Truss chooses price controls to tackle energy bills

When Liz Truss spoke from the steps of Downing Street on Monday, she declared proudly that she ‘campaigned as a conservative’ and would ‘govern as a conservative’. It was a dig at her leadership rival Rishi Sunak, who she beat by 15 percentage points, and who she accused throughout the campaign of having lost his way over tax hikes during his time in the Treasury. He insisted this was the path to fiscal responsibility; she insisted it was the path to recession.

Yet Truss’s first policy announcement of her premiership – and quite possibly one of the biggest announcements she’ll make as Prime Minister – is not one you can call ‘conservative’. To tackle rising energy bills, Truss has decided to use one of the most popular (and radical) tools from the socialist economic handbook: price controls. 

Truss confirmed the details of her plans today in parliament. She has binned energy price cap policy and superseded it with the ‘Energy Price Guarantee’. Ofgem’s job – setting the energy price cap to reflect the wholesale price of energy while guarding against so-called ‘runaway profits’ for energy companies – will be transferred to the government instead, which will set the unit price energy companies can charge consumers. So for the foreseeable future, politicians will determine what the public pay, rather than an independent body.

And the first call has been made: from 1 October, energy bills for the average household will be frozen at around £2,500 for the next two years. For businesses and charities, the same cap will apply for six months, and then more targeted support will be implemented. Green levies, totalling roughly £150 of average household bills, will also be scrapped.

Of course, the cost of energy is not actually ‘frozen’ – it is in no politician’s power to set the global price of energy. The extra costs will be covered by the state, the consequences of which will fall on taxpayers at some point down the road. And it’s going to be very expensive.

But we’ll have to wait to find out just how many tens – or more likely hundreds – of billions of pounds the government thinks its intervention will cost. The details will come, Truss said, later this month when Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng presents his first fiscal statement. A less generous package for households and businesses was estimated earlier this week to be approaching £200 billion – and there will no doubt be some calculations and estimates from independent bodies ahead of the Chancellor’s statement. But even once the official estimate is announced, plenty of unknown factors mean fluctuation is inevitable. The recent fall in wholesale gas prices will provide some hope that these policies will cost less overtime than expected. But further dwindling of energy supplies this winter or an extension of the Energy Price Guarantee could easily see the total amount rise – possibly by quite some margin. If energy costs head towards the higher end of predictions (Cornwall Insights thinks wholesale prices would have taken the now-defunct energy price cap to £6,600 next spring) the government will have a colossal bill to pay.

The risks here are numerous. Having lambasted Sunak’s £400 energy handout to all households (which Truss’s government will retain), it is impossible to deny that freezing energy bills is a monumental handout to the UK’s richest, who will have the biggest houses to heat and who could afford the (much) higher bills – and by all accounts should be paying them rather than receiving subsidy.

The distortion of the price mechanism also heavily increases the risk of blackouts this winter. We have a global shortage of energy – an ugly reality that domestic governments can do nothing about overnight. Truss’s decision to lift the fracking moratorium signals that the government wants to increase domestic energy production, but the policy change is unlikely to produce any quick or meaningful uptick in supply as local areas – which get the final say on whether fracking goes ahead – remain deeply opposed. So, we all need to use less energy this winter. The key has always been to make sure this happens in a safe and sustainable way, especially for the most vulnerable households.

But by covering so much of the cost, Truss’s government has removed a lot of the incentive to cut back energy usage. Indeed, some people will probably increase their energy usage as bills will be so heavily subsidised by the state. The government’s plan to craft a public awareness campaign around how to use less energy this winter raises questions about the extent to which politicians understand their own policy: have they not made the connection that capping costs makes people more likely to whack up the heat? Or are they well aware of the risk, and plan to ask the public not to take advantage of the subsidies they’ve held out on a silver platter?

But perhaps what is most remarkable is that Truss and her team are holding up price controls as the solution to the energy crisis: a concept that has led to devastating consequences in the past. Price signalling is necessary for any functioning market; setting the price of a commodity where politicians would like it to be, rather than where it is, only distorts the market further and is guaranteed to lead to misuse of energy, which increases the likelihood that Truss will have to U-turn on her promise not to mandate rationing this winter.

As James Forsyth notes in his cover piece for the magazine this week, the government thinks that if the energy support package is so big and so generous that no politician or party can possibly claim it doesn’t go far enough, this will give Truss a window of time – perhaps several months – to get on with her other free-market ambitions, such as rolling back the Johnson-era tax hikes and implementing some pro-growth reforms. Truss also expects the freeze on bills to take the wind out of the sails of inflation, curbing it by ‘4 to 5 points’, as household energy bills and petrol prices have been making up a big chunk (though not a majority) of CPIH inflation.

But at what cost? There are the hard numbers: Truss’s government does not seem remotely shaken by the idea of borrowing hundreds of billions of pounds to get through this latest crisis – another crystallising moment for the Tories and their new, cosy relationship with debt. And then there are the costs that are harder to measure, such as the things which have been ideologically ceded to the other side: the economically dubious idea that price controls can be implemented without consequences; that a politician is better placed to set the price of energy – and ultimately allocate resources – than an independent body (or indeed the market); and that free-market solutions are for the campaign trail while socialist policies are for governing.

Will you be able to get through the ponderous aphorisms without giggling? The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power reviewed

Amazon’s much-heralded Tolkien prequel The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power began by answering a question that has puzzled humankind – and possibly elves – these many millennia. Why is it that a ship floats and a stone doesn’t? The reason apparently is because ‘a stone sees only downward’, whereas a ship has ‘her gaze fixed upon the light that guides her’.

And this, I’m afraid, set the tone for much of the dialogue that followed in the two episodes released so far – as, to their credit, the characters managed to exchange an endless series of ponderous aphorisms without giggling. So it was that we learned how ‘the wine is sweetest for those in whose bitter trials it has fermented’; how ‘the same wind that seeks to blow out a fire may also cause it to spread’; and, more pithily, how ‘there can be no trust between hammer and rock’.

On the plus side, any pedants watching will have been delighted by the scrupulous observance of old-school linguistic rules. There was, for example, no sloppy use of objective pronouns (‘No one yearns for home more than I’), a deep if sometimes effortful commitment to not ending a sentence with a preposition and even the widespread avoidance of anything so vulgar as an abbreviating apostrophe in phrases like ‘I cannot’. Unfortunately, however, that only added to the sense of a show creaking under the weight of its own solemnity.

As you probably know by now, The Rings of Power is the most expensive TV series ever made. Although if you didn’t, it wouldn’t have been hard to guess, given how assiduously the programme kept drawing attention to the fact, underlining every admittedly spectacular cityscape and aerial shot with wildly swelling choral music.

So, you might be wondering, what about the plot? Well, there’s quite a lot of that too. Leading the way is Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) who, centuries before she became a wise immortal queen, was a wise immortal kick-ass heroine, able to take out a snow-troll with a few showy twirls of her sword, and unfashionably convinced that the threat from Sauron hasn’t gone away. Further down the social scale a village of harfoots – whose accents, after an initial burst of all-purpose rustic, settled down into the kind of stage-Irish normally accompanied by shillelaghs – have spotted strange portents in the sky. A group of folks in mad hats are being menaced by monsters. Oh yes, and a top Elven designer is working on what appears to be some sort of ring…

No doubt the programme’s undeniable professionalism will ensure that these elements come together. Yet, after these two hours of mostly self-regarding spectacle, I can’t pretend I’m massively intrigued as to how. Granted, there are occasional quieter moments. But even these are buried beneath so many layers of costume and set design that the cast are often forced to take refuge in the trusty old tactic of hamming it up and hoping for the best. And all the time, that central problem remains: that if The Rings of Power were to go on a dating website, one attribute it could never claim for itself is GSOH.

In the 1990s, I went on a James Joyce walking tour of Dublin led by his nephew Ken Monaghan (son of Joyce’s much younger sister). Even then, what was particularly striking was the totality of Joyce’s victory. When Ken was growing up, his family forbade him from mentioning his connection with such an obscene, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic writer. Now, of course, it was source of enormous pride – and a handy source of money, as Joyce tourism began its takeover of the city, thanks to a novel that not many people have ever read.

On Wednesday Arena: James Joyce’s Ulysses confirmed this strange triumph as it celebrated the book’s 100th anniversary with a pitch-perfect documentary that, like Ulysses itself, was both meandering and coherent, funny and serious, kindly and irreverent.

Amid Adam Curtis-style snippets of vaguely related footage, an archivist proudly showed us the street directories and newspapers the exiled Joyce used to recreate 16 June 1904, the day – plot spoiler alert – that Leopold Bloom walks around Dublin (a date Joyce touchingly chose because that was when he received his first handjob from Nora Barnacle). An impressive collection of talking heads including Anne Enright, Colm Toibin and Howard Jacobson took us through Joyce’s life and career, the genesis of the novel and its agonising journey into print. A selection of the book’s greatest hits were illuminatingly discussed.

On a more melancholy note, the programme also featured Salman Rushdie at his most twinkling – even though when he first read Ulysses, it rather put him off his dreams of becoming a writer. ‘I thought, well I can’t do that,’ Rushdie told us with perhaps uncharacteristic modesty. ‘Plus he’s done everything.’

The competitive world of metal detecting

Some detectorists will tell you that the holy grail of metal detecting is a hoard of Roman coins or Anglo-Saxon jewellery. Others will point out – borrowing a line from the TV series Detectorists – that actually the holy grail of metal detecting is the Holy Grail. Since I took up metal detecting, last summer, I have tried to set myself more modest goals.

They can be summed up in some wise words spoken to me in a field in Wiltshire after I’d suffered a near-barren day (my only finds having been a musket ball and ‘canslaw’ – a shredded drinks can). ‘A find is a bonus, a good find is a good bonus,’ said my fellow detectorist with a consoling hand on my shoulder.

My companion could afford to be sanguine – he was none other than the great Dave Crisp, finder of the Frome Hoard of Roman coins (52,503 of them) in 2010 and a poster boy for metal detecting due to the exemplary way in which he alerted the archaeological authorities once he’d unearthed the hoard.

The day I went out with Dave on the North Wessex Downs he bagged another half-dozen ‘Romans’, scattered across a field where he reckoned there had been a camp. It was his ‘permission’ – land on which the owner permits you to detect – and he had taken me there to enable me to find my first Roman coin, a rite of passage for detectorists. In other words he had led the horse to water. But the horse was unable to drink – and now stood there long-faced; a parched, useless Dobbin.

This sense of failure – and envy of other detectorists’ success – had become familiar to me in my fledgling detecting career. I had tried to fight it, I really had. But it would just pop up – most shamefully a few months earlier in a freshly cut field in Oxfordshire.

Muffled up despite the humidity, a man was detecting near me when he shouted out ‘Hammered!’ and performed a brief jig in the stubble, a mini-version of the ‘gold dance’ that detectorists are supposed to do when they find the ultimate precious metal. Finding a ‘hammered’ coin – handmade, usually medieval – is another yardstick by which detectorists measure themselves and needless to say I was yet to find one. So when I witnessed this performance I felt sick to the stomach.

My mood darkened further when the detectorist walked over and insisted on sharing the moment with me. Then he explained why it meant so much – he had spent the previous few months undergoing treatment for cancer. This was the first time in a long time he had been outdoors and it had paid off with a lovely little find. Life was not, after all, unrelenting misery.

Though he didn’t know it, he showed me how to become a better person – as, unwittingly, did other detectorists. People like wise old Dave Crisp and a blind chap called Dean, who lost his sight in adulthood but still has a detailed map of his bit of Romney Marsh in his head.

I do find stuff. I’m not a complete waste of space as a detectorist. But I have come to realise that metal detecting is not really about finding hoards or hammereds. At the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s about digging out and prizing the best bits of yourself. Mind you, I’ve practised the gold dance just in case.

Nigel Richardson’s new book The Accidental Detectorist: Uncovering an Underground Obsession is out now.

How to tackle illegal migration

Immigration policy is a mess. For at least the past decade, it has been characterised by unrealistic targets and broken promises. Every government has promised to reduce dramatically the number of foreigners who arrive here in search of work, or justice, or hope. Every government has failed. The numbers keep going up. David Cameron promised to reduce immigration to below 100,000 a year. So did Theresa May. Boris Johnson claimed his version of Brexit would see immigration fall precipitously. None of them came close to keeping their word.

Curbing immigration, both legal and illegal, is an immensely difficult problem, so perhaps it is not surprising that successive governments have failed. What is surprising is the stupidity of many of the policies which they have claimed would succeed.

In April, Johnson announced that his solution to the growing problem of illegal immigration was that the Royal Navy would take control of monitoring migrants crossing the Channel. The Navy would intercept the boats, rescue the passengers and take them to England, where it would be determined whether they were entitled to stay.

The policy has had the opposite effect to the one intended: far from deterring people–smugglers, it encouraged them. Since it was announced there have been more, not fewer, boats of migrants attempting to cross the Channel, and in less seaworthy boats. People-smugglers can offer places in over-crowded boats knowing that those boats will be picked up by Navy ships and the migrants taken safely to England. From a people-smuggler’s point of view, and indeed from an illegal migrant’s, what’s not to like? Once they get to the UK, many migrants picked up from boats in the Channel don’t wait to find out whether they are entitled to settle here. They just disappear into the black economy.

The idea of using the Navy to reduce the number of illegal migrants crossing the Channel is almost – but not quite – as silly as the idea of transporting illegal immigrants to Rwanda. The chance of that working is close to zero. Legal challenges will almost certainly prevent the policy getting off the ground. Britain’s High Commissioner to Rwanda advised against it, on the grounds that Rwanda had been recruiting refugees to fight wars in neighbouring countries. Should any migrants actually be transferred from Britain to Rwanda, there is a good chance that they will suffer maltreatment at the hands of their hosts. It is not difficult to imagine what the courts will make of that.

And yet Liz Truss insists that she is committed to the policy. She has said she thinks it will act as a deterrent. It won’t. For deportation to Rwanda to work as a deterrent, thousands would have to be transferred there – and that is not going to happen. Illegal migrants to the UK have anyway worked out how to avoid being deported to Rwanda: don’t claim asylum, just slip away before you are ‘processed’.

Truss has also said she will ‘work with other countries to get new deals to find new locations’ for Britain’s illegal migrants. Well good luck with that. Rwanda was not the Home Office’s first choice. Officials tried just about everywhere else, but no other country was interested.

Truss’s promise to get the French to ‘deal with backlogs’ by being ‘very clear and robust in my negotiations’ is no more likely to yield results. The failure of the French to implement the border policies we want them to has many causes. But the one thing that is certain is that it is not because British politicians have so far failed to be ‘clear and robust’ in their negotiations with them.

The Home Office manages to combine crazily impractical policies with a determination not to do the one relatively simple thing that could actually reduce illegal immigration: deport illegal migrants back to their home countries. It doesn’t have to involve forcible deportation, and it usually doesn’t: most are persuaded by a combination of the offer of cash from the Home Office if they go, and the threat of being detained if they do not. But what matters is the likelihood of getting caught and then sanctioned. A few isolated cases won’t have any deterrent effect.

Fewer than 8,500 illegal migrants were forcibly or voluntarily returned by the Home Office to their native countries in 2020. The number persuaded to leave the UK for the year to March this year went up to more than 11,000. But in 2013, just eight years earlier, the figure was close to 47,000 – four times as many. And 2013 was not an exceptional year: the previous four each saw more than 40,000 illegals persuaded to leave the UK, as did the years 2014 to 2016. The number started to fall significantly in 2017, and dropped consistently for the next two years. Then in 2020, it went off a cliff: a measly 8,374, more than 11,000 fewer than in 2019.

Some of this fall was due to the effect of Covid lockdowns, but by no means all of it – as the figure for the year to March 2022 shows. There has indeed been an increase in the number of illegal migrants who returned home. But the most recent figure still only amounts to one quarter of the number who returned home in 2013 – which is what it would have been if there had been no Covid, and the numbers had fallen from 2020 at the same rate as they did between 2017 and 2019.

Again, not all of those who are recorded as going back do so as a result of some form of intervention by the Home Office. But by far the majority do. And generally, the two are linked: the more illegal migrants who go home because the Home Office helps them to do so, the more who eventually go home independently of intervention.

Unfortunately, the Home Office has been quietly demolishing the infrastructure needed to persuade illegals to return home. There are fewer people working in Immigration Enforcement, and less money available for it as the government devotes more to dotty projects. £120 million has already been paid to the Rwandan government – an amount which represents about half of the entire budget devoted to Immigration Enforcement.

That department has not been abolished, but it has been diminished. Persuasion requires credible threats, and credible threats require detention spaces: illegal migrants have to be served with a letter threatening them with deportation, then held for three days before deportation procedure starts. Six years ago, there were 4,500 detention spaces – not nearly enough. But now there are fewer than 2,500. The threat that an illegal migrant will be detained is increasingly empty: there is simply nowhere to put them. Illegal migrants identified by the Home Office are still issued with the letter threatening deportation – and then nothing happens. They are given the opportunity to disappear into the black economy. And most of them take it.

Truss has said she plans to increase the Border Force by 20 per cent. That would be better than continuing to run it down – but it’s nothing like enough to ensure that most illegal immigrants are persuaded to leave Britain, which requires increasing the Border Force by at least 100 per cent, something which is not going to happen while Truss is Prime Minister. Why? Because all the Home Office’s spare cash is going to be devoted to a futile attempt to transfer Britain’s illegal migrants to Rwanda.

Using Home Office officials to identify illegal migrants and then persuade them to go home is a lot simpler than transporting them to Rwanda or asking the Royal Navy to intercept boats in the Channel. It is also a great deal more effective. That the Home Office is only managing to persuade one quarter of the number of illegals it was ‘helping’ to return home a decade ago suggests that Priti Patel, the outgoing Home Secretary, has been deluded about what needs to be done to reduce illegal immigration. Let us hope that Suella Braverman, her replacement, will change that situation. Because as long as the delusion persists, immigration policy will remain an ineffective mess. And immigration, both legal and illegal, will keep going up.

Buckle up! The Liz Truss era is here

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng arrive in Downing Street having been on a long political journey together. Both elected in 2010, they have co-written books setting out their shared economic agenda; they have co-founded party groups during their time in parliament; and now they will govern together. The future direction of the country, and the Tories’ electoral prospects, depend on the success of this new Downing Street partnership.

Their strategy is one of big economic gambles from day one. Chief among these is the big energy package, potentially costing over £100 billion, designed to ‘freeze’ energy prices for households and businesses. This will involve the state – future taxpayers, in other words – picking up the tab to protect today’s consumers from the current high prices. It’s an intervention on a par with furlough in both scale and cost, and will need to be financed with debt. It is bigger than anything the Blair or Cameron governments attempted. Truss’s tax cut – reversing the National Insurance rise – is tiny by comparison to the energy-bill bailout.

The energy freeze is a pragmatic move, not an ideological one – having politicians determine the price of energy is hardly free-market policy. But most governments in Europe, whether left or right, will be doing something similar, and they all hope debt markets will stump up the cash at an affordable rate. Truss’s hope is that a big bazooka approach to energy can give the government time and space to get going on the rest of its agenda.

The real start to her period in government will come later this month, with a budget (although it won’t be called that) reversing the National Insurance increase and cancelling the planned corporation tax rise (from 19 per cent to 25 per cent). This marks a substantial fiscal loosening. The idea is that this stimulus will head off a recession.

Perhaps more striking is what isn’t on the new Prime Minister’s priority list: spending cuts. A number of Tories dared to hope that with Boris Johnson gone, the profligacy of the last few years would cease – yet Truss and Kwarteng seem happy to fund hugely expensive measures through borrowing. It’s a dramatic shift from Truss’s earlier political career: in 2009 she was writing pamphlets about what could be cut in the aftermath of the financial crash, while Kwarteng would suggest throughout the Cameron and Osborne years that the Tories were too slow in reducing the deficit. Now, the hope is that the economic growth stimulated by tax cuts and reform will make massive government spending affordable.

To understand the scale of the gamble, consider the latest Bank of England forecasts. The Bank envisages the UK economy flatlining for years, with no growth to speak of. To Truss, this reflects the burden of high taxes – the highest since the 1950s. But state spending is now so big (and about to get bigger with the energy-bill bailouts) that making a meaningful difference is hard. When Truss and Kwarteng first entered parliament, few would have expected them to be dramatically intervening in the energy markets and borrowing huge sums to boost growth.

Yet their shift towards being more relaxed about debt represents a wider move in thinking on the economy within the Tory party. There is a general frustration about the rising tax burden and a growing feeling that this trajectory must change immediately, regardless of circumstance. Kwarteng has been known to warn that if things stay the same, then Britain will end up with a ‘neo-Butskellite consensus’ on economic management.

The Truss-Kwarteng solution is to move away from traditional fiscal conservatism: to cut taxes, borrow more and reform the economy, hoping that growth will pay for the borrowing. Thatcher’s allusions to household finances are out, replaced by confident assertions that the markets are more forgiving nowadays and the British state has the flexibility to borrow what it wants, and at low rates.

James Carville, Bill Clinton’s political point man, once joked that he wanted to be reincarnated as the bond market because ‘you can intimidate everybody’. But during both the financial crash and Covid, developed economies managed to borrow unprecedented sums of money without seeing their borrowing rates (or gilt yields) spiking. This began to change the thinking about what was and was not possible. Suddenly the bond market intimidated nobody.

So the political calculation shifted: if you could borrow money to shut down the economy, why not borrow money to reform it? In a Tory party with a big-spending prime minister in the shape of Boris Johnson, this idea became increasingly popular – despite former chancellor Rishi Sunak’s insistence that major spending projects had to be paid for. Kwarteng and Truss haven’t set out any spending projects they’d cut. Indeed, they are committed to raising defence spending. But they are both agreed that the priority is not raising taxes – and that if the deficit has to rise, so be it.

Under Cameron, taming the deficit was presented as the defining mission of conservative economics. Truss derides the traditional Treasury insistence on ‘making sure that tax and spend add up’ as ‘abacus economics’. Not so long ago, Tories would liken an approach such as hers to believing in a ‘magic money tree’ – it was the main weapon used to attack Labour. Such language is unlikely to be heard now.

So the big question remains: will the markets wear it? Advocates of Trussonomics are confident that the extra deficit will be seen as a price worth paying for a transition to a lower-tax economy. The boost in growth, they say, will strengthen the public finances in the medium term. Others have a more basic argument about why the UK will be able to borrow so much for so long: markets are crashing, there is a glut of money which has to go somewhere, and the UK only has to avoid being the winner of the ugly-baby contest to meet its borrowing needs. Considering the West’s broader problems – such as European gas prices – that should not be too difficult to achieve.

The danger is that market sentiment can change quickly. Think back to Black Wednesday in 1992, which saw the Tories lose their reputation for economic competence. It took a generation to regain that trust. These days the UK isn’t in an exchange-rate mechanism or tied to another currency. But that doesn’t mean it is exempt from risks. The UK government is having to pay 3.1 per cent on the money it borrows, treble the rate of interest a year ago. If it rises much further, this will trigger concern because the UK is very sensitive to even relatively small moves in the cost of servicing its debt. Britain spent £5.8 billion on debt interest in July alone, up 63 per cent on the same month last year.

Can reform speed up growth? George Osborne cut corporation tax in the hope that this would stimulate business investment, but the response was disappointing. Truss has long been a believer in deregulation – the reform she talked about in her opening speech in Downing Street. As a junior minister, she pushed hard for rolling back burdens on business, only to be thwarted by the limits of coalition. Her decision to appoint Jacob Rees-Mogg as Business Secretary suggests she is serious about pursuing these kinds of reforms now that she is in charge.

Deregulation is politically difficult. Boris Johnson had an 80-seat majority but was forced to abandon planning reform when Tory backbenchers took fright after the party’s defeat in the Chesham and Amersham by-election. Planning reform is what could have the biggest impact on growth: Truss is known to be keen on building. But it is hard to imagine Tory MPs backing anything too radical this close to a general election and with a leader who does not have an explicit electoral mandate to build more homes.

There is also the question of jobs. It’s already relatively easy to hire and fire in Britain and, as George Osborne found with the Beecroft review, it’s hard to further deregulate without being accused of debasing workers’ rights. The direction of travel – with Uber and other workers in the gig economy – has been in the other direction, with employers accused of cheating workers out of holiday entitlements and sick pay. Rees-Mogg’s critics will not be shy of accusing him of holding workers in contempt.

Truss thinks this argument is winnable: she has spoken of the young in Britain being a generation of ‘Uber-riding, Airbnb-ing, Deliveroo-eating freedom fighters’. But will she be willing to spend so much political capital in order properly to deregulate? Former Tory ministers (of whom there is now no shortage) say such reforms will be difficult if voters are fretting about their own job security. Moreover, the Tory electoral coalition now includes more working-class voters than it did in 2010.

Truss, however, has long argued against the idea that red-wall voters want Labour-lite policies. She is convinced that this is a fundamental misreading of the political climate, and what that section of the electorate really wants is radical change and distinctively Conservative policies.

The Truss-Kwarteng approach means that the Tories are, at least in the short term, setting aside fiscal conservatism. They’ll not be able to talk about a ‘black hole’ in Labour financial plans. Starmer will be able to argue that Labour would also borrow to boost growth but that the money would be spent differently: on universal child care, say, rather than tax cuts. The danger for the Tories is that they end up being outbid by Labour.

But Truss didn’t campaign as a fiscal conservative and she won’t govern as one. Instead, she argued that the Tories have been unduly constrained by fear of the markets and the ‘Treasury orthodoxy’ of balancing budgets; and that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

There is no shortage of problems facing Truss and Kwarteng. There is the NHS crisis, the small-boat crossings making a mockery of the government’s claim that it controls Britain’s borders, the tension rising over the Northern Ireland Protocol. Add to that the obvious international difficulties: an ongoing war on Europe’s eastern front and an increasingly aggressive China.

The new government will struggle to persuade the public it can handle such issues if its signature economic policy – borrowing to fund tax cuts that boost growth – does not pay off.

Does Cincinnatus have anything in common with Boris?

On retiring from office, Boris Johnson described himself as a sort of Cincinnatus, returning to his plough. This famous story attracted two comments from the media, both missing the point.

According to the historian Livy (c.59 bc-17 ad), when Rome’s last king, the tyrannical Tarquinius Superbus – ‘the arrogant’ – was ejected in 509 bc, those who had acted as his advisers (patricians, i.e. senators) assumed control. But conflict soon emerged between them and the plebians over problems of freedom, poverty and debt. By refusing to co-operate with the senators, especially by refusing to wage war, the plebs eventually won the right to appoint tribunes from among their number to try to solve the problems in the plebs’ interests, with mixed success.

In 458 bc Rome found itself in serious military trouble – so serious that even the plebs realised the safety of Rome was in doubt. So despite the tribunes’ protests, two armies were raised, and a filthy, sweating Cincinnatus was summoned from ploughing his three-acre farm – or was it digging a ditch? – to put on his toga and appear before the senate. He was given total power as dictator for six months to deal with the crisis. It took him 15 days to defeat the enemy, at which point he went back to his farm and resumed ploughing (or digging).

On the Today programme, Dame Mary Beard said that the ‘sting in the tail’ was that Cincinnatus was no lover of the poor. But how is that relevant to the story? Others pointed out that in 439 bc Cincinnatus was again called out of retirement, much against his will, to deal with what was described as a potential coup, namely someone bribing the poor with free grain (presumably the explanation of Dame Mary’s ‘sting in the tail’). Was this, then, the implication of Mr Johnson’s reference, that he would at some stage return? But even if it was, Cincinnatus still resigned again, this time after 21 days. So that does not work either.

This tale is what Romans called an exemplum: a story from the past useful for discussing moral problems. So what did Mr Johnson mean by it? Does it even fit him?

Green screen: the march of TV ‘planet placement’

Britain’s film and TV industries want to help save the world. That’s hardly news. But one organisation is ensuring the industry focuses its efforts on environmental sustainability: Albert, which also goes by the name of Bafta Albert.

You might have seen the logo – a black footprint – at the end of many TV programmes, from BBC’s Newsnight to Sky Sports News. It’s a rapidly expanding body that few people other than industry insiders have heard of. But Albert is increasingly influential in determining how media institutions programme content, conduct their working practices and set their goals.

It describes itself as an environmental organisation which aims to encourage TV and film companies to reduce their carbon footprint. ‘We are leading a charge against climate change,’ it says. One of its big initiatives is Planet Placement – effectively introducing subliminal messaging. The unspoken idea is that almost everyone in broadcasting must accept Albert’s worldview. In many ways, it is the Stonewall of Sustainability.

How did this happen? In 2010, Albert was founded by the BBC to provide a carbon calculator for the film and TV industry. Its name was proposed alongside another carbon-savings software package called Victoria.

At its launch the following year, BBC Vision’s Sally Debonnaire said that producers who want to ‘reduce their company’s energy bills no longer have to worry if they don’t know where to start’. Albert would do the hard work: providing spreadsheets, targets, training programmes and online tools to help companies be more environmentally friendly. One of its training packages is described as ‘an opportunity for all those in the TV industry to explore how to use authenticity and creativity to prevent the end of the f#<$ing world’. Production companies quickly signed up to demonstrate their sustainable credentials. All BBC, ITV, Channel 4, UKTV, Sky and Netflix productions in the UK are now required to register their carbon footprint using Albert’s calculator.

In the past decade, Albert has grown into a media machine and is now a subsidiary of Bafta. Its overriding message is that broadcasters have a duty to change the public’s environmental attitudes and behaviour.

At COP26, the UN climate change conference in Glasgow last year, a series of debates held in conjunction with Albert set out the terms of acceptable broadcasting. Broadcasters were encouraged to sign a pledge to make environmentalism central to their activities. This included a commitment to ‘reach more of our audiences with content that helps everyone understand and navigate the path to net zero, and inspires them to make greener choices’; to ‘develop processes that help us to consider climate themes when… commissioning, developing and producing content’; and to ‘recognise the importance of fair and balanced representations of visions for a sustainable future’.

What broadcasters have agreed to is a promise to ensure the correct message filters through to an unsuspecting public. Sky, together with the Behavioural Insights Team (or ‘Nudge Unit’ as it was known when it was set up in 2010 by David Cameron’s government), claims that 75 per cent of people support ‘TV broadcasters “nudging” viewers to think about the environment, whether that’s through documentaries, advertising or increasing the coverage of environmental issues in the news’. Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy has recently been announced as chair of the Albert news consortium. He has been enlisted to ‘explore how the climate change conversation is represented on screen’. Broadcasters must now take into consideration whether their output fits with Albert’s principles. So much for impartiality.

By buying into Albert’s mission, the broadcast media have agreed to combine forces to make sure their output, from soap operas to news, sport to children’s cartoons, puts the planet into programme content. ‘Collectively, our industry reaches millions of people every single day. That represents an unprecedented opportunity to shift mindsets… It’s a chance to shape society’s response to climate change,’ says Albert. The broadcasters agree: ‘We believe broadcasters have a clear role and responsibility to encourage lifestyle changes,’ said Dana Strong, CEO of Sky Group. As an example of where this leads, in the run-up to COP26, the producers of Casualty, Coronation Street, Doctors, Emmerdale, EastEnders, Holby City and Hollyoaks worked together on a climate-change storyline.

But Albert’s influence doesn’t stop there. Production houses can join its certification scheme, in which their company is tracked, traced, monitored and advised on how to do better. The resulting certificate has up to three stars. (Birds of a Feather, for example, has been awarded two stars; Loose Women, three.) As Albert says: ‘This is the only possible way our industry can move forward.’

The war movie 1917 was the first large-scale UK film to gain a three-star Albert certification. It earned this for, among other things, digging trenches sensitively to ‘ensure that as little damage was done to the land and biodiversity as possible’, as well as the hair and make-up department minimising landfill ‘by using bamboo toothbrushes and biodegradable wipes’.

Scripts can also receive praise. I May Destroy You was commended for an episode which, Albert says, deals with ‘how the climate movement engages with black people and black communities and highlight(s) some of the hypocrisies that can lie at the heart of the climate movement when it’s being pushed by privileged middle-class white people’. As for Love Island, Albert applauds the ‘tactful placement’ of ‘personalised, reusable bottles… so much so that over 260,000 bottles were purchased by fans from the latest series alone’.

Albert exerts a huge amount of power in the world of TV and film production. But how many viewers are even aware of its existence, or the rise of ‘Planet Placement’? It may come as news to discover that Albert is in the director’s chair.

In defence of pigeons

I have done absolutely nothing this past year except pound away at a book. For complicated logistical reasons that are far too boring to go into, I discovered last summer – rather in the manner of a Bank of England economist blindsided by the inflation rate – that I had badly miscalculated how long I had to finish it. A deadline that I had initially thought was February 2023 turned out to be July 2022. As a result, I have done nothing these past 12 months except write about the Romans. I have incinerated the Temple of Jerusalem, destroyed Pompeii, inaugurated the Colosseum and built Hadrian’s Wall. What I have not done, however, is much exercise – and so no sooner had I breasted the tape of my deadline than I was off for a 20-mile walk across London.

The capital is so infinite in its fascinations that during the lockdown my wife and I found our appetite for travel perfectly satisfied by going for long, themed treks across the immensity of its sprawl. The theme for last weekend’s walk was animals. We visited London Zoo, of course, but also a farm in Vauxhall and a riding school in Brixton. At the Tower of London we remembered in our prayers the elephant kept there by James I and which, poor creature, was never given anything to drink but wine. At Gough Square we paid our respects to Hodge, Dr Johnson’s beloved cat, and at Carlton House Terrace to Giro, a dog owned by Hitler’s first ambassador to London, and which, after an accident with a rogue electricity cable, was buried at the top of the steps leading to the Mall. Most moving of all was the memorial in Park Lane to the recipients of the PDSA Dickin Medal: the animals’ equivalent of the Victoria Cross. Among those who had helped to fund the memorial, I noted, was the late Charlie Watts.

The species of animal that has won the most Dickin Medals – more even than the dog – is the humble pigeon. I was delighted but not remotely surprised to discover this. I have sat at the feet of Gordon Corera, the BBC’s security correspondent, and learned from him that pigeons are ‘the true superheroes of history’. Their astonishing homing ability – still not properly understood by scientists – has enabled them to do humans noble service since the time of Noah. (A dove, as Gordon has memorably put it, is merely ‘a pigeon with good PR’.) A few weeks ago, he came on The Rest Is History, the podcast I present with my friend Dominic Sandbrook, and brilliantly made his case. British pigeons, dismissed by far too many of us as rats with wings, have served their country bravely and well, and splendidly merit our admiration. Kenley Lass, the first pigeon to deliver intelligence from occupied France; Winkie, who saved a ditched aircrew in 1942; Mary of Exeter, who braved shrapnel and Nazi hawks to complete her missions: heroes one and all. Alarmingly, however, we have allowed the National Pigeon Service to fall into abeyance. Unlike China or France, we have failed to invest in the solar-flare-proof long-distance communications that only pigeons can provide. As a result, we are confronted by what Gordon, in sombre tones, has termed the ‘pigeon gap’. I hope that the new government – distracted though it may be, I acknowledge, by other matters – will take urgent steps to close it.

It is the measure of how hard I have been working that I even had to put cricket with my team, the Authors, on hold. Thankfully, I finished in time to play at one of the most atmospheric grounds in the whole of England: Erlestoke in Wiltshire. Built inside the walls of what was once an Edwardian garden, it is the love child of L.P. Hartley and Frances Hodgson Burnett. The ground was as beautiful as ever, the match an absolute thriller, and the hospitality quite gloriously wine-soaked. Yet wonderful a day though it was, I could not help but feel there was a slight summer-of-1914 feel to the whole occasion. Had there been ladies with white parasols and moustachioed gentlemen muttering about some damn-fool business in the Balkans, I would not have been surprised. Winter is coming. These past three years have taught us to dread what it can bring. For decades, our medicines and our energy supplies enabled us to forget what countless generations of our ancestors, reaching back to the very beginnings of human habitation on this island, could never afford to forget: that cold and darkness kill. So I felt happy to be playing cricket again, not just because I had missed it, but also because I knew that the memory of it will serve me, this coming winter, to warm my spirits and my hopes.

Liz Truss can’t ignore the issue of NHS reform

It’s hard to think of any Prime Minister who has entered office surrounded by such low expectations. Liz Truss was backed by just over half of Conservative party members and secured barely an eighth of MPs in the first ballot. Her critics dismiss her as a lightweight, wholly unsuited to tackling the problems now facing the country. The presumption is not just for trouble, but calamity: the fastest drop in living standards in living memory, followed by prolonged recession and worse.

So if Truss manages to send inflation into reverse and makes a noticeable cut to taxes by Easter, it will be seen as quite an achievement. She has also been helped by Rishi Sunak’s somewhat wild exaggeration of the risk her tax cuts posed to the public finances. Her proposed reduction of National Insurance by 1.25 percentage points, while welcome, is rather small – and was priced in by the markets some time ago. If they were going to baulk at Trussonomics, they’d have done so already.

Perhaps the biggest threat to Truss’s survival is the state of the National Health Service. It’s striking that her long-standing ally Thérèse Coffey, now her deputy, was asked to become Health Secretary. The new Prime Minister must deal with an organisation in deep crisis.

Some 29,317 patients had to wait more than 12 hours to be admitted to hospital after being seen in A&E in July, up from a few hundred before the pandemic. The average ambulance wait time for illnesses such as strokes was just under an hour, three times as long as was normal in 2019. There are 356,000 people who have waited more than 52 weeks for an operation or other procedure – such waits had been eliminated prior to Covid. Traditionally the summer has seen a lull in NHS demand before cold weather and winter viruses set in. There’s been no such lull this year. In a sign of what might be to follow, Australia has just seen its biggest flu spike in five years.

Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer,is concerned that low temperatures will lead to thousands of extra deaths. This fear is well-founded. Every winter, Britain suffers at least 20,000 excess deaths – a figure that would cause much more controversy if those affected did not tend to be in their eighties and over. Studies show that when home temperatures dip below 17°C, the likelihood of blood clots, strokes and death goes up dramatically. Official guidance is to keep living rooms at 21°C for the elderly, but how many can afford to do that this winter? Britain’s poorly insulated homes mean our winter excess deaths are far worse than those of, say, Norway. Combine this with an NHS that is already toppling over and the picture is stark.

It is ironic that the NHS overload is down to the panicked decision to impose lock-downs, which were justified by the prospect of an overwhelmed NHS. The public answered calls to ‘protect the NHS’ by not using it – a message health chiefs deeply resented because they knew the failure to deal with smaller health issues leads to a build-up of bigger issues further down the line.

In all, there seem to have been eight million fewer NHS appointments during the lockdowns. The original assumption was that half of these people would seek healthcare eventually, which is why waiting lists – six million at the end of lockdown – were expected to surpass nine million next year. It now seems that far fewer patients are coming forward. The number of people being diagnosed with illnesses such as cancer has fallen sharply, while the number of people dying at home has risen.

Eventually, Truss will have to reckon with the question of whether lockdown cost more lives than it saved. This is about the future, not the past. The NHS’s fragility means we can expect more calls to lock down in the event that a new pathogen should strike. We need to be in a better position to assess the health risks of doing so. What are the consequences? Which interventions save the most lives? As more data emerges, answers must be found before new panic sets in.

The NHS in its current form is unlikely to survive the effects of lockdown. More capacity is badly needed, and pouring cash into the unreformed system has not worked. There was a time, before Tony Blair’s premiership, when a government presiding over a struggling NHS could have been accused of starving it of money. Britain once lagged behind other developed countries in health spending. But it is no longer possible to argue this point. At the last count, Britain spent 13 per cent of its GDP on healthcare, more than any developed country other than the United States, itself often accused of running a very financially inefficient health system. Too many lives are at stake to ignore the need for reform.

For now Truss will have to get through this winter as best she can. As far as possible, her energy-bill bailout should be aimed at protecting the most vulnerable: that is to say, the over-eighties and those most likely to die of the cold. The economic issues she faces are huge, but so too are the risks of a collapsing health service. Protecting the old and infirm should be the first priority in whatever plan she has for the next few months.

Holds out huge promise for future seasons: If Opera’s La Rondine reviewed

One swallow might not make a summer, but it certainly helps rounds the season off. ‘Perhaps, like the swallow, you will migrate towards a bright land, towards love,’ sings the poet Prunier to Magda, the heroine of La Rondine, but love itself is the real bird of passage in Puccini’s gorgeous Viennese operetta-manqué. Magda trades in her old lover for a younger, cuter model and after a summer of happiness leaves him too, without undue regret. That’s basically it. No death leaps from battlements, no ritual disembowelling; none of that stuff that we’re meant to find so regressive and problematic in an opera house, and so visceral and cool in an HBO drama. Just a simple, plausible romance, played out to glowing waltz melodies. It’s probably Puccini’s least popular mature opera.

But on a West Country evening in the last days of summer, as prosecco corks pop gently in the sunset and shadows lengthen across soft green lawns? Come on: it’s perfect, and nothing will convince me that Michael Volpe, the new executive director of If Opera (the outfit formerly known as Opera at Iford), didn’t choose it for precisely that reason. The venue for If Opera’s inaugural season was Belcombe Court, an impossibly pretty manor house just outside the really, utterly, unfeasibly pretty town of Bradford-upon-Avon and, well, you’re not going to do Wozzeck in a Conservation Area, now are you? Not that I’d put anything past Volpe, mind, and apparently the plan is for If Opera to be peripatetic – adapting its projects to different venues around the English mid-west.

On opening night, though, we had La Rondine in a big tent in the tussocky, lantern-lit gardens of Belcombe Court, with only the half-hourly hooting of the train to Westbury (or possibly Portsmouth Harbour) to puncture the idyll. It was unfortunate that one such blast coincided with the exact moment in Act One where Prunier (Ryan Vaughan Davies) expounds his swallow metaphor for Magda (Meinir Wyn Roberts), and where in Bruno Ravella’s production, an animated bird darts and soars across the backdrop. That apart, the opera tent sounded pretty decent: a big, bright acoustic that took the colours of the 26-piece orchestra and made them ping, even if the cast occasionally struggled to achieve clarity (basic audibility was never an issue).

But it was warm, it was fragrant, and under the baton of If Opera’s artistic director Oliver Gooch, Puccini’s Lehár-inspired melodies fluttered their eyelashes very seductively indeed. Ravella updated the action to the early 1960s, as required by opera director law, but in the first two acts, at least, Flavio Graff’s designs evoked a jazz-age atmosphere that felt right and looked elegant. The way Graff and lighting and video designer Luca Panetta lit and framed the wide, shallow stage was a lesson in how to make the most of a potentially awkward performance space.

And the cast? Well, Roberts made a touching Magda, with a generous sound that twined itself around Joseph Buckmaster’s tenor in their love duets (he was her toyboy, Ruggero), making the whole ensemble light up. As Prunier, Davies exuded such relaxed vocal charm that it was easy to assume that he was destined to be the romantic lead. As it was, his pairing with Lorena Paz Nieto (a properly sparky soubrette) as Lisette left you wishing that Puccini had made more of their subplot. Puccini clearly understood the convention that operettas are meant to have a serious couple and a comic couple, but like a lot of things in La Rondine, he never quite runs with it. This is high-level nit-picking: what he left us is still lovely, and If Opera’s production holds out huge promise for future seasons.

At the Proms the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Jules Buckley performed with Public Service Broadcasting, an indie band whose members appear to have stepped from the pages of The Chap magazine. Their latest project, This New Noise, was a musical celebration of the BBC’s centenary. The BBC, we were told, is invaluable and irreplaceable, and the performance ended with the full orchestra walking silently from the stage in the manner of Haydn’s Farewell symphony, the better to evoke the existential threat that the Corporation currently faces from Market Forces, the Wicked Tories, or possibly Charles Moore – the exact nature of the menace was not entirely clear.

It was more fun than it sounds, and the hipster beard quotient in the Arena was visibly higher than normal for a midweek Prom. Floodlights strobed around the hall and a big screen showed archive footage: Broadcasting House, the Daventry transmitter, and a faintly unhinged visual love letter to Lord Reith, set to pulsing chords. There was a wistful setting of the pre-war German poem ‘A Cello Sings in Daventry’, sung by Seth Lakeman (Werner Egk once wrote a whole radio opera with that title, which might have made an interesting Proms project). For much of the evening, though, the music did what pop groups always do when they get access to an orchestra: use it to play grandiose backing harmonies while the rockers noodle more or less inaudibly out front. It received a standing ovation.

Promethean grandeur: Maurice Broomfield – Industrial Sublime, at the V&A, reviewed

When Maurice Broomfield left school at the age of 15, he took a job at the Rolls-Royce factory, bending copper pipes on a turret lathe. That was what you did in Derby in 1931: Rolls-Royce was the town’s biggest employer, and entire generations expected to pass the best part of their lives behind the walls of its 13-acre plant. But Broomfield didn’t stay. Not long into his new job, he saw a photo of an ageing employee being packed off into retirement with a handshake and a gold watch. This was a person who’d never had any real control over his own life; who’d worked when he was told to, and stopped when they told him it was time. Broomfield wanted something else.

When he returned to the factories after the war, it was as a photographer. He shot workers bottling salad cream in Bermondsey, and buffing a ship’s propeller in Glasgow; in one series of more than 100 prints he turned the camera on the hidden entrails of his own art, documenting the factories where Ilford Ltd made photo paper and glass plate negatives. But his greatest works were the ones made of nothing but heat and fire. In ‘Tapping a Furnace’ (1954), shot at the Ford plant in Dagenham, a single figure stands in a vast empty space, emptying molten steel from a crucible. No light, except the volcanic glow of the furnace: pure livid potential. In ‘Wire Manufacture’ (1964) a worker stands at a machine cutting wire, but the metal coils dissolve into the halo of wild sparks around him. There’s a cathedral-like grandeur in these photos, something Promethean: tiny human figures, in control of so much raw fire. But they were never really in control: Maurice Broomfield was. He made sure of that.

Broomfield was not a documentary photographer. He was not an invisible observer, merely capturing the world as it is. His images were precisely framed and composed; sometimes work would shut down entirely so he could arrange his shots. For an hour or so at a time, he ran the factories – moving workers around, turning machines off and on, even changing their clothes. In 1966, he visited United Dairies, and decided that the workers’ black boots wouldn’t suit the clean, gleaming image he wanted. He had them all painted white.

Very few of his photos give the impression that anything in particular is being made. The Somerset Wire Company appears to be producing sparks more than wire; in his shot from a paper mill in Northfleet, the paper dissolves into a wash of light and speed. His lens turned all these factories into theatres: places that existed not for the production of cars or wire or electricity, but images.

Critics often compare Broomfield’s images to the art that was, in his heyday, coming out of the Soviet Union. The same reverence for huge machines, the same thrill at industry for its own sake: the people in Soviet paintings aren’t really producing cotton or steel either, but socialism. But Broomfield mostly worked on commission for the factory owners themselves; his photos were used to illustrate company reports. His workers stand heroically alone, faceless, with nothing to suggest they might have any human existence outside the factory gates. There’s certainly no hint of the unfreedom of working-class life, the same thing that sent him fleeing the Rolls-Royce factory in Derby. Still, his admiration for his subjects is obvious. Their skill, their power, the vast forces they control. For a moment, the factory workers are frozen as the masters of the world.

A lot has changed since. There’s a funereal tone hanging over the V&A’s exhibition of his photographs. The short blurb by the door reminds us that ‘many of the factories he photographed – and the communities of workers and skills that supported them – have either vanished or been subsumed into global corporations’. Placards inform us when each site closed. A short film – narrated by Broomfield’s son – shows footage of smokestacks being dynamited, and the concrete husks of what was once British industry. All that grandeur feels different now. Ozymandias in Dagenham, building the ruins of the future.

In the 2020s, we all became miniature Maurice Broomfields: working from home, performing a little theatre of labour for whoever might be watching through our webcams. No dark machinery, just millions of blank faces looking at screens. The art world is still fascinated by technology, but there’s no burning wire or molten steel in sight. Sotheby’s sells procedurally generated ape cartoons; artists live-mint NFTs in converted warehouses. We’ve all become so very, very small.

Confounding and fantastic: 100 Gecs, at O2 Forum Kentish Town, reviewed

Let me introduce you to the two poles in pop and rock. One is marked by authenticity, musicianship, a certain traditionalism. This is the pole that in critics’ discourse is called ‘rockism’ – the assumption that rock (or, at least, real people playing real instruments) is the normative state of music. The other is artificiality, brashness, a disdain for heritage – a celebration of everything that is inauthentic, where a good idea is worth 100 guitar lessons. And that pole is known as ‘poptimism’. Poptimism is why you end up with learned essays in the New Yorker analysing the singer Ariana Grande nicking a doughnut from a shop with reference to the work of John Ruskin. (Yes, that really happened.)

The US duo 100 Gecs are firmly at the poptimist pole. Their music fizzes, almost literally. It’s like a packet of sherbert dropped into a bottle of Tizer, possibly with a bomb of MDMA thrown in, too. It’s all E numbers, artificial flavours and colours and more added sugar than you could weigh. At times, at the Forum – so hot the air seemed to hang with sweat – it was like watching an avant-garde reimagining of the Australian children’s entertainers the Wiggles. From the moment Dylan Brady (in a wizard’s hat and cloak) and Laura Les (also in a multicoloured cloak, but no hat) walked on stage, it was much more like being at the circus than at a rock show. It was both confounding and fantastic.

100 Gecs have become just about the hippest thing in pop, in a way that would (and should) utterly mystify anyone old enough to have teenage kids. They make, say, Duran Duran look like the Velvet Underground in terms of seriousness of purpose, even if their music is the result of magpie minds and a keen vision. For all that it sounded like a children’s party, there was more going on in each song than was possible to comprehend.

But how to describe it? Beware, for here will follow a list of terms that will likely mean nothing to you. Broadly, they are what is known as hyperpop, which is electronic pop with all the characteristics exaggerated. And within that are what is apparently known as ‘nightcore’ (music artificially speeded up in the production process) and ‘chiptune’ (music based on electronic game tracks). But there’s also a whole lot of 1990s alt-rock in there – pop-punk and ska-punk especially. Even live, the vocals went through a variety of effects, and ‘live’ itself is something of a misnomer, for while the tracks were largely different from their recorded iterations, almost all of them involved Brady pressing play on a computer, then the two of them jumping around the stage shouting. The only time one knew everything was entirely live was when they played ‘gecgecgec’. They had stools brought out, and played it semi-competently on acoustic guitars, presumably in a comment on the pointlessness of authenticity.

They were onstage barely an hour, of which a good 15 minutes was messing around making stupid noises, including a couple of minutes of tuneless banging of what I think were some instruments from a gamelan ensemble, but couldn’t see for the dry ice. Yet none of it ever came across as cynical – no matter how short-changed one might feel rationally. That this was their belated UK debut perhaps accounted for some of the febrile excitement around the place, but it was a whizzbang explosion of entertainment, and beneath the seeming meaninglessness of tracks such as ‘Doritos and Fritos’ or ‘Hollywood Baby,’ there was a very old-fashioned pop songcraft at work. I went in already weary at the prospect, but left delighted.

The other pole was represented by Fleet Foxes, appearing at the lovely Islington Assembly Hall ahead of UK festival shows. You want authenticity, Fleet Foxes have got it by the bongful: beards, acoustic guitars, close harmonies, one member who spent much of the show playing tambourine, because a rattled tambourine can make all the difference to your sonic collage, man. Now, I’ve adored Fleet Foxes since first hearing them on MySpace way back when, and there’s no doubting the craft. But how authentic is it really, when Robin Pecknold – who has sold a ton of records, and who plays big rooms around the world – still comes on stage dressed like an engineering student who got out of bed late? It’s no more real than coming on dressed as a wizard. Just less fun.

The music was lovely – songs from their last album, Shore, were delivered with precision and grace, and early numbers ‘White Winter Hymnal’ and ‘Mykonos’ have lost none of their beauty. But, truthfully, it did not feel – to me, though it clearly did to the vast majority of the reverent crowd – like a living, breathing event. It was a recital. A terrifically done recital, but no more than that. Whereas 100 Gecs, no matter how little of it was actually live, felt wholly and completely alive.

Nureyev deserves better: Nureyev – Legend and Legacy, at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, reviewed

I was never Rudolf Nureyev’s greatest fan. I must have seen him dance 30 or 40 times, starting with a Bayadère in the mid-1960s, and while his sheer presence remained so potent that he was always exciting to witness, I became increasingly aware of how fiercely willed his dancing was – a struggle with or against his own body, almost self-punishing (he believed that he performed at his best when he was totally exhausted). His final appearances, when he was showing symptoms of the Aids that killed him in 1993, were truly painful to watch on that score. He really had nothing left to give, but the compulsion remained.

Closer to my heart was his near-contemporary Anthony Dowell, with his noble modesty and feline beauty of line; and then came his younger compatriot Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose technique was far superior and whose art was infused with a joyful insouciance more appealing to me than Nureyev’s ferocious Tartar intensity. They were lovable; Nureyev you could only worship.

What an ego, what a personality, however – and it should be said that despite his hellraiser reputation, he was a highly disciplined professional and his colleagues generally adored him. Born to be the centre of attention, he was blessed with what is commonly called charisma and a face as dangerously beautiful as Garbo’s: you simply had to watch him, even if he was standing at one side and some fabulous ballerina was spotlit. Nobody could make an entrance like he did – a quality Ashton exploited in Marguerite and Armand, where he burst on to the stage at a breakneck run, suddenly halted, then froze in a pose of palpitating ardour. And even though he was not that spectacular airborne, objectively analysed, he could make you think that he was (Nijinsky, one suspects, had the same trick).

In any case, like him or not, he has become ingrained in the mythology of ballet, as this gala Nurevev: Legend and Legacy, curated by Nehemiah Kish, set out to demonstrate. It was a sincere and courageous effort to honour this dieu de la danse, but like so many of these ad hoc affairs it was hampered by endless rounds of clappity-clap, last-minute substitutions, an absence of any real thematic coherence and a shortage of money – with the orchestra perforce located on stage behind a scrim, there were no backcloths and only very restricted lighting. The result looked inelegant and did the dancers no favours.

Nureyev’s limited talent as a choreographer was showcased in the tasteless solo that he devised for himself in his productions of The Sleeping Beauty – a typically busy affair, overburdened with ostentatiously complex steps, faithfully reproduced here by Guillaume Côté. Even worse were his horribly vulgar reworkings of Soviet warhorses like the Gayaneh pas de deux and the Laurencia pas de six, which even Natalia Osipova’s brash brilliance couldn’t redeem. Including a passage from one of Nureyev’s full-length original ballets from Paris, unfamiliar to London audiences, would have made the programme more representative.

Iana Salenko and Xander Parish (the British dancer who joined the Mariinsky from the Royal Ballet and has migrated to Oslo since the Ukraine invasion) offered a disappointingly flat account of the exquisite Bayadère Act Three pas de deux, and William Bracewell and Francesca Hayward couldn’t make much of the Act Two Giselle pas de deux in this prosaic context either. With Natascha Mair and Vadim Muntagirov contributing a Sleeping Beauty pas de deux as well, the classics were over-represented.

A few consolations made the evening worthwhile, notably Francesco Gabriele Frola’s fleet footwork in Bournonville’s enchanting Flower Festival in Genzano; Alina Cojocaru dancing with sublime understated eloquence in an excerpt from John Neumeier’s Don Juan alongside Alexandr Trusch, an intriguing Ukrainian based in Hamburg; and Cesar Corrales and Yasmine Naghdi fizzing through the camp bravura of Le Corsaire pas de deux to send everyone home happy. But Nureyev was about so much more than this suggested.

Rhapsodic banalities: I, Joan, at the Globe, reviewed

‘Trans people are sacred. We are divine.’ The first line of I, Joan at the Globe establishes the tone of the play as a public rally for non-binary folk. The writer, Charlie Josephine, seems wary of bringing divinity into the story too much, and he gives Joan a get-out clause to appease the agnostics.

‘Setting aside religiosity we’ll settle for more of a street god, a god for the queers and drunks… a god for the godless.’ What can ‘a god for the godless’ mean? No idea. Joan throws in a few more hipster platitudes about ‘elevating our humanity, finding the unity hidden inside community, remembering our collective connectivity fuels courageous creativity [sic]’. At press night these rhapsodic banalities were cheered so aggressively that one feared the consequences of not joining in, or of not honking loudly enough.

Act One traces Joan’s military successes as she leads the Dauphin’s army to Reims (or ‘rants’ as the actors pronounce it). In the second half, her battlefield skills desert her and she’s accused of witchcraft by 42 black-clad judges.

Historically the piece is accurate but the costumes and the moral tone are snugly rooted in today’s culture rather than in Joan’s. The medieval court has been designed like a skate park with a rear wall arranged as a wooden chute which the actors climb up and whoosh down comically. It’s funny the first six or seven times. Then it gets tiresome.

Joan’s rhetoric becomes a little grating as well. She shrieks that she’s ‘full of God’ rather too often, and she has a habit of complaining that the dictionary lacks the words to express her complex, subversive and multi-layered personality. But that’s true of us all. And it’s a peculiar complaint to hear from the central character in a three-hour play devoted to her unique story.

At the Dauphin’s court, she befriends a chap called Thomas who shares her anxieties about her identity and who offers her succour and encouragement. Which is very handy for her but it diminishes the intensity of her dramatic mission. Joan is a teenage prodigy who seeks to change the course of history in an era of warlords and knights. So why does she need a male accomplice to help her out? A solitary struggle would be more gripping.

The court is nominally ruled by the Dauphin, who lazes around in tennis whites and listens to bad advice from his prattling all-male cabinet. After his coronation, he strips down to a pair of M&S underpants. The point is to portray him as an emasculated halfwit but this malign characterisation is rescued by Jolyon Coy’s superbly languid comic performance. Some of his scenes are as funny as Blackadder. The Dauphin appears not to mind that his court has been taken over by women. His heavily pregnant wife, Marie, orders him to carry the train of her dress as she strides around glaring imperiously at terrified underlings.

Marie is herself dominated by her mother, Yolande (Debbie Korley), who wears a shrill blue power frock, like Mrs Thatcher. She revels in her triumphant femininity. ‘In this world of men,’ she declares, ‘if you want anything done well, hire a woman.’ The audience cheered that statement like a bunch of brainwashed Young Conservatives in the 1980s. To portray the court as a matriarchy is an amusing piece of mischief but it also mars the drama by weakening Joan’s rebellion against male authority. What’s the point of this yarn if women rule already?

The show’s best feature is the inventive music performed by three excellent percussionists in an upper gallery. But the grinding length of the script undermines its value as entertainment. How come no one at the Globe suggested editing a few speeches and trimming the repetitive dance routines? Too scared, perhaps.

Farine Clarke’s London Zoo looks at the dog-eat-dog world of newspaper publishing in the 1990s. The internet is causing news-stand sales to fall but one title, the Daily Word, has posted a rise in circulation. This makes it a target for bosses at the ruthless UK National News Group who want to buy the paper, boost its advertising income and bank the profits. This is an age-old dilemma. Should the readership or the advertisers govern a paper’s editorial direction? Traditional wisdom states that the readers are king but the yuppies at the news group want to defy that rule and make off with the loot.

We follow the journey of Arabella, a sensitive graduate who has to navigate the shark tank with the support of an amiable but weak accountant Charles. They’re opposed by the avaricious Christian, a self-adoring misogynist, who makes no secret of his amoral nature. Though set in the media world of the last century, the themes of manipulation and greed feel perfectly up to date.

Gore-fest meets snooze-fest: Crimes of the Future reviewed

You always have to brace yourself for the latest David Cronenberg film, but with Crimes of the Future it’s not the scalpels slicing into flesh or the mutant dancer with sewn-up eyes (and mouth) or even the filicide (oh, boy) you have to brace yourself for. In this instance, the most shocking thing is that it’s so muddled and dreary. It’s a gore-fest, true enough, but it’s a gore-fest that is mostly a snooze-fest. That’s what you need to brace yourself for.

I first became acquainted with Cronenberg when, as a young teenager, I bunked off to see Shivers (1975) and while every film since (The Fly, Crash, Eastern Promises, History of Violence) has proved difficult, as I am squeamish, I always felt I’d left the cinema with something and had been in the presence of a master filmmaker. But here, when it was over, I felt nothing but relief. Thank God that’s done, is all I thought.

This is set at some unspecified time in the future in a world that’s a peeling, rotting wasteland. It opens with an eight-year-old boy playing on a rocky beach with a half-sunk rusty tanker in the distance. Later that night we see him brushing his teeth, then crouching under the bathroom sink to eat a plastic wastepaper basket, biting into it as if it were an apple, while producing white, glue-ish spit. It is super-creepy and his mother is so alarmed that once he’s in bed she smothers him with a pillow. Filicide. Always a nice way to kick off proceedings. And then it’s all downhill from here.

Our attention switches to Viggo Mortensen as Saul, a man who sleeps in a bed that looks like a giant pulsating beetle and who keeps growing internal organs he doesn’t need. This is known as ‘Accelerated Evolution Syndrome’, which is somehow a response to a world now riddled with synthetic chemicals, although why this is happening to Saul, and no one else, is never explained, just as so much is never explained. Why would the body evolve to produce superfluous organs? Can we even call that evolution? He has a doting partner, Caprice (Léa Seydoux), and together they are performance artists with a show that involves her surgically removing his new, redundant adrenal gland, say, and tattooing it. They are famous and beloved by audiences because…I don’t know. Maybe there’s no telly in the unspecified future? Elsewhere, there’s a pair of government agents (Kristen Stewart, Don McKellar) tracking these new organs while a detective (Welket Bungué) is investigating something or other. The dead boy’s father (Scott Speedman) also comes into play while harbouring his own agenda.

There are scalpels to flesh and there is plenty of blood, some of which Seydoux has to lick up, ecstatically, but as there is no one to care about and there’s a cold heartlessness at play you could say it’s bloodless. All the characters whisper in epigrams that make no sense. Kristen Stewart’s character whispers that ‘surgery is the new sex’ but how? Why? Before an autopsy on the dead boy, one character whispers: ‘What will we find in there?’ ‘Outer space,’ is the (whispered) reply. The narrative never properly goes anywhere. One scene doesn’t necessarily follow another. So there’s no tension or suspense, and to top it all Saul has a staccato cough and does so much throat clearing it’s irritating beyond belief.

This has received some rave reviews elsewhere, just so you know. But I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, and it’s so deadly earnest and dark it’s like wading through a depression but less fun. Usually, if I’m baffled by a film, I’ll try to watch it again. But, in this instance, I don’t think you could pay me enough for that.

The uncomfortable lessons of the new Fourth Plinth statues

The Revd John Chilembwe – whose statue now adorns Trafalgar Square – is notorious for the church service he conducted beneath the severed head of William Jervis Livingstone, a Scottish plantation manager with a reputation for mistreating his workers. The night before, Chilembwe’s followers had broken into his house and chased him from room to room as he tried to fend them off with an unloaded rifle. Eventually, they pinned him down and decapitated him in front of his wife and children. It was the most significant action in the 1915 Chilembwe rebellion, a small, short-lived affair in an obscure corner of the British Empire today known as Malawi.

It says a lot about our times that a figure with Chilembwe’s record should be vaunted with a public statue. The Fourth Plinth Commission announced the decision in July last year, when dispute about statues was intense. The summer before, Black Lives Matter riots had erupted in Britain. Edward Colston was torn down, Gandhi and Churchill were daubed with graffiti. The Chilembwe statue was chosen to shine ‘a spotlight on important issues that our society continues to face’, said Sadiq Khan. In other words, it was a deliberate salvo in the already heated culture wars. But Chilembwe’s real story is an ambiguous one, and I wonder if the Fourth Plinth Commission has got more than it bargained for with this particular contribution to the vexed debate about our past.

The installation is actually a pair of statues: the second figure is John Chorley, an otherwise unremarkable English missionary who was Chilembwe’s friend. An iconic photograph exists of the two men standing together, and it is on this that the statues are based. The artist, Samson Kambalu – a Malawian professor of fine art at Oxford – has cast Chorley much smaller, to diminish him and exalt Chilembwe. Nevertheless, what is astonishing is that Chorley should be there at all: a white missionary to Africa is hardly a common subject for public statuary in the age of identity politics.

‘We have to start putting detail to the black experience… to the African experience, to the post-colonial experience,’ Kambalu has rightly said. And to that end, the story of Malawi is especially useful because it encapsulates so much of Britain’s imperial record in Africa. But it comes with a trigger warning: this is not a straightforward tale of black and white, good and evil. The detail is complicated, and sometimes uncomfortable.

Why is Chorley on the plinth with Chilembwe? Ultimately because British missionaries were essential in the formation of modern Malawi. Before their arrival, it was the land that fed the vast Indian Ocean slave trade, whose largest market was in Zanzibar. For centuries, the Arabs and their indigenous, Islamised accomplices had been capturing and trading slaves in incalculable numbers. David Livingstone called it ‘the open sore of the world’. The issue obsessed him and, in response, he stirred up one of the greatest moral crusades of modern times.

From the 1850s onwards, thousands of young men answered Livingstone’s call, and volunteered for missionary service in Central Africa. In the early years, they died in droves, mostly of disease, their graves scattered throughout the region, and still venerated today. But their sacrifice was matched by their achievement. The societies they encountered were near disintegration thanks to slave raids, war and the ensuing disorder and famine. When the missionaries proposed peace and goodwill to all men, their message was widely welcomed.

Of course the slavers resisted, and an early attempt at armed confrontation ended in disaster. Thereafter, the missionaries operated mainly just through a heroic appeal to better nature. Only a handful of slaver strongholds were subdued by force after the British government had reluctantly established a protectorate in 1891. Otherwise, it is striking how peacefully slavery was extirpated from Malawi. The missionaries then established schools and colleges of towering academic ambition, which quickly produced the first crop of campaigners for independence.

The flip side to missionary endeavour was the colonisation that quickly followed. White settlers and entrepreneurs never came in large numbers as in Kenya or Rhodesia, but the society they created was nonetheless like those that existed throughout the Empire: capable of cruel exploitation, and always permeated with racial injustice. It was against this that Chilembwe reacted with violence.

Born in the 1870s, his mother seems to have been a slave, his father her captor. As a young man, Chilembwe became the servant of an unsuccessful, itinerant English missionary called Joseph Booth, who was to prove the major influence of his life. Booth was a born-again Christian, a socialist, and a fervent critic of colonialism. He was also an enthusiast of an evangelical American cult that believed Christ had returned to Earth a few years earlier and was biding his time until the Battle of Armageddon, scheduled for 1915.

In 1897, Booth took Chilembwe to the United States on a fund-raising tour. The pair were fêted by black American churches, and Chilembwe was sponsored to enrol at a Baptist seminary in Virginia. Two years later, he returned to Malawi as a pastor and founded his own mission. At first he prospered, but his radicalism – acquired from Booth and from America – put him at odds with colonial society, which regarded him with suspicion and disdain. He quarrelled with his white neighbours and denounced them and the government in his sermons. This was grudgingly tolerated until the Germans invaded the colony in 1914, and Chilembwe wrote to a local newspaper objecting to Africans fighting in a war that did not concern them. In response, the authorities decided to deport him. His health and business ventures had been deteriorating for some time. It was also 1915: the year appointed for apocalypse. In what seems to have been a knowingly reckless decision, Chilembwe incited his congregation to rebellion.

Besides the infamous decapitation, the rebels attacked another plantation manager and a business in the town of Blantyre. But far from rising in support, the local population responded with bewilderment and, later, even hostility. A further attack was attempted on a nearby mission station, with whose leaders Chilembwe had long feuded. But the rebels found the place already evacuated, apart from one sick child too unwell to leave, and a missionary who had stayed behind to look after her. The rebels tried to stab him to death, though he later recovered from his wounds.

Everything then petered out as government forces ruthlessly took control of the situation. In the aftermath, 36 of the rebels were sentenced to death, 300 imprisoned. Chilembwe fled into the forest where he was hunted down and shot dead by askaris. His final act had been to write to the Germans seeking alliance. Though the message failed to reach them in time, it was an unedifying gesture. Just a few years before, Germany had suppressed a rebellion in its immense colony to the north by massacring up to 300,000 people.

So why should Chilembwe be celebrated at all? It would, from one angle, be easy to condemn him as a murderous lunatic of little real consequence. And yet there is a poignancy to his example. ‘We will all die by the heavy blow of the whiteman’s army,’ he is reported to have said on the eve of the uprising. ‘The whitemen will think, after we are dead, that the treatment they are treating our people is bad, and they might change to the better for our people.’ In these words, there is dignity of purpose as well as real foresight by which it is difficult not to be moved. Chilembwe bequeathed an example of defiance, courage and sacrifice. The next generation took inspiration from this, though they chose mostly peaceful means in their pursuit of independence. When this was granted in 1964, one of Chilembwe’s own children was still alive to see it.

When you examine the detail, you can ignore neither the injustice nor the beneficence of Empire: both are essential to the story of Malawi. If we celebrate Chilembwe as a hero, there are many others we should also acknowledge, especially the British missionaries: ‘Men good and brave who, to advance knowledge, set free the slave, and hasten Christ’s kingdom in Africa, loved not their lives even unto death’ – to quote the plaque that commemorates them in Zanzibar’s Anglican cathedral.

It is these contradictions that Kambalu captures so admirably, and without rancour, in his pair of statues. Our sententious age needs urgently to be reminded that history is complicated, and the figures who have shaped it are seldom unproblematic. In atonement for his faults, perhaps Chilembwe can now teach us to learn from statues, rather than topple them. Let the Fourth Plinth be his cenotaph, and a place for us all to make peace with our past.

In defence of Iain Macwhirter

Those of us on the right often sense a form of racism in the protests by some of those on the left who are suspicious of the racial diversity in the Tory front bench. Kemi Badenoch has often spoken about how black politicians who differ from the Labour narrative are accused of somehow betraying their race. Priti Patel has spoken about how much she hates the label ‘BME’ which lumps together all ethnic minorities as if they have more in common with each other than whites (she banned her officials from using it). James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, has said he has been told to ‘go home’ and referred to by a common racial slur: a ‘coconut’. Brown on the outside, white on the inside.

But perhaps the most controversial reaction came from the commentator Iain Macwhirter who wrote on Twitter: ‘A coconut Cabinet?’. The comment, on the face of it, looks appalling. But there is no context. It was a three-word tweet, a reply to another message; but this was subsequently quote tweeted in isolation and presented as a prima facia case of racism. Twitter users promptly added to the outrage and demanded his resignation from the Herald (example here). 

But no one who follows Macwhirter’s work (as I have done for years) could think that he has a racist bone in his body – and will have seen his tweet as obviously ironic. But Macwhirter was guilty of another classic error: expressing irony or satire on Twitter.

Here is his explanation:

‘Earlier, I made an ironic reference to a term used by some on the left about black people who are deemed traitors to the cause through joining the Tory party. After I posted it, I realised this joke might give offence and deleted it. It was unacceptable language, wide open to misinterpretation, and I am sincerely sorry for the distress I have caused. I have repeatedly applauded the Conservatives for having the most diverse cabinet in British history. Indeed, I tweeted earlier that the Truss cabinet made the Scottish government look ‘hideously white’ I have always championed racial diversity in my columns and I am dismayed that my cack-handed attempt at humour suggested otherwise’.

The problem is that such ‘attempts at humour’ – even if they are recognised as humour – can be career-ending in a newspaper industry whose executives are fearful of Twitterstorms. For example:

• No one who knows Kevin Myers thinks he is in any way anti-semitic, yet his long career was ended by a rhetorical flourish line from the Sunday Times saluting the hardheaded salary negotiating skills of Vanessa Feltz and Claudia Winkleman who were both well-paid. ‘Good for them,’ he wrote, adding fatally, ‘Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price.’ As Lionel Shriver said: ‘The aside was meant as a compliment. It was not so perceived’.
• Kelvin MacKenzie walked through fire every day in the 1980s when he built up the Sun, the newspaper he edited, against the protests of the outside world. But he was fired after a column referring to the footballer Ross Barkley as a ‘monkey’: he had no idea that Barkley had a black grandparent. The sub-editors let it pass – no one reading it properly would think it was racist – but a Twitterstorm followed where trolls said otherwise (including the then-mayor of Liverpool). The Sun removed the column online: it was the last one its former editor wrote.
• Donald McNeil, a New York Times reporter, was forced out after a Twitterstorm sparked by claims that he had used a racial slur in a conversation about racial slurs to high school students in Peru years ago. The newspaper, where he had worked for 45 years, demanded he repent to assuage the mob. The debacle is described by Vanity Fair here.

I should say that I disagree with Macwhirter – his politics differ greatly from mine on Scottish independence and much else – but I can also recognise what’s happening right now. In Twitterstorms, trolls try to edit the reputations of their targets (Macwhirter’s Wikipedia entry has already been updated) so three words that he wrote in an instant are seen as more notable than the millions of other words he has written over his career. This is the defamation game. The mob is looking, begging for their target’s employer to accept their concocted premise and bend the knee before them. So far, so good: the Herald has duly released a statement (on Twitter) saying:

‘We are aware of an offensive tweet by one of our freelance contributors, Iain Macwhirter. Although the tweet has since been deleted and an apology issued, we have also suspended his columns while we investigate further.’

I’m not sure what there is to investigate. Macwhirther has been a columnist for decades: is there a sentence he has ever written to suggest he’s racist? Or anything to dispute his point that he is consistently anti-racist? Is there any reason to entertain, even for a second, suggestions to the contrary? 

I have my own views on social media. Twitter is like a loaded gun in a journalists’ pocket pointing at their groin and can go off at any time. Using it for anything other than promoting articles (or exploring points of debate) has big risks. Every writer needs editing and we’re exposed without it: journalists who are paid to be neutral can have their bias exposed. Jokes can be used to kill. Editors need to adjust for this era, protecting writers from risk of malicious misinterpretation (‘Did you mean it that way? Could we defend that phrase, if things kick off?’). Such questions would have saved Myers and MacKenzie. Of course, that’s if their titles wanted them to be saved. Newspapers can ditch columnists from time to time, and don’t need a reason. Donald McNeil was an old-school troublemaker in the New York Times who once organised a walkout in a pay dispute. Twitterstorms give publications a pretext to ditch people, often older people. But it is deeply damaging to do so because it looks like bowing to the mob – and risks telling all other journalists they are vulnerable to what the mob does and says.

The Herald has a brand new editor and this will be the first dilemma of her new job. She’ll be under pressure to drop him. ‘Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times,’ wrote Bari Weiss. ‘But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.’ Let the same never be said for the Herald.

Flat broke: my Help to Buy disaster

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ The surveyor shook his head. It would take me longer to boil the kettle than for him to do a valuation of my 400 sq ft, one-bedroom flat. I paced awkwardly around. A minute later, he gave me the thumbs-up. Valuation complete, he left. I boiled the kettle anyway.

Four years after the purchase of the flat, via the ‘Help to Buy: Equity Loan’ scheme, I couldn’t be more desperate to sell. Would I make a profit? I just want to escape its clutches and avoid a loss. Why sell? Let’s start at the beginning. Why buy?

Perhaps it was an early midlife crisis. At nearly 30 years old, I thought it time to leave the familial roost. It was unfair on my parents to have me, the resident ghost daughter, living at home for ever. I was single and had spent years flip-flopping between living at home and renting with friends. Now, my friends were either married, living abroad or on such high salaries that I could no longer afford to rent with them.

The timing was right but only one conundrum remained. Money. As a teacher, I hardly earned big bucks. My bank’s mortgage limit at the time was my annual salary multiplied by 4.5. My maximum mortgage allowance was £170,000. In London, this opened few doors. A property search engine delivered fruitless findings: long boats, parking spaces or retirement homes. Shared ownership was out of the question because my salary was too low.

Then Help to Buy came along. Looking back, I wish I’d never heard those three words. Like many bad ideas, it sounded good at the time. It provided a tailor-made, first-time buyers’ solution, designed for poor millennials like me. The guidance on Gov.uk was inspiring: ‘Help to Buy equity loans provide a low-interest loan towards your deposit. Customers need a 5 per cent deposit, and the government lends up to 20 per cent of the value of the home (up to 40 per cent of the value if you are purchasing in London).’

What did this mean for me? No longer restricted to a budget of £170,000, I could buy a new-build property valued up to £350,000. On the spreadsheet, the numbers made sense. A 40 per cent government loan (£140,000), the mortgage (£170,000) and my life’s savings (£40,000) totalled £350,000. And the best thing of all? I could buy the property by myself, with no family donations required. For once I felt like a grown-up.

In August 2018, I moved to my new home turf: a one-bed flat in Zone 5, north London. I squirmed at parting with my hard-earned cash. ‘Are you sure?’ my parents asked, more than once. ‘It’s a big decision.’ Of course I was sure. Property was an investment.

After stamp duty, solicitor fees and furniture costs, I was down to my last penny. A few weeks later, I realised I’d never stopped to think about the location, or if I’d be happy to call this place home. ‘It’ll be a dream to clean,’ said a friend, smiling encouragingly. ‘It’s so tiny.’ The flat, although shiny, with top-of-the-range specifications, was soulless. It didn’t feel like a home.

This year, reality hit. I have recently changed career to be a civil servant. My salary has taken a nosedive. I’m approaching middle age, with decreased earnings, and learning the hard way about rising interest rates. I have to sell my flat. Financially and emotionally, it is the only way out.

Four years ago, five years seemed a long time. Not any more. Next August, the term on my fixed-rate mortgage ends. Furthermore, monthly interest payments on the 40 per cent equity loan will kick in – it is interest-free only for the first five years. I admit I turned a blind eye to this guidance on Gov.uk when I bought my flat: ‘In the sixth year, you’ll be charged interest at a rate of 1.75 per cent. This will be applied to the equity loan amount you originally borrowed.’

And there’s more good news: ‘The interest rate increases every year in April, by adding the Consumer Price Index plus 2 per cent.’ In other words, from year six onwards, I am doomed. The numbers in my spreadsheet have turned red. My monthly outgoings could rocket to unknown heights. It is a gamble I can’t win.

I’m not alone. In the year that I bought, some 46,000 people took out mortgages under the Help to Buy loan scheme. They’ll be hit by increased interest rates next year. Another 52,000 people will reach the end of their interest-free and fixed terms in 2024. Who knows what inflation will be by then?

What now? The property has been on the market for nine weeks with no offers yet. My estate agents remain hopeful. In my view, however, my little flat is lost in an overcrowded market of new developments. It’s a clone of thousands of other flats just like it. What’s more, the flat has depreciated. I bought at £340,000, and will be lucky to sell for £300,000. Help to Buy does at least have one saving grace, which is protection against negative equity. The payback of the equity loan is valued at 40 per cent of the final selling price. So if, for example, I sell at £300,000, then I only pay back £120,000, rather than the original equity loan value.

The repayment of the Equity Loan (£120,000), my mortgage (of which £160,000 remains) and the early mortgage repayment fee (£4,000) will cost me £284,000. If I sell the flat at £300,000, after this deduction, I am £16,000 in the black. So far, so good – or is it? Four years prior, I contributed my life’s savings (£40,000). That £40,000 has turned into £16,000. I have made a net loss.

On Gov.uk, the scheme is painted as a success story: ‘The Help to Buy equity loan scheme has helped more than a quarter of a million people to buy a home.’ The scheme closes to new applications in October. In my view not a moment too soon.

‘You’ve learnt a lot from the experience,’ sympathise my parents. But it has been an expensive lesson that I could ill afford to learn. Pride comes before a fall – which in my case, will be a spectacular fall off the property ladder.

Are the rumours of human sacrifice in Bolivia true?

One summer a few years ago, I joined a group of miners in Potosí, Bolivia, to toast the Andean Mother Earth. I had just moved to La Paz, the country’s political capital, to try my hand as a journalist. As we chatted, a cup of warm beer and shots of spirits were handed around the circle. Before drinking, we had to pour a little on the earth and a little on the head of the white llama that was trussed up between us. My notebook from that day is specked with brownish stains. After we’d finished passing around the spirits, the llama was held down and its throat was cut.

‘The most important part of the llama is the blood,’ one miner said. ‘Blood is life, and the gods don’t bleed. If we don’t give them blood, they will take miners’ blood instead.’ He looked at me with a slightly menacing smile. ‘But there is one thing better than llama blood – gringo blood.’ They all cackled, and the drinks continued round.

I didn’t think too much of his joke at the time. Bolivian miners take some pleasure in shocking foreigners, whether by swigging near-pure alcohol, playing with dynamite or joking about human sacrifice. But the moment came back to me last month when a young man appeared on the news – slurring, bloodied and covered in dirt – claiming he had just punched his way out of a coffin buried under a Bolivian building site. He said he’d been used as a sullu: a sacrifice for the Pachamama or Mother Earth.

A sullu traditionally refers to a dried llama foetus. It may, for example, be buried under a building to appease the Pachamama and ward off accidents. The use of sullus is an ancient practice and remains commonplace. In La Paz, there’s a witches’ market that sells them next to trinkets for tourists. Up in El Alto, the neighbouring city which is almost entirely Aymara and Quechua, Bolivia’s two largest indigenous groups, there are rows of cabins where ritualists sell sullus alongside coca leaves, sugar figurines, cigarettes and alcohol. Offerings are put together and burnt over braziers beneath three peaks of Illimani, La Paz’s sacred mountain.

The practices of a sullu offering depend on where you are in Bolivia. The many thousands of small-scale miners in the highlands like to go a little further than the city dwellers. The stakes for them are high: they spend their days crawling through hand-hacked tunnels, inhaling the particles that will one day likely kill them, hoping to find a good vein of tin or silver. They make daily offerings to El Tío, the Uncle, a mercurial, devilish figure who lives beneath the earth. It’s not uncommon for Catholic Bolivians to leave this god of the underworld cigarettes or spirits, despite strong condemnation from the church.

For the traditional festival to the earth gods, they splash out on a white llama. When its throat is slit, the blood is collected in bowls and fed to the earth, painted on cheeks and spattered over the mouth of the mine. Then the animal is butchered, its innards buried and the meat barbecued for lunch. The bones, burnt to ashes, go to El Tío.

The more one offers, the more one receives. And though historians and spiritual leaders say it would be a perversion of ancestral rites, there have long been rumours of human sacrifice. The story told by the bloodied man fits the urban myth, which says that drunks are plied with alcohol before being buried alive. The myth was popularised in the 2008 film Elephant Cemetery. The title refers to establishments where alcoholics can pay to drink themselves to death. In the film, the protagonist spends his last weeks of life drinking in one of these bars and stewing in memories, thinking back to a time when he sold a drunk friend to some builders to be buried as a sullu.

Such a bargain might not even be necessary. Walk through La Paz early on a Sunday morning and you’ll see people passed out on the pavement. Look up and you’ll see skyscrapers going up around the city.

The recent report isn’t the first to make it to the media. From time to time, someone will show up claiming a miraculous escape; others disappear and bodies are found in suspicious circumstances. Homeless people in Bolivia worry about where to sleep, for fear of being spirited off to a midnight sacrifice.

Rarely are any of the cases formally reported or pursued. This latest one won’t be either. The man’s mother has said that her son, while traumatised, would not be taking the matter any further, because they lack the money to bribe police and prosecutors into action. Some have cast doubt on the details of his story. The police say they would prosecute him if he turns out to be lying.

But people seized the chance to revive the sullu story. In pulpy news reports, bemused construction workers were asked whether they’d ever seen someone buried alive. Presenters on chat shows frowned and shook their heads, lamenting the turn from tradition to crime.

Online, it became the joke of the week. Black humour is pervasive in the country. Last week, I was invited to a sullu-themed event at a nightclub. (The flyer, tastefully, depicted a llama foetus rather than a human sacrifice.) I didn’t go, but I did go to a karaoke bar. When the birthday girl had had so much to drink that she ended up on the floor, every-one looked at each other and said ‘Ya está lista’ – she’s ready. We all cackled, and the drinks continued round.

Ballet comes of age with Sergei Diaghilev

‘What exactly is it you do?’ asked a bamboozled King Alfonso XIII of Spain upon meeting Sergei Diaghilev at a reception in Madrid, while the Great War raged on in Europe. ‘Your Majesty, I am like you,’ came the impresario’s quick-witted reply. ‘I don’t work, I do nothing. But I am indispensable.’ At first glance, the Russian expatriate’s estimation of his own worth may seem theatrically grandiose, but as the dance critic Rupert Christiansen shows in Diaghilev’s Empire, his new history of the Ballets Russes and their buccaneering onlie begetter, ‘indispensable’ was really no overstatement.

Now, 150 years after Diaghilev’s birth, the story of the Ballets Russes, its temperamental director and the wild programme of scandals and intrigues that played out both on stage and off is of course well known. But where Christiansen’s book comes into its own is in its description of the radical and lasting changes that Diaghilev brought to bear on the art form – changes made all the more striking by some extended, insightful considerations of what came before and after the fact. Part biography, part history of ballet in the 20th century, the book looks at how the larger-than-life impresario was able to take what was at the end of the 19th century the ‘childish business’ of ballet and not only drag it, often through sheer force of will, into artistic maturity, but also establish it as ‘a crucial piece in the jigsaw of western culture’.

Strange though it may seem, ballet was not the obvious choice for the young Diaghilev. His first experience of it, in Vienna, had left him cold. But he was drawn to artistic circles and was convinced that his talents could be put to good use there. ‘First of all I am a great charlatan,’ he confessed to his stepmother in a moment of winning candour. ‘Second I’m a great charmer; third I’ve great nerve; fourth I’m a man with a great deal of logic and few principles; and fifth I think I lack talent.’ Where did all this lead? ‘I think I’ve found my real calling,’ he explained: ‘Patronage of the arts.’

While Diaghilev famously achieved his aim of turning ballet into a Gesamtkunstwerk by commissioning such luminaries as Michel Fokine, Igor Stravinsky, Léon Bakst and Pablo Picasso, he also, as Christiansen highlights, frequently employed other less reputable means. Indeed, he had a knack for buying into rule-breakers ‘cheap and early’, raising their market value with no little investment of time, patience and subterfuge. When a young Vaslav Nijinsky was fired from the Imperial Ballet in 1911 (his refusal to cover his outrageously revealing tights in a production of Giselle had so shocked the dowager empress as well as several courtiers that it was deemed a case of lèse-majesté), Diaghilev immediately capitalised on it. Dispatching a telegram to his agent in Paris, he ordered him to spread the story: ‘Appalling scandal. Use publicity.’ This was the birth of public outrage as a marketing tool, and from the outset the impresario intended to extract everything he could from it.

Diaghilev’s self-avowed lack of scruples extended well beyond his pursuit of publicity, too, and Christiansen does not shy from the more challenging aspects of his life and legacy as viewed today. Time and again we see the impresario taking young and vulnerable dancers to bed in return for patronage as well as a leg up. His directorial-cum-dictatorial tendencies, as well as his quick temper and supremely fragile sense of amour-propre, led him to sabotage and even to end the careers of several of his own troupe, and are rightly spotlighted here, although thankfully without veering into the heavy-handed or moralistic.

Perhaps one of the less anticipated aspects of book is that Diaghilev’s death in Venice, complete with the dancers Serge Lifar and Boris Kochno brawling over his not quite cold corpse, comes just two-thirds of the way through. In the chapters that follow, the author opts to take a wide-angle view of Diaghilev’s many rivals, survivors and successors, marshalling an impressive range of memoir, private correspondence and journalism to provide a convincing and genuinely illuminating sense of the many fields – ballet, art, literature and film – in which his legacy ebbs and flows today.

While Christiansen, as he explains in his preface, may not have set out to ‘thrill scholars and experts’ with a radical reassessment of Diaghilev’s life, he ultimately achieves something else entirely. Diaghilev’s Empire is a riveting account of a visionary who, for all his many faults, truly did make himself indispensable. Written with sympathy and wit, the book is judiciously researched; but, more crucially, it draws on a lifetime of balletomania, giving readers the benefit of exceptional range. It is also a delicious read into the bargain.