ was attached to it. And she didn’t need to take selfies because people were always shoving cameras in
her face.

The podcast is narrated by Katy Perry, the Californian singer who kissed a girl and liked it and then married Russell Brand. She speaks in a breathy way and is as partial as Meghan Markle to celebrating another woman’s ‘fortitude’ and ‘authentic self’. Elizabeth Taylor’s CV did not stop at plain ‘actress’. She was, as Perry put it, an ‘actress, artist, activist, advocate, mogul, daughter, mother, grandmother, friend, lover, wife, influencer’. You get the idea.

The point this podcast is trying to make is that today’s influencers are far less influential than they think they are. More than 40 million accounts on Instagram have more than a million followers each and similar statistics could probably be produced for TikTok and Twitter. What do these numbers really add up to? It’s all very vacuous. Elizabeth Taylor, by contrast, possessed ‘real power and longevity’. Fine. But describing her as ‘an influencer who went the distance’ feels slightly daft.

The episodes improve as they move away from this formula to explore the actress-mogul-mother’s biography. They proceed roughly chronologically from Taylor’s life as a child star to her establishment of an Aids foundation in the 1980s, and feature some brilliant clips and anecdotes from childhood friends and family members. I particularly liked hearing Taylor describe the lightbulb moment she learned from fellow actor Montgomery Clift that she didn’t need to cry real tears or shake real shakes, as she had done as a child actress. This would only lead to more shaking long after a scene was over ‘because your body doesn’t know the difference’ between acting and reality.

It’s just a pity that so many of the interviews descend into hagiography. It is hard to keep a straight face when hearing Elizabeth Taylor described as ‘such a generous gift receiver’. You can just imagine her reaction at being presented with a social-media freebie.

The barmaid of Manet’s ‘Folies-Bergère’ is about as unTaylorish as they come. She’s been described as the Mona Lisa of the 19th century owing to the enigma of her look and the dislocation between her full-frontal portrait and her reflection from behind. For the first episode of Moving Pictures, a new series starting on Radio 4 this week, we’re encouraged to find the painting on Google Art and zoom in on her expression and surroundings while we listen.

The programme is beautifully produced, with vivid passages of narrative reimagining Manet at the time of painting the picture intersected by interviews with art historians, who pause over the work’s most intriguing passages. Have you ever noticed the red logo on the beer bottle on the bar? It was the first logo ever to appear in western art and the first to be trademarked in the UK. How about the mandarins in a bowl? They are probably glacé. 

This feels like slow radio but with a satisfying intellectual dimension. There’s no obvious agenda and no outlandish theory to push. The once popular idea that the barmaid looks depressed because she’s a prostitute – a contemporary caricature described her as a ‘seller of consolation’ – is rejected as too tidy. ‘Manet,’ says narrator Cathy FitzGerald, ‘doesn’t like tidy.’ There were complaints when the Courtauld added a new label to the painting late last year presenting the woman as an item on offer to the gentleman in the mirror. The programme does a comparatively good job of speaking to you rather than at you while you immerse yourself fully in the art on screen. It’s blissful listening.

Refreshingly macho: BBC1’s SAS Rogue Heroes reviewed

Sunday’s SAS Rogue Heroes – about the founding of perhaps Britain’s most famous regiment – began with a revealing variation on the usual caption in fact-based dramas about how everything in them really happened, except the things that didn’t. ‘The events depicted which seem most unbelievable,’ it read, ‘are mostly true.’

And from there the same sense of somewhat incredulous, head-shaking admiration for its subjects remained. The unexpected result was a 2022 BBC drama that took an unashamedly gung-ho approach to macho heroism – and that, give or take a spot of swearing and heavy-metal music, didn’t feel very different in tone from those classic British second world war films of the 1950s. So much so, in fact, that you couldn’t help wondering whether any writer less hot than Steven Knight (creator of Peaky Blinders) would have been allowed to get away with it.

We were, mind you, reminded of how hopeless the British Army was in the early years of the conflict. The opening scene featured a 1941 convoy off to save Tobruk running out of petrol mid-desert. This latest cock-up was the last straw for David Stirling (Connor Swindells), who, aghast at being denied the chance to slaughter some Germans, headed straight to a Cairo bar. Once there, he downed several whiskies and shared with a pair of Australian soldiers his theory of how the fighting should be conducted – i.e. very violently indeed. ‘Eyes,’ he pointed out, ‘are for thumbs to push into the brain.’ (Not surprisingly, the Aussies immediately finished their drinks and left.)

Luckily, Stirling wasn’t the only frustrated British semi-psychopath in north Africa. Outside Tobruk, Jock Lewes (Alfie Allen) conducted a highly practical seminar for his men on how to kill 50 Germans. In an army jail, where he’d been imprisoned for beating up a military policeman, Paddy Mayne (Jack O’Connell) took a break from quoting A.E. Housman to beat up several more.

No wonder that when Lewes had the bright idea of forming a new parachute regiment to attack the enemy’s supply lines (a plan his superiors apparently didn’t notice), the commendably ‘mad’ Stirling and Mayne were high on his list of target recruits. To sound them out, he set up a meeting in a Cairo club where, adding to the old-school feel, the discussions took place in the presence of a belly dancer. Not that she was the only woman we saw on Sunday. There were also a selection of chorus girls in their underwear, and a duly chic French agent, complete with cigarette and heavy lipstick.

At this stage, the men’s goal – to gather a few like-minded colleagues and ‘win the war’ – might seem a little ambitious. Yet in a programme that’s pretty bonkers itself, you wouldn’t want to rule it out completely. Either way, judging from the first episode, we should have a lot of slightly alarming fun seeing how far they get.

But, as it transpired, the BBC wasn’t finished with eccentric fact-based television for the week. First Contact: an Alien Encounter mixed interviews with scientists, ‘repurposed footage’, spooky music, endless vistas of stars and ill-lit dramatised scenes to imagine what might happen if extra-terrestrials show up. (Happily, this was not a programme ever intimated by ‘if’s, however colossal.)

What followed was occasionally intriguing, but ultimately a bit unsatisfying – the problem being that it always felt torn between the demands of scientific responsibility and exciting telly. Naturally, the scientists it chose were those who believe there’s advanced life in the universe somewhere – because, well, there just must be. Even the most bullish of them, though, couldn’t come close to giving us what we really wanted: the possibility of some sort of extra-terrestrial version of a Zoom call.

Instead, the scenario the show came up with started with a signal coming through – although not one readily distinguishable from white noise. Fortunately, a few days later, an ‘Artefact’ 200km long was spotted traversing the sky at a fair old lick of three million km/h. All of which seemed promising for a while – until that pesky scientific responsibility kicked in again, leading to a series of anti-climactic conclusions that left us alone in the universe once more, at least for the past billion years or so.

Still, what did feel convincing was what might happen if all this stuff that won’t happen happened. First Contact, for example, did a fine job of imagining the response on Twitter to apparently imminent alien arrival. Equally believable was the mix of extraordinary human cleverness and extraordinary human stupidity we’d be likely to display. On the one hand, in the quest to identify the Artefact’s origins, our space telescopes would work out the size, temperature and potential habitability of planets hundreds of light years away. On the other, back on Earth, we’d instantly empty the shops of all toilet paper.